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Comment by queuesorcs | Hacker News Reader

As much as I love to check hackernews, I’m not normally able to chime in with relevant information on most topics. I feel like this may be one where I can actually do that though as I’m former military and my job directly related to drones on a daily basis. Depending on what’s asked, I may not be able to answer but I’d love to help by sharing any knowledge or information on the subject that I can as I’ve gained so much from others sharing on different topics on here. Ask away and I’ll check back in 15-20 minutes.

Editing to add on that I’ll continue to check back on this for at least the rest of the day in case there’s anything else I can potentially shed more of a light on.

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How much accountability do remote pilots have for incidents like this? I.e., is there an ammo budget? What happens if a pilot decides to "go GTA" and destroy things for fun?

To be clear and so I’m not misleading, I was neither a pilot or a sensor operator so I cannot guarantee you that there isn’t more to it than what I know. As far as I understood the drone pilot works in conjunction with a sensor operator. Because the drone pilot is an officer he is the one to fire the missile but the sensor operator controls the laser to direct the missile. I would strongly believe that there are other emergency stops available due to my experiences but at the bare minimum, the sensor operator could always direct the missile away and the sensor operator themselves can’t do anything without the pilot actually launching the missile.

Editing to add in that hellfire missiles cannot be redirected once launched.

> "go GTA"

Is this an actual thing people think drone operators do? Surely the same that would happen to any military personnel who did the same with their weapons, except with a drone there's perfect camera footage to evidence it as well.

One of the other major things that made me want to offer any information I can is the lack of knowledge on the topic I’ve seen posted on here and places like Reddit. I just would never attempt to have an actual discussion on Reddit though. When you have a topic so shrouded in secrecy and the only articles that people see about them are articles like these, it’s not too surprising though. There’s just so many variables to account for from the administration in office during the strike, to the human managers that happened to be on the clock at the time.

I still don't see what's unusual about drones. What stops fighter pilots from doing the same thing?

Would you still have signed up if you knew then what you know now?

I want to preface this with the fact that a few specific incidents left me disillusioned with the military and that I don’t think people really understand just how horrible war is. That being said I wouldn’t change the decisions I made. I truly believe the work that I did was a net positive and that my work contributed to saving the lives of both military members and civilians. Unfortunately not everything goes perfectly and I still struggle with those things mentally to this day. The things that do still haunt me aren’t the extremely hard to avoid tragedies, they were the events caused by poor leadership and people being placed in positions they didn’t deserve to be in. I think one thing most people don’t consider is that at the end of the day the military and government overall work and function very similarly to the businesses they work or have worked at. The big difference is that the incompetent manager doesn’t mess up part of a presentation, order, or whatever else you may be working on. It leads to innocent lives being lost to an avoidable situation and ends up being referred to as a tragedy.

Back when I enlisted, I decided that I would rather live with the regrets of joining than the regrets of not joining.

If you may indulge me as someone who's not martially minded, may you please give a few examples of what could be the regrets of not joining?

It was simply something that I wanted to do. Not joining would not be true to myself.

A friend and I were having a discussion about the merits of the war. He was antiwar, and I was not opposed to it. During the discussion he asked me "Why don't you join up then?"

I didn't have an excuse. Either I need to change my political beliefs, I am a coward and a hypocrite, or I should join. I joined.

My political beliefs have since changed. I am much closer to a libertarian now than I was before. I still am not antiwar, sometimes violence is the answer.

I learned firsthand the meaning of "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times."

Given this is HN -

What did you see in your time in the military regarding drones and drone operations that don't have good equivalents in the civilian world (and that isn't classified and has real civilian world uses)?

Similarly, what does the civilian world do better?

Anything you wish someone would build to make life easier?

What's the mood like? Are people excited to plug in and kill the baddies? Or is it just another day in the office yada yada Mondays are the worst? Do you prefer operators with previous gaming experience? Were there ever any operators that refused mission orders? how hard would it be for someone(higher ranking) to override an operators mission?

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