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Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I worked for a defence contractor for a while. Everyone had their own justifications for remaining working there effectively supporting and building nothing defence related at all, just offensive strike based killing machines.

Graded pay scales meant people's price was very low.

I quit when I started putting 2+2 together.

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> building nothing defence related at all, just offensive strike based killing machines

We must have very, very different concepts of defense.

Blowing up semi-random farmers on the other side of the world, those with no retaliatory strike capability, and posing no actual threat to your country? That's not defense. "The best defense is a good offense" sounds best to those who sell the missiles

That is exactly my point.

What about terrorist masterminds on the other side of the world who are deniably plotting to kill and maim many hundreds of innocent US civilians, but whose plans will be thwarted if they are blown up? What if there are a couple of accidental civilian casualties when the terrorists are blown up? What if only four of the five targets are terrorists, due to an unforeseen and unavoidable mistake, and the fifth target is semi-random farmers? What if we have five targets, and we know one is a terrorist, but not which one? I mean, nobody in the Pentagon is actually just sitting there thinking 'lets go and blow up some farmers today, those drones aren't going to target themselves, you know...'

Why should I care if some random angry guys on the other side of the world hate America? We have plenty of those here in the states.

> Blowing up semi-random farmers on the other side of the world

This crude propaganda cliche doesn't offer anything for the discussion. If you take an emotional snapshot of a complex situation and assume that's the whole truth of a situation you almost always are pretty far from the truth - even if in some subset of reality this snapshot is true.

How many of the 3000[0] "terrorists" that Obama ordered blown up (accruing about 400 civilian casualties in the process) had actual plans and setups in place to make the trip to America and kill someone?

My right wing uncle with his gun collection is a bigger threat to the American people. Why did those 400 innocent people die?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-...

> How many of the 3000[0] "terrorists" that Obama ordered blown up (accruing about 400 civilian casualties in the process) had actual plans and setups in place to make the trip to America and kill someone?

This is a relevant question, but not precise enough. What I would be interested instead, is, what's the total mean and variance of american lifes saved in all those operations? And more importantly, what other hypothetical possible combinations of these variables (civilians killed, combatants killed, unuidentified casualties, mean and variance of americans saved) we could have if different decisions have been made - i.e. what's the whole problem space?

Of course, this data is impossible to get and hard to estimate, but this is much closer to the real dilemma at hand.

Well, assuming they are going to build that stuff regardless, you could argue it is better to have people with a strong moral fabric working in defense. For example, a moral person will be more motivated to design a weapon that limits collateral damage than a person with little regard for human life.

The thing is, on the engineering level, one can only do so much. You may design the most beautifully controlled high precision weapon with all the interlocks and whatever.

Nothing of that matters if layers above you casually bribe people left and right in order to more freely sell to even worse people than what your democratically elected leaders decided were OK - and that first set of prospective customers are probably not so pretty in the first place, because you know, realpolitik and trade-offs. :-/

I worked at a defense contractor for awhile. We worked on stuff that could be used to track vehicles and dismounts in urban environments. Sure you could use it to follow someone to drop a bomb on them. You could also use it to give the guys on the ground a few extra seconds heads up when it looks like there might be a car bomb headed their way. The latter use case was the one the users really seemed to appreciate the most (there was probably some feedback I wasn't privy to though). It only takes a couple seconds to swing an M1 around but already having it pointed where the threat will be coming from makes a world of difference in how exposed the guys on the ground feel.

So, you got a job at a defence contractor hoping you were going to write code for life saving medical devices? I think I see where you went wrong...

No I was goaded into it by nationalistic, racist, war mongering, pro military family members who spent most of my life telling me blowing shit up and killing people was the best way to solve conflicts because they hated (well really feared) everyone other than their own race.

This prepared me nicely for a career as a cog in the military industrial complex.

not being able to think critically for yourself however, is not an adequate preparation for working as a software engineer in any organisation, though...

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