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.
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.