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Notes -
Average pirate, maybe given the choice of a button that maroons the defending crew vs a button that just deletes them. Most came from backgrounds as lawful seafarers and understood the plight of the average sailor of the age. Benjamin Hornigold probably yes, he mostly tried to maintain at least a thin veneer that he was acting lawfully as a privateer. Just straight deleting the operators of merchant vessels would not have been in line with the veneer of lawful privateering.
Regardless, if the legal target is the drugs and vessels that are carrying them why waste a missile on them when the operators likely would surrender and you could just scuttle them by opening a seacock? I mean if they run or start shooting at you, sure they left you no choice. If the targets are the actual vessel operators, then definitionally this is an extrajudicial killing; in the sense that it is a intentional killing by a state actor without any judicial process. I'll let the lawyers argue about whether it's also an unlawful killing, but I do consider conducting extrajudicial killings to be an odious, ungentlemanly, and undignified task if I were the one that had to push the button. Maybe the age of expecting our officers to also be gentlemen is long gone or never existed, or our modern environment makes that ideal impossible. I still think it's lamentable if that's the case.
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