If a Drone Strike Hit an American Wedding We'd Ground Our Fleet
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They're not autonomous, they're flown by pilots who just happen to not be sitting in the aircraft they're flying.
Manned aircraft have killed huge groups of innocent civilians more than once, but apparently that's fine because the pilot was sitting in the aircraft.
Now take away the risk to American life and lower the cost of the attack significantly, and viola, you've got a much itchier trigger finger now. If you've played MW3, which would you rather do, use the drone to take out enemies or risk your character dying?
A drone totally changes the dynamics of the fight. If we were able to get tons of drones and "mechwarriors", I don't think wars would be quite as difficult to justify. As technologists we are often blinded by the coolness of things. As someone who has worked on AI for drones early on in my career (for the US govt), I shudder to think that I may have contributed in some ways to a terrible technology for humanity. At the time, I had friends deployed and in my head, I thought that it's better we have UAVs than my friends coming home in bodybags...
I doubt that. It would seem that a pilot sitting in a cockpit would be a lot more trigger-happy.
Both pilots can make two types of mistake: don't recognize an enemy for what he is, or do the same thing with a civilian. If plane pilot mistakes an enemy for something else and said enemy succeeds in his efforts, the pilot will lose his place and may be his life. The drone pilot, on the other hand, will only lose the drone, which is also cheaper then a plane. But the cost of the other mistake is the same for the both of them.
So, it seems that plane pilot has actually much more reason to shoot on targets he's not sure about.
The commander/politician/leader is answerable and responsible for his soldiers, as such if the risk to the soldier's life is taken out of equation an attack suddenly begins to make more sense as it carrier lower risk & lower costs, therefore requiring less justification.
Remember the downed F-117 pilot in Serbia? The repercussions of Somalia? Drones carry no such risks. The risk of political and public fall out is minuscule compared to traditional operations. Public outrage over "collateral damage" is negligible, because frankly, there is no public outrage about civilian deaths. Especially if "suspected Al-Qaeda operatives" were among the killed.
It's basically the NSA equivalent of mass spying. If spying becomes so cheap that they can just do it to everyone, then they're thinking "why not"? Same with drone striking. If it ends up costing them only like $10,000 per target - why not kill the associated forces, too? You know...just to be on the "safe side".
Compare internet forums vs f2f discussion - it is much easier to end up in a flamewar saying hurtful things on the internet when your opponents are faceless words on a screen than when it's a person sitting across from you.
Said about literally EVERY SINGLE change in warfare over the centuries. I am talking all the way back to armor and catapults to gunpowder based munitions, the blitzkrieg, rockets, planes, bombs, and of course nuclear weapons.
The thing is -- it is absolutely true, but it is always true, and therefore meaningless.
Lets look at the Gulf War for example -- the US lost 113 soldiers to the enemy (an addition 35 to friendly fire)... they killed "at least" 20,000 -- some estimates go as high as 35,000+(and an additional 3,500+ civilians). The asymmetry of modern warfare is nothing new, pointing to drones as some line in the sand is just, IMHO, silliness.
Someone should have seen this coming a long time ago and called them multistage-guided-missiles or some other name.
The term 'Drone' is basically used as link bait and confuses the argument... If we replace 'drone' with 'stealth bomber', is it now OK to bomb a wedding?
But that's the thing: in my mind more human soldiers means less potential for outright slaughtering of civilians. So more drones might end up raising the body count. in the long run; not for US soldiers, but for people you'd miss just as much if you'd happen to be born as their friends.
> Our policy persists because we put little value on the lives of foreign innocents.
Suppose, for argument's sake, that this is true: that America puts nearly no value on the lives of foreigners in the pursuit of foreign policy. Nevertheless, attacking so indiscriminately that weddings are targeted unknowingly would be unthinkable because of the tiny chance of retaliation. But with no chance of retaliation it becomes possible for depraved indifference to foreign lives to influence policy.
Now, you may not agree that American foreign policy is depraved in this fashion, but the REASON that many feel that drone strikes are morally different is because if it WAS depraved in this fashion, the use of drones would be different from the use of other military force.
> If you've played MW3
doesn't have "civilians" as a game mechanic (unlike Counter-Strike or a lot of arcade shooting games, for example), so the comparison doesn't really work.
When a robotic combat bot/UAV is used, it is significantly harder to justify civilian casualties as it then becomes a much more cold/calculated decision. Guess it then boils down to the "precision" that is available. I don't suppose a drone can take out a single occupant in a vehicle so it's minimum quantum attack size is an entire vehicle and hence the additional casualties.
This bot driven warfare is some scary ass technology with a huge potential for abuse. Even if a future UAVs could target a single individual, that type of technology would have any aspiring dictator salivating at the thought...
Regular aircraft are "expensive." They're literally expensive, in dollar terms, but even ignoring that they're logistically and operationally resource-intensive to operate. You only have so much airpower at your disposal, you're limited by flight deck space and pilot availability, you want to keep some in reserve, and aircraft are a bitch to maintain. Like, a week in service per day of flight time.
Basically, you default to not using them. You don't bust them out unless you have good reason to. You don't just cruise around looking for people who look suspicious, because that would be a tremendous waste of resources that could be better-spent elsewhere. Like transporting supplies for the troops on the ground. You only bust out the planes when you have solid, definitive, verified evidence that there is something that should get blown up.
Drones flip that around. You can't quite go cruisin' around just looking for stuff, but it's worth the time & effort to check out quite a few of your semi-sketchy tips. Now you're doing a lot more operations, on less-reliable intel, and the risk of cock-ups rises significantly. But because the drones are remote, none of that risk is borne by any member of the military performing the operations; all the extra risk falls on the local civilian population. I don't think many people partaking in these operations are intentionally heartless, but this is a classic case of moral hazard, and on the margin more aggressive, risk-taking behavior is incentivized.
Additionally, putting a drone in the sky is faster than putting a regular plane in the sky. This means that planes tend to be used only against 'static' targets, which gives you an opportunity to scout & verify. Drones allow you to hit 'time-sensitive' targets, which means you are now making time-sensitive decisions. A wedding party got hit because some dude had literally minutes (or less) to decide if a collection of vehicles was a wedding or an armed convoy. I take it as axiomatic that the added time-pressure increases the number of wrong decisions.
When you read hours of maintenance per flight hour, you should remember that much of the maintenance is done on parts which are being rebuilt off the airframe.
>Now you're doing a lot more operations, on less-reliable intel, and the risk of cock-ups rises significantly.
Please provide a citation for this claim, as it is not self evident. Many claim that the increased loiter time of UAVs allow for better timing and targeting, and there has been video evidence of this. You may be correct, but you still bear the burden of evidence when you make this claim.
>putting a drone in the sky is faster than putting a regular plane in the sky.
This is untrue, as the USA has had B1 and B52 bombers continuously in flight over Afghanistan for weeks on end at many points in the war, to provide air support for ground forces. Most strike aircraft and bombers are also much faster than the UAVs.
You can argue about force projection all you want but the US is not trying to engage in some warfare campaign against the entire planet.
We deploy drones in places where there are perceived terrorist threats. As you can see in collateral murder, all you have to do to be perceived as a threat is to be alive. This tells me that the U.S. government is overly paranoid.
Next, we are or will soon be deploying drones right here in the U.S. That tells me that the government perceives its own citizens as a threat or as a possible threat. This is backed up by the fact that they 'accidentally' collect U.S. citizen electronic communications.
The U.S. government makes far too many "accidents" for them to all be truly accidental.
Words are important, and language frames every issue. "Drones" as opposed to "unmanned aircraft" or "unmanned assault aircraft" is a huge difference in perception.
I think that's why the U.S. military popularizes the term drone over "unmanned aircraft" which even then isn't true - it's a remotely manned aircraft.
The 'world burning' today is ten times less of actual burning than in, say, US actions in Vietnam or Korea, and hundred times less than ww1/ww2 - I'm glad that the scale of suffering is shrinking so much.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/16/afghanistan-tal...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/06/afghanistan-wed...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/world/asia/24pstan.html?_r...
The USA wont kill everyone that opposes them with such a campaign, but the point is the same as "terrorism", to send a message of fear if you dare oppose us, or associate with people who oppose us, damn the "collateral damage".
Make no bones about it, this is exactly the same kind of asymmetrical warfare that the USA itself condemns as terrorism.
Some drones are operated by a division of the CIA and are out of military control, however. This is probably the most worrisome aspect of the program.
However, as long as 99% of their targets are bad guys, Americans are going to continue supporting the program. It's zero risk for American pilots, and everyone likes to read about more dead terrorists with their morning coffee. More points to whoever's in charge.
Governments like Yemen's will also support it because #1 it does their dirty work for them, and #2 they can blame an evil foreign power. Win-win.
The problem here is that 100% of the targets are bad guys while seemingly a very low percentage of the casualties are. Americans continue to support the program because the media does not do it's job. Instead they act as a mouth piece, a cheer leader, instead of doing actual journalism.
The War on Terror, much like the War on Drugs, is a utter failure. It has ZERO chance of being successful because of tactics like this.
Do you really think that the disconnection doesn't have an effect on some level? Whether it's the number of people signing up at all, being ready for a mission, or actually following orders?
How many people would follow the order of shooting from a controlled plane to unsuspecting people in a convoy -vs- an order to take a knife and kill an unarmed not resisting person in front of them? The end result is the same. Giving them enough distance just makes it much much easier.
Even so, and despite all the training, some do refuse orders. They're also at least theoretically obliged to refuse illegal orders (i.e. war crimes), at least in my country.
I think the previous commenter was speaking on the level of disconnect between a drone pilot and their intended targets. It's much, much easier for someone to go through with clicking a button and watching an explosion on a screen than it is to say, murder each of those people if they were in the same room.
Tech equivalency is a meaningless concept and it is completely stupid to apply it in particular to WW2 where the majority of civilians never asked or wanted a war to begin with.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/On-Killing-Psychological-Learning-So...
General Marshall discovered after WW2 that only 15% of front-line soldiers even fired their weapon at the enemy. Even soldiers don't like to kill enemy troops in the middle of a battle!
But in all seriousness, this isn't police action, its a foreign power.
If terrorists disappeared tomorrow. Let's say we use our surgical strike weapons to target every cell every member, and in one hour they are gone. What would happen? Billions of dollars disappear from the pockets of everyone in the chain. Military contractors, drone maintenance, promotions, bonuses, career advancements, no more completed missions, medals, no job to go to.
So the direct financial and career incentive for everyone in the chain is to always make sure there is a stream of new terrorists, new cells, new intelligence chatter about "the Great Satan". And that is indirectly accomplished by indiscriminately bombing civilians. Everyone who is involved in picking the target and knows it is a funeral, will know civilians will die. I can't help but think they also know it is job insurance as well. They would be stupid not to.
American public via media has been tested enough during releases of so many atrocities, torture tapes, lies, monitoring that by now, I think they've built an accurate model of how much outrage will be generated and how much will actually threaten future operations, funding, reelection and so on (so far not much).
The bottom line, I don't even know and 100% believe them when they say these are all "mistakes". The incentives and the motivation, especially in the long term, is for them not to really care if civilians get bombed.
It doesn't need to make more profits during wartime than in peacetime to exist.
It only needs to have multiple actors whose interests align to produce more military funding and hardware than is needed to defend the nation.
Chomsky, for example, analyses this in respect to the media. Large media ends up acting in sync with government's propaganda because there are set of constraints and incentive s built in. From outside they often act _as if_ they are centrally controlled by a single government party.
You know what would help "debunk" such a thing; if there was a site where every single investment made by any member of congress was required to be listed.
Consider reactions to the idea that we cancel the Joint Strike Fighter program. Long story short, every politician who had a contractor working on the project in his constituency started making noise about all the jobs that would be lost if we were to shut down the program. No secret conspiracy; that was an open debate that happened in the public sector, and which many Americans were talking about over dinner.
Even the actual influencing of decisions to engage in hostilities is so everyday as to be unremarkable. For example, the big defense contractors spent a whole lot of money lobbying members of Congress to convince them that the 2009 Afghanisatan surge was a good idea. I think some wonks wrote columns about it in Foreign Policy magazine, but otherwise the news was barely even noticed.
As for how that leads to a sort of "continuous warfare" policy where we're always on the lookout for new enemies. . . I think that just emerges. If you've spending billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer money on some new toy, then at some point someone's going to start asking why. And of course if your job is tied to a project, the very last thing you're going to say is, "No reason, actually this is a pretty silly lark if you ask me." So folks start coming up with hypothetical adversaries, and starts inventing war games and conducting exercises built around these hypotheses. And things just sort of roll along from there.
“They actually like deploying. So when you go visit them in Afghanistan, in the western Pacific, you don't get questions like, ‘Oh, shoot, what's sequester going to do to me?’ They know how to spell it, but that's about it. They want to know, ‘Hey, Commandant, you know, is this going to be the last deployment I'm going to get on, or am I going to actually be able to go to combat again or be able to go to WESTPAC (western pacific) again,” Amos said. “So our morale's pretty high right now, and I think it's going to stay high as long as we give them something to look forward to. The reorientation to the Pacific has just reenergized a lot of Marines as they think about Afghanistan: ‘My gosh, we're coming out of there in 2014. What's left?’ Well, we talk about Darwin, Australia. We talk about Japan. We talk about Guam. And their eyes light up.”
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2013/11/after-war-budget-cut...
For how many years were people dismissed as nutjobs and "conspiracy theorists" when they talked about NSA spying? Now we know it was all true. Would you like to make a bet as to whether or not the US military-industrial complex acts in its own self-interest when comes to the "War on Terror"? When it comes down to it, there is nothing particularly "extraordinary" about these claims.
> You have made these accusations without any evidence.
The evidence is circumstantial and based on past behavior patterns of the US government. Read "Decent Interval" and its follow-up "Irreparable Harm" by Frank Snepp, or "State of War" by James Risen (for something more recent) to get started on this history. Again, there is nothing "extraordinary" about the previous poster's claims.
Just because it is true, doesn't mean those people aren't nutjobs or conspiracy theorists.
[Unlikely thing X] came true! Therefore, [unlikely thing Y] will, too!
Even if X and Y were incredibly similar -- in this case they aren't, at all -- that's still not a logical assumption. It's not even evidence toward Y.
We have seen mountains of evidence that people follow their incentives even when those incentives lead to perverse, counter-productive behaviors. It's basically what the entire "Freakonomics" franchise is built on, for example.
We also know that the incentives faced by the military establishment are pushing toward more war, more violence. This is obvious, just look at the early '90s when we thought the world was going to be more peaceful. We cut back on military spending, military contractors howled and screamed.
So, while we have no direct evidence that anyone in the military establishment is willfully disregarding civilian casualties, we do have extremely strong inferential evidence that some people in the military establishment are likely to do so, now, in the past, and in the future.
And for the example you offer, judges' very job description require them to narrow down on a case by case basis, and to make a decision based on the evidence available, beyond reasonable doubt. The ethical principle that requires this to be so is that the asymmetry of power between the individual and the State is so big that it is most fair for the whole process to start with a bias in favor of the individual.
Other situations require a different kind of analysis. And the consequence to apply this level of precision to political analysis is that no analysis (and no criticism to the de-facto policies that are guarantied to emerge anyways in this vacum of knowledge) is ever possible.
Yes, but this isn't a war. It's a bunch of crude assassinations. There are no meaningful military objectives regrettably costing some civilian lives; these drone strikes are the primary act of war, and they accomplish nothing of value. They just breed more enemies.
It seems to me that the incentives structure rewards a continued War On Terror. Everyone directly involved in it, tends to profit from maintaining it.
Also I refuse to blindly believe in the inherent goodness or extraordinary purity of heart of those involved. You ask for extraordinary evidence that they are incentivized to kill. Ok, I can also turn it around and take the point that those involved are by default bad, don't have pure motives, are evil and are motivated by money or desire to inflict pain and require extraordinary evidence to prove the opposite.
We have seen them lie time and time again. To the people, to Congress. At this point they have the burden of proof that their have good and pure motives at the core of their decision making. Sorry, they lost the confidence that once might have been placed in them.
Any industry that is built on addressing problems that people naturally have is going to generate lots of revenue. It has been proven that people naturally fight with each other. People fight over race, religion, sports, politics, and territory. Nations do the same thing.
If you think it would end terrorism by killing all current terrorists and if you think it would even be possible, I think you're misguided.
It won't change until people in the chain have incentives to avoid war.
Now let's think how to accomplish it: maybe there should be huge tax on profits for military contractors in the time when operations are going ? Maybe private for-profit military contractors have to go in the first place ? Maybe we shouldn't pay them for every piece of equipment but only for time spent working ?
As to people in the field, there are some ideas as well like freezing all bonuses during the military operations and such. The thing is it has to be profitable for individuals involved to seek peace not war. The war machine is never going to stop otherwise. The balance should be such that once high command in charge feel it's necessary to start military operations they should meet at least some resistance from rest of the chain not "fuck yeah sir!" as it is now.
The truth of one conspiracy cannot be used as evidence for the truth of others. It simply doesn't make sense.
[0] They didn't really laugh at Einstein, but you get the idea.
And in the meantime, if they can make people think they have those problems, that would be even more revenue.
Like the pharmaceutical industry that sell you drugs for diseases you didn't even know existed. Or cigarettes manufacturers that want to solve your problem of not being addicted to nicotine...
Using the same logic, nothing should ever get better because those who benefit from "bad things" will never allow them to be stopped.
(Note: I'm not convinced war profiteering is the driving motivator for the NSA, just pointing out the fallacy in your argument.)
Thats not true because it ignores existing structures of power.
A common thief benefits from the bad things they do, but has no power to influence those that might seek to stop him, and so is convicted.
A banker who committed fraud (read: stole) during the recent financial crisis has the power of capital and lobby behind them, and walks.
The existing structures of power in place are actually designed to stop many of the bad things you describe, however there is nothing intrinsically moral about them so they can be corrupted by capital and lobbyists.
Back in the 80's and 90's, people who insisted the NSA did all this or that really couldn't explain how the technology would work to do all that. People insisted spy satellites could read my newspaper, yada yada.
About 5 years ago, the chips, scale-out HW, storage and Linux (thanks submitters!) reached the point where the known daily capacity of information stream or their meta could be stored by someone like the NSA or Google.
One just needs to assume technical capabilities is what defines reality.
I don't think that was too off-the-wall, even in 1988 or '89.
I can recall, although not google up, at least one back-of-the-envelope effort to figure out if some organization could store all internet traffic. I think the answer was "yes", and this was done maybe 5 years ago.
You forgot the one group of people who could actually stop this, literally overnight: Politicians.
You're talking about moral humans, here. Our soldiers/airmen/marines/sailors are not soulless automatons, nor are officers that develop strategy and provide direction. Nor would I consider their pay to be either incentive or motivation.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but there are immoral individuals in the US army, especially in the high ranks (where sociopath usually meet), like everywhere else.
If incentives are in place, nature will find the way even if you can't point to one single person who actually pulled the trigger.
A choice is being made in either case. Innocent people are being killed in either case.
Read this. Follow orders or get court marshalled. Its no surprise that after objections from pilots that they started singling out people who didn't give a shit about things like ethical objectives other than shooting their target accurately.
A large finance source for the Al-Nushra front in Africa is Jordan/Saudi Arabia. But those countries are allies to the US, so there are no drone strikes there. There are also no strikes in Iran or Syria.
Yemen government is very complicit to those strikes and it should at be mentioned in such articles.
But self-defeating? Not sure I can even see a plausible argument for that one.
I guess drone strikes are just a cheaper solution for that problem, with less outrage than prison camps.
It might seem nationalistic to some but it reminds me of a quote from "A Few Good Men" -
Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.
Btw, not saying the comment is bad in anyway.
And maybe eventually people will actually start thinking about the opposite position before they post something.
Or maybe they actually won't.
Because the next question that should inevitably spring up is ok, ok, but why the fuck would someone in Yemen want to kill US citizens?
Once you start answering that question, the question of morality in drone strikes becomes a lot more difficult to answer.
It's a whole chicken and the egg thing.
Taken at face value, US should go and bomb with these drones a whole lot of other people too. And no, they wouldn't be "jihadists". I'm sure there is many many people in the states that very much want to kill other U.S. citizens.
I also don't see how blowing away teenagers in an Afghan village who have no idea what 9/11 is, is some kind of macho statement against oppression. Pretty soon, if not already, we'll be killing young people born after 9/11. Not sure if this is the big win the GOP 'defense first' voter thinks it is. Sounds like yet another failure in policy, much like the profitable war on drugs.
When we give the nation state carte blanche on both a moral and budgetary level, expect nothing but endless abuses of power. There are 150,000 Iraqi graves that wouldn't have existed if Bush was honest. Lets not forget that. If there's a global bad guy in Nicholson's speech people should defend against, its probably the US military, and I say this as a US citizen.
It should be noted as well that the entire premise of the film wasn't "the ends justify the means" but rather the exact opposite. People can do great evil while believing that every action they take is fundamentally correct and for some kind of nebulous greater good.
Maybe you shouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt on those horrible things they are doing in your name.
Those numerous killing of civilians should require at least some questioning.
I am very confident that I do not have to do that. How are you going to make me?
Wait, I do? Did they pass a law or something?
The Terrorist we know today are a pretty much related to those people who were supported by American Intelligence agencies in the mid70-80s, against the soviet. The "Barbarians" among those folk were given advanced weapons, that America possessed, those weapons might be outdated, and America may have a upper hand, but that is only a matter of time. Sadly, this has became a chicken and egg problem.
The circle of REVENGE is a continuous one, you kill more people innocent or not, you sprout a new rebellion. They will eventually hurt you back, today or tomorrow. and the process will continue.. presidents, prime ministers would come and go by.
The only way to stop this is to actually STOP. Stop interference in ways like espoinage, drone strikes, killing of "Suspected" militants.. never given any right to appear before court.. everything. The root problem is the so called intelligence that does more than just collect information about "suspected" enemies.
Someone has to rise up and stop it. for both sides, perhaps it escape us humans sometimes, the very fact "those who are hurt are the ones who can forgive or take revenge." Thats about there it is to this.
Really sad to hear about that nameless bride/groom & family. May they R.I.P.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
One view considers these documents to be the expression of the inclusive rights granted to the citizenship.
The other view considers these documents to be the definition of the extents and limits of federal and state powers.
The first view currently prevails but that was not always the case. Under the second view you can not waive your right to remain silent, or waive your right to unreasonable searches. In other words, being Mirandized doesn't grant the right. It's simply informing you of what you always have.
Just so you anyone knows, not all americans feel the same as our govt. does.
The US is active in that it's actively treating citizens of other countries as second class.
Of course? Ask Chinese citizens about their right to free speech.
> The New York Times reported in 2013 that the Obama Administration embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties, which in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.
So 5 people were of military-age and male? Given a size of 22 people, it sound reasonable. I wonder how many were children.
Edit: I seemed to have forgotten that it is black and hispanic males in New York who are stopped.
A minority male between 14 and 40 is more likely to mug someone than a 70 year old caucasian woman; that's not something made up by racist conservatives. But if there's such a thing as rights, they must apply even to higher-threat demographics.
One interesting exercise is thinking about base rates of mugging, and likelihood ratios for mugging, and discerning your own personal "4th amendment suspension" breaking point for each percentage.
But they are suspected of a crime, because of their demographic category.
I should have explained the thought experiment more: Suppose future sociologists identify some identifiable cluster of traits that corresponds with a 99.9% likelihood of committing a mugging on any given day--if you see someone with these traits, it's overwhelmingly likely that they've either just mugged someone, or they're just about to mug someone.
With that level of certainty, you're either in favor of unreasonably searching them and seizing their mugging weapons (or some other intrusive measure like constant monitoring), or you're in favor of unnecessary muggings.
The reason this is a thought experiment is that no real-world identifiable group is that likely to commit crimes. But there is a measurable likelihood ratio, even if treating everyone equally is more important than it.
How fascinating.
Obviously we need to re-count the number killed during the 9/11 attacks - surely all military-age males killed were combatants - they were just fighting in a war they didn't know had started yet.
Just like we have international treaties for other horrible things like mustard gas.
Do all the reconnaissance you can get away with. But I don't want a tired, overworked, morally disconnected 20-something sitting in a trailer somewhere in the US, pulling a trigger to kill unquantifiable targets anywhere in the world. Or any other country doing it to anyone else for that matter.
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[1] http://www.opcw.org/about-opcw/member-states/
[2] http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/11/us/u-s-chemical-weapons/
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Chemical...
I don't think the GP was suggesting dropping pepper gas bombs, or using mace cannons while storming an enemy outpost.
From a political point of view, drones are much more attractive than traditional methods. You won't see the corpses of dead Americans being dragged through Mogadishu with drones. You won't see captured pilots being paraded in front of a camera with drones.
In any case, I remember it fairly well, no need to look it up. Which current likely target is a heavily-armed state with a strong air defense system?
(North Korea is a possibility, although I have to wonder just how good their air defenses are these days. It also strikes me as a target where drones would be a great idea if it ever comes down to a shooting war.)
I'd also like to note that the F-117 shootdown didn't involve the pilot being captured, much less paraded in front of a camera, although he certainly could have been.
Modern fighter pilots can be just as overworked and have about the same risk of dying from being shot at.
If an Qaeda militant had gone to US city and bombed a wedding where they suspected harbored US officer, how would that play out? 22 injured, 17 killed by Qaeda militants in boston. Terrorists mistakenly targeted a wedding, trying to go after 5 US officer.
If there were no propaganda in media, surely this would play out identical as this drone strike. No world leaders expressing their condemnation of the attacks, condolences, and solidarity. Military strikes kills huge groups of innocent civilians all the times in wars, so nothing to write about.
Nobody's calling this a mistake except the media.
5 Al Qaeda dead, 5-10 people sitting next to an Al Qaeda member also dead.
Intelligence even pointed out which 4 cars out of the 11 car convoy contained the Al Qaeda members.
If you think there is no war going on over there, the 52 civilians slaughtered by Al Qaeda on Dec. 5 in a Sana'a hospital would disagree with you.
Check out how Al Qaeda operates here at the 56 second mark, where one of them casually lobs a grenade into a crowd of civilians during the Dec. 5 attack: http://www.guns.com/2013/12/14/graphic-cctv-footage-militant...
The US drone strike was a direct response to the Dec. 5 massacre by Al Qaeda.
We should be striving for much better standards if the west is to have any moral authority. Not as bad as Russia, China or Al Qaeda is not good enough.
Then there are practical issues that indiscriminate attacks are liable to create as many enemies as they kill as sons, brothers and fathers are bereaved and decide to join the fight.
[Edit: I'm British not American and I'm not saying Britain is any better but I really hate the "we aren't as bad as something really bad" as a defence for either country's actions. We should do better].
The Hacker News community should like it as it focuses on the stats and facts rather than anecdotal stories the media slings.
The main thesis: Violence (in nearly every form) has been on a precipitous decline in the modern era. War deaths (and civilian causalities) are at all time lows and still declining.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
You're asking me if the US's geopolitical and military operations currently are increasing or decreasing total violence in the world. A tremendously complex question to answer accurately.
My answer (opinion) is this: On the whole I think the US has contributed to a decline in total violence in the world. Not to say there haven't been bad decisions along the way. Advances in military tactics and foreign aid policies have been aimed to decreased violence. As for an exact figure, that is impossible to know.
How many future wars were averted when the US won the nuclear arms race? How many civilian casualties are minimized with each advance in precision bombing over the last ~75 years of military aviation? How many wars have been averted through foreign political action (aid, coups, treaties, etc)?
Obviously those are unmeasurable in each discrete instance but the book I referenced above provides some aggregate statistics which, when correlated the US's rise as a world power, show a huge decline in worldwide violence (and not just in 1st world countries).
They should stop doing the stuff that increases violence. Like this incident.
Just like a startup tries new tactics so does the US military and foreign policy organizations. And just like startups, some of those ideas fail miserably and look like ideas that should have never been tried in the first place :)
Germany already has declined participating in the attack on Iraq, but still provides plenty of passive (possibly also some active, even though that would be illegal) support (logistics, allowing air bases) and most people still perceive it as the right action.
It is hard to find recent surveys on the topic and especially Transatlantic Trends seems to refuse to ask the question if Europe should continue to support US military actions further and focuses mainly on the NATO (neither drone strikes nor the Iraq War are NATO operations).
I don't understand why the rest of the world is OK with this. I really don't.
so a better title would be, If Bush were President we'd ground out fleet.
So no, not really. Republicans are the ones halting congress in every single way and doing what you just suggested. It is the entire point of the party. Regressivism is extremely easy, just fight against any changes and if someone ever actually manages to change anything your platform is to change it back. Republicans and Democrats do not do the same thing, I am so tired of hearing about this.
Drones aren't autonomous. They don't target anything. Weapons officers do.
Besides being plain wrong and bad reporting, dehumanizing (attributing it on the drone) shifts responsibility and makes it seem like problem is solvable by "fixing" drone or by grounding them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_State_killings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege
http://m.static.newsvine.com/servista/imagesizer?file=joemyx...
The premise of the article is non-sensical. If we didn't have drones, would the airforce be bombing targets in Yemen? Undoubtedly.
I kind of imagine this like all of those movies about drug cartels where these incredibly rich families are leading semi-normal lives and then during a normal family event like a wedding, are attacked by the rival drug cartel. It sucks and looks really bad, but if you got involved in something illegal like Al Qaeda or the drug trade on a massive scale...didn't you kind of bring it on yourself?
Either way, more evidence needs to be shown for these kinds of attacks and why they are necessary?
The problem is that our democracies are broken. Most people aren't well informed or unconcerned, and those who are don't have enough weight to make a difference.
Maybe we could find a way to make our democracies functioning better via public discussion on the internet.
We could imagine some kind of big political forum where logical reasoning would be enforced. Critical thinking would be encouraged. Rhetoric would be banned. Facts would be checked, politician would confront the public and each other on long and deep debates. Decisions would be taken collectively...
Some people will always have more clout than others. Even here on Hacker News you have people with (I believe deservedly) more weight than others.
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Drone warfare is the worst kind of undeclared war: It's highly prone to backlash, but so cheap it is irresistible to politicians and military leaders.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
There's nothing intellectually gratifying about this story - it's an "outrage story".
That doesn't mean it's not important, just that it's not HN material.
- Do nothing
- Use drones
- Use conventional weapons which, he argues, would have more collateral damage
- Put troops on the ground and be perceived as an invader.
So either you should argue that these are not the options or you should argue that he did not pick the right one.
- Employ soft power / carrots instead of sticks such as foreign aid and literacy education.
- Take actions that make people hate you less instead of more.
- Equip/arrange for the locals or neighbours to do your dirty work.
- Get a UN vote saying whatever you want to do.
- Arm the government, conditional on a transition to democracy over the course of ten years.
- Employ targeted bombings only on terrorist training camps, not on weddings.
- Convince, bribe or threaten local cultural and religious leaders to guide their followers away from whatever you want them away from.
- Divide the country along race, religious or class grounds and install a minority government that serves your interests.
- Place bounties on the heads of people you want killed and increase the payout until the free market takes care of things for you.
- Just let them take care of their own internal political issues and wait for the terrorists to reach the US or one of its allies before whacking them.
- Increase employment rates and workloads so people are too busy/tired to devote attention to trying to destroy america.
- Free bread / circuses / fast food / TV.
- Drugs in the water supply.
- Nuke the whole place as a warning to others.
- Adopt a realistic foreign policy that admits the inevitability of civilian deaths, occasional bad apples engaging in torture and executing prisoners etc. and just agree to monitor and set realistic targets regarding the number of civilian deaths etc.
- Do something low impact and ineffective and let the next president deal with it.
FWIW, the correct response to terrorism is to do nothing militarily, and treat it as a crime problem with an intelligence aspect nationally. People in faraway lands have little capability to do the US any harm.
Its hard to have a permanent war if you actually keep reducing the number of enemies.
Putting troops on the ground would be worse than doing nothing, but still better, less cowardly and maybe less error-prone than bombing from drones.
Using conventional weapons would actually be the worst option.
So out of (his own set of) four, he picked the 3rd worse.
Is it really so terrible not to bomb wedding parties?
Even then I feel that more than Obama or any other politicians or military official it is the general public to blame. The public wants democracy but does not understand that democracy does not work out of the box. One needs to get involved to make it work properly. It is a good system but needs fixes. The problem with democracy is it treats my stupidity same as your intelligence and my apathy same as your concern. And as long as people like me hold majority there is not much others can do.
Wait... no, it was done by the USA military so it's not terrorism, totally cool, nothing to see, carry on.
It's nothing more than a form of terrorism, primarily against the American people.
"come and get us, it's getting too quiet around here and people are starting to question their leaders"?
This kind of argument just makes me want to violently throw up. There is absolutely no honor in using a remote drone to kill people from a distance. It is among the most despicable things a human being can do to another human being.
How about we make America take a really honorable position and say this to our American military friends: you are not allowed to kill anyone unless you've attempted, directly, to communicate with them - in their language - and discussed the reasons for their hostility directly, person to person. Only after this has occurred, and all other efforts to resolve the persons aggression, is the right to kill granted.
I'm sure we'd see all those fascist US military personnel take another look at their chosen career path if they did, indeed, have to use the mighty power of American technology, to communicate and make direct peace with the targetted individuals instead of decapitate them, fill them with lead, murder their children, injure and maim their relatives, disfigure the strangers who were simply in the area, at the wrong time ..
You can either agree or disagree, but if you feel the target is accurate based on your intelligence the venue doesn't really matter IMHO. Civilians will be killed no matter if it's a wedding, funeral or some other random day.
Would we have cared if bin Laden was attending a wedding?
This, of course, has already happened.
And also: what do you think the chance is that the enemy might decide to operate under this presumption of innocence is the US doesn't?
Do you want this spiral to go up or down?
The question is why is this not being done in the same way in other cases, given that random killings of civilians are perhaps the best terrorist recruitment tool ever devised.
perhaps you've answered your own question?
Also, not an easy task to fly a Navy SEAL team around the world constantly to do operations like this. Not only does it risk their lives, but sometimes it's not even possible to get there physically or in enough time.
Also, somehow the terrorist were able to recruit before the US and it's allies "retaliated" with drone strikes. Sort of a chicken-and-egg problem but it would be crazy to blame terrorism on the killing of civilians that only took place.. because of actions of the terrorists.
Or that's the BS excuse they say to support their actions.
Not to mention, that's not an excuse in the first place. Only someone brainwashed by constant BS spin would accept that.
If those "suspected targets" (hit in a sovereign country which is not at war with anyone, without due process and UN approval, not given a chance to surrender, and not doing anything at that specific time) gathered at kindergardens would it be OK to hit there? How are weddings any different?
Have you forgotten that we are supposed to be the good guys?
The morals of bombings and war didn't change. Their behavior changed. So yes, we could be the "good guys" if we stopped spying and shooting at every foreign nation. We could be the "good guys" if we stopped spying on every citizen, and stopped creating a domestic military force out of municipal police.
How well did that approach work in Vietnam?
For some this would make the actions worse, however I appreciate the debate as it's worth having. Should we care about our enemies traditions and cultural beliefs when waging war?
This is a ASB (alien space bat) type of argument as used in many a sea-lion argument "obviously Hitler could have invaded the UK" (only if the ASB's destroyed the royal navy from orbit)