We need to make sure we're not being manipulated. Here the Guardian is just serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion. I'm not sure how this is different to much of the chest beating I'd see on Fox News. I'm not here to argue for or against the drones. Just that if we pride ourselves on being educated and critical thinkers that we apply that to all sources of data we read.
We all know war is hell. We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm. So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific. Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war? I suspect they decrease it with smaller more targeted bombs vs prior more traditional larger bombs. Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village. Maybe they increase it because we're carrying out a lot more sorties than we did prior when a jet and a pilot were needed/at risk. However, I'm not sure and this article goes nowhere close to helping with the discussion.
"The view is so pixelated it makes decisions tough" Can you imagine military people who fight/fought on the ground in real combat and order in strikes reading that? Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?
The military is aware of the impact on these operators. From a February 20013 article sighting a Defense Department study: “Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”
Lastly, imagine how you'd feel reading a similar opinion piece on Fox News from a gun ho former operator talking about all the American lives he saved by observing and taking out "the bad guys". What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives and dramatically reducing the number of innocent civilians killed vs how we would have approached the same problem just 25 years ago.
War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate. Biased ones feed their viewership what they know they'll eat up and do little, maybe even damage, the search for truth.
Thank you so much for reminding me that I should care about not being manipulated.
Your comment is so full of really good unbiased views that I just wanted to tell you how much non-manipulated I felt by your comment.
I especially enjoyed your notion that the Guardian is "serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion." You are so right. I always fell that the White House and the American military are always providing really insightful information that is really backed up substantiated by information.
I really felt the links in the article regarding the reporting of drone casualties were just pure manipulation. The manipulation was very strong as I read how credible people were debating the lack of information that was being provided:
My original response was much more involved but I curtailed it to this.
I believe I replied pretty much in the same manner as jusbin1369.
My hope is that for people that look at comments only they will actually read the article instead of reading jusbin1369's comment and skipping it because they wouldn't want to be "manipulated" or consider the article another "propaganda" piece.
I also get very wary of questioning the intelligence of HN's crowd. I would gather readers are smart enough to know when they are being manipulated or not. I don't feel I need to be told or tell anyone how to be careful.
This issue is complex. I for one am grateful that we have newspapers outside the US that are willing to do this type of reporting. We all love technology on HN and I am sure we all love drone technology (I certainly do) but personally I feel the use of technology is more important than the technology itself. I definitely think in this debate, there does seem to be room for much much more information that needs to be put out there.
It is sarcasm. I don't disagree with you on it. In terms of its effectiveness, I don't know. I contrasted a strong comment by singling out a single point about it. I certainly didn't intend it to be an attack and I hope its not seen as such by jusben1369.
In terms of its appropriateness, I guess that's debatable too. If me and jusben1369 were having a chat about this person to person, I'm sure we'd know that its a hearty debate and we could debate the merits of our opinion while still respecting each other and knowing that we have differing viewpoints. Not to say that this is always easy to do.
With only the written word, I guess these types of comments can be seen as verbal jousting. If this is viewed as such by everyone (especially jusben1369) then this was not my intention.
It might be appropriate on reddit, on the street, in a TV debate, in your living room, Hyde Park speakers corner, but it is not on HN. These kinds of comments are discouraged here, it's in the posting guidelines.
Sarcasm is a tool for someone that can't actually come up with a counter-argument. It's an appeal to absurdity combined with a strawman. Exaggerate the other side's point until it sounds ridiculous and pretend that's an argument.
Did you detect an argument in the OP to be responded to? The argument that people die in war, perhaps? The Fox News argument? The argument that if they're bombing weddings now, they were probably bombing villages before?
The sarcasm seemed to be based on the fact that you can agree that truth is good and falsehood is bad and not see that as a reason to dismiss the Guardian piece.
Sometimes the ridiculousness of the opposition's argument is more compelling to the majority of people than saying "You've committed fallacy A, B, C, D, & F." Especially when the 'argument' in question actually isn't even an argument.
"Opinion piece is misleading because it isn't a factual non-biased piece of journalism" seems like one of these times.
Ridiculousness is just a subjective opinion though, that's why it makes such a terrible argument. I think it's ridiculousness that McDonald's doesn't have free refills in the UK, but I doubt many UK residents feel the same way.
The comment was sarcastic and hostile and dismissive of his point. It may not be incorrect, but it's the kind of thing I'd expect to see on /r/politics and come to HN to avoid.
Hey Avenger123. "I especially enjoyed your notion that the Guardian is "serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion." You are so right. I always fell that the White House and the American military are always providing really insightful information that is really backed up substantiated by information." Two thoughts there. It feels like you're arguing "two wrongs make a right" And secondly I spent time pointing out that there are pro war (Fox News) equivalents that I/we find equally objectionable. I don't like either. It's just unlikely that a pro war/drone piece would ever make it to the top of HN so I'm here objecting to a Guardian piece.
And these were? It read much more as a practice in "no one is unbiased so this is misleading."
It also tries to equate drones use against individual targets (a couple individuals generally) with large scale bombing, which is highly disputable, given that it is used more in an assassination sense. The "manipulation" in the comment is pretty blatant.
Two substantive counterpoints I spot in the comment are 1) that telling us about the effects of drone weapons is emotional manipulation, not informative, because the "drone" part doesn't affect it at all and 2) the idea that decisions are hard because the view is "pixelated" applies just as much to the regular kind of warfare.
1) It is clearly labeled as an opinion piece (First person abounds: I saw, I wish, I knew)... If you are looking for informative, unbiased, hard hitting journalism in an opinion piece you may be looking in the wrong place.
2) Decisions are always hard, even with perfect resolution/clarity, but adding additional handicaps (pixelation) seems like relevant information... I don't see how that is 'counterpoint' in any way?
1) seems like the pertinent disagreement, here. OK, fine, it's an opinion piece, and we shouldn't expect any sort of actual information from such a thing. Why, then, are we posting and upvoting such crap? Why is anybody defending it?
Agreed and agreed. The only reason I chimed in is because labeling an opinion piece as 'manipulation' seems pretty suspect. That is tantamount to saying "anyone who has an opinion I disagree with is manipulating me."
Article really shouldn't be on HN in the first place imo.
You can make that charge of any warning about emotional manipulation. And since every warning is a form of emotional manipulation, it's not actually possible to escape it.
It's possible to be aware of such manipulation, but it's impossible to avoid doing it.
Providing a counter point to the Guardian piece doesn't mean he's being misleading. New technology applications, military or otherwise often go through a pretty searing gauntlet of fear. To that end, pointing out the alternative pros and cons of the alternative scenario which is usually troops on the ground is helpful- not manipulative or misleading.
The article in the Guardian is not done by a fly by night newspaper without any credibility. The newspaper was started in 1821 and is considered a leading newspaper. It does identify itself as a liberal voice but so what. When did reading about the life experience of a UAV analyst who actually provides some real context to her discussion by providing external links become a source of manipulation and a "biased" view. Frankly, I learned more about UAW operations from her article than any release done by the "official" sources. There is no reason for me to believe that Heather is not who she says she is or that she was influenced into saying what she says.
It's not about taking sides on the drone issue. It's about an article being attacked that was written as commentary by someone who is a thousand times closer to the situation than most of us ever will be. I will gladly read more of these. If Heather stated how great drone attacks were, my thoughts would still stand. Let's have all the information out there without attaching the information as manipulation or biased. Personally, I would like to decide what's manipulative and biased without being told so.
> We need to make sure we're not being manipulated.
By whom? The people telling us their experience with the program, or the people who tell us nothing about what they do for our own protection?
> The military is aware of the impact on these operators. From a February 20013 article sighting a Defense Department study: “Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study.
Can you give more context on the quote you cite? I'm not sure how staring at the ground addresses suicide risk, as I do not believe anyone is dying of boredom here.
> War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate.
All the more reason to listen to those who present their own direct experience with it, no?
> Can you give more context on the quote you cite? I'm not sure how staring at the ground addresses suicide risk, as I do not believe anyone is dying of boredom here.
First i thought that was the idea, but I think "the ground" is "the aftermath" here, as in bodies and carnage on the ground.
It's a commentary. Commentaries are supposed to be one-sided.
The Guardian commentary appeals to emotion while making it clear where its sympathies lie. That is perfectly acceptable and proper for a commentary.
It's also quite relevant to the debate to bring emotion into it. You hinted at it when you asked whether "we're carrying out a lot more sorties than we did prior," but you only mentioned the military cost of it.
A key issue that the commentary highlights -- and perhaps the HN reactions to it as well -- is that we may be flying more drone sorties because the American populace is more comfortable with them.
It's a variant the old "smart bomb" argument from Desert Storm. If the U.S.'s only option was to carpet bomb Baghdad, then there probably would be more domestic opposition to the war and it may not even have happened. But the warmongers argued that we have smarter, more precise weaponry, which perhaps moderated opposition, leading to more horror and death.
Thus highlighting the actual horrors that drones inflict, and the widespread terror they instill in an entire population who live in constant fear they could be annihilated at any moment, is a very valid contribution to the debate.
Furthermore, the main point of the commentary is that we, the people supporting the politicians sanctioning these drone policies, should be asking questions. The appeal may be emotional, but demanding more transparency so that that we can make informed decisions on whether to support these programs is not just reasonable, but the right thing to do.
Between you and the "let's put ourselves in their shoes" guy, I think I've now changed my view about the use of drones.
Prior to today, I was on board with the "smart bomb" argument. I think people arguing against the use of drones really need to focus on how they're worse than traditional warfare, otherwise people who hold the views I held will just tune out.
There's no such thing as an unbiased report and you are being disingenuous here as the article is clearly a personal account. As such, it obviously wouldn't and shouldn't aim to be a broad survey on the pros and cons of the utility and ethics of various approaches. On the contrary, the aim is clearly to add new first-hand information to the public debate, which has hitherto been deliberately biased by extensive and coordinated efforts to repress that info.
How is this story anything but a plea to the people to reign in their heinous military masters? You state 'we must be sure we're not being manipulated' - towards what end, exactly? The logical conclusion of this opinion piece (it is marked thus) is that we should not allow our elected representatives to get away with murder.
Fewer drone strikes are not necessarily in the national interest. Taking the horrors of drone strikes out of context is manipulative if we don't also consider the horrors of the alternative ways of achieving military objectives.
>The types of activities being carried out in Yemen, Pakistan, etc, if state sanctioned, would be justification for war.
Activities like weddings, hospital operations and schooling?
>Does the fact that Yemen and Pakistan can't police themselves internally enough to stop these activities make military retaliation unjustified?
Is there anything concrete about those activities except "person X met person Y there, and person X is a terrorist" type of "intel", filtered and produced by various military agencies?
Or, let me put it another way: would it be ok to bomb some part of Oklahoma to kill Timothy McVey? Or are third world lives cheaper?
This is kinda off topic but Timothy McVey actually had no ties to Oklahoma at all, so Oklahoma would be safe, he looked up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building (the building he bombed) in the phone book. He was looking for a building with the max amount of federal offices in it. He grew up outside of Buffalo New York and lived somewhat of a transient life and he built the bomb with Terry Nochols in Kansas.
War certainly isn't defined as being between nations. Think of wars involving Viking tribes, or the Barbary wars. And yes, to any given nation, people outside the nation are cheaper. Its a basic premise of human nations.
>War certainly isn't defined as being between nations. Think of wars involving Viking tribes, or the Barbary wars.
Those are pre-nation-state examples. The tribes (or city-states, or what have you) played the role of nation states back then.
>And yes, to any given nation, people outside the nation are cheaper. Its a basic premise of human nations.
It's much more seen in nations that are used to being on the upper side with minimal impact on them, the same kind of nations that have built and justified racist theories of inferiority.
(Hating the enemy in some capacity is always present, but thinking of him as an inferior/cheaper human is not).
Why must war be against countries? The types of activities being carried out in Yemen, Pakistan, etc, if state sanctioned, would be justification for war. Does the fact that Yemen and Pakistan can't police themselves internally enough to stop these activities make military retaliation unjustified? Would you feel better if we just declared war on Yemen and Pakistan?
Yes. The scariest thing about our current military adventures is that they are based on a declaration of war against a brand name rather than against a state, which could conceivably be toppled to end the war. The 2001 AUMF goes a step past Orwell by declaring war not merely against Eastasia, but against any organization that might potentially share any of the amorphous subjective defining attributes of Eastasia.
I despise war in general, but my god do I agree with you on this. I worry about the future, and where this War On Nothing Concrete will lead our western world...
Would you feel better if we just declared war on Yemen and Pakistan?
Yes! I for one would love to live in a nation that required public informed consent, after public debate of public information, by elected representatives of an informed public, before killing people on the other side of the globe.
But at the same time we can't go to war with a group that consists of very weakly affiliated individuals who don't actively threaten us at home.
The concept that Al Qaeda is a homogeneous group with a structured hierarchy ("#3 Al-qaeda leader killed") that threatens America has mostly been manufactured by the military and media:
So let's send drones to Saudi Arabia. Most of the 9/11 attackers were Saudis, and it was done in response to our presence there.
This is anti-national security -- all this does is pour gasoline on the fire of anti-American sentiment. People like you supporting this madness is the reason the world is going to hell. Ugh.
Saudi funded religious schools are a key formenter of anti-American Islamist sentiment around the world. Forget drones, their actions warrant larger-scale military action.
No, the fact that they fund religious schools that teach virulently anti-western sentiment is an attack on our national interest and justifies military action.
Maybe we should stop buying Saudi oil first? I mean, we've pretended to stop buying Iranian oil, so we could pretend that about Saudi as well. I hear good things about fracking.
From an ethical standpoint, you violate the Categorical Imperative, to say nothing of the Golden Rule. We also have schools (religious and otherwise) that demonize Islam, Arab nations, Iran, etc. Does that fact justify violent action on the part of those aggrieved parties? Should we care about similar anti-"western" lessons taught in various parts of Asia and South America? Suddenly it seems your proposition could be very profitable for the military-industrial complex...
First, drawing false equivalence is never a compelling mode of argumentation. I don't know of any federal program to build schools that "demonize" Islam or Arab nations. That message certainly exists, but it's not a government-sponsored message.
Second, it's not just schools that teach anti-Western statement. It's a concerted effort by Saudi Arabia to aggrandize its influence over the Islamic world while undermining western influence. Maintaining spheres of influence has, historically, been considered a sufficient justification for engaging in military action.
Third, if you want an ethical argument, how about this one: the world under western influence is fairer and more just than the world under Saudi influence. In my home country of 150 million people, Islam as it was practiced used to be relatively liberal. Our country derived its cultural cues from India and Britain. With increased Saudi influence came the loss of secular democracy and the oppression of women. Increasing Saudi influence and decreasing western influence is robbing hundreds of millions of muslims around the world of the benefits of progress. What's so ethical about allowing that to continue?
You consider the equivalence false, but would a visitor from another planet agree with you? More to the point, do average Muslims agree with you? I realize that Islam has its faults; it is a human activity after all. I realize that the ways in which some Muslims demonize "the West" differs in important respects from the ways in which some westerners demonize Islam. I'll stipulate that "Saudi" Islam has been a bad influence in your home country. But what the hell does that have to do with USA military action?
If Bangladeshis want to kick Saudis out of Bangladesh, they can damn well do it themselves. How pathetic would the USA have to be to fight a proxy war with that objective? Please, even though you find your personal opinions happen to coincide with the slogans of the USA military-industrial complex, don't imagine that entity ever has you or your home country's well-being in mind.
In general, the distinction between manipulation and argumentation, is that argumentation attempts to get the reader to see your point of view. That is, if I believe X for reason Y, then I will say that in my article. Manipulation would be arguing X for whatever reason you think the reader will find convincing.
In this case, the criticism was that the Guardian argues against drone strikes (and perhaps this particular war), by using some poor arguments e.g. that drone strikes are especially likely to kill civilians.
I agree, but to be a little more precise: throughout history the rich/elites have lied to civilian populations so they would go along with money making war activities.
What is sad now in the USA is that there are very few politicians who speak the truth and very few news outlets that don't just cooperate in the propaganda.
>What is sad now in the USA is that there are very few politicians who speak the truth and very few news outlets that don't just cooperate in the propaganda.
There never were any. Name this mystical time when he U.S. government was some benevolent force for good and not constantly lying to the civilian population to push them to unwanted wars.
How so? Most americans have unfiltered access to the internet where they can get far more information than the old days of having 1 or 2 local newspapers and 3 TV broadcast networks.
I agree that some people, us included, are saavy enough to read news sources from around the world and make reasonably informed decisions based on a variety of sources.
However, the US corporate news is largely a propaganda machine and the vast majority of US citizens get their news in propaganda form.
Don't believe that? Do an experiment: identify a few news stories on Fox News, MSNBC, etc. and then spend some some on Google News reading coverage for these stories from a variety of other countries. I do this a few times a month for news that I am interested in, and it is an eye opening experience.
The authors of "Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America" spoke at Google last fall when I was consulting there. They roast local and national news as being very biased and not covering things that people really should know.
I've worked in the defense industry. You suspect this and you suggest that and assert "we need to make sure we're not being manipulated".
Let me tell you something: based on my experience it is far easier to believe the source for the linked article than to take anything you wrote seriously.
Let me tell you something: I used to work in the defense industry as well (in "the U.S. drone program", no less!), and I disagree. So...yeah. Changed your mind yet? No? It's the truth. That must not be a very effective form of persuasion then.
I'm not sure why anyone, like anyone at all, is getting worked up over what jusben1369 wrote, which wasn't even expressing an opinion on the matter so much as just advocating critical thinking. It's just as important to apply critical thinking to sources of information that provide conclusions that you agree with as it is to those you disagree with. The more significant and emotionally charged a topic is, the more important it becomes to not slip up and abandon basic reasoning.
Basic reasoning would allow one to conclude I wasn't attempting to persuade anybody. The person I replied to didn't provide anything other than his own emotional screed in which he accused the article's author, and people who support the author's points, of being emotional, pretty much without basis. Like you have done to me, for example. I don't see anybody "getting worked up" over anything. I see accusations of such from people, such as yourself, attempting to cast disagreement with his comment as coming from a basis of emotion rather than reason in an attempt to poison the well.
Don't admonish people to not abandon basic reasoning when you yourself have done so. It's petty.
> We all know war is hell. We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm. So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific.
This is a perfectly valid line of inquiry, in my opinion, because drones are often seen as being a "sterile" way to fight a war. No casualties on our side. To many, and especially the mainstream press, this basically means "no casualties worth caring about". So, reminding people every now and then that drones DO cause horrific destruction and death is a perfectly worthwhile undertaking.
> Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war?
Your questions is almost absurd, it is not the right question to be asking. Of course drones reduce the overall horrors of war, because one side experiences no horrors at all! On the other hand, since one side experiences no horrors at all, it seems reasonable to think that these weapons will be over-used, used in situations where violence is not strictly necessary, thus actually increasing the amount of violence. Also, because the drones are essentially an enemy that can't be fought, the only rational counter is to strike at whatever American assets are available and vulnerable (terrorism).
IF drones are more effective at killing the enemy than earlier methods (tomahawk missile from sea, manned airplane/s releasing multiple missiles) where effective = = smaller, more targeted kills then they are reducing the horror of the war on the enemy too. That would be on a micro level and it appears to be true. If however as a result of the ease of using drones you run significantly more attacks than pre drones the net effect would be more horrors visited on the overall population. These are very real questions worth answering. We'd all love for there not to be wars but if there are then prosecuting them in the most humane way possible to target only the combatants is a very worthwhile thing to study. I'd like to learn more. I also agree with your point that if we become so effective at this to the point where the enemy feels no chance at any type of revenge because they never even get to engage with a real live American then out of frustration they very well might turn to more terrorist acts. It's a very valid point.
This is the definition of FUD. You're arguing that the Guardian shouldn't be trusted because the government should be trusted because war is hell, issues are complex, truth is helpful, and lies are not helpful, and Fox News.
> We need to make sure we're not being manipulated. Here the Guardian is just serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion. I'm not sure how this is different to much of the chest beating I'd see on Fox News. I'm not here to argue for or against the drones. Just that if we pride ourselves on being educated and critical thinkers that we apply that to all sources of data we read.
Agreed. Let's start with the basics: WTF is doing a UK/USA-driven drone in the middle east anyway?
Why must we make sure we're not being deceived? Why isn't the burden of proof on the people taking money out of my paycheck and using it to brutalize people on the other side of the globe?
And this "war is hell" stuff is just so tiring and intellectually barren. If someone told me "x is hell," and I know that x is entirely optional, I would say "okay then, don't do x." I will never understand how the mantra "war is hell" is used to justify or excuse war.
>"How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicle] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?"
Right from the start the author veers of into things that have absolutely nothing to do with the viability of drone warfare.
Using the authors logic, every single piece of equipment we have that wasn't designed specifically to prevent death by IED should be abandoned. Guess we don't need guns, uniforms, canteens, body armor, etc.
The author does have some valid criticisms, but they are obscured by ridiculous tangents like this one.
As for my own thoughts, I think that drones are a valid tool, but I also think that our government needs to use them in a far more responsible manner.
Unbelievable that you seem to have such a hard calloused view of civilian casualties. Curious: what do you do for a living?
The lies of omission by the US government in reporting any data on civilian casualties tells the real story, in my opinion. Drones are probably the sickest manifestation of the US Department of War. I used to be a defense contractor a few decades ago and was mostly proud of what I did, but what we are doing now it all seems so very wrong.
Hi Mark. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I have a calloused view towards civilian casualties? I'm really confused by drones. In one camp you could argue that without them there would be a much greater loss of life and more horrors of war. We would still be going after various members of the Taliban in the Afghanistan/Pakistan mountains only now it would be fighter jets and boots on the ground and therefore heavier casualties all round. On the other hand you could say that the ease with which we can now kill our enemies - without the critical downside of the death of our own troops (and the subsequent public opinion swing against war that then follows) has created too few disincentives and resulted in increased and unnecessary deaths. I'm not sure which it is! This headline grabbed me as perhaps by someone who could discuss the positives and negatives of how drones are really being used and I could draw some conclusions. Instead, as others have pointed out too, it offered very little in the way of substance about drones. Instead, it was a broad anti war piece with a lot of emotional imagery which spoke very little about drones and really didn't have any conclusion or point. So I felt like a bait and switch and that I was being lured by a misleading headline (Thus my manipulated theme)
In any case, I fail to see why our government needs to spend as much money as all other countries combined on our military. I don't think we need boots on the ground when there is little real threat to people inside the USA. I am in favor of almost all of our military being redeployed back inside our country.
I saw a statistic last week that bathroom accidents kill 100 times more people in the USA and EU as terrorism.
The fake war on terrorism is just another way to give our tax money to the ultra-rich who do make money on forever wars.
The last statistic I saw was that our military budget was 17x larger than the next on the list - China. Agree that's a pretty wasteful spend vs investing those dollars in education, infrastructure etc at home.
You're argument is a bit silly and childish though. Couldn't your silly statistic be explained by the fact that we do "fight terrorists." I'm not saying it is but logically you leave that pretty wide open.
That said, I do agree that much of the "war on terrorism" has led to huge financial wastes with no practical benefit and even corruption with these large contractors. But I don't think I agree in a fantasy conception of the world in which terrorism, or whatever you want to call it, does not exist.
I believe the statistic hiliting the relatively few deaths from terrorism is valid, and supports my contention is that the USA probably spends an order of magnitude too much fighting terrorism. It is unclear, but I think it is possible that programs like global NSA hoovering and drone attacks in other countries might put us in more danger of terrorist acts.
I try to put myself in the shoes of the potential drone targets. I live in Los Angeles, which seems to be the official city of the police helicopter (always followed closely by the news helicopter, because the possibility of violence is entertainment). Over the years it's gotten to the point where multiple times a week they're buzzing around the neighborhood, stabbing the backyard with their searchlights. I've never quite gotten used to it. Especially if I'm out at night, I wonder, "Is there a police sniper in there, and do I look like the perp they're searching for?" This is in spite of the fact that I know police snipers don't go in the helicopters (at least I think they don't, please don't correct me if they do!).
The idea that those police helicopters, which already make me feel like a mouse stuck in an open field surrounded by owls, could be replaced by unmanned drones armed with missiles fills me with abject terror. Not only would I have to worry about myself getting falsely targeted, I'd have to worry about the next door neighbor being falsely targeted.
Now, if the police helicopters were replaced by drones, that would be scary. Imagine if they were replaced by drones operated by another country. Scary times ten. Now it isn't a question of if I'm a criminal, or if I look like a criminal, it's a question of whether or not I'm near enough to someone acting against the national interests of that country.
The abject helplessness of being in the eye of an unmanned drone, the complete and utter impotence of being unable to strike back at it... that is a special kind of terror that the drones bring. We talk about 'terrorism' a lot. Obviously all warefare inspires terror--but what makes an attack a terrorist attack? From the American perspective, 9-11 was a terrorist attack and Pearl Harbor wasn't, even though they both inspired terror. 9-11 inspired terror because there was nothing to fight back against--it was people who were quite demonstrably willing to get killed in order to achieve their objective. In fact their objective was to be killed. Once they died, there was nothing tangible to fight back against. The inexorable nature of that kind of attack inspires a particular fear, and attacks specifically designed to inspire that fear are considered terrorist attacks. Drones are similar--there is literally nothing to fight back against, and their distant, silent nature means the possibility of death is ever-present.
That said, yes. If a platoon of Marines were to attack my house, my death would be as inevitable as my death would be if a drone strike hit my house. And as an American I do live with a particular type of fear, which is that of the DEA and SWAT team escalations. At any point, a no-knock warrant could be incorrectly issued for my house and I could have paramilitary troops attack. And I could get killed because the wrong SWAT officer got startled by the wrong thing (As a follower of statistics I fully understand I'm more likely to die of a heart attack, but we're talking about semi-rational fear--if everyone were a truly rational operator we wouldn't nearly the issues we have now). And that happens frequently in the US and is the sad product of an erosion of due process brought about by a mixture of racial fear and the Drug War (well, the two are often the same thing).
But there's two ways of interpreting the escalation of SWAT raids and the concurrent escalation of incorrect shootings. One is that it's a problem of due process, and needs to be rolled back in frequency. Two is that it's a problem of precision. The second argument is where people start talking about the supposed benefits drones, because they're in theory more precise. There are certainly people trying to argue to the public that a drone strike is highly precise, clinically correct, and technologically accurate. The article is arguing against that. And I would add to the article's argument that the amount of general fear (and therefore hatred of government, and therefore terrorism) inspired by escalation will be increased by drones.
To me, the relative precision of drones vs SWAT or ground troops is beside the point and obfuscates the real reason why populations get radicalized against US policy. Simply put, there is no precision until there has been a trial by jury. Even then precision is in question, which is why there's such an argument about the death penalty. When due process is undermined, the population becomes more alienated from the government, and more individuals become radicalized, and more terrorism happens.
>> When due process is undermined, the population becomes more alienated from the government, and more individuals become radicalized, and more terrorism happens.
How many lives of soldiers would be risked and how much money would be spent for operations to 'capture' the terrorists in foreign nations? And will nations like Pakistan allow military (or law enforcement) operations on their soil by foreign govts to capture the terrorists? No of course not. Drone operations take place in Pakistan/Yemen and other nations because of the inability of such nations to police their population adequately.
The real problem is NOT the drones but the failed (or almost failed) nations where groups of terrorists can operate in OPEN essentially, whose goal is to hurt/topple another nation.
If some Chinese or Russian 'freedom' fighters decide to train militarily in US with the goal of toppling current govt of China/Russia and did actually cause deaths/damage in China/Russia, would US govt sit back and let them train in US? Probably not.
All this 'omg, the drones are terrible' is useless. You don't want to see drones operating in foreign nations? Use your energy helping NGO and the local govt overcome corruption, ignorance, and backbone shattering poverty. Give no space for terrorists to operate in. Sure it's near impossible task. But that's the only real solution, and real solutions take real work.
The drones are a 'perfect' tool for rich nations for warfare whose population don't want to see their own getting hurt/killed. It's not going to go away.
Could you not just as easily argue that drone operations take place there because they're powerless against them? Perhaps it's also their inability to protect their population adequately that America take advantage of.
In my opinion the real issue here is that innocent civilians are getting killed in a nation America have no official presence in, and certainly no state of war with and where there is no chance of recourse. Are civilians in failed or almost failed (whatever that really means) nations fair game? Is there any precedent for killing civilians without either declaring war or at least putting a presence on the ground?
Actually, there probably is - and it's probably best referred to as terrorism.
Anyway, I agree that arguing here isn't going to change anything - but I disagree that these people are fair game just because of where they are and what goes on there. I don't think it's venturing far to say some are justified in hating America, that doesn't justify terrorism.
The Pakistani Government officially supports these strikes. But their public image demands them to publicly be against the strikes.
Pakistan's government can end the under-the-table deal and officially make the Drone Strikes illegal. However, as it is right now, the drone strikes are sanctioned by Pakistan.
Its a great deal for Pakistan, and it aligns well with the US's goals. Win/win for both countries, all else considered. Whenever the US leaves Afghanistan / Pakistan for good, the Pakistani government retains their good will with their people, the US takes the bad PR garbage associated with the war... and the world becomes a safer place in the long term.
>If some Chinese or Russian 'freedom' fighters decide to train militarily in US with the goal of toppling current govt of China/Russia and did actually cause deaths/damage in China/Russia, would US govt sit back and let them train in US? Probably not.
The line of argument is so simplistic it boggles my mind. Lets get few facts straight:
a. Goal of terrorists is not to topple US government. You can't draw parallels between things without understanding their motive. Primary goal of a terrorist organisation operating out of Islamist state is to flex muscle and create terror. Often it is - revenge killings so as to deter state forces (of US, India, NATO). So far with each drone strike - make no mistake US is creating more terrorists. As a Indian, I detest each time our government kills/arrests a law abiding citizen of India - for just being a Muslim. Terrorists win each time. If you can accept those innocent people as collateral damage, you should be ready to accept 9/11 or Mumbai bomb blast victims as collateral too?
b. Deep down I believe some US citizens simply do not understand how terrorists work. They think, if you drone strike a bunker with important terrorist leader - problem will simply go away.
The truth is - there is power and power allows powerful countries to make rules and let them get away with it. US uses drones strikes against Pakistan because they know they will get away with it. They dare not do the same against, Russia, China or even India. Assuming that drone strikes help reduce terrorism is just too naive.
"The line of argument is so simplistic it boggles my mind. Lets get few facts straight":
1. Operation cyclone: This was part of the cold war, both countries fought proxy wars across the world. The Soviet Union actively aided anti-american forces in other parts of the world.
2. Sure, everybody detests improper detentions (and killing, but I haven't seen much evidence). If a country is fighting home-grown terrorism with a religious flavor, it is likely that a few people from that particular religion will get illegally arrested. Now as rational people, the important point is whether this is happening at some scale and whether this is a statistically significant number. But it will never be zero.
The problem with the most common breed of terrorism is that it is entirely religiously motivated. Left to themselves, tyranny of the majority will soon ensue in those countries. Sure you could just let them take over and leave the problem to future generations, but the bigger argument for intervention is that democratic countries should stand up for the rights of people living in countries where extremism is an active part of everyday politics.
It's very sad to see how the political/militarist propaganda is making an incredibly good job.
> The problem with the most common breed of terrorism is that it is entirely religiously motivated.
What's the religion supposed to be? Destruction of the USA? Do you think that terrorists target USA because it's written in their sacred books?
"Left to themselves, tyranny of the majority will soon ensue in those countries. Left to themselves, tyranny of the majority will soon ensue in those countries. Sure you could just let them take over and leave the problem to future generations"
There are many many countries with such regimes, and the majority of them is left to theirselves. Middle east countries are picked because they serve the political agenda.
Seriously, do you think that countries like Syria are the lucky ones which has been chosen to be "saved"?
And do you think that bombing a country will improve the situation? Hint: it won't.
>it is likely that a few people from that particular religion will get illegally arrested.
And killed. Taken together, I would be hesitant to call it a few.
>Now as rational people, the important point is whether this is happening at some scale and whether this is a statistically significant number. But it will never be zero.
This is nauseating. It never ceases to amaze me how cavalier people have become about other people's lives. If we are going to be so confident that we are just, then we should start by looking at the root cause. These dim-witted platitudes about pure religious fervor and hating us for our freedom are ridiculous. The fact that a sitting president could conduct a war over such pablum and not be roundly ostercized and impeached is testament to how little we seem to invest in determining what's really happening and whose interests are being served in our name.
Then, when the next generation of drone-terrorized and, hence, militarized individuals takes up arms against us, we will all sit back in shock and discuss how barbaric they are and how they also hate our innoncent, peace-loving populace for our freedom.
Of course, that will justify the next round of rationalized illegal detentions and collateral damage.
When you buy into this thinking, you become complicit. It is no longer being done in your name. It is being done at your behest. And, you don't even know why.
Bravo!
All human rights violations aside, what the US doesn't realize is that every new drone strike is creating new cadres for Al Qaeda and others to recruit from.
Except that they do realize that (US government and military are not stupid). Everything is right on track on their book.
War on terror correlates directly to political climate for authoritarian policy
Side effect of war on terror correlates directly to produce more terror
More terror correlates directly to more war on terror
I may not think the same way as a terrorist, but if joining some "club" made a really powerful country with really advanced weaponry want to kill me, I would probably be disincentivized from joining said "club".
At first it may be like, "Screw those bastards for killing us! Let's try to get them back!" but then after watching basically everyone I know who is a part of this group I joined get killed without us really accomplishing anything, I'd probably think more along the lines of, "Yeah, I don't want to do this anymore."
>I would probably be disincentivized from joining said "club".
What if you felt that you might be killed irrespective of whether you joined the club? Further, what if you believed that joining the club was your only hope (no matter how slim) of preventing yourself and others from being killed?
Actually I gave 2 examples of India (as much it dismays as an Indian) and US where these countries have supported so called "Freedom fighters".
The reality is Pakistan or Yemen does not want terrorist on their ground more than me and you. They want them gone too. But the so called drone strikes and random killings make people angry, so there is a grass root support for terrorist organisations (at least in certain part of these countries).
We are in a vicious cycle here and drones don't help.
"You don't want to see drones operating in foreign nations? Use your energy helping NGO and the local govt overcome corruption, ignorance, and backbone shattering poverty. Give no space for terrorists to operate in."
Ah yes, this is the shit I just love about these arguments. Stop complaining about these things that kill thousands of innocent people. Your only appropriate action, according to some guy on the internet, is this utterly insane task he has made up. You are allowed to do that, but you're not allowed to object to drones killing people...
How? How does your brain get to this point? I'm just sitting here floored that I live in a country where a non-zero amount of people feel the way you do.
>How? How does your brain get to this point? I'm just sitting here floored that I live in a country where a non-zero amount of people feel the way you do.
If you are really are floored by this, you have a very weak sense of perspective. These conclusions are all very easy to get to if you follow this notion that members of terrorist organizations must be killed. If you set that as an unmovable goal, you will very quickly end up at these types of conclusions.
Try to gain some perspective. Just throwing a fit of incredulity doesn't help any arguments because the other side usually feels the same way about you.
"Just throwing a fit of incredulity doesn't help any arguments because the other side usually feels the same way about you."
Just as this massive exaggeration makes your point similarly difficult to take seriously. But you seem to value snark to strangers over actually relaying any sort of useful information so I'll leave you to that. Cheers.
edit: oh hey, what a shocker, a quick look at the first page of your posting history reveals literally no actual contributions and a bunch of snarky one liners. Give this guy a round of applause for these rock bottom contributions everyone! Bravo!
Your justification for the murder of innocent civilians falls short in many ways. You have simply rationalized the murderous ideological propaganda of the US military-industrial complex.
As long as you keep murdering just goatherders, you may indeed still get away with this kind of impunity. You fail to understand, however, how vulnerable the ones doing the killing are, to reprisals and retaliations.
It only takes a small bit of serious hacking and/or data mining to figure out the home addresses of everyone involved in these massacres, and from there to schedule them one by one for termination. The 40 million Target credit cards were much more difficult to obtain than that.
There is a tremendous asymmetry of information between your centralized murder engine and your decentralized enemies. The database of everyone involved on your side exists and can be stolen. The other way around is not true, regardless of all the surveillance that the NSA does. Therefore, the murderers are guaranteed to lose this conflict.
The documentary Dirty Wars suggests that the Obama administration added an increasing number of names to JSOC's kill list based on variable confidence intelligence. Isn't this the definition of mission creep?
A terrorist part of the 26/11 attacks on Bombay who was an informant for US DEA.
Which NGO should I contribute to for the DEA to realise that human life has value beyond the territorial borders of United States? White Men's burden is back.
If you think that the concern about DEA and SWAT can be easily dismissed, consider that SWAT teams regularly get involved in serving warrants for non-violent crimes -- in 1995, 3 out of 4 SWAT raids were based on drug warrants alone... and mistakes on those warrants can be made repeatedly:
"Perhaps no one was more victimized by the battlefield mentality that had set in at the NYPD than Walter and Rose Martin. The Brooklyn couple, both in their eighties, were wrongly raided more than fifty times between 2002 and 2010. The couple filed numerous complaints with the police department. They wrote letters to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. They were ignored. In 2007 they at least got someone at the NYPD to try to wipe their address out of the department’s computer system. But the raids continued. It wasn’t until the couple went to the media in 2010 that the city finally looked into the problem. Back in 2002, someone had used the Martins’ address as a dummy address to test the department’s new computer system. When the new system was implemented, no one removed their address. So anytime NYPD cops in certain precincts used the system for a warrant and forgot to remove the dummy address to put in the correct one, the police would end up at the Martins’ door."[1]
I believe the milita movement, the source of the second most destructive terrorist attack on U.S. soil in recent history, would beg to disagree. For them, it is the central issue. Oklahoma City was explicitly revenge for the Branch Davidian raid by the AFT / FBI. Who is to say the next major terrorist attack won't be from that direction? Look at the NSA revelations. Whereas more pedestrian people like me think it's more government incompetence than Illuminati machination, the NSA revelations are proof positive to people of that ilk that the overarching conspiracy they've believed was happening is patently real.
It points to the same fundamental misunderstanding of law. Law depends on overwhelming non-lethal force on the side of law. Where that is not available, it cannot be used.
So complaining about US legal guarantees (that have exceptions, like DEA, SWAT and frankly IRA teams) not being available outside of the region where the law's overwhelming advantage exists is no more valid than complaining the sky doesn't turn red to make sure your sunset picture looks cool or complaining cars don't fly.
The Bombay terrorist bombings are indeed -- like so many terrorist attacks -- a false-flag operation, organized by the United States' intelligence services.
You are threatening to "proclaim that the tin foil hat brigade has now thorougly infiltrated HN." based on one single post made by one person in a community of thousands? Did you go to a school specifically to learn how to create logic this poor?
In a community where skepticism is valued there will exist the lazy quota who will look at popular opinion, assume the antithesis must be true and in turn, begin looking for supporting 'facts'. Don't be so surprised. :P
Your argument is about the psychological fear of it rather than any rational reason to be afraid. The deaths caused by them (or prevented because of them) should be the main issue.
Your comment seems to ignore the fundamental question which has nothing to do with drones: should we be blowing up people remotely?
It's not just a question about remote vehicles - it's about the moral issues of blowing things up that are not physically proximate (and thus not a direct threat) to yourself.
Such easy talk when the war is fought on another continent than the ones responsible for it.
That's the whole point, and drones make this divide even larger.
"We all know war is hell"--No, we don't. Because we're not actually there.
Just because they're not in the US, or US citizens, doesn't mean they're not human beings, with families and a desire to be free from danger, happy, healthy and comfortable.
How can you even begin to make such arguments from the comfort of your desk chair, about people on the other side of the world being attacked by your flying robots? Oh, how aware you must be of the shitty situation they're in!
'War' is a very specific term of the trade. Using any and all tools available when you are at War can be easily defended by a whole lot of people (not everyone0. US is not officially at war in Yemen or Pakistan or for that matter Afghanistan. Hence, I think, use of drones introduces another dimension to the arguments. Ultimately, there is and always has been one principle used by humanity - 'Might is right'. Of-course smart ones can always hide this core principle in layers of arguments of convenience.
You are right that the first victim of war is "truth". But we are beyond classical war, we have global and economically driven war, that is beyond the grasp of normal people. How is it possible that the whole world is at so many "mini-wars", that the world doesn't take notice of the big picture? It's no joke, stupidity or paranoidity, when you say that the in many countries the whole media is in the control of only a few. Everybody knows only as much as he is required to know. In the USA you don't hear about wars that would make you sensitive for the topic, but about things you've already heard a thousand times. The same happens in many other big countries. People see their local news, but it omits the whole picture, just to show emphasize what's important localy. It's so subtle that people would say, that's ok, it's a kind of patriotism, maybe.
You can tell me that I'm wrong, or believe that this is mad, but please have a look at these few resources first. Let's make our decisions objectively and with critical thought as the parent thread's op said.
"What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives"
But is this really a good thing? it seems to me the only thing that the american public really cares about is the number of US casualties. Without any, the US will have even less restriction to pursue their wars.
ahhh, sorry if that wasn't clear. That was part of my fictional pro drone Fox News opinion piece. I'd imagine a pro war/pro drone piece would include a quote like that. I agree with your observation that you make.
I can't really imagine too many better firsthand accounts than someone who actually worked on a drone program. Would you have the guardian publish only secondhand opinion pieces?
Fwiw they also published an op ed by a defence minister and linked to it twice in this article so I don't see the manipulation angle on a newspaper wide scale, although obviously the guardian editorial board has some strong opinions. Stronger than other newspapers? You'd have to make that case.
Incidentally, while I appreciate your attempt to keep a clear head, your comment that things are complex applies to almost any situation worth discussing.
> We need to make sure we're not being manipulated. Here the Guardian is just serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion (...)
> We all know war is hell.
Yes, but the drone attacks are unlawful systematic assasinations that are turning peace time living into hell. As there are no declared war zones (afaik, as I understand it the situation in Iraq is in a peculiar state of limbo, and there are presumably interventions in some of the civil wars that could be accepted as "wars", even if not decleared as such) were the US (or NATO) is involved.
So your comment is doing quite a bit of manipulation, itself -- accepting the use of leathal force against foreign civilian and paramilitary targets as equivalent with waging regular war.
I think history will show the push by the US in normalizing this type of terror to be a significant blow against the geneva conventions and agreement on the "rules of war" (which have never been followed to the letter, but have at least held the hope of bringing war criminals to justice and be used as a sound basis for refusing illegal orders).
I can't see how this stance by the US can't be used for justifying attacks on senators and lobbyists on US soil (for "their role in funding and facilitating illegal terrorist attacks against civilian targets").
Well, there might be global conflict, but global war is a little disingious - at least when the casualities and effects are so extremely polarized. I've never felt afraid of retaliation even if Norwegian forces have shot up some kids or guided a missile down on an illegal target somewhere. Even with the few attacks on the US it would be hard to say that it would be rational to live in fear of attack orchestrated by foreign nations when on US soil?
As for declared war zones (vs declared wars), that was an unfortunate slip in editing on my part (text fields and smart phones don't mix well imo).
> Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village.
The (supposed) ability to make surgical strikes leads to different decision-making than when dropping bombs meant wiping a while village off the map. It makes it easier to call for more bombings increasing the likelihood of more false-positives (i.e. bombing the wrong house). Hell, SWAT teams have a horrific record of storming into the wrong house guns-blazing, and they are not in life or death situations (i.e. they have enough time to plan / make sure that the address is correct).
"Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?"
I would be interested in the statistics you base this on. How many strikes are fire support strikes vs. "lone" drone strikes? My impression up to your comment was that most drone strikes are not fire support strikes.
That's a strange takeaway. Manipulated into what? Not liking drones? Not liking war? Being skeptical about drones? Opening to other points of view beyond the official narrative (or non-narrative)?
And, "manipulation" would imply that there is something untrue in the article. It's irresponsible to assert as much without any substantiation on your part.
The article is out now. If there is something to refute, then the powers-that-be can do so.
>We all know war is hell.
War is hell, but the distinction here is that drone activity is not "sold" as such.
>Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific.
If it was offered in a vacuum, then yes. But, it is being offered as a counter-argument to the current drone-narrative. Or, perhaps more accurately, a counter to the lack of information being made public.
>The military is aware of the impact on these operators.
The military may be aware, but this article is specifically addressing public awareness. Part of the title reads "The public should know what really goes on".
You forgot to mention the simple fact that there is no problem at all to be solved there, and the US entered the war with some entirely made up pretext to test new weapons, show the rest of the world it's ground military supremacy and protect corporate interests, like it has always been.
While you are correct, please bear in mind that we are already being manipulated by politicians. The public discourse on drone strikes is dominated by those who seek to downplay the horrors of war associated with these attacks. It has worked.
Currently the public don't seem to consider drone strikes as being like other military attacks. Drone strikes aren't replacing traditional bombing campaigns. If there was a public outcry and drone strikes were stopped, the US wouldn't start dropping conventional bombs on houses in Pakistan.
This article should be more even handed, but it is important that the public understand that these new weapons are not completely clean and consequence free.
> We need to make sure we're not being manipulated. Here the Guardian is just serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion. I'm not sure how this is different to much of the chest beating I'd see on Fox News. I'm not here to argue for or against the drones. Just that if we pride ourselves on being educated and critical thinkers that we apply that to all sources of data we read.
I had some of the same reactions that it seemed like some of it was hijacking anti-war for anti-drone. I would be upset with the guardian if they received this and did not run it. I don't know what their back-and-forth process would be in editing this.
> We all know war is hell. We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm. So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific.
Right, so let's not be too quick to accept that drone warfare and traditional warfare are the same thing. It's very important to distinguish and consider what is new. You can read into a bit and see she's not just listing the effects of weaponry on humans. Considering her vantage point through a screen, and mental state during and after the attacks, her "how many X have you seen" questions are very drone specific. For one thing, she probably has orders more Xs than anyone in a traditional combat position. For another, the non-threatened state in which she killed another is important. I think her questions help me see her witnessing the carnage.
> Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war? I suspect they decrease it with smaller more targeted bombs vs prior more traditional larger bombs. Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village. Maybe they increase it because we're carrying out a lot more sorties than we did prior when a jet and a pilot were needed/at risk. However, I'm not sure and this article goes nowhere close to helping with the discussion.
I would say they increase human suffering and hide horror. I think that your suspicion that it decreases horror goes along with horror being hidden. "A lot more sorties" needs to be discussed before dismissing this as not helping. When you bomb an entire village, it's in a war zone and everyone on both sides is damned certain of what happened and the outcome. Here we bomb several more houses, in areas that aren't even war zones, because our intel is "better" and our strikes are more "precise". The enemies, locations, and outcomes are undefined and unchecked, hard to see. And since the attacks are smaller and more secretive, visibility is reduced. There is little public visibility or scrutiny on our side. It's not war as usual. It starts to tend toward the whole planet being a theater of war rather than any one specific place. It's horrifying.
So drones are used outside of designated war zones and in non-traditional combat. Then i'm not convinced that "Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war" is the right question. But the article adds firsthand account that the feedback systems are very low bandwidth and easily make mistakes. It adds firsthand experience of psychological damage that operators suffer. These both help with discussion around that question.
> "The view is so pixelated it makes decisions tough" Can you imagine military people who fight/fought on the ground in real combat and order in strikes reading that? Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?
Exactly, "maybe not caring". I think justification would be easier in a situation like that: in battle, with smoke around, on something resembling a battlefield, a well-defined enemy. I think i that the less i was threatened, the more guilt and psychological damage i would suffer later for an incorrect kill.
Add in to the mix the fact that we are serving hellfires to peoples faces using the same low-bandwidth, inhuman triggers we might use to serve ads to their faces (signature strikes), it's really a new problem. Precision in space and time doesn't matter much without precision in intelligence. The bandwidth, confidence, and human involvement must be very high on killing system like this, as they're used in scenarios that have little to do with traditional battlefields. The "so pixelated" argument helps us see this and should not be dismissed in the way that you are dismissing it, by saying it's harder for boots in combat to make decisions in limited visibility.
> Lastly, imagine how you'd feel reading a similar opinion piece on Fox News from a gun ho former operator talking about all the American lives he saved by observing and taking out "the bad guys". What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives and dramatically reducing the number of innocent civilians killed vs how we would have approached the same problem just 25 years ago.
> War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate. Biased ones feed their viewership what they know they'll eat up and do little, maybe even damage, the search for truth.
Firsthand experience of the suffering caused is good to hear about. Repeatedly stating "War is hell" seems to accept that we are only discussing legitimate war situations. It's not so easy to skip to "War is hell" in the war on terror. Without visibility or even statistics about what's going on, i'm ok with seeing anything that raises awareness. I'd like to see the pot stirred a bit on this one. With human beings, i'd like to err on the side of caution. Worst case is it's biased as heck and it causes discussion and justification. I wish one of my concerns was that We the People could accidentally dismantle or harm a highly effective and necessary drone program.
"Heather Linebaugh served in the United Stated Air Force from 2009 until March 2012. She worked in intelligence as an imagery analyst and geo-spatial analyst for the drone program during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan."
Your post is bullshit, and you are attempting to manipulate us.
Your argument comes down to this: people should not be reminded that war is hell. That's it. That's the entire crux if your poorly considered post.
If you're a pro-war sociopath, then you have a point. If you prefer a well-informed populace, then you have no point at all.
Worse than that, you're attacking people who can add additional perspective solely because they're not providing every perspective simultaneously. It is morally disgusting that you claim The Guardian damaged the search for truth by adding counterpoint to existing propaganda efforts.
It is truly sad that you felt the need to attack The Guardian for writing this. You are eloquent, but deeply misguided.
It saddens me that your thoughtless and damaging response is pinned to the top.
Right now we have one major source of news about drone programs: government PR. It is biased and one-sided.
The Guardian has found a legitimate source of an additional perspective and they are adding it to the public's understanding. And you are somehow claiming that this makes things worse. That is bullshit.
The only people hurt by this are pro-war assholes who view reminders that war sucks as being problematic to your twisted causes.
Congrats on being a mediocre person who doesn't believe in anything or have any opinions. This is the most offensive thing I think, even more than me disagreeing with you. Just picking middle of the road bland boring contrariness.
>We all know war is hell.
Apparently "we" don't because people continue to wage war.
>We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm.
No, making it into a game complete with an Xbox controller abstracts the realness from it.
> So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific.
It isn't about drones, its about killing people. Who gives a fuck if it is a drone or a spoon. It is clearly an article about shitty wars being pursued by shitty people, not about how technologically advanced drones are.
>Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village.
What a false fucking dichotomy. How about not bombing fucking anyone? And who the fuck is "we"? I didn't bomb anyone and will continue to not bomb anyone.
>"The view is so pixelated it makes decisions tough" Can you imagine military people who fight/fought on the ground in real combat and order in strikes reading that? Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?
Again, false dichotomy. It does not have to be grainy drone feeds or confused soldiers on the ground. There are more options than A or B.
>The military is aware of the impact on these operators.
That doesn't mean they give a shit. I am aware of the drug addict a few houses down. I don't care.
>Lastly, imagine how you'd feel reading a similar opinion piece on Fox News from a gun ho former operator talking about all the American lives he saved by observing and taking out "the bad guys".
I wouldn't care. I don't care about "American lives" and I don't care about insurgency lives. I care about people regardless of nationality. I feel bad for the jack asses on both sides that eat up the lies of their leaders and kill each other in the name of nothing.
>What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives and dramatically reducing the number of innocent civilians killed vs how we would have approached the same problem just 25 years ago.
Its amazing how redefining anyone that is an adult male who dies as an enemy combatant reduces civilian deaths as well.
>War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate. Biased ones feed their viewership what they know they'll eat up and do little, maybe even damage, the search for truth.
Being a boring middle of the road stick in the mud does more damage than anything.
Pointing out an opposing view, or the downside of the alternative to drones (boots on the ground) does not make the author a sack of shit.
War will be around until humans work harder to understand each others perspectives and evolve socially as quickly as we have with technology. You can help us all to that end by not being name calling anonymously on the internet.
I'm not sure the expletive was warranted, this being HN and all, but the post he referred to did start with an ad hominem by implying that a personal account of how drone operators have the same emotions as everybody else was manipulative.
He isn't a sack of shit for having an opposing view point. He is a sack of shit for this middle ground all sides have a valid point and the truth is somewhere in the middle bullshit.
He actually doesn't take the middle ground. He's avoiding the drone vs anti-drone argument to make a perfectly valid and legitimate point about the Guardian article.
And that's one reason why people go to war; they can't understand the arguments of both sides of a conflict, so it escalates to something that even unintelligent people can do: fight. If more people would take the time to discover the root of their conflicts, they wouldn't just take the easy way out and start name calling or throwing punches.
Very few people want to be evil or wrong for the sake of being evil or wrong - they believe they are right and they just have a different perspective on how to be right.
Truth is just the perception of fact. Depending on one's values, the truth can be viewed differently by different people. That's why it's very difficult to find "one right answer".
I personally think the middle path is always the place to begin seeking the truth.
I can tell you are angry (i have a 6th sense with these things). I am angry too. I am so angry at what my country does, and how ignorant the majority of us are about it. I have no salve. I have no solution. War's hellish qualities serve as entertainment fodder instead of a lesson.
I am angry too, but i respect the place we are and, respectfully, you should too.
This response should be exhibit A as to why HN was better when PG was enforcing the no-politics rule.
It's phenomenally rude, emotionally charged, wildly unfocused, and somehow actively advocating being loud and uninformed. It's hard to engage with a post like this in any sort of rational way.
Posts like this crowd out people like me from participating at all on HN by creating an unhealthy environment for discourse.
> No, making it into a game complete with an Xbox controller abstracts the realness from it.
False. This is exactly what the article was addressing: unreported suicides and clinically depressed drone pilots. It definitely doesn't feel like a video game to those people.
Maybe not the people piloting, but the people ordering them to. It makes it a lot more trivial for everyone involved than actually hopping in a jet and blowing up some weddings that way.
Being offended about anything is the weakest form of argument. You're upset this person does not subscribe to your binary world-view in that particular post.
Perhaps this person felt they didn't want to pick a side because they wanted to avoid the flame war.
It's just a stupid online forum, where the arguments are meaningless and the points don't matter; have little affect or influence in the real-world can have little to no value, other than the smug satisfaction one obtains from patronizing another person into the fetal position with their oh-so-superior logic an rational skills.
Congratulations, you now have 1000 internet points. Spend them wisely, son; don't let people see your real power levels.
Thank you for this. OP seems to be in denial of the fact that there is no "War". Whatever is going on is just to keep the massive industrial military complex running funded by tax payers. Fighting against Hitler was war. Running after a bunch of helpless people in the desert to test latest weapons and keep the bottom 10% of the population employed is just evil.
Unfortunately, you may have had a point, but the abusive and offensive way about which you've made it makes it nearly impossible to discern it. Your comment is exactly why I stopped reading comments on news papers, it is full of ad hominem attacks with a serious vileness that makes it clear you are neither interested in discussion of the subject nor capable of providing meaningful insight.
I agree with the other poster, political posts bring out the partisans and assholes.
The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people
If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed.
Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA?
We need an international ban on armed drones before it is too late.
There you go again ck2. One of your classic comments.
We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible.
The real solution, of course, is to avoid wars, and violence, in general. Supposedly, the world is more peaceful now than ever, even with Syria, the train station suicide bomber is Russia today, etc.
Personally, I don't want to see the US be the world police. There's a high cost in both money and American lives. Still, for the foreseeable future, the world needs to address the problems and try to solve the remaining problems. Otherwise, decades from now, people on HN will be complaining about how future weapon systems are killing innocent people.
But unfortunately, it always is.
American life, and American citizenship is more precious than any other life.
I know it's not the same issue, but throughout the whole NSA snooping revelations, Americans have only been concerned by the legality of spying on their own citizens.
All of us foreigners are fair game.
This is similar. The value of an American life is much more than that of a foreigner's life.
Americans should be more concerned about the NSA spying on US citizens than on foreigners. Here's why:
When the US government decides a US citizen's communication patterns makes him a terrorist, the US government is free to knock down their door in the middle of the night and whisk them off to Guantanamo, and NO ONE except the US government can do anything to stop them.
When the US government decides a foreigner is a terrorist, they have to ASK your government to cooperate, and if they don't, the US has to be ready to go to war to kill/capture him.
The difference between the NSA spying on an American and a foreigner is that only the foreigner has a government that can protect them from the US government.
> The difference between the NSA spying on an American and a foreigner is that only the foreigner has a government that can protect them from the US government.
Pakistan is a nuclear power and even they don't have a government that can protect its people from the US government.
> When the US government decides a US citizen's communication patterns makes him a terrorist, the US government is free to knock down their door in the middle of the night and whisk them off to Guantanamo, and NO ONE except the US government can do anything to stop them.
While I dislike how the U. S. government has decided that who they classify as terrorists superceding the rights of a US citizen, this is just wrong. Communicating with terrorists on a typical basis isn't enough for the U. S. government to do so - the only cases where I have heard of this happening is when the US citizen in question has carried out actual violent terrorist actions such as armed combat.
You have far less protection against the U. S. government if you are not a citizen, since there is nothing protecting you against broad actions. You can be assassinated in the middle of the night & your government wouldn't be able to do a damn thing to pre-empt that. There are also far less protections as to spying as well, but that has nothing to do with this article.
Arguably, if you are living in Pakistan or some other "near failed" state which gets military support from the US, you are at a much higher risk.
Some B.A. in the NSA digs through your traffic and decides you are some terrorist mastermind, next thing you know a Hellfire blows up your home and family.
It's not an American thing. It's the human condition. I don't care where you live, if someone who lives down the street from you and looks like you gets killed, you care more about that than about someone on the other side of the world. That's how people work.
But there is no reason it has to be that way. For most of human history we lived in small tribes of a hundred people or so, and everyone pretty much cared only for the people in their own tribe. But then we moved on to entire cities of thousands, where you likely didn't know everyone else, but it was still possible to care for strangers because they were still part of your "tribe". Then we moved on to nations with millions of people, and nationalism still proved to be effective.
So maybe we can someday go to globalism. Putting the whole of humanity inside your circle of concern, not just your friends and members of your tribe.
That's how people with an inadequate exposure to multiple cultures during childhood work.... such as most Americans, sadly, who remain fantastically insular. As a British kid in US school for a year, I was astounded to find that of this group of "elite" children, only two (other than myself) had ventured beyond Illinois, and one abroad - to Canada.
Oh, indeed. Geography is no small part of it. Folks from corners of the world in proximal contact with other cultures end up with far more cultural cross-talk and the ensuing ability to understand other cultures... or they have the inverse reaction, of outright xenophobia.
Our government isn't democratically elected - had they enacted the electoral reforms that they said they would, the next might have been - but they won't, and it won't be.
Reply to classicsnoot: in your referenced article the estimated US population is 317 million, and the world population is 7134 million. 317/7134=0.444 so the US population is then 4.4% of the world population.
thanks to you and @alpeper, i appreciate you reserving judgement i used to be embarrassed of my poor maths skills, but now i do not have the time for silly feel.
7000000000
300000000
I never got passed pre-algebra, but i am having a hard time getting to 4%. I fully acknowledge i am shit at maths, but i would love an explanation (completely serious; i have heard this "4%" malarkey a few times now). I know these numbers are estimations at best, but they seem accepted so:
>China: 1.3-1.5 billions
>India: 1.3-1.4 billions
>EU: 400 millions
>US: 400 millions
>sum total, all nations: 7.1 billions [1]
I know this may seem like semantic silliness, but here of all places i expect accuracy within region. to the larger point, at this time, american minds are more valuable in terms of conviction, as it is our country that is so reckless in regards to others, be it in the realms of security, supply lines, manufacturing, etc. This is no an inherent value; the most important dude at the party is always the person with the weed. It is not because she is better than her peers, it is because of her relationship to here peers in the context of what they want and what she has. Before you charge up your righteous indignation cannons, this "importance" along with all the times i must sit through a harangue about why i need to be more respectful/appreciative of the greatest nation on earth drives me, and many other americans, completely nuts. i fucking hate it, but when i travel, my brothers and sisters from overseas will only let me be a shitty american. some of us over here are paying attention, you know.
pass the tea, mate. this whole coffee thing needs to end as well.
> There's a high cost in both money and human lives - nationality should not be a consideration.
Here's a sobering thought: The way super-villains are portrayed in movies is basically how leaders were expected to act up through the 1600's. Screw over and kill your neighbors to benefit your side? Just business as usual. Torture and gruesome and spectacular executions? Just business as usual. Kill prisoners and animals in large part because of the entertainment value? Just expected behavior.
I wonder if the way leaders and the national security apparatus behaves now will be viewed as super-villainy in the future? Probably.
And here you go again missing the point, trying to falsely equate drones and B-52's, while arrogantly implying Americans are more valuable than foreigners.
BTW, when was the last time B52s were used to bomb weddings to kill one suspected, not convicted, terrorist? Drones are used for that, in place of human assassins, or, heaven forbid, a judicial process. Remember that? The law?
This is the difference. With drones, governments think they can get away with it. They claim it clean and use the same false equivalents you use.
Tell me, if you are to be stopped in the streets, do you want that to be by a person, or robot? In the end, that is where these cowards will end up.
Not to detract from your point, but we used B-52s frequently for air support missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Units (well, usually AF CCT or TACP on the ground with the unit) could call up fire missions and would get a platform, which could be an A-10, F-16, F-15, F-18, B-1B, B-52, etc. as supplied by the air force based on what was available (usually overhead, or within a short flight). CCT had more flexibility in getting "better" stuff or more specific requests.
So, I'm going to say "2010", but it might actually have been 2011 or 2012 or even 2013 (I haven't kept up).
Drones, Napalm, B-52 bombing—all weapons for cowards. The problem with remote-control war is that there's no political cost; remember that the Vietnam war didn't end because the great public bought into the hippies' peace&love ideology, it ended because the great public was receiving too many of their sons back in body bags.
I bet people used to call rifles "weapons for cowards". And before that, muskets. And cannons. Before that, I'm sure people thought bows and arrows were "for cowards". Or spears. Or just plain pointy sticks.
They probably did up until the point when both sides were armed with them. But the difference with Napalms, B52s and drone strikes is the enemy they were used against were never likely to be able to obtain similar weapons and thus threaten their opponents to a similar extent.
I'm not particularly sure about the concept of "cowardice" here, I just had to point out this logical flaw.
On what timescale does "never" apply? Large technological gaps in weapons between different people carrying out a fight aren't that uncommon, after all. A couple hundred years later and you can hardly tell the difference.
It seems reasonably possible that the people we're currently blowing up with drones would have similar technology by, say, the year 3000. (Not the exact same people, obviously, but that group of people.)
“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.” Patton
All weapons are the weapons of cowards. It isn't fair that almost all the weapons we use in Afghanistan are superior to our enemies, and it isn't fair that they resort with IEDs and suicide bombs.
If you have equal weapons then you look for superiority in numbers or tactics. Long gone are the days when "honourable" war meant agreeing to fight pitched battles on terrain that suited neither side and both sides knew was coming. Those "honourable" wars were also the most brutal to both prisoners and civilians.
A related point is that we used to have conscription and it was much harder to get elected if you didn't have a good record of service. This meant that leaders thought much harder about going to war and there was a genuine political cost in that the masses had a better grasp on the implications.
> The problem with remote-control war is that there's no political cost
Oversimplification. Domestically, the US is still paying the cost of using, eg, Agent Orange in Asia, today (children of service members born deformed).
Really? I haven't received my bill for agent orange in forever. Anyone sent to prison for authorising its use? Civil lawsuits? No, there was no cost (except to those directly affected) for using agent orange.
You haven't received a bill? Fascinating — do you not pay taxes? Because if you are, then you most certainly have been paying for medical treatments for veterans and their families, as well as various US government cleanup projects.
Sorry, can't find that bill. I pay taxes and I regard any class action funding from the DoD with the same skepticism as the Iraq War. No one is paying for it, not in dollars. We've spent many trillions in Iraq and the government just charges it to the fed who kicks the can down the road.
I'm sure I might pay for it one day. I'm fairly sure my kids and grandchildren will pay for it.
"The number of conflicts (both international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990s to just over 30 in 2005 (definitions are obviously fluid; these are the ones used by scholars at the universities of Uppsala and British Columbia for a project called the “Human Security Report”). On their definitions, the number of international wars peaked during the 1970s and has been falling slowly since. The number of civil wars continued to rise until about 1990 and then fell precipitately. In total, the death toll in battle fell from over 200,000 a year in the mid-1980s to below 20,000 in the mid-2000s."
USA and its allies are occupying two countries and they are fighting the local resistance. The occupied countries never threatened the offensive forces. Does it reminde you of anything similar that happened 70 years ago? And btw when was the last time that USA was in a war as a defensive force? When did the American soldiers defend their homes and their American soil?
Your stance is that we should never involve ourselves in any foreign conflict and only fight when we are domestically attacked? Please be more explicit so the discussion can be more focused. Certainly, we could move all our our soldiers in all countries back to the US. We still have troops in Korea, Japan, Germany, and many other countries.
Maybe. The 'declared war game' has several nice properties:
1) It provides a definite start and end to hostilities.
2) Clearly identifies a target.
3) Has relatively clear rules of war, especially with regards to treatment of POWs and civilians.
You don't want to play that game. Ok. So what are we left with?! We have not-really-POWs at Guantanamo. We drone-strike targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and apparently Yemen. There is no clarity around who the targets are, why they are targeted, who sentences them to death and what the procedure is, how long this will last, and any other information that would introduce some sort of accountability. Just a few weeks ago, a wedding convoy was mistakenly targeted and 17 innocent people died. Clearly there was some MASSIVE lapse in intelligence. Worse, why is a convoy EVER targeted given that more than likely most convoy-travelers are either innocent or not-deserving of a death sentence even if a known terrorist is among them. So...why did this happen? who was responsible for the 'mishap'? what was done to make sure this doesn't happen again? Who was fired/disciplined/court-marshaled?
The question is not whether the US military is murdering on a consistent, timely basis. It's a question of why the murdering is happening in the first place.
I have no power to change any aspect of the US military, but that doesn't mean I can't decry it as evil.
It wasn't a declaration of war. It was an authorization of military force against targets that that committed or aided in the 9/11 attacks.
Using this Act almost 15 years later to justify drone attacks against targets that had nothing to do with 9/11 stretches the interpretation a little. No? I mean, surely, you're not suggesting that this act means the office of the president has perpetual authorization and apparently such a huge leeway in its interpretation.
It most emphatically was a conditional declaration of war.
> It was an authorization of military force against targets that that committed or aided in the 9/11 attacks.
"An authorization of military force" is an exercise of Congress' power to declare war. And it was against those "nations, organizations, or persons" that the President of the United States determines to have committed or aided, or harbored those who have committed or aided, in the 9/11 attacks.
> Using this Act almost 15 years later to justify drone attacks against targets that had nothing to do with 9/11 stretches the interpretation a little. No?
The attacks are against al-Qaeda, an organization which did not have "nothing to do with 9/11".
> I mean, surely, you're not suggesting that this act means the office of the president has perpetual authorization and apparently such a huge leeway in its interpretation.
Until and unless it is repealed, yes, by its plain language the AUMF gives the President perpetual authorization with very broad discretion -- which is why a number of people (including Barack Obama) have called for it's authority to be conclusively sunsetted by Congress -- though the continuing attacks against al-Qaeda aren't really any kind of a stretch.
Its not about precision weapons anymore., its not about killing the right or wrong people. Its not even war anymore, its a kill list and the real question is will the kill list ever end, the kill list has been endlessly growing.
Dirty Wars [1] is a fine piece of investigative journalism by Jeremy Schaill about exactly this.
Except there's not really a war. There's just poorly-targeted killing, or let's just call it what it is, murder.
Weddings, funerals and restaurants are not war zones.
If you know are in a war zone, you can at least do your best to avoid it or flee as a war refugee. Should all citizens start fleeing all countries being targeted by drones?
You are referring to what I think was called Operation High Tower in the Vietnam War, which in retrospect was a low point in my country's actions. You have the benefit of hindsight so I find it disturbing that you sound OK with the napalming and massive high altitude bombing of mostly civilian populations.
I wholeheartedly agree with your comments about war.
> There's a high cost in both money and American lives.
Likewise, there's huge financial opportunities in a war for the military-industrial complex which just so happens to have strong ties with our political leadership.
>We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible.
I don't war a war at all. I want sovereign countries to be left to their own.
If there is a cross-country attack, then it can be handled either by the country's police (if it was by individuals acting on their own) or by a proper war operation.
By some accounts, 1 in 10 killed was a child. Why don't we ever discuss this on HN?
Until after the WWII, the US really didn't involve itself in much of the world's conflicts. Our tradition is to pretty much leave the world to fix its own problems. We joined WWI during the last year of the war and WW2 was already 3 years in before we officially joined.
Would fewer people have died if USA hadn't interfered in Syria to the extent that we have? I.e., no constant media and political coverage, no arming the rebels, no diplomatic ante-upping games? It's impossible to be certain, but it certainly makes sense. What is indisputable is that further action on the part of USA will increase the death toll dramatically, as it has done everywhere else.
Further action on the part of the USA will always increase the death toll, like it did in Kosovo? And staying out of things will always reduce deaths, like in Rwanda?
I don't pretend to have the answer in the case of Syria, and I'm not advocating anything one way or another. I'm just pointing out that your model of the world doesn't appear to predict the past, let alone the future.
How would intervening in Rawanda have saved lives exactly? Go in and arm the Tutsi's? Start killing Hutus? It is probable that intervention would have caused more casualties (including to US forces).
Kosovo is also disputed even in terms of actual casualties, let alone projected casualties, and is probably not a good case for intervention.
I fully agree there is not a good answer either way (syria included)... Just pointing out that your examples don't really predict the past or future either. Prediction in any case seems like a waste of time. (Unless you're The Doctor that is.)
Unless of course the support provided by a (Western) outsider had caused other tensions (warlords uniting or what have you), thus increasing the body count, which is one possible outcome out of many.
Genocide tipping in exactly the opposite direction is another (obviously unintended) possibility. Oh yeah... The rest of the wiki you link talks about that... Oops!
You can't predict a future that didn't happen. (Again unless you're The Doctor).
If you believe the judicious provision of weapons is a worthwhile humanitarian endeavor, then by all means create an NGO dedicated to the task. I can certainly envision donating to such a charity. Please don't involve the USA military-industrial complex in such a Faustian manner.
Also it isn't so convincing to link to a wiki section that supposedly proves your point about reducing bloodshed, while the very next section on the page describes 5 million people killed in the same area in the following decade.
It's possible that the war might be already over if the US hadn't supported rebels, but we can't be sure. Someone else may have filled the vacuum. Consider that we weren't involved in Rawanda and 800,000 to 1,000,000 people were killed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide
Also, I'd be a little embarrassed to suggest that the solution is to not have any media or political coverage. At the very least, there should be more coverage on the world stage.
It can only help if leaders know the world is watching, their acts are being recorded, and someday they may be held accountable.
>Do you mean like in Syria where 130,000 people have died?
Yes.
How many have died in the US Civil war? I read ~215K combat deaths and ~500K civillian deaths.
Should someone had intervene, e.g Britain or France, aiding one side over the other (and pushing their own agenda)?
>Until after the WWII, the US really didn't involve itself in much of the world's conflicts. Our tradition is to pretty much leave the world to fix its own problems. We joined WWI during the last year of the war and WW2 was already 3 years in before we officially joined.
Actually, in historical terms, joining WWII was an already made decision, not something the US was "dragged on". The Pearl Harbor was just a pretext, and they worked quite hard on provoking that kind of aggression from the Japanese. They US (not the people, the policy makers and large interests) saw the decline of the old colonial powers, and reached for the opportunity to get a large slice of the post-colonial pie.
Plus, it had a long colonial/invasion history of its own, from Philipines to Mexico and beyond by that time.
The French did intervene in the US Revolutionary War. That's probably why there is a United States today.
Yes, WWII is well documented. The point was we didn't send in our full military until 1941. It's possible tens of millions more people would not have died if we had joined earlier.
>The French did intervene in the US Revolutionary War. That's probably why there is a United States today.
That's not the civil war I asked about though -- the revolutionary war was already between 2 different nations (well, one under construction).
And there was other differences: France did it to weaken Britain (the part which was their rival to their colonial and trade empire). Not to "bring justice/democracy/what have you".
And if France could do much power-wise, it would have taken whatever much it could from the new nation.
But this isn't the war we fought in Iraq or the war we fought against Japan or Nazi Germany. If US declares war against country X and I loosely identify with the objectives I will support it too.
This is war against terrorism. We are not in war with Pakistan. In fact we send them billion of dollars as aides. Then as reasonable Citizen it is my duty to ask - hundreds of billions of dollars we are spending in war against terrorism, are we anywhere close to winning it? Are we even using a winning strategy? If not, why spend american lives and money pretending world police where we should leave it to the UN?
...solve the remaining problems. Otherwise, decades from now, people on HN will be complaining about how future weapon systems are killing innocent people.
Aha, your theory of history is of a teleological bent. Not really my cup of tea, as it requires ignoring nearly the entirety of human history...
The word 'drone' should be excised from the discussion. Whether the pilot is sitting in a trailer outside LA or in the cockpit has very little to do with morality of the rules of engagement.
The US has been repeatedly killing the wrong people in another country since before the age of robotics. The issue we need to focus on (after the issue of whether we should be fighting the war in the first place), is the rules of engagement.
For example: "Positive identification (PID) is required prior to engagement. PID is a reasonable certainty that the proposed target is a legitimate military target."
How are operators trained to interpret "reasonable certainty"? How do we balance protection of local civilians with protection of US troops and the aims of the war? These issues are old, outside of the context of drones or even aircraft.
No - the alternatives are air-strikes and artillery.
Drones have the advantage of loiter time, they can spend ages in situ gathering intelligence and analysing whether to shoot or not. This does generate the mental health problems for the analysts the articles describes - the same as for snipers, they watch the person they are going to kill.
Aircraft and the infantry that call in air strikes and artillery do not have loiter time, usually the enemy know they're out and about (certainly in Afghanistan) and thus they are "reactive".
The alternative to drones is counterinsurgency. For example, the wedding party in Yemen, if it were a target of actual importance, would have been captured and interrogated, with suspected insurgents detained for further questioning. The problem is that we don't have the manpower or the political latitude to do that in all these regions, so we send in killer robots instead and hope we hit the right people. This is a recipe for high false positive rates, even with the best equipment, because the HUMINT and SIGINT that underlies target identification is shaky to say the least.
Just as in the past we outsourced our repression to client states in the region, those same regimes are now outsourcing their counterterrorism to us in the form of drone strikes. We are helping to consolidate the power of creatures like Saleh, at the eventual ruinous cost of American lives and global legitimacy through the inevitable blowback.
The 'kids' part deserves emphasis. In recent times the military has been lowering its admission standards, and as such all manner of emotionally immature and mentally unstable are being allowed in. This isn't new, but it's been on the rise.
The soldiers we're sending over there aren't trained professionals, they're glorified mall-cops with sub-machine guns. The ones with special training are involved in special operations and they're few and far in-between, and personally I'd prefer we maintain a group of highly specialized individuals rather than an army of meat shields.
This true, except for the part where the US military is cutting forces[0] and it is becoming harder and harder to join[1]. It's probably easier to pretend the majority of the military is comprised of barely pubescent country bumpkins with no training past the Boy Scouts, but that's just not the case.
As a human analogue to the drones, it is not unrealistic to imagine that phones, shovels, or other objects have been mistaken for guns by an observer in a tense situation (for example: a SWAT raid). Granted, one is clear visual cues that are confused by a human mind in the heat of the moment, while the other is bad quality readings. We're talking about two different implementations of the error.
This drone project could go one of two ways (ending the project is highly unlikely). The first way is upgrading the video quality, but this brings a number of issues with it such as latency (quite important in combat as any on-line gamer will tell you). The second is to provide AI to the drones... which frightens me when we can't get a voice recognition phone system to work. Google cars are just driving now after years of research (not flying, evading, identifying IEDs, identifying shovels, and engaging targets strategically on any given battle zone)... I don't expect the drones to fair better at this task because they're funded by the gov.
The only way the drone program would be pulled for a while is if the back doored encryption protocols were routinely exploited. We won't see an end to drones, or any end to proliferation at home or at war, and I'm skeptical we'll see drones get "better" any time soon.
The crucial difference is that drones are used in contexts where they have a very high false positive rate. It doesn't matter how accurate your missiles are if you are operating in an area where it is impossible to accurately identify targets. Considering the total lack of oversight and regulation on these secretive programs, it is unsurprising that they have the latitude to cause large amounts of civilian damage without inviting any limits on their activity.
Do drones have a higher false positive rate than human-piloted air support? Numbers are going to be hard to come by -- the military doesn't want to reveal anything. Qualitatively, the Collateral Murder video that wikileaks posted a while back (in which a US helicopter gunned down a pair of Reuters reporters because they were carrying objects that could have been weapons) sounds very similar to what's described here.
The data on both are pretty much impossible to find. Having looked at a number of civilian think tank studies into the issue, even if you come up with a statistic like 3 militants killed per civilian (as reported in some studies) it is very hard to say how that compares to other methods, or if alternatives even exist. Most of the comparisons in support of drone ops are to the wholesale target:CIVCAS for the entire ground forces, which of course is inflated by actual engagements with enemies.
I think we should look at this in terms of whether or not we should even be operating with outright force in the hinterlands of Yemen or AfPak, where there are very high concentrations of civilians. "Kinetic operations" with high explosives are, in my opinion, highly inappropriate for dealing with insurgents hidden among the population. Our intelligence isn't good enough, and is often gleaned from huge leaps of SIGINT logic, leading to entire families being killed over nameless metadata correlations to suspected terrorist nodes.
Drones already have long latency times, their "flight" which is the bit that requires potentially quick response times is already "AI" controlled.
People don't move so quickly you can't handle latency in terms of targeting. Vehicles can be identified and the weapon system can handle tracking them - latency doesn't come into it.
Of course they will improve. It is like saying 4 years ago that smartphones won't improve - they are already small, have limited battery, limited throughput on mobile internet etc. Drones will improve like any modern technology that's being used.
> If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed.
A little perspective could prevent such knee-jerk reactions. The ambiguity of drone targets is still miles ahead from basically blind carpet bombing a whole area that was (and still often is) the rule for the last century or so of modern warfare.
The thing is, the convenience of drones has made it much easier for countries to carry out strikes without any regard to the damage they will cause.
In the past, the possibility of your soldiers dying on the ground was a huge deterrent to frivolous strikes.
Today, drones conduct major strikes without paying any heed to international borders. Drones conduct missions nobody would have imagined possible a few years back.
While there is a huge benefit to the invading army in terms of reduction of fatalities, there is also a cheapening of war that lets commanders order strikes at their whim.
I'm sure nobody in the US or NATO armies in Afghanistan admits this, but this happens in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Drones may cheapen war in the way that you describe, but that still doesn't negate the fact that they kill less innocent people than the weapons and tactics that we used to use.
You seem to argue that the expense of a war can act as a deterrent. And yet, history is filled with bloodbaths that have failed to bring an end to war as we know it. Vietnam was horrific but it didn't keep us out of Iraq. I don't think getting rid of drones and forcing people to fight mano-a-mano will help prevent war. Deterrence only seems to work when the costs are astronomically high (e.g. nuclear weapons).
I don't understand how we can have a the technology for a drone but we can't fly it close enough to get a good quality photograph. I am all for limiting casualties for the US, but how is it not a war crime to just kill people without 100% proof they are the enemy?
And seriously, if cell phones are going to 39 megapixels, why can't a drone send back a good photo?
The advantage of a drone is it can "lurk" too far away to be easily seen. Building a camera that can take very clear pictures from a long way away is impossible (because of distortion from the air and weather). If you make the drone itself smaller, then you hit the Rayleigh limit:
Additonally, bandwidth needs to be taken into account. Even military satellite uplinks are slow and in many cases feeds are being sent to a ground station and then converted into digital for uplink.
Actually you are sort of wrong in both cases. Because a) drone is moving; b) drone can take multiple pictures; c) multiple drones can take pictures simultaneously.
In case of multiple drones taking pictures, these can be synchronized using GPS time, down to a microsecond. And knowing the GPS coordinates of each drone you can recover the image. Pretty much with arbitrary quality. (& If you are really good at it and the object is stationary, you can do it even through heavy fog. I'm not kidding, you really can - I can point you to some fancy research in computer vision, that allows you to do just that.).
Oh. I've tried finding that exact publication - they took a video of a city scene with dense fog/clouds in the background. If you'd play the video you couldn't see any shapes through the fog. At all. But after passing the whole video through reconstruction/de-noising, they've been able to recover the background (you could see s mountain, instead of dense fog).
It is not surprising and it's a pretty standard result actually. Can be called by different names (sparse sensing, denoising, superresolution, ...) and done by different methods (BP, LASSO, ...), but it always comes down to having a model (with some priors, e.g sparsity prior!) and using that model to re-project the data from your measurement projection into the projection of some interest to you.
I have no idea at what level you are, so I'd suggest this very well presented lecture (1 hour total): Compressed Sensing by Terence Taohttp://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC94A02A1218B24DF if you want to learn more. Examples of image recovery are in the part 5, part 6.
Not to justify any of this business, but why on earth wouldn't they apply 'beyond reasonable doubt' in their own minds when summarily executing somebody in the first place?
Because everyone hides behind "just following orders" up the chain.
It is also somewhere along the line of why police feel it is okay to try to shoot suspects on a busy street and often shoot the wrong innocent person and mess up their lives.
That sort of standard works when the executor has massively more power than the executee. For the US versus an ordinary criminal, we can do it. Facing something that looks more like a war, applying standards of justice generally results in losing.
In this case, the executor has more power than the executee. The US can reduce people to bloody smears from drones that are almost invisible to their victims, with all the actual humans safely ensconced in bases hundreds of miles away. The people they're targetting have nothing like that - they cannot fight back without putting themselves straight in the line of fire.
The difference is that we don't deploy our soldiers in the contexts and use-cases that we do with drones, because the risks are too great. Drones are expendable, so they are used in hostile conditions where the intelligence isn't as clear. That's why in practice they lead to high false positive rates. The real question is whether we should be using this technology to be waging war in areas where we wouldn't have done so otherwise.The choice between risking blood vs. risking electronics leads to a dangerous degree of latitude in how these weapons are deployed, that leads to a subsequent increase in civilian casualties which need not have occurred.
Public health researchers face the same issue every day when they decide whether or not to deploy a new treatment with unwanted side effects. If the false positive rate of your diagnostic heuristics is too high, then the overall damage to society can easily outweigh the effectiveness of the treatment, no matter how technologically advanced or curative it is.
The asymmetry of people getting killed in your country versus people getting killed in enemy countries is as old as human history. The bedrock of international relations is killing people in other countries. That won't change. We won't become a world of pacifists anytime soon.
Given that, do drones make more mistakes than armed soldiers or bomb drops or cruise missiles? That's the relevant question. And there is good reason to believe they do. The drone operator may not have as good a view as a soldier, but also doesn't risk his own life on a false negative.
I read that but farther down I read "but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end." seems to contradict. I understand what's meant, pixels and detail are different, but it's a poor choice of phrasing.
> If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed.
Mistakes are going to happen whatever you use. It's not clear that sticking better cameras on the things wouldn't give you enough information to make it comparable with other attack vectors.
The problem with this is that it doesn't give any context for the capabilities of other platforms. In reality it is the best we have, by far for attempting to identify friend or foe on the battlefield. When I say by far, I mean it. It is several orders of magnitude better, oh and it has a memory (DVR) so that the users can improve their capabilities.
So the whole things couches it wrong. You could have just as easily have written this:
Despite the feed often being highly pixelated, the video feeds offer far better resolution on suspected enemies than any other method, day or night, often including close quarters combat
I think the innocent victims that we make today will get us on track to developing better drones with more resolution and less errors and doubt.
I imagine a perfect drone without any human controller, doing it's business by AI, actually making the world a better place.
[edit] lots of hate and naive comments. Fact remains that human progress has always come through sacrificing some of us for the greater good. Innocent people have always died and will keep dying until we get to a point where robots take over for us.
What a disgusting point of view. The only thing that would make the world a better place is if the funding for death-machines was instead being used to deliver water purification plants, schools and education packages, medical supplies - to those human beings living in the 'foreign lands' who really need it.
For the cost of a single Hellfire, many Afghanistan villages could've been given power, for the first time, to charge their phones, making it possible for them to communicate, to educate themselves. But instead: BOOM! There goes some kids leg.
What a pity that the desire to create such technology is not, instead, being directed by the government towards truly peaceful technologies..
fit2rule: "the funding for death-machines was instead being used to deliver water purification plants, schools and education packages, medical supplies - to those human beings living in the 'foreign lands' who really need it."
And what happens when people who accept those plants, schools and education are killed by people who don't want them to accept those gifts from us? Back in the Vietnam era I made the same argument you do (for awhile). But the VC learned to kill villagers who accepted aid. The same thing goes on today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc.
In a better world, one without war, I would agree with you. But that is not the world we live in. Sometimes you have to think things through to second-order and higher effects.
You do realise the Taliban are specifically opposed to Western education, especially the education of women. You have groups like Boko Haram (literally "Western education is sinful").
Dropping books on villages when the security situation hasn't been established is akin to dropping landmines - anyone who picks one up and takes it home risks being killed.
There is a very good reason the Afghan campaign was about providing security in an area first then building schools, providing power, healthcare etc.
The problem is that Helmand province (especially) is so close the Pakistani border, and thus limitless reinforcements, providing the security there to do anything else is nigh on impossible.
Educating new generations is vital to the effort to replace these heinous groups with sane, functioning societies. Just because 'its hard to educate' doesn't justify the continued killing of innocents.
No-one is saying that we shouldn't try to educate our potential enemies, especially in places like Afghanistan. I'm just pointing out that your "drop books on them instead" it fatuous and wouldn't work.
Provide the security so that people won't be killed for being educated, and education is best. Educating without security just leads to dead kids.
Look, take the amount of technology developed to murder, kill and maim - and instead use that same degree of technology to educate, enlighten, and liberate. How hard is it to understand this concept?
It was once very, very difficult to drop a bomb on a childs head from afar - you used to have to do a lot more. Now its 'easy', relatively speaking. Imagine if that same scale of efficacy were applied, instead, to educating - to healing - to helping instead of killing.
What would the "B1 Bomber" of education systems look like? Lets develop it, and deliver.
Most Americans think we already spend too much on foreign aid. So, politically what you are proposing isn't going to work. Perhaps a privately funded solution. The "Three Cups of Tea" author was doing some of this but it turned out he wasn't completely honest.
It isn't just the military presence that drives fundamentalist Islam. "The Great Satan" is evil because of culture - educating children will also be seen part of the same evil - Westernisation.
cf Boko Haram - the Nigerian group whose name is literally "Western education is sinful".
Yes. However, nobody is interested in funding these types of drones. The military has the budget to really kickstart drone development and take us to the next level.
As alwasy, the military leads the way in science with their limitless budget, funded by fear.
Peaceful spinoff project is where the benefits for everybody will come from.
For the cost of a single Hellfire, many Afghanistan villages could've been given power, for the first time, to charge their phones, making it possible for them to communicate, to educate themselves.
A nice thought, but anyone who has spent time in rural AFG/PAK or Yemen/Somalia (where most of this is happening) will tell you that that is not what would happen. More typical, the power would be diverted to or ripped out by the local warlords to maintain their own power over the population - and most of the "regular" citizens go along with it because it meets cultural demands of the religiosity and tribalism that has been baked in for.
Liberalism (classic) can't be forced on a region or a group of people.
No one ever wants to portray death as a technical aberration because it is an icky feeling. Also, people love to be self righteous and condescending because it adds millimetres to their imaginary pedestal. Just to rile them up more, which guy campaigning for president in 2008 had killed more Americans by hand, McCain or Obama? The answer is shocking, but not unbelievable. My grandfather was a naval aviator. He told me about a dear friend who was smashed to bits immediately after take-off because the deck crew had installed his control surfaces backwards. Was he a person, or a lesson to future deck crews? was it a tragedy, or a teachable moment?
If you are like me, you are easily able to divorce the appalling human costs to obtain the raw data of cause and effect. I have had to force myself to temper my observation, given that most people do not want you pointing out unique anatomical facets whilst a person lays bifurcated. Pay them no mind, fellow freak. It was our lot that were the first barber-surgeons and grave robbers, and it is through our collective twisted perspective that we will continue to stick our little babby fingers in the wall socket of the unknown.
Surely you're intelligent enough to see the distinction between Barber surgeons, grave robbers, and killing machines.
There's a whole world of applications for AI and machinery that we could be pooling our resources into, but instead we're funding a continuing war on "terror" abroad. There's no reason why the war is necessary, no reason why technological progress would be made faster in the art of killing vs anything else.
Perhaps you believe that perpetual war is unavoidable and necessary. We could argue that.
But the way I see it, war isn't necessary, and the technological progress we make by funding war is a slim silver lining at best on a double edged sword with no handle. So you see, I find this thread ridiculous. I think you guys are psychopaths. And you're outnumbered by the rest of us.
Your use of "us" is adorable. There have always been more of "you". Who else would make up the wave assaults, mass labour pools, and factory employees?
War may not be necessary from an emotional standpoint, but from a technological standpoint it is the only game in town. The recent developments in peaceful IT are unique in human history, and they themselves are predicated on war technology and research. In fact, i challenge you to name one area of technology that is not based on war research and military development. I don't think you can name a single device that is not built off of something war related. I have a special place in my heart for the myth of pure science and research. I also believe it could become a reality. I posted ITT about how it might be possible to counter the militarization of our air. I think a few successive generations of scientists who are not affiliated with war making could bring about peaceful advancement, but as it stands now, technology absolutely requires mistrustful nations, reckless generals, and politely amoral science and tech workers.
All of that AI and "machinery" has a military background. They control the purse, so they dictate the purpose.
Surely you are canny enough to know that petty appeals to my "intelligence" only serve to make you seem desperate to be right. All 3 of those things, hell all things, are neither good nor bad. They are merely titles given based on context. Context is everything. A civilian sees a RPV as a killing machine. A EOD tech sees a drone as an insurance policy. A president sees a Predator as a solution. I see a way for normal people to enhance their effect in shaping their world. All of us see the same toy, but we all have a different use for it. Surely you are intelligent enough to understand that context can bring new light to any topic or situation...
What war was Genetics (Device: Micro Arrays, PCR Machines, etc) built off of and applicable to?
Or do you count that as 'medicine'? In that case you can reduce everything all the way down to cave men battling over fire.
I don't disagree that war time has pushed science for the vast majority of history... But there are fields that were not created initially with offensive or defensive purposes in mind.
My girlfriend went the BioMed route as well when i posed this question to her. Personally i would have tried business machines.
The bulk of all modern medicine (western at least) owes its regimen and SOP to military medicine. Just as i have seen ligatures (tourniquet) go from a no-no to standard practice in the last 10 years, each generation has watched medical science be advanced by martial situations. Epidemiology, rehabilitation, prostheses, surgery; they all are where they are now because of war and the responses to war. Modern sensing equipment is a grandchild of the tech build up of the cold war. Fracking super glue was a Vietnam War Era advancement.
I do not like it, as i think human on human war is an obsolete expression of very small groups of wealthy folk colluding to expand (ditto for racism), but i think it is a bit naive to assume we can just carry on with the march to the stars on the assumption that peaceful means of technological advancement are superior/ will be adequate. Humanity requires a challenge to be its best self. I grow tired of the challenge being an artifice of business (which is the predicate for all wars. all.), and if Global Climate Shift is in any way alterable, i sincerely hope that humanity's response will be the next "war", or concerted conflict if you will.
War is not the key ingredient, but it is by far the best catalyst known to people thus far.
So you're going with the "Everything came from the caveman's need for fire" argument it sounds like. Unarguably true if you want to reduce that far.
I still don't think you can come up with a logical example of Genetics being a war tool (yet) though. Yes Medicine has benefited from war time progress in many ways. But Medicine is not Genetics. While Genetics may be part of medicine (squares are rectangles but rectangles are not squares). All of the things you mentioned (surgery, rehab, prosthesis, etc) were practical medical applications for the battlefield, while Genetics was not created for or applicable to such things (although it has seen more recent attempts to apply it in that fashion).
Also business machines can easily be tied to war. IBM + Nazi Germany.
Finally challenge need not come exclusively from war. For instance using my example of Genetics, the challenge of explaining how traits are passed (or any sufficiently broad challenge), and being the first one to come up with it (scooping people and stealing their work to do so: Rosalyn Franklin) can drive people as well.
I don't disagree that war pushes innovation in any way. To say such a thing would be naive and ignorant of history. But it is not the only game in town.
I do not think cavemen needed fire, unless of course everything was preplanned but undetermined. It is an interesting thought: a human society that develops without the accessory of tools. I think it is possible, but it would be so fragile.
To all your points about genetics: Edward Wirths, and all the accompanying links in the wikuhpuhDIEuh. I know they may not have known the were the early innovators, nor does their misguided research have a huge part in the modern attempt to begin refining our genetic structure in response to senescence and error. But their techniques are alive and well. If you don't treat the subjects like shit and you keep your mortality rates subdivided so they are not counted together, you can perform a buttton of research.
I know it does not need to come from war to be innovative. I personally believe that all inspiration comes from either fear or love. I think we as humans are exceptionally good at fear. I know i am shit at love.
I love your handle. I would love to talk further with you about some of those "other games".
Nor can you name a single device that is not built off of something non-war related. If you refuse to admit your logical fallacies, then I have no point arguing with you.
You think that your psychopathy puts you in some elite category of non-labouring factory commander. It doesn't, it just makes you aberration to be tolerated until you all kill each other. Your failure to ground your value system into your nature -- a fellow human -- makes you an evolution inconsistency waiting to resolve itself. That is why you are outnumbered.
If not, you'll find that the future holds unexpected surprises for you as your pet machine comes to crush your frail body, only after realizing through trial and failure that you weren't able to transcend your physical nature.
I wish i had not had to go dark, because this comment is so full of undefended, feel based dirigibles of nonsense i was having Red Baron flashbacks.
> Nor can you name a single device that is not built off of something non-war related.
The Gloobenstien. This is a device powered off farts. It is used to detect and avoid /b/ronies. You lose.
>You think that your psychopathy puts you in some elite category of non-labouring factory commander.
I think my Borderline Personality Disorder has put me in my parents basement with no job and a huge list of ex-friends and lovers.
>it just makes you {an} aberration to be tolerated until you all kill each other.
What do you mean, "you people", you racist melon farmer? Seriously though, thank you for the new script idea. A serial killer that kills killers via giant, killer death arena called the KILLER DEATH ARENA. It is perfect, because people are fascinated by death, and it is totally unbelievable [Harry Potter, Saving Private Ryan, Deathbed: the Bed the Kills People]. "We" tend to kill you guys. Tigers do not often hunt tigers, though they do attack them if their territories overlap.
>Your failure to ground your value system into your nature -- a fellow human -- makes you an evolution{ary} inconsistency waiting to resolve itself. That is why you are outnumbered.
Evolution is not an intelligent process, you cretin. "We" are outnumbered because "we" cannot hide from our own stupid, unlike some of my human cousins.
>If not,{sic} you'll find that the future holds unexpected surprises for you as your pet machine comes to crush your frail body, only after realizing through trial and failure that you weren't able to transcend your physical nature.
It is like you were watching I,Robot and you accidentally appended your comment with a point in a phantasmagorical argument you had with the cute, bony doctor type. I will not get to transcend my physical nature. I do not want to. I will help build a tomorrow where our future cousins do not have to see each other as adversaries or competitors to make some fuckhead proud of all that he has "gained".
I think you got all feel, and wrote without thinking. I do that so much that i have to take sabbaticals from my commentry. If you actually read this, i would love to have a full on discussion about what you perceive as "us" and where "our" place is in the world.
> The Gloobenstien. This is a device powered off farts. It is used to detect and avoid /b/ronies. You lose.
You parsed my sentence wrong or something. I challenged you to find a device that isn't built off of something non-war related. Mind the double negative. You do see the point I'm trying to make, no?
> I think my Borderline Personality Disorder has put me in my parents basement with no job and a huge list of ex-friends and lovers.
That's beside the point but, well, that sucks. Wait, things are starting to make sense.
> What do you mean, "you people", you racist melon farmer? Seriously though, thank you for the new script idea. A serial killer that kills killers via giant, killer death arena called the KILLER DEATH ARENA. It is perfect, because people are fascinated by death, and it is totally unbelievable [Harry Potter, Saving Private Ryan, Deathbed: the Bed the Kills People]. "We" tend to kill you guys. Tigers do not often hunt tigers, though they do attack them if their territories overlap.
You're absolutely right. I actually have no evidence to suggest that non-psychopaths are better or worst off than psychopaths. I was just hoping you'd disappear but I guess that didn't work.
> I will help build a tomorrow where our future cousins do not have to see each other as adversaries or competitors to make some fuckhead proud of all that he has "gained".
OK so you're clearly not a psychopath, so there's nothing more discuss about psychopathy per se. But I believe you are confused about something. There is, to this date, perhaps nothing quite as important as nation-state war and defense in determining the outcome of technological progress. But with the invention of the internet I hypothesize that we won't be seeing the kind of wars we have been seeing in the past -- it's much harder to convince enlightened people to kill another man.
So the battlefield is shifting away from the field to the infrastructure of computation, cryptocurrencies, and social media networks. Popular opinion is what will defeat the drones, not another drone army. And popular demand is what will drive technological innovation in the future, not national "defense" budgets. We've already lost, the world is constantly on the verge of a nuclear meltdown. What good is another killer weapon?
Your comment shows you have a very narrow view of things like "battlefield", "enlightenment", and, ironically, what the internet is to the vast majority of humans. Nationalism is indeed an insidious concept.
I know i am not a psychopath, but i am not so different from them. You are a mental midget. I assume it is because you are, or esteemed by a small peer group as, inordinately good at some "valuable" skill. Despite this, you are probably not very notable in very many categories. You probably wish you were a 'path or some other distinct brand of different. But you aren't. You are just a person that is good at something, maybe. Why this has developed into a childish fear/loathing of the differently endowed is interesting from a diagnostic standpoint. If you ever get the chance to see a battlefield, or a battle for that matter, you may be unpleasantly surprised at how little has changed in the nature of death. True, the way we deliver the rock has changed, but we still just through rocks and try to make peoples' insides their outsides. It is the attempt to kill, and the counter-attempt to stop the killer, that drives offensive/defensive innovation. The clan aspect of scientific research guarantees that even highly specialized approaches to war making will spin off unintended devices and methodologies.
I believe that the internets of the future as well as a growing understanding and incorporation of "aberrant" personalities will lead to a Pax Humanitae, but only if narrow, hidebound idiots like you are relegated to the peanut gallery.
The stuff you wrote above is pretty twisted. Forget for a moment about the gist of our argument, which I was looking forward to discussing, but no more because it devolved into ad-hominem attacks on me, of which you know next to nothing about.
I sense that what you wrote above represents a dominant line of thinking, where you look down upon others & their abilities, while putting violent destruction on the pedestal above and beyond what it actually merits. This leads me to think that you were abused physically and mentally at one point in your life, and it still affects your mindset today.
If so, I hope you can find a way to heal yourself. Perhaps adopt a pet if you don't have one. You'll be amazed what a dog can teach you.
War is the only way forward. The funding of war machines comes from a desire to survive. A fear to die. This will always take precedence over any other kind of progress.
Stop investing in start-ups and a couple of people will be a little less wealthy. Stop investing in the military and we and/or our way of live dies within a decade.
War is the fastest way forward. The funding of war machines comes from a desire for possessions. A fear of being weak. This will always take precedence in the minds of politicians and aristocrats over any other concerns. Stop investing intellectual capital into dreams and ambitions, and we will continue to stagnate. Stop investing intellectual capital in the military and bureaucracy and we must actually have a healthy dialogue and interplay with the rest of the world.
I grew up in the DCon capital of the world, friend. I have heard every iteration of the jingoist "spend or die" speech. I am fed, clothed, and housed by tax dollars spent on "expanding capability" and "maintaining status quo". It is not about security and freedom, it is about securing profits and freeing untapped investment. Do you think that DCon is somehow different than SV? Small groups of whip smart young people using the lost ideas of an older generation to carve out a slice of an expanding market. Information Technology and War Technology are two facets of the same gem.
Your original premise may be accurate, but i do not believe it is correct. The path you take effects the place you go in many ways, and not all of them are obvious or even observable at the moment of choosing.
The key difference is in the violence. People sacrifice themselves voluntarily for the slim chance of gain and the real chance of progress, all the time. There's no reason to think that killing is a necessary or efficient method of finding progress.
Methinks you just like killing people. That's pretty psychopathic. Don't you have any friends?
There is no need for such talk. We can at least pretend to be grown-ups and have a discussion.
Violence is not the key difference.
Dying when a plance crashes into your home or dying from a rocket fired from a malfunctioning drone are just as violent and just as "meaningless" to the next of kin. However, in both cases we learn something and we progress.
I'm sorry, but the world does not work in the way that Disney has made you believe.
It is completely factual. Look at life and human history from an information theoretic point of view.
DNA for long term storage, cell to cell communication culminating in multicellular organisms, nervous systems and memory, symbolic communication and information transmission through conversations. Writing, printing, telegraphs; computers, networked.
Technology is a self-amplifying meme, and, now that there are technological means to transmit, persist and process complex information outside of human brains, we are no longer necessary to perpetuate it.
I'm upvoting your comment because you should have to deal with its dehumanizing effect. You imagine the victims of drones to be, perhaps, no different from those voluntarily participating in medical trials.
The common trend we see with the US government is total lack of restraint. It acts as a tyrant and a bully.
1) The government acquires drone technology. Rather than use it to kill a few known terrorists it operates massive drone programs which result in the deaths of 100's of innocent people in multiple countries.
2) The government develops advanced surveillance technology. Rather than use it on a few identified potential threats it decides to scoop up virtually all electronic communications of both its own and foreign citizens with regard for neither the letter nor the spirit of the US Bill of Rights.
3) The government enacts ridiculously heavy penalties for "crimes" whose negative impact is debatable then uses these laws and its virtually unlimited legal resources to terrorize individuals who engage in activities it doesn't like.
I would like to think that some of the better president's in this nation's history: FDR, Kennedy, etc., would have acted to reign in these abuses but in any case that isn't relevant to our current generations which seem devoid of any concept of collective well-being or spirit of disinterested public leadership.
You only have to look at past wars to see this is clearly not a total lack restraint.
During WWII, the US purposely burned down entire cities (not just small villages, some of the biggest cities in the world) just to scare the shit out of the other side.
In Korea and Vietnam millions of civilians were killed by artillery and air raids on villages and cities. By some accounts nearly all buildings in N. Korea were destroyed by bombing.
Even in Iraqi and Serbia, the US was bombing civilian targets like bridges and power plants.
LOL at FDR being against drones. He was overseeing the purposeful destruction of as many German and Japanese civlians as possible.
The entire concept of targeted drone assassinations is so surreal. Executing a convict in the US civilian court system requires a trial with a high-burden of proof, and the convict is afforded multiple appeals before the sentence is carried out. But in this case all it takes for the state to execute a suspect is the interpretation of some mid-level analyst. More perplexing, there are no qualms around civilian collateral damage. In what universe is striking a convoy carrying a suspect but also carrying innocent (or even if not innocent, not deserving a death sentence) civilians, deemed acceptable?
> In what universe is striking a convoy carrying a suspect but also carrying innocent (or even if not innocent, not deserving a death sentence) civilians, deemed acceptable?
During war, as accepted by every politician going back to the dawn of civilization. On the plus side, for the past several hundred years, we've started to make efforts to minimize.
> there are no qualms around civilian collateral damage.
Really? That seems to be all anyone is talking about when it comes to drones. From the perspective of anyone from more than a century ago, we're obsessed with it (and conversely, from the perspective of today, Dresden and Hiroshima would be war crimes.)
>That seems to be all anyone is talking about when it comes to drones.
Just a few weeks ago, a wedding convoy was mistakenly targeted and 17 innocent people died. Why is a convoy EVER targeted given that more than likely most convoy-travelers are either innocent or not-deserving of a death sentence even if a known terrorist is among them. That's what I meant. Furthermore, where is the accountability?! Who was disciplined for this MASSIVE intelligence failure?!
> In what universe is striking a convoy carrying a suspect but also carrying innocent (or even if not innocent, not deserving a death sentence) civilians, deemed acceptable?
I've worked on building some AI for drones for the US, and I'm fairly certain that advents in new technologies will mitigate most of the concerns in the article. It will make for a seriously scary new world, where devices like this exist at massive scale. Dictatorships will be even more brutal, and oppressors, even more oppressive. The sociopath in control of these machines will no longer have to worry about someone not carrying out orders properly due to emotions or questioning their judgement.
All that aside, the one aspect I don't see getting resolved is the psychological effects of someone relatively "normal" & smart watching the horrors and carnage of war and then heading to the grocery store for some ice cream after his/her shift. Unlike being in a miserable (i.e. battlefield) place where your body is filled with adrenaline and a good chunk of your mental resources are dedicated to keeping yourself alive and getting the hell out of there alive. Having the time to reflect on the serious inequities in the world that you've just been witness to can't easily be swept under the rug. Even if the systems are mostly automated and pictures have a higher resolution, provided that the person/analyst/commander behind the screen is a somewhat sane and intelligent member of society, the psychological tolls might be worse when you're experiencing carnage thru relative safety.
Just curious, you said you worked on building some of these systems, so how did you personally square your morals/ethics with the fact that your employment was probably helping to bring about this "seriously scary new world"?
I took a similar job once, sold on the awesome technical challenge (aeronautical mapping, gyro/sensor input, camera control, etc). But over the time I worked there, I became more and more ethically conflicted about some of the potential applications of the technology I was developing. Was it wrong to continue working on this, given the potential for it to be abused? Personally, I believe developers are a lot like doctors in that we have a power that most lay-people consider to amount to magic, and with that power comes an obligation to do no harm. On one hand, if I wasn't working on this technology, they'd just hire someone else to do it, so leaving would not stop the program. On the other hand, while one person can't have an effect, if we all made the ethical choice, it might ultimately become difficult for these types of programs to exist.
In the end I decided I wanted to be in the group that avoided such ethically questionable projects, lucked into a great opportunity to move into mobile development, and the rest is history.
That's crazy, I ended up feeling the same way. At first just the cool factor of building something like skynet blinded me. I had friends deployed in wars and I often found myself being worried and told myself that what I'm working will someday make sure that my friends' probability of coming home in a bodybag will be reduced significantly. I also told myself that my code itself was so early that it would never see any real action in any meaningful way. But eventually what I was helping to build became too much to think about.
I moved on to hacking car ecu's and making them go faster. Utterly meaningless compared to my previous job, but a good fun couple of years of what amounted in my mind to toy-building after what I'd previously worked on. You can say I joined your group as well. I can only imagine what the poor sobs in the article go through, they don't exactly have the option to join said group. Not to mention watching real people dying in near real time must have a crazy impact that I can't ever compare to my own experience.
Thx for posting the article. "Siri, kill those people", sounds like the makings of a new John Cleese bit. Had to check twice and make sure I wasn't reading an Onion article.
I still wonder how much less existential strife an operator might experience by delegating the killing to an AI machine, especially if one can still see the faces (better resolution) and the carnage following "Siri" carrying out orders.
I'm sure there is something at the end of 1984 (the book) that applies here.
But, anyway, not exatly for everybody but those things will become cheap someday, up to the point that a person can build one, and stay as lethal. If that threatens us, it also threatens the people controlling today's drones.
(And, just to be clear, I'm making no moral judgment here.)
I watched a documentary by Vice recently about the Taliban in Pakistan. I do not remember the exact words, but when asked about allied air superiority with drones, an insurgent commander responded "Talking to people, I can get a few people to join my side. With one drone strike, I can get a whole village on my side." And herein lies the problem: for every insurgent a drone strike kills, whether he deserves it or not, that drone stroke motivates many more to join their ranks.
After a flood, the Taliban helped to rebuild villages in Pakistan. People felt that the state did nothing for them, thus again strengthening support for the insurgency. I feel as though, if the US instead invested the money from war to rather rebuilding, infrastructure, healthcare, education, that the insurgency would fade on its own.
People join the insurgency because they are motivated by hate and anger. Attempting to eliminate it through extermination is futile: the collateral damage only multiples the numbers wanting to fight. The way to win a war is by winning hearts and minds, as the cliche goes.
> "the video provided by a drone is a far cry from clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited clouds and perfect light"
I wished she had pushed the questioning even further:
Even if it's a weapon, that doesn't mean the person is a threat. I mean it's full of people carrying weapons in the U.S., they are not presumed a threat.
And even if the person is deemed a threat, maybe the he would surrender, but now he is not even offered this choice.
The U.S countryside is strewn with men and women fitting this description. I bet it would be even more true if foreign soldiers were occupying america and routinely bombing its citizens.
I find amount of pro-drone comments here quite stunning, including the complete lack of appreciation of how the economies of scale of drones will radically alter the equation of whether these are a good idea or not.
"Now, all right we killed some innocent civilians, but that happens in war and we're at a constant war against terror now so there you go. Lets not jump to any conclusions about drones before all the facts are in!"
All I can say is that these people will probably shut up and at least moderate their views as soon as the police in their country starts deploying drones en masse.
I thought this would be an anti-drone confession, but in reality it looks mostly manipulative.
Most of it is the impact of using drones on drone operators and the soldiers who have them on THEIR side. How about the impact of drones to the OTHER side? You know, the one under attack? Even giving them both 50% share of the article is a disservice to them, and here it's even worse.
How about them breaking international law? How about them being used for murder operations in a no-war situation? How about them used already and even more down the road against a country's own citizens?
Another part of the article is about how they have low fidelity screens and radars and such. As if, if they had better tech (which they'll get down the road) all would be well with them.
Not much touching the actual ethical, human, political and diplomatic implications of their use.
> soldiers who have them on THEIR side. How about the impact of drones to the OTHER side?
I think this is still a somewhat useful (even if unfair) approach. So much of the conversation is already centered on how the "other" side effectively has no rights because they're not in America and are suspected of terrorism, and how drones are so much safer and cheaper for "our" side. I view this approach as saying "OK, so you want to believe those non-American deaths really can be written off as an 'unfortunate but necessary cost of war.' Let's see how horrific this still is for our troops that have to run these things and watch people die day after day; how IEDs still slip through screening and our troops have to watch, from thousands of miles away, their own comrades bleed out on the side of the road, through an oversight they may feel responsible for."
Most of the politicians are spinning this as something precise and safe for our troops. It makes sense for the counterpoint to focus on how it's not precise and has hidden human costs to the troops. And it is clear the author understands the immorality of the deaths themselves, but that's not the focus because there aren't many people willing to argue in that arena.
I don't think it's manipulative at all. He says that he wishes the pro-drone people would be know more or be more forthcoming about the realities of the drone programs, and that they should be more transparent. The point of view that of the "other" side has also been mentioned many times, by The Guardian and other newspapers.
Does anybody think there is space for a "CS Students against Weaponry" alliance? I go to Umass Amherst, and there are tons of people who end up working for Raytheon upon graduation. Sure, the 100k / yr is quite tempting when you just came from community college and a retail job just years before, but perhaps some education may stop students from agreeing to internships and careers at Raytheon, etc. It's oftentimes good students who are mostly oblivious to why their skills are being exploited. Maybe we could affect this mindset and bring a larger student audience into the ethical discussion. It is becoming harder and harder to distinguish your contributions to the indirect damages caused to innocent third-parties. And with CS, it's not like there is a shortage of jobs. But that may be a misguided view--it's obvious that students take these jobs because they 'have to' or risk suffering anywhere from 10k to 300k of debt, depending on the school and their financial background. It's all very much a shame.
Educational institutions are the battleground for mindshare between the military-industrial and the peace-lovers. Don't ask the question whether you should start a "CS Students against Weaponry" movement or not: just simply do it.
You have to make peace, it doesn't just happen. Same with war, incidentally ..
> It's oftentimes good students who are mostly oblivious to why their skills are being exploited.
I'm not sure I agree with that, but if that's what you think it doesn't make sense to try and keep the "good" students away from military contractors. If they're going to build weapons (that use/require code) I'd rather they have the best developers available. Hiring bad programmers certainly isn't going to decrease civilian casualties.
All this criticism against drones. Drones are awesome.
I've worked on the ground in Afghanistan on a Mechanized Infantry Platoon. There's nothing more calming than hearing the buzz from a drone keeping an eye on the terrain from above and reporting to the TACP while you're on the ground. We where saved multiple times from running into ambushes and IEDs thanks to drones. Sure, Apache's could do the job as-well, but when they run out of fuel, and they do more often than a drone, you're on your own.
Sure, that's another mission from flying a drone to a compound in Pakistan and dropping some explosive on it, that I can not comment on since I have not seen the Intel behind those missions.
Best comment in the thread. So we should concentrate on development of 'guardian' and 'intelligence' drones, and leave the offense part to the soldiers on the ground, right?
I believe both types of drones are needed, if the "fly-to-pakistan-and-drop-a-bomb-on-a-compound"-drones didnt exist, the SOF guys would have more to do, and would take more losses, I guess.
I'm pretty sure the intel needed to carry out a drone-strike is insanely high.
Drones are also great when the insurgents flees on their motorcycles, as often happens when the ground forces come in.
How are the drones even relevant to the discussion? There are people controlling some device in order to kill other people. Why does it matter that the device happens to be an UAV in this case? How is it different if the device in question is instead a cruise missile? A rifle? A knife? A fist?
To me, the whole discussion about drones is a big misdirection that uses people's irrational fear of "killer robots" to make detractors forget that ultimately, there's a human pulling the trigger.
Who cares if Obama authorized a drone strike to kill a US citizen abroad? What I care about is that he authorized an assassination of a US citizen, not that he chose "drone strike" as the method.
I think complaints are not about drones per se, they are about the US drone program. It doesn't matter whether it's an UAV, a manned aricraft, or a rocket propelled chainsaw. What matters is that there's a program of systematic murder of innocent people on the other side of the globe without any formal declaration of war.
That's true, but it's missing my point. The whole "drone war" is being cast as robots killing humans, mostly ignoring the fact that humans are making every decision about who to kill. This puts the focus of the debate on the technology instead of where it should be, which is on the people who have decided that it is ok to kill other people. So people protesting the program are demanding "Stop using drones!" when they should be demanding "Stop murdering people!"
These seem like compelling arguments against our "war" in the middle east, but I'm not sure why we should be singling out UAVs. People die in wars. Sometimes they are enemies, sometimes they are friends, and sometimes they are innocent bystanders. Do drones really make war worse than it already is?
Depend on what has highest chance happening - That children dies because people who should confirm what is a threat fail because they are too lazy (or bad pixels, or bad weather / angle and so on), or children dies because solders on the street become so extremely mental unstable that they shoot innocent people just for laughs.
The only thing this shows is that the recruiting standards for the US drone program are substandard, as the author was allegedly part.
1) Yes, absolutely UAV based jammers don't block all IEDs. Ground jammers like WARLOCK also don't block all IEDs. One thing they did do was force a lot of command detonated IEDs to go to command wire systems, instead of various wireless systems, which meant we then had a man with a switch in his hand within a few hundred meters (tops), who we then lit the fuck up before or after the attack. Sure beats someone being in another city with a cellphone!
Just because something isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it's worthless.
2) Yes, UAVs are offensive combat weapons, particularly the programs in Horn of Africa and Pakistan. OTOH, I don't see a huge difference in getting killed by a Hellfire from a drone vs. having guys from JSOC show up at your door. There's a legitimate concern that UAVs lower the threshold to engage in ongoing low intensity conflict, but in the cases where they do have the right targets, I see no difference between drone, manned aircraft, or on the ground trigger-pullers.
3) The vast majority of drones are pure Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) missions. DOD didn't even arm their drones for a long long time, it was CIA (who operate in those places) who pioneered armed Predators (then the other armed drones). Part of this is internal politics (pilots = officers), part of it is that when you've got manned aircraft armed with diverse weapons systems orbiting overhead, you can just use a smaller/cheaper/lighter drone for pure ISR, then when you develop a target, send the manned aircraft with a full suite of weapons to choose from to do the actual attack mission.
4) The grainy image of a UAV camera, over a 4h monitoring mission, is probably way beyond the standard of proof of a combat shooting in general. The UAV defaults to "no shoot". A soldier in combat who is threatened defaults to "shoot". You don't need high precision on a single image if you're able to spend a long time watching, gathering supporting information (knowing the area, vehicles that approach, etc.). This isn't law enforcement or civilian self defense; it's war. It's totally legitimate to question whether we should be at war, but the actual conduct of the war is less debatable IMO.
According to someone familiar with current specops / USAF rules-of-engagement, the rule is that an officer always had to be present to authorize a kill by a UAV. Period. If JSOC or others were/are doing something different, this could be grounds for court-martial.
It is "present in the ops center" I believe , which is the same standard as for ordering other strikes. I'm not as familiar with the backend, I just know the launch/recovery of UAV part, and the terminal part.
It sucks to be part of the human element making life and death decisions about armed robots being used in non-traditional war situations.
That's about all I got from this. And yes, it does suck. There was a third claim, that the public is misinformed/misled, but I take issue with that one. I think most people understand that somebody, somewhere is pushing the button.
This essay didn't go into the rationale for drone warfare, or the situation that brought the west into armed conflict in the first place. So it's not hitting on a lot in terms of talking about the geopolitical issues, it's just a plea for more empathy about what's actually being done.
I share that concern. We should be more empathetic. However -- and this is a big deal -- feeling more fully the terrible things we are doing does not in any way make those things less necessary. Those are two separate subjects.
I think we are going down a bad road with armed robots, but I don't think essays like this are helping the discussion much. Still, it was good to hear this voice.
"There was a third claim, that the public is misinformed/misled, but I take issue with that one. I think most people understand that somebody, somewhere is pushing the button."
True - though the mislead part I feel largely relates to claims of surgical strikes and claims of minimal 'collateral' deaths and injuries.
" the terrible things we are doing does not in any way make those things less necessary"
What is being done is indeed terrible - though I have yet to see the necessary bit backed up by any coherent numbers.
> The UAV's in the Middle East are used as a weapon, not as protection, and as long as our public remains ignorant to this
Honestly, it has always been seen as a weapon. The whole point of drone is to carry out mission 24/7 as much as possible, because a pilot can't fly back and forth without sleeping. Also, humans have emotions they don't always follow orders.
> incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure
I have always thought the military fly drones to carry out specific mission, such as taking photos or launching an attack. And the latter is usually confirmed by some "intelligence". I want to see how many drone attacks were performed without a single human intelligence confirmation.
> But here's the thing: I may not have been on the ground in Afghanistan, but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end
This is best seen in the movie Black Hawk Down (2001), based on true story.
> The whole point of drone is to carry out mission 24/7 as much as possible, because a pilot can't fly back and forth without sleeping.
Humans are still required to fly the drones. The "whole point" is that drones can accomplish the same mission without risking a pilot and at a fraction of the cost of a manned aircraft.
He didn't mean he was watching it clearly in 4K resolution when he said "great detail", he was trying to convey that he had a good understanding of what was going on on the ground even though he wasn't on the ground.
Civilians got killed by manned aircraft too. A-10s launching Hellfires at a wedding party, or AH-64 Apaches gunning down farmers in a field. It happens. And whether the pilot is sitting in the aircraft or a thousand miles away makes no difference. It's the same imperfect people making the same imperfect decisions based on imperfect information.
The issue is not that it happened. The issue is not that people died. The issue is that Drone Warfare allows rich people in power to remotely kill people they deem as threats whilst selling a story of reduced casualties on both sides. The casualties of this kind of war will be human at first...
Absolutely, yes. It requires many years and oodles of cash to train humans to desensitise themselves to the degree it takes to be a good fighter jock [I have a few family members who have flown. They are brilliant. Flying is an amazing endeavour.]. I am sure it takes a fair amount of time to achieve the same level of "discipline" in an RPV team, as well. [Here follows a bunch of things that are personal observations.]I personally believe that both of these categories of specialization are symptomatic of a deeper mental illness in humanity. I am not really interested in less death or more death as some kind of assessment of a things value. Death, in all things, is unavoidable. We, as humans, see ourselves as individuals because it is empowering. In reality, we are largely indistinguishable from each other when one takes a broader perspective. Both fighter jets and military RPVs are cool as hell, but they are both death implements, or deathplements if you are grammatically frisky.
I heard an interesting interview on NPR with a retired CIA chap. He was legal council to some alphabet soup within Central. He pointed out the irony of the controversy over the "Enhanced" Interrogation Techniques" and the relative quiet on the part of the American public about the Dispassionate Remotely Piloted Death Eagle Master Plan[This is the official name of the CIA's RPV program. look it up.]. I found it poignant. he has a book. I believe the title is Company Man.
This topic can be summed up as war is hell. It is brutal, bloody and evil. UAVs, nor anything else alters this.
Modern democracies know this well and try to hide the horrors of war from their citizens. To have the freedom to wage war for as long as possible (or as long as needed) before public outrage forces them to stop.
Citizens are at fault for not knowing history and not paying attention.
This is only going to get worse if they make drones autonomous, which this TED talk shows they have a lot of reasons for why they will want to make them autonomous, unless there's huge public outcry demanding a ban:
Scary as current drones are, they are nothing compared to how crazy things are going to get very quickly.
Think of completely power-autonomous drones, the size of a wasp, swarming by the millions in the sky. The swarming feature alone would render most people helpless against an attack, or their sheer presence. To this, add distributed intelligence features, and networked control. The swarm becomes something akin to an intelligent, flying, all-seeing liquid.
Then think of the drop in price that will enable this to become the dominant method of surveillance, policing, and military operations. There will quickly be nothing stopping dictatorships from buying billions of them, making them ubiquitous and all-pervasive. Killing, threatening and controlling billions of people suddenly becomes quite cheap, efficient, easy and cost-effective. Don't like those people demonstrating in your city? Send the swarms.
> One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?"
This is precisely what the Oculus Rift folks and the people working on the helmet that goes with the F-35 are working against. Biological senses are freaking amazing. The outliers on the upper end of the scale are downright incredible. Synthetic substitutes need to be really well engineered to be comparable or surpass them. (Which is precisely what happened with RADAR. Did you know that modern radio telescopes developed from technology we used to eavesdrop on Soviet EM emissions reflected off the moon? Did you know that the energy gathered by all of the radio telescopes, ever, is less than that of a single snowflake hitting the ground?)
it's not the first time i see reports about war traumas for drone pilots and analysts.
I hope this won't be used later as an argument for fully automated drones. I much prefer having a least some people traumatized by being in war than none.
I think it's pretty clear that, the US army looks out for one nation only the U S of A, they are definitely making it clear that humanities best interest is not their long term goal. They look out for their own, I think we all live in a world where we all look out for our own. The US army are no better than the terrrorists who took the innocent lives of Americans. Honestly the US is just a big bully and what it all comes down to is media, they've brain washed the entire nation to make it seem like all these drone attacks are ok, they're not severe, they're not as bad as it sounds, justifying it through fancy words the common people can't understand. The fact is its usually worse than it sounds but most people just choose to switch off from it because no one wants to think about these depressing things, and by switching off their brains they are empowering the politicians that pull the triggers.
It's never ok when innocent people die, innocent civilians of the US don't want innocent civilians of other nations to die. The fact of the matter is it's not these civilians who are pulling the trigger.
The way I see it we all follow a pattern. In the US you have 2 big political parties, democrat and republican. I mean no one ever questions why we let these dickheads stay in power? Why isn't there a third, fourth or a fifth party? They have fabricated a world and a media were they have basically brain washed the entire world. I mean honestly do u think having 2 parties take turn in power is a democracy? What it all comes down to is to not give them the power. I think in every nation all around the world not voting is as powerful as voting. Breaking that pattern and having that critical thinking, to call the politicians bullshit, and impeach the shit out of them when they fuck up and lie, that conviction to get up and do the right thing. But that will never happen, because it's too hard, because we've all been brain washed, becuase everyone is busy living their lives.
I think the American people have forgotten that their government exist to serve them not the other way around, when you pay tax your paying for a service, when you not getting the service you asked for, you should get up and do something.
I believe a highly relevant podcast is the incredible one by Dan Carlin called "Hardcore History". The episode below is one history fan's opinion of how we were able to justify mass killing of civilians in acts like the Atomic Bomb, Bombing of London in WW2, and the Fire Bombs against Tokyo.
The title of this article is a bit misleading - I was expecting some fresh facts about the drone program. What I got instead was some heavy pathos and not much substance.
So this affects people's lives and involves politics, but I can't help but feel like it's an engineering problem that could be solved. Measure how accurate information is from drones and how confident they are, calculate (even if roughly) how much is gained or lost by taking action. And then do whatever maximizes expected utility.
I feel like merely having access to another tool should never make things worse unless the leaders are incompetent.
What stuns me the most about drones is how unfair they are. The targets are mostly the Middle-East and they have absolutely no chance to take them down. And then they wonder why they attack innocent Americans working in an embasy. How are you supposed to fight something you cannot see? You don't, so you attack something of the enemy, no matter what, because it is the last option to hurt him.
There are a lot of comments, so i apologize if i am parroting a wiser person, but this thought has been occupying my head for some time and i crave the sweet relief of discourse.
Drones are here to stay. Maybe like nuclear weapons, they will be something we try to eradicate later, but for now, we must accept and incorporate them, as companies/governments will make it happen regardless of our [read:citizenry(...of the world, of course)] concerns or opposition. In light of this, it is me earnest and sincere belief that control of the sky over our heads is up for grabs. Bothered by kill bots flown over your head by sme assholes in Nevada? Start building aerial jammers, yo. Think those pigs in your 'hood are corrupt? Set up video surveillance and make it open/free access online. Take pictures of cops using their mobiles whilst driving. Say nothing unnecessary at traffic stops; be happy to join them for a free ride to the station and a front row seat to how paperwork is an unbiased weapon in the hands of informed folks. I am so sick of soccer moms and military assholes telling me what is "safe", what "security" means, and how freaking precious our nation is. There is no one coming to save us, not in the US, not in Europe, and especially not in China (India... well we will see). But that is cool, because we have Internet. Seriously, in a stand up arms race, who is going to win, they people paying 100 million per drone or the people paying 1000 per drone. We dont need ordinance. We don't need permission. We have all the know how required [the OP/author sounds like a soldier of conscience if there ever was one]. This is not some Occupy circus. It is not a call for revolution or insurrection. It is just one person, trying to point out the facts...
We, as the armchair scientists and tech inclined folk of the world, have the balance of insight, experience, funding, and motivation on our side. what is more, we need not kill anyone. we dont need to blow anyone up. Most importantly, we get to be honest, and we get to work by choice.
We as people need not sit idly by while politicians and constables decide our fates and the fates of our brothers and sisters around the world. i long for a day when my country, because we kick ass, carpet bombs africa and the middle east weekly with well made books, toothpaste, and ruggedized tablet computers. I do not think this is a fantasy, but i am very aware of the other options.
Side note, I am excited for the application of all of this drone technology into things other than killing. War seems to be one of the few things that the US is unapologetically willing to go into debt to fund. Lots of cool possibilities with high resolution sensor technology.
This article could just as well describing how war is conducted since we switched from all cotton to cotton-polyester blend utilities uniforms. It lets the reader assume that in some way drones are worse than non-drone warfare, without advancing any argument in that direction.
Sometimes they can't tell if someone is carrying a weapon or not. Consider that for a moment. Even if they are carrying a weapon, why should that be enough information to issue a death sentence for them and everyone in their near proximity?
No, it's something I heard from a guy doing UI design for this stuff. We were comparing notes / discussing what's the minimum resolution to pilot a remote vehicle.
what wories me the most with that UAV analyst problem is that there is only two solution. Minimize or even stop these operations or automate them with computers. I'm "curious" where this later option could lead us.
I think that one thing we 'normals' don't seem to understand, is that when you are in the business of killing, murdering, maiming other human beings, you're no longer really part of society. Society is determined by the survival of its members - start removing them, and you get a lesser society. That is obvious.
But we in the 'normal' society don't have a clue what those in the 'murdering business society' really think about us. More often than not, you'll find that the 'official killers' really don't care about human life - or else they wouldn't be devoting their time on earth to the singular purpose of killing, maiming, destroying life.
Its a simple fact that if you get up in the morning with the intention of taking a human life, if ordered to do so, then you no longer belong to the human race. You belong to something else. Not a single one of us in the 'normal society' can entertain the thought of killing someone, on a daily basis, and not suffer consequences. How is it then for those who spend their entire lives working to be the best possible killers they're allowed to be?
You seem very opinionated about this. I haven't given this as much thought as you have, but I think that doing something to protect your society from evil must count for something.
Do you really see it as black and white as you describe it?
Yes, I do. The reason is because I think that anyone whose job it is to murder, maim, kill - officially, with sanction from the state - and who chooses to do this as a career is a very, very sick individual. We do not need a military that can deliver a bomb on some individuals head at the drop of a whim - we need an organization that makes peace, for the state, far more.
"...we need an organization that makes peace, for the state, far more."
What does such an organization look like, and how does it work?
It's very easy to say that we should just stop killing people and instead make peace. It's extremely difficult to put forth a realistic plan that accomplishes that.
Imagine if the resources being used to develop drones and bombs and other killing robots were instead being used to develop tools that would improve the lives of your average Afghani child. This would be a far more honorable investment than the current situation.
Yes, I'm not sure I know what it would look like, but I'm pretty sure that its possible to develop the "B1 bomber" of education systems. I'm quite sure that the technology being used to deliver death from the skies can instead be used to improve the agricultural requirements of the average Afghani village. Heck, even an AK47 can be turned into a water pump, given the right intentions ..
What you describe is an incredibly difficult and completely unsolved problem.
While I agree with the sentiment, I disagree with talking about it as if it were something you could just decide to do one day, and then it would get done.
I would love to see more effort put into making peace. But making peace isn't simply a matter of declaring that you will "make peace, not war".
>But making peace isn't simply a matter of declaring that you will "make peace, not war".
Yes it is. Because the same is true of war: you have to decide to do it. The problem is, the American people have subjugated all their decision-making responsibilities to people who are too lazy, stupid, or just plain evil to think that anything other than non-stop war is their solution. This has been the case in America for 80 years now - so its a generational thing as well, at this point..
> the American people have subjugated all their decision-making responsibilities to people who are too lazy, stupid, or just plain evil to think that anything other than non-stop war is their solution.
Well, I supposed you are just calling every American government employe lazy, evil and stupid. You have just insulted millions of Americans. I am sure there are lazy and evil people out there, but your view is extreme, to the point you don't even know how to deal with reality. There are hardworking people. I don't know what people do in the government because I am never a government employee. Do you happen to know? Where did you get the impression that these top officials are all evil? Based on what? Selective events and newspaper reporting? Maybe there are nice top-ranked people tried to stop the war but others overpower him in the decision making process. Some biography says some X president is not stupid, that that former president was in fact very hardworking and very smart. How do you or me know whether that's the case or not. Can newspaper mislead us? Can popular gossip and stories mislead us to think that all the higher up officials are bad and evil?
We have to respect democracy. To remind you, this is a democratic republic. We elect people to represent us. I am sure there are some lazy stupid congressmen who don't care about voters until 6 months before election. I am also sure there are people who want to change the system. Also, people can become lazy after seeing how little they could do, so they either gave up and don't care, or kept on compromising and couldn't deliver his dreams.
> This has been the case in America for 80 years now - so its a generational thing as well, at this point..
No. It has always been that way. Why didn't we end slavery early? Why didn't we end racial segregation 200 years ago? See, my point is proved: it didn't happen just 80 years ago.
Things changed and evolved as time continues to roll.
Making war is also an incredibly difficult and unsolved problem. We regularly just "decide" to make war for a particular objective, with very little thought to how it will be accomplished (And what plans we do have usually end up not working as expected).
Why should resolving to make peace not war require more thoughtfulness than waging war?
They both require thoughtfulness. I'd have the same kinds of things to say to someone who simply proposed "war", without details, as the solution to anything.
This would be a far more honorable investment than the current situation.
Honorable and effective are not the same.
Seriously, the problem is hardly farming. The world has thousands of years of farming development, and Afghanistan has been farmed for just as long. Nor is the problem education systems. The problem is political, and I fail to see how we can drop K-12 educations on people who aren't allowed to or are unwilling to learn.
But, of course, you appear to be a flower hippie pretty dead-set in your ways, so I don't really hope to change your mind. You keep working on that B2 Tulip Bomber- I'm sure if we can only manage to bomb Afghanistan with flowers & love, world peace will be immediately achieved.
It is points of views such as yours which stand in the way of true peace being attained in the world.
The problem is, and always has been: education. What sort of education gets delivered to the village when the US maims half its children, kills its elders, and terrorizes its mothers?
Yes, the long-term goal should be education. No, we can't bomb them with textbooks. When women are killed for trying to get an education, perhaps more drastic action than a better water pump for farming is merited.
When all you know about a country is based on what you have been told by those who will profit from your point of view being skewed, there is no hope.
Fact: Women are killed in the USA, too. Fact: the USA has its share of militant religious fanatics, too. Are we going to bomb the USA because of this fact?
Ok, so why should I believe what you tell me? How do I know you don't stand to profit from skewing my point of view?
If you can't trust what anyone tells you about foreign events, it's too late. The voting public does not have time to travel to Yemen, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, China, and every other country on the globe to develop personally informed opinions.
> Imagine if the resources being used to develop drones and bombs and other killing robots were instead being used to develop tools that would improve the lives of your average Afghani child
The improvements would very likely violate Taliban law and the improved children and their parents would be targeted for accepting the improvements.
The usual argument is that such people 'occur naturally' and the army at least directs their activities outwards (it forms the distinction between grunt and officer class in the forces). I don't agree with the premise but it's a nature vs nurture question.
In my experience the vast majority of people join the military for job opportunities and benefits. I know more military members than average I would say. My husband and many of my friends being active duty, my father, grandfather, some friends, and the majority of my uncles being vets.
The military doesn’t commit suicide at a significantly higher rate than the general population.
I don't buy the justification. We can choose not to kill people. We can choose to spend our time educating people, instead. Those who join the military, subjugate themselves to others, and stop making choices. This is a contagious disease, not some 'normality' about human existence...
Your killer is a straw man - someone who seeks to only kill more, to become the most murderous possible person (s)he can, a "Hannibal Lector" of vengeance w/o the epicurean instinct. Then you've further demonized him/her. This is paranoid idealization. But some notes:
fit2rule: "when you are in the business of killing, murdering, maiming other human beings, you're no longer really part of society"
Soldiering sometimes requires killing. So soldiers are no longer part of society? What about the executive branch of our government (which issues the orders to soldiers)?
fit2rule: "we in the 'normal' society don't have a clue what those in the 'murdering business society' really think about us"..."This is a contagious disease, not some 'normality' about human existence..."
Murderous thoughts run through the minds of people everyday. They don't usually act on them but they are there. It's part of our nature: we've always done it. Here's a famous quote:
"I am a man: I hold that nothing human is alien to me."
- Terence
For a history of killing and how the responsibility has shifted from the individual to the government:
"Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist" by Richard Rhodes.
fit2rule: "the 'official killers' really don't care about human life"
Categorical nonsense. People love their spouses, children, family and friends. Soldiers are people as are Presidents. Even psychopaths love and protect their children (usually). All will protect the ones they love from those who they fear will cause harm.
fit2rule: "if you get up in the morning with the intention of taking a human life, if ordered to do so, then you no longer belong to the human race." ..."Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human"... "anyone whose job it is to murder, maim, kill - officially, with sanction from the state - and who chooses to do this as a career is a very, very sick individual."
You're out on a limb here- this is simply a rhetorical blast. I fail to see how being a killer makes you inhuman. I don't know how you would treat someone as "anti-human" - possibly kill them?!8-\
Look around you. What is the rarest substance in all the universe? Life. Why should we remove it from the face of the Earth, if we haven't yet engaged it in conversation?
Every villager killed is a missed opportunity to educate, enlighten, and liberate - both parties.
The point is this: there isn't enough evidence to support killing, and more than sufficient evidence to support not killing. Yet, it still happens - and the reason why is, the people have not woken up to the fact that they are responsible for the actions of their State, and that they do deserve whatever comes to them when they let their State murder, maim, kill.
fit2rule:" What is the rarest substance in all the universe? Life. "
I would say "Intelligence." There's an abundance of life on Earth but not much intelligence.
fit2rule: "The point is this: there isn't enough evidence to support killing..."
There often is. If someone has wantonly killed before, (s)he'll do it again. One can allow them to continue or stop the activity. I have little to no mercy for someone intent on homicide. Such people are not usually willing to sit down and talk their problems through.
fit2rule: "...the people have not woken up to the fact that they are responsible for the actions of their State, and that they do deserve whatever comes to them when they let their State murder, maim, kill."
Until now I didn't realize that you were laying out a justification for terrorists, jihadis et al to strike against nation-states. Thank you for that clarification.
Violence is a part of nature, and humans are evolved to participate in it like all animals. It only becomes evil in the context of human values, where I agree there is no reason for people to be killing each other. However the ability and taste for killing is a genetic trait that has been valuable for some individuals over time, so don't fool yourself that some people aren't genetically primed to be killers.
Humans can choose to be non-violent. This is what makes us human.
The moment you remove that choice - either personally or socially - you become an animal, again.
Genetic traits? Well, we've overcome them before, with our free will - we'll do it again. We had lots of genetic traits that predetermined our inability to live on the Moon - but we soon decided that wasn't going to get in our way. Why can't we do the same thing with War?
Because viewpoints such as yours are contagious diseases which fester in the mind of Mankind, and very few are ever prepared to cure themselves of it.
> viewpoints such as yours are contagious diseases
Way to take an even-handed comment like mine stating facts with minimal value judgements and attempt to turn it into fuel for your idealogical steamroller. The only problem is you didn't really read and comprehend what I said.
The problem is, you don't realize what you are saying can be used by those who wish to murder to continue to do so. Yes, your point of view, since it is used tirelessly as a justification, is responsible for continued crimes against humanity.
> "but I think that doing something to protect your society from evil must count for something."
A very much black-and-white description of the current war. "Evil" is actually the most descriptive form about an enemy that can't be specified, a war that selects its foes arbitrary and which lacks any specific goals for winning. Lacking all that, all a person can say is: "we are protecting the good side that is us from the evil that are them". There is no more specific way to describe it, which also means it can never actually end.
These soldiers are facing a huge personal price for the part they played in this war. The psychological impact of "just following orders" is huge and could damage them for the rest of their lives. We should respect veterans because of the personal cost, not because of the benefits (imagined or otherwise). You may see it a good vs evil, but I doubt that many of the victims do.
>These soldiers are facing a huge personal price for the part they played in this war. The psychological impact of "just following orders" is huge and could damage them for the rest of their lives. We should respect veterans because of the personal cost, not because of the benefits (imagined or otherwise). You may see it a good vs evil, but I doubt that many of the victims do.
Not to equate the Army with the Mafia, but this argument applies equally well to mafiosos. Both follow orders, do evil things, and suffer PTSD.
> "I think that doing something to protect your society from evil must count for something. Do you really see it as black and white as you describe it?"
> More often than not, you'll find that the 'official killers' really don't care about human life - or else they wouldn't be devoting their time on earth to the singular purpose of killing, maiming, destroying life.
That's not true. Many joined the military because they believe in their version of patriotism. They are also trained to adopt to utilitarianism as much as possible. The part they are missing when they follow deonotology, as a solider, at least to the Kantian, using someone as a merely mean to an end is not right. So killing 20 villages to kill 2 terrorists is not acceptable (and Nagel's absolutism argues this). But they try to justify their action by remembering they are soldiers and they are fighting terrorists. So killing a few innocent may justify the end.
You've identified the problem - deonotology - but not the solution. Anyone who kills for a living, is violating the most basic rules of human life, that have been taught us since we rose from this Earth: life is sacred. You can't educate a dead man.
"the most basic rules of human life, that have been taught us since we rose from this Earth"
That is just fundamentally untrue. The notion that all life is sacred and killing for a living is wrong is a very, very modern notion.
Members of the military kill because it needs to happen. They would rather be members of a professional, trained force that means the number of total dead is minimised to the greatest extent possible. Modern wars by professional soldiers kill very few, both soldiers and non combatants, compared to the wars of conscripts and untrained masses.
>The notion that all life is sacred and killing for a living is wrong is a very, very modern notion.
Since time began, humans have been trying to stop it. So I don't think you're thinking this through ..
>Members of the military kill because it needs to happen.
Members of the military kill because they are ordered to do so, and no longer have the ability to express their own inherent free will. Nowhere in the history of war has it ever been true that 'to kill a little now means not killing more later' - if it were, the killing would have stopped.
Who? You're quoting fancy philosophical terms, so here goes:
Aristotle: the sort of war that involves hunting “those human beings who are naturally suited to be ruled but [are] unwilling…[is] by nature just”
Plato's Republic had warriors as a vital part of his ideal society.
Aquinas and Augustine gave us the Western "Just War" theory though other cultures had covered the idea earlier. Even Cardinal Wolsey's (and the Church's) thinking around perpetual peace was to allow fighting non-Christians.
Kant and Bentham are hardly since time immemorial. I'll give you Jesus (only 2000 years), but the God of the Old Testament was rather pro-conflict, and other religions have very pro-conflict tenements.
The accepted views of the majority of humanity until the late 20th century (perhaps not even now) is that different genders and races were unequal, that some were fit to rule over others, and that war was an inevitable consequence and participation in it was an honourable, noble and patriotic (once patriotism had emerged as a concept) activity.
Who is not thinking this through. Plus the killing has massively reduced - the last decade has been one of the lowest for deaths in conflict in human history.
fit2rule:"Nowhere in the history of war has it ever been true that 'to kill a little now means not killing more later' - if it were, the killing would have stopped."
Not so. You jihadis have found that, for example in Algeria, by killing off the (relatively small) leadership of centrist and non-radical muslims you can eliminate opposition to radical jihad. Once these people are eliminated, opposition to jihad plummets (people are afraid to speak up) and Taliban-like elements can take over.
So indeed _you_ and _yours_ have learned that "killing a little now means not killing more later".
The first premise is right: life is scared. At least in our culture that's the case. We believe the natural rights of being a living human. But I argue that the 2nd is not true. The claim is too strong. If life is sacred, we ought not to kill anyone. Capital punishment must not be exercised as a result. Because people are rational animals they can make poor judgements. So we must forgive and give them a second chance, a chance to live behind the bar and be educated behind the bar. People who execute capital punishment order is violating the most basic rules of a human life, right? The prison didn't do anything to the executioner. So we should never kill Hilter even if we caught him alive. Absolutism says we must not kill anyone unless that person is doing some hostile to you (pointing a gun at you, and so you have the right to defend yourself). But if Hilter is just sitting at his desk, and you destroyed his army, will you kill him? One say he was being hostile, but that was his past. And he indeed COULD become a great man again. Who knows?
Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human - since human lives are being removed from the universe as a result of their actions.
This goes for the current Joint Chiefs of Staff as much as it does any historical figure.
> Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human
Sorry, this is rubbish. This society we know of is built and established with guns and blood. We shall not have police, army or even guns. We fought wars. Your ancestors, my ancestors all fought in war one way or another. If you think that self-defending yourself against some murderer is wrong, then what is the purpose of protecting life?
Life is precious. Why are we killing cows and chicken? I supposed you are animal rightist then. That's anti-animal as anti-human (but humans are animals!)
We do not live in a world where War is necessary. We live in a world where War is created, for some purpose.
With the tools and technologies we have available to us today, why is that purpose still to maim, murder, kill? Shouldn't the purposes have been aligned, by now, to make the trillion-dollar debt of the American people worth at least something to the rest of the human species?
We don't need another B1 bomber. We do need schools where our children can learn to respect and love each other.
If we never take hard problem to a philosophical discussion, what can come out from the discussion?
> We do not live in a world where War is necessary. We live in a world where War is created, for some purpose.
And why is war or violence created? Because we have desire, we as thinking things have thoughts and emotions. We become jealous and angry. We become depressed and sad. We harm others for these reasons.
> We don't need another B1 bomber. We do need schools where our children can learn to respect and love each other.
And we have schools. And we teach them to respect. The world you are describing does not exist. As long as there is freedom for someone to think, there is violence. Violence can be physical or verbal. You can kill someone by saying something very harsh and this person may go depressed for the rest of his life and ends up in a messy, unproductive life.
I will respect you being a pacifist, but I urge you to think about other ethics theories as well.
The argument that society was built on foo can also be used for arguing for slavery, the oppression of women, child labor, etc.
Just because we did do something in the past does not justify doing it in the future.
The right to defend yourself is not the right to kill, especially on a mass scale. The places that these drones are being used are not places that have a credible military threat to the united states. (unless you count their governments having nukes)
> The right to defend yourself is not the right to kill, especially on a mass scale.
He is not asking not to kill at a mass scale. He is against killing others, regardless of what the reason is. There will be no ground for fighting for democracy. There will be no ground for protecting my life, my lover's life, or anyone's life. There is no mechanism to defend the things I cherish when a murderer comes to my doorstep with an AK47.
We're talking about nation states here, not individuals. You have, absolutely, an individual right to defend yourself.
You do not have - unless the state grants it to you - the right to murder other human beings. States that use murder as a solution to their problems are undoubtedly going to fail - because the purpose of the State, in the first place, is to provide human beings with safety and protection from death. Death delivered, or received, is still a failure of the State to fulfill that promise.
I do not believe that anyones' interest is protected by the maiming, murder, and disfigurement of villagers' children, on the other side of the world, for the purposes given by the States that are doing it. I believe that the reason States are committing these crimes, is because the Murder Societies within these states are out of control, and no longer answer to the people who put them in power.
> because the purpose of the State, in the first place, is to provide human beings with safety and protection from death
We as an individual can do anything we really want. So if someone wants to kick another person in the head, he could. He will be held legally responsible for kicking the victim.
Ideally, at least this is what the American government is/was supposed to form -- we are the one that gives the government the power. We can totally remove a President if we want. We can dissolve this Union if we want. But that won't happen easily because many of us think about stability, we apply utilitarian views. There is nothing wrong with that.
The issue that you want to raise is the state decides who can kill or not. This is part of civilization. Everyone is supposed to have a role and we determine what people can do and what people cannot do. We want to have police officers who will patrol around with a stick and a pistol. We agree that when the police officer is being attacked he can apply an equivalent counterforce. If someone shoots back, the officer can shoot back. We give the offices the permission to kill another human being because we apply absolutism. We only harm those who harm us directly.
Not every police shooting gets away from legal and moral judgement. Some are found guilty for using excessive force or intentional murdering.
We don't protect people why just educating them. We mobilize them. We arm them, we teach them how to build a healthy body, what to do when they face danger. The world you imagine will not work in any civilization as long as there is a freedom to think. As I said before, the only reason we have desire is because we are allowed to think for ourselves and for other people. We are angry because we have emotions. We become depressed because we have expectations. To protect people who become incapable of staying peaceful and respectful by harming another person physically or mentally (e.g. verbally), we use some form of force on them. And this could be military action (to protect people from invasion) or apprehension. This is true because we value our own life, and we want to be protected.
It is true that some of the military action is morally impermissible in this modern time. We don't need to do a revenge in order to show off our power to scare off our enemies (this was necessary in ancient time), but we shouldn't say that every time we slaughter a human is morally impermissible.
The ethic approach I take is virtue ethics, which looks at the environment, rather than the action or the consequence.
You said what makes us human is that we can decide what not to do and if we allow killing we will go back to animal. I don't see why we should disregard our familiar biological facts. We are animals. Animals have emotions. They can group and hunt. They can think on their own. They may not have science or computer to use, but they are also thinking. In fact, no one can prove or disprove whether physicalism is true or false, whether dualism is true or false. We cannot. We have "the other minds problem". We can't really know what it is like to be a bat (Nagel's paper). We can only speak from our own experience: oh so this is sonic vision and this is how we can see if we had a sonic vision, but that's it.
So what is left with us? We will continue to apply survival of fitness? There was a famous case in England where two sailors were charged to kill this other young sailor boy after the shipped sunk and after they starved for months.
(1) had the boy came up with the idea first and sacrifice himself, is killing that person in the first place wrong?
(2) had the boy asked about this, and the boy agreed, is killing the boy to help the other two more healthy sailors from starvation morally wrong?
Will you be willing to give up your space shuttle ticket to your friend and sacrifice yourself in a zombie crisis? If Russia had dropped an atom bomb years ago, would you think it was okay to destroy Russia like we destroyed Germany by saving the rest of the America? Or do you actually think we can apply peaceful talk?
People consume resources. Dead don't need food and shelter logistics.
(disclaimer: I don't advocate killing people, but I do believe that those concerns were and are evaluated doing wartime, if letting someone go is not an option)
Are you asking me? I don't understand your question. I am arguing that if killing is absolutely not allowed at all, regardless of the cause, as he suggests, is wrong.
I think you intended this as a reductio ad absurdum but a lot of people take this view, quite possibly the majority of Europeans and Buddhists for example.
>Recently, the Guardian ran a commentary by Britain's secretary of state for defence Philip Hammond. I wish I could talk to him about the two friends and colleagues I lost, within one year leaving the military, to suicide. I am sure he has not been notified of that little bit of the secret UAV program, or he would surely take a closer look at the full scope of the program before defending it again.
I doubt he gives a shit, and the reason we are in this mess is because most people think people like him do give a shit, they are just "misinformed."
The unfortunate truth is that any leader who orders soldiers to go to war should know that innocent and guilty people are going to die, women will be raped, property destroyed and looted, and so on. In WWII there was a deliberate policy of incinerating populated cities, but even if we don't go to that extreme the outcome is going to be grim. I hope any defence secretary both knows this, and considers it, but also considers what happens when you don't deploy soldiers/drones/etc.
>but also considers what happens when you don't deploy soldiers/drones/etc.
Nothing happens. Nothing. The reason those people are pissed is because of the U.S. government constantly fucking with them and poking them. Over throwing governments, secret renditions, locking up loved ones in Guantanamo with no trial indefinitely. I'd be fucking pissed too.
Obviously not much happens in the short term if we don't interfere in the affairs of Pakistan and neighbours. In the long term they might rebuild their terrorist training camps, but .. meh so what. Only a few people have been killed by terrorists, it's not a big deal and not a fundamental threat to civilisation.
You couldn't say that there would be no consequences for not engaging in the 1930s. Many more countries could have been overrun by fascism for decades.
We all know war is hell. We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm. So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific. Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war? I suspect they decrease it with smaller more targeted bombs vs prior more traditional larger bombs. Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village. Maybe they increase it because we're carrying out a lot more sorties than we did prior when a jet and a pilot were needed/at risk. However, I'm not sure and this article goes nowhere close to helping with the discussion.
"The view is so pixelated it makes decisions tough" Can you imagine military people who fight/fought on the ground in real combat and order in strikes reading that? Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?
The military is aware of the impact on these operators. From a February 20013 article sighting a Defense Department study: “Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”
Lastly, imagine how you'd feel reading a similar opinion piece on Fox News from a gun ho former operator talking about all the American lives he saved by observing and taking out "the bad guys". What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives and dramatically reducing the number of innocent civilians killed vs how we would have approached the same problem just 25 years ago.
War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate. Biased ones feed their viewership what they know they'll eat up and do little, maybe even damage, the search for truth.