Following the Vietnam era, planners began to fear that the US would never again go to war. War was just to messy, too cruel, too close to home. It created amputees, homeless vets, PTSD, etc.
The public's distaste for war was not of a moral nature, it was a byproduct of an increasing standard of living. Life was easier, people saw less suffering and death, expected more from life, etc.
As with the space program, America's worship of technology could be leveraged to build super weapons... but only if those weapons led to "hygienic" war in which Americans didn't have to see the horrors firsthand.
So our defense contractors built smart bombs, highly accurate missiles, etc. UAVs are just the next step.
The future holds both precision insect-size (or smaller) attack robots, as well as massive space-based lasers (the death star was uncannily prescient) aimed at earth and able to vaporize nearly anything that isn't heavily armed.
All of this will be controlled by a smaller and smaller class of military personnel. Gone will be the days of recruiting welfare recipients to enlist.
The debacle over "Star Wars" as envisioned by Reagan was mostly b/c the technology wasn't mature enough at the time. But just as George W. Bush jumped at the chance to wage two large wars (b/c the public momentarily would consent) there will come another moment for space based lasers, and we can be sure that our planners will not let that opportunity go to waste.
The recent stories about the drone fleet being pwned, followed by the stories about the Chinese building drones, are designed to get the average person to say "Darn it we need America to be a leader in Drone tech, let's spare no expense to have the very best".
Nowhere in the trajectory toward space based lasers and assassination drones is any moral concern likely to emerge. Why? Because when war is hygienic nobody realizes that it's ugly and worthy of moral reasoning. The discussion becomes about the merits of one technology vs another, one nation's tech vs another, not about what horrific purposes these devices will actually be used for.
So your point is well taken. And it is not lost on our planners. Have you ever wondered why Rumsfeld made such a big deal about saying "Damn it, the US will torture whomever it likes!". Not b/c this was new policy, or b/c he wasn't well aware that his remarks would create a shitstorm. He made the remarks to distract everybody (hawks and human rights activists alike) from what was actually happening. It worked incredibly well. Finally he resigned to leave the impression that he'd been somehow a loose cannon and not a master player in an amazingly well executed propaganda campaign.