Discretion is everything. Any time we'd hit a compound, we would pore over the intelligence, assess whether this was a likely badguy, whether they were a key player or just a low level radical, etc.
Equally important, are the people around said badguy likely also bad or innocent bystanders? If they're probably bad we want to capture them all together. If they're probably innocent we want to wait until the dude wanders off to minimize the risk to civilian life and property, even if that means greater risk to us.
Once you actually get to the target location, it starts all over again, only with less time and information. Is that a shovel or an RPG? I can't quite tell from here. Looks like an RPG -- what if I'm wrong? There's a house behind him, what's the risk if I wait 30 seconds...?
It's a real profession that takes real expertise by people with real emotions.
You had me until race war but yes. This is true in my exp.
It all comes down to training and experience. Police training budgets are tight, officers roll in single squad cars (little safety), sometimes physical fitness standards aren't upheld (fat cops can't scrap with someone they have to use a device to subdue them), and mental health issues abound (the job can be quite stressful and boring at the same time).
I've watched a lot of body cam footage of (legitimate) police shootings. I wonder how many of these one on one situations would have turned violent if the perp knew there were two officers bearing down on him instead of one?
But yeah, maybe a marine on the ground has more discretion than I realize. The other cases, though, I think are valid.
Spoken like someone who's never been anywhere near the military. In case I wasn't clear enough: this is patently false, as any combat veteran can attest.
ROE often explicitly allow for discretion in target engagement.
Pilots drone or not have the best situational awareness and they often scrub missions and even abort after launch if the situation changes to what they would consider unacceptable.
Essentially any type of “fire at will” order is discretionary.
Pilots didn’t sign up to blow up schools and hospitals and they can and are directly liable for any collateral damage and civilian casualties they can and do question the intelligence and information which lead to authorizing the strike they’ll asses the strike package and they will assess the situation and the target to the best of their abilities before engaging.
Shit does happen, mistakes are made but they are by far not the norm.
Serious question, are you aware of any cases of US pilots ever being punished for collateral damage or hitting the wrong target?
The laws both national and international that govern military operations don’t put civilian lives a head of military operations in all cases.
I’m not American but from my experience we had to do a lot of work for risk reduction when planning missions, essentially we perform and throughly document the process in which we reduce the risk of collateral damage that came in form of selecting a strike package to minimize the damage, choosing a time that would ensure minimal non-combatants in the AO and also providing the parameters of engagement to the pilots based on the value of the target.
I can say that out of the approved strikes close to 50% of them were aborted last minute and even after munition launch due to the pilots giving us the no-clear in the last moment and then essentially missing the window of opportunity.
I'm not involved with the military in any way, shape or form. My guess would be that if such a thing happened, it would be buried (see Chelsea Manning, Abu Ghraib etc).
You did say though that pilots are directly liable for any collateral damage, so I was curious as to whether that had any real meaning - would a pilot actually face charges (military or criminal) if they, for example, negligently fired upon the wrong building, or failed to abort launching against a pre-approved target that it later turned out was obviously a school, hospital, wedding party, etc?
If a pilot tracks a school bus that loaded a bunch of kids and heading into town and calls it a military target and blows it up they will be charged.
Investigations also happen quite often, quite often they don’t result in anything because everyone did what they were supposed to do to reduce the risk and make the best judgment call based on the information they had.
You can’t charge people for making a mistake as shitty as you might think it is war gets people killed by definition and for the most part professional soldiers do what they can to make sure that the people who die are combatants.
However, I can attest that pilots routinely provide us infantrymen with information that we weigh very heavily in our decision to engage. Moreover, it is often the case that air-strikes fall under the "close air support" (CAS) category, which in turn means the aircraft shoots where and when the ground troops request it.
In other words: discretion is what separates the professional soldier from the disorganized militia.
That seems like a very strong claim.
Put another way, if we think of 1960's era ICBM technology as entry level autonomous warfare, it's the least effective example of this kind of technology. That alone should give a bit of pause.
That is how potent this technology is, and it should be regarded with no lighter wariness.
It is more precise, more durable, more accurate, and worst of all, requires fewer people per intervention, indicating that it can be operated with a hair trigger, leaving the capacity to react with force more prone to emotional decisions.
If it seems that ordinary guns make it easier for ordinary civilian citizens to lash out at tens of victims, this technology will expand that ability even further. But, put in the hands of unrestrained organizations and institutions, operating with the capacity and constraints of nation-state authority, no less than World War III is on the table.
It's precisely because people do have discretion that we have the concept of the strategic corporal [0].