Statistical decision making is very slippery stuff.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...
"According to the GTD, 80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013, including perpetrators and excluding deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, the majority of which are combat-related. Of those 80 Americans killed, 36 were killed in attacks that occurred in the United States."
https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths...
And anyway, if you want to get into that question, then we'd have to start including the civilian deaths caused by ISIS, and that's going to make the balance even more favorable to drone strikes. There's no reason to limit the analysis to Americans, either. Dismantling Al Qaeda, ISIS and other terrorist networks contributed to the reduction in terrorist violence against many groups, not just Americans. Probably not even primarily Americans.
Not to mention the rather obvious fact that the interventions in question were designed to reduce terrorism, and so their efficacy can only be truly benchmarked against the counterfactual world in which they were not implemented. However, conveniently, the balance is still overwhelmingly favorable even in the actual world that we happen to inhabit.
[0] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathTol...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009846329/military-suicides-...
So let's not speak with too much certainty. Drone operators have harrowing stories of false positives that were never reported as such. A false positive is a strike on civilians.
The Unseen Scars of Those Who Kill Via Remote Control https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/drones-airstrikes-ptsd...
Although when you think about it, those single-celled bacteria look awefully suspicious and up to nothing good.
I can think of multiple decade-long government projects off of the top of my head (including from NASA) that had entire programs scrapped because they ran out of money.
Overages from a single military program, like the F-35, have eclipsed the entire budget of those canceled projects.
You can't make actionable tweaks to the system when the books are compartmentalized.
None of that though doesn't cost money. Which is why I question the logic that Ad serving is somehow more responsive or accurate because a false-positive "costs money".
Ad companies don't get to hide their books from the public.
Many examples of the IC lying to Congress can be found with digging. Dirt can absolutely be dug up if Congress sees fit to do so. They just haven't seen fit to glex their oversight powers.
Edit: Edited to state that this was not fire of combatants in a combat zone.
The basics are that Al-Awlaki was (allegedly) a kind of pro-terrorist or pro extreme Muslim kind of preacher moving about the Middle East spreading his message. Possibly also hooked up with real terrorists / jihadis. A drone strike killed Awlaki and a second drone strike, a couple weeks later, killed his sixteen year old son. The US claimed killing his son was an accident - but that's pretty implausible. Years later, under Trump, a special forces team killed his eight year old daughter.
That seems incredibly unlikely. Friendly fire incidents have been a fact of war, pretty much forever.
Friendly fire, _by definition_, is not something the Army _actively plans_ to do.
First item on this list: https://www.military.com/military-life/6-times-military-was-...
> 1863: The New York City Draft Riots > the governor [...] had to call in U.S. Marines.
As with so many aspects of American governance, they "solved" an either-or problem by implementing both ideas.
Not close to the first time. Kent State is one famous example. Countless people shot for trespassing on bases
By the way, if you want to split hairs and bring up examples like Kent State, the elephant in the room is the self-defense justification in a lot of these examples. Find a killing that occurred when a soldier believed their life to be in danger.
Well, no; we just weren't doing it using the military. Or at least weren't doing it using the military in a way that we got caught. The US government (and, I expect, nearly every government since the dawn of governments) has been killing people outside of "the battlefield" forever.
This is to say nothing of the many, many times the Army was used to clear natives from lands claimed by the US. Presumably, in most of those incidents, they were not considered American citizens. However, they definitely were in the most recent incident I can think of, the Wounded Knee massacre, which happened in 1980. That was the 7th Cavalry, and they killed 250 Lakota, including women and children.
I'm sure that there were plenty of other times it happened, but, for a relativly well-know and documented incident in 1932, check out the Bonus Army[1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army#:~:text=The%20Bon....
And union busting police? And modern police, before and after 2020?
This will continue until (1) the courts eliminate Qualified Immunity and (2) police unions have to carry liability insurance for all its members.
It is easy to get outraged at the military, but the police is way more harmful here.
Citation needed. The current pattern of extrajudicial remote targeted killings outside of a Congressionally-declared battlefield is completely novel and only began in the Predator drone age, as far as I can see
Edit: some data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations_by_the_...
In 1896, under circumstances not entirely clear, Sun was caught and detained for 13 days by the Chinese legation in London. It appears likely that Sun ran into a fellow Cantonese who worked for the legation and was found out and seized while visiting him under an alias. The legation planned to ship Sun back to China, but, before this could be done, Sun had converted a British employee at the legation to his side and got word through to James Cantlie, former dean of Hong Kong College of Medicine. The British Foreign Office intervened, and Sun was released from his captivity. The incident engendered great publicity and gave Sun’s career a powerful boost.
From the biography of Sun Yat Sen. They probably wanted to execute him in China for plotting against the throne.
Respectfully, I beg to differ.
I am not some sort of naive activist. I accept there is a price to be paid for the relative comfort I live in. That said, some basic rules have to be followed if only to ensure citizenry that they are followed.
For better or worse, most citizens seem to be getting regular reminders[1] that the rules, at best, are not applied evenly. The trust in institutions is already low. Some basic accountability has to apply even to the highest echelon. Scratch that, it especially needs to apply to it.
[1]https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119185396/paul-pelosi-nancy-...
I guess one of those rules could be: Don't travel overseas to participate in a war against the US government. Yes, I understand, this is a hard rule to follow, especially if you're of the rebellious bent, but comfort requires compromise.
I am surprised that I even have to point it out, but you do not stop being an American by traveling outside the country. Hell, you do not stop being an American even if you send money to sanctioned entities.
There is a reason there is a process for those, who deviate from societal norms. It ensures people en masse do not take matters into their own hands. That process does not, or at least should not, include current regime deciding you get deaded behind closed doors. Deviation from it historically yielded very poor results.
If you are not sure why that is a bad idea, and a bad omen, for a republic supposedly governed by law, I am genuinely not sure I can help. I am just sad that some people explicitly believe this.
So how is this different from rules forced by ISIS?
> and how well convinced we are of what the accuracy based on past experience; and how much the deciders knew about last inaccuracies, when deciding to continue a practice.
This in particular. How did proceeding this way do in the past? What did we get when we decided to continue with a discrepancy? If the discrepancy did not result in an issue, why? was the information bad, our handling of it, or just chance? If it was an issue, can we avoid overriding it again, can we get better info, can we discard it altogether from consideration?
(note: this comment doesn't relate to the content of the article at all, but about the decision-making process outlined above)
Right, they are almost always worse than first-hand information, and they are almost always better than low-grade intelligence obtained under pressure/influence (like the WMDs in Iraq). That is no justification.
You're probably right about this, in a sense, but it beckons a pretty interesting question: provide an example when "signatures" are better than first-hand information.
Counter example: If your job is to find enemy subs, then sonar feedback off the hull of a Akula Class nuclear attack sub may be better than direct visual observation of the sub
The counter example doesn't fit. In you example the sub is hostile because it is Russian. Here the people are convicted to death by circumstantial evidence. Very, very bad circumstantial evidence. It is just "worth" it because there are little consequences for the murderers.