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I wonder how long Gandhi would have lasted using "active, aggressive, non-violent resistance" against Stalin or Mao.

Gandhi threw the British out of India using active, aggressive, non-violent resistance.

That strategy worked because the opponent was the British and Gandhi understood how to exploit the culture he was fighting. It would have been a foolish strategy if it had been, say, the Soviets.

But they will make it easier and easier for us to kill and kill and kill

How strange it is, then, that as we get better and better at killing, we seem to be more and more reluctant to do it.

and open the doors to even more horrible forms of warfare than those we practise now.

You want to talk about horrible forms of warfare, go look at what cultures of times past used to do. Genghis Khan would be a good starting point.

We are about to perform the Standford Prison Experiment with our entire society, with the West in the role of arbitrarily powerful jailers and everyone else as a prisoner.

The stanford prison experiment tested the reaction of a single individual being ordered around by an authority figure, in a controlled setting. It has no baring on large populations, especially within democratic societies.

We do it because we like it, not because it works

Killing a guy who plans to kill you tends to work quite well. If there are other, more efficient ways of dealing with the problem, then great - you'll find that even most soldiers prefer a peaceful solution. We don't actually LIKE being shot at. But it has to be a real solution, not just a delaying tactic which puts off the problem for future generations to deal with.

Depends what you want to do. You couldn't fight a war like the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan with drones alone - those are wars of occupation, with large numbers of infantry on the ground. The advantage comes with conflicts like those we saw from time to time in the 1990s: faction A (we like) are fighting faction B (we don't like), but we lack the will for a proper war, so we just bomb faction B's facilities and units and let faction A take advantage. That's the kind of situation where drones would be wonderful. Mind you, I don't think the risk to pilots is a major deterrent to our leaders in that case: it's more a matter of how the scenes of devastation on the ground will play with the voters, and those are the same whether it's a human or a drone that did it.

See Also: The mercenary wars fought in late medieval Europe.

According to Machiavelli, the problem with those wasn't so much that the availability of mercenaries let leaders go to war with less risk to their own people: it was that the mercenaries themselves were unreliable and disloyal. For a start they'd fight only for their pay, and so their stomach for a losing battle was considerably less; and if the mercenaries won their battle, then whatever lands had been conquered were held by the triumphant prince only so long as he kept the loyalty of the mercenaries. Whose price, of course, just went steeply upward. Better, he said, to triumph by your own arms. This, at least, is not a problem with machines, which will happily sacrifice themselves for you, more willingly than even the most jingoistic soldier.