Life as a drone operator
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
If you can take the low-budget effects, I recommend watching the movie Sleep Dealer[1]. It is probably the best cyberpunk[2] film ever made; unfortunately, it never got a lot of attention.
The film deals primarily with telepresence, with an emphasis on the remote operation of drones. Not just military drones, either; drones also enable "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" workers.
[1] http://www.sleepdealer.com/
[2] A lot of people confuse cyberpunk with flashy tech and network shenanigans; Gibson describes cyberpunk as stories about the interstitial - the people caught in the cracks of "legitimate" society (consensus reality).
A mostly-spoiler-free example might be the "simstim social media" service: by looks it's pretty cheesy, but in concept it's a perfect caricature of modern monetized youtube. (from 2008, well before the modern "youtuber" phenomena).
Some people may not like that it's in Spanish (subtitled).
As a long-time fan of everything "cyberpunk", I stand by my claim that Sleep Dealer is the best cyberpunk film ever made - even if the filmmakers were dreaming somewhat larger than their budget.
The fact that these operators get shit on by their associates for being out of harm's way and expressing reservations about their mission can't be helping either.
Long slow boat rides and a quiet, personal welcome home seem to have the most success in easing people back to normal.
That is, of course, as long as the theater/front wasn't actually IN the country you also happened to live in and call home. Small detail easily forgotten.
Soldiers follow orders. The Nazis followed orders. Therefore all soldiers are Nazis. Well done. Congratulations.
These people are not following orders 'whatever they are'. They're not attacking schools because the Taliban's leaders children go there, unlike oh, I don't know, say the Taliban who massacred 150 children at a school in Pakistan because soldier's children go there. They have rules of engagement defining how to determine if an order is legitimate and acceptable, which they are following, but of course the article never mentions that. Now fair enough, there are troubling incidents described in the article, but we're only get individual perspectives, nothing is really corroborated. I'd like to see more independent oversight of the drone programs. But flinging about Nuremberg analogies is hardly justified.
And declaring war "on terror" won't cut it either; that's basically equivalent to saying, "we are potentially at war with any country any time, when it suits us." Nor will saying "they're the bad guys and we are good," which is kindergarten-level argumentation. Or "we know they're terrorists but we can't share the evidence, just trust us."
The media discusses the details of drone operations all the times, but omits to have this much more fundamental discussion about violating the borders of sovereign countries.
Actually, yes you can. Suppose that country, Pakistan, is complicit in those drone strikes, allowed drones to operate from it's territory for a time and provides intelligence to facilitate them? The (former) Yemeni government also explicitly permitted drone strikes to be carried out on it's territory.
Governments have always had the right to carry out attacks in order to prevent imminent threats to their country, and terrorists planning attacks does count. There is a clear legal framework.
You can reasonably argue that this is wrong and that it doesn't matter how imminent the threat is or what those people are doing, they cannot be attacked even if the government of the territory they're in says that you can. That's an argument you could make, I suppose. But as it stands, as a statement of fact that's not what international law says.
Quoting from your article:
>Philip Alston, the former UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, condemns the U.S. claims of self-defense as overly expansive, stating that "if other states were to claim the broad-based authority that the United States does, to kill people anywhere, anytime, the result would be chaos."
You mean like the order "Please ignore those men raping children, we want to be their friends so we can't call them out of that"? Or orders such as "Please blow up that group there. We have reason to believe that one of them is bad, and if the children there have to die to get to them, we think it is worth the price"?
Also, an important point is that it IS NOT war in the case of drone strikes most of the time.
Admittedly, I am one of those people who can absolutely not understand why the actual people in the trenches during war do not just get out and agree with the other people they are supposed to be shooting, that those particular people don't have anything to do with the political reasons for the conflict, but don't let that distract you from the points I made above.
About what it takes to kill at work and be a dad at home.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/obama-drone-war...
Wow, that's more than half as many people as were killed in the 9/11 attacks. We should have this thing wrapped up by Christmas.
Civilisation seems to stem from the drive to discover ever easier ways to kill
Short googling for "autonomous weapons" will yield many more results.
I can't reply to atemerev, so I'll do so here. Are you even reading my posts? Autonomous flight is largely a solved problem. Recognizing a gun in a silhouette isn't even close to good enough. What if he's a hunter, or a Pakistani soldier, or just wants to defend himself? The kinds of strikes drones perform are driven by intelligence., e.g. form the article, 4 people on camels traversing a given valley. What if there is another group of 4 people? What if one of them splits off before the drone is in strike range? What time window is reasonable given how fast they could traverse the terrain? What if the image now shows that actually there's a child with them that wasn't in the intelligence report? Humans can interpret the intelligence report, evaluate incidental factors such as travel times and terrain, recognize new data points and come to a reasoned conclusion based on hundreds of factors about whether or not to engage. Computers simply cannot cope with these sorts of problems.
Driving a car in San Francisco is harder than flying a drone. Google had built autonomous cars that can do that. Hence, there are autonomous drones.
Finding your face among millions poorly made pictures taken from mobile cams is _much_ harder than determining whether somebody's silhouette in a video feed contains the profile of a gun. _I_ can take Python and write this kind of program (it will not be military-grade, but will work most of the time). Hence, military also tried and tested this. Especially given the telemetry and infrared data available.
Image processing and recognition is now at least on par with humans. See clarifai.com demos for examples.
I think thats unlikely to be true a decade from now.
Because of these high tech weapons, wealthy western nations are able to maintain their sovereignty without requiring all fit males to serve in uniform for 2-3 years.
The alternative to not having these high tech weapons is a man shooting another man to death.
War is terrible. But that's life.
That isn't obligatory. We could decide that we're no longer going to engage in imposing our will by force, and our military will only be used in self defence.
How long do you think extremists could keep up recruitment if we stopped pissing people off by killing their friends and family, often for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
It could be water, economy, power.
You don't change people's minds by turning up and dropping a couple of Hellfires on them. All that achieves is pissing off their family, and making them less receptive to your arguments. Would you be receptive to someone telling you they know better on matters of morality after they blew up your brother?
And without those high tech weapons, a lot of warm bodies would be required to pick up a gun and shoot to kill. Close enough to see without the aid of zoomed image on a screen.
I'm talking beyond just what West has done or not. Or what ME has done.
It's terrible. But again, that's life.
Non Muslims have considerable involvement in sex slavery and other forms of modern slavery.
So what?
None of this means you should support a government that wantonly kills people on the other side of the planet on a whim.
These terrorist attacks are not because we are in a war with Islamic nations. They are designed to create and draw us into wars with Islamic nations. They are provocations to start wars which ISIS and Al Qaeda want to have. They are as much a response to us withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan as anything else. Check out ISIS and Al Qaeda's published literature. If we withdrew completely from the Middle East and all Moslem states the attacks would not stop, they would intensify because by deliberate policy they are dedicated to creating a situation in which conflict with the west is unavoidable. I'm afraid that anyone who thinks we can just walk away from this fight and everything will be fine, just doesn't have clue 1 why we are in this to start with.
The Wahabi/Salafist world view is one of inevitable and necessary warfare with all non-Muslims, leading to global conquest and a worldwide Caliphate. It's non-negotiable and inimical to democracy, freedom and liberal values. You either convert or die and they way to achieve this is by provoking as much division and strife between westerners and Muslims as possible.
Wars don't happen because someone is right or wrong. Wars happens because of wealth and desire for wealth.
The US has a fleet of drones and still maintains a large army.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004598.html
However, I disagree with GP's assertion that the absence of drones would result in mandatory service or a draft. Neither will be politically palatable in the US for at least another generation or two. Vietnam is still too recent in people's memories. Besides, one of the main things that reduces the number of needed troops is not weaponized drones, but improved communication and sensor platforms. This allows for (more) precise and accurate strikes and troop placement. Larger areas of control can be maintained by fewer people.
The other, much better alternative is to stop aggressive military actions entirely and go home.