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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

> you've got a much itchier trigger finger now

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.

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Clarification: I don't mean that the pilot has an itchy trigger finger, I mean the system or decision maker. I see how the two might be confused based on my original comment.

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.

The reaper/predator and other drones cannot survive in contested airspace; any pilot(s) in modern combat aircraft would be at almost no risk of being shot down.

This isn't about the pilot, it's about the decision making process within the higher command structure.

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.

Look at it this way: it makes killing people with targeted missiles that much cheaper, which means they will want to do more of it, not just to "important targets", but to "associated targets", too.

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".

> it makes killing people with targeted missiles that much cheaper

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.

I highly doubt deploying soldiers on the battlefield is by any means cheap.

Neither the pilot of a fighter/bomber or a drone gets to decide on the targets. They're given orders from above based on the intel provided to the commanders. So the issue isn't itchy trigger finger of the pilot, but itchy trigger finger of the commanders. The commanders have demonstrated over the last decade a willingness to send drones into situations they would not send fighters/bombers. There are few instances of US incursions with fighter aircraft over the last few years compared to the number of incursions with drones.

The US used to send aircraft straight over the USSR!

Much of that spy aircraft predating the widespread use of satellites, and certainly predating modern drone-style aircraft. The options available were different, so of course the option selected was different.

Yes, and there was a big stink on this side of the Atlantic when one was shot down.

The thinking is it is easier to dissociate consequences when they are nothing but pixels. It become more of a video game than a reality when sitting in a safe gaming pod flying the drone. It isn't fully transformed to a game, but it is to an extent.

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.

Look, I don't have a position in this discussion, but your argument is prototypical for much of the others in this thread and it just seems so flimsy. Here is another totally made up argument just the other way around: for a UAV pilot, and their commanders, the 'kill order' is much more rational. Soldiers get to make decisions that are not influenced by the hate against the person who 2 minutes ago shot their buddy next to them in the head. Nanking massacre? Would never happen with drone pilots.

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.

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