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...
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?
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.
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".
Killing people is already really cheap. What's not cheap is deciding _not_ to kill them on the battlefield, given incomplete information. Drones are helping with information and making _not_ killing people cheaper.
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.
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.
See? I'm not saying that argument is right. It is only just as neat, simple and (probably) wrong as the 'killing through a joystick causes more casualties because it dehumanzes the process' argument.
> 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...
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.
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.
"Should" used to mean "probability or expectation", then yes, it "should" continue to to get "worse" (read: change).
War is a horrible endeavor at its very core. It will always be, we try to "civilize" it via rules that are always broken as soon as things become dire. It isn't the implements or efficiency that are the problem, but the waging of combat itself.
> 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.
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.
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.
Words are important, and language frames every issue. "Drones" as opposed to "unmanned aircraft" or "unmanned assault aircraft" is a huge difference in perception.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The United States is not a party to either treaty.
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.
Unmanned:
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.
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.
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.