I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
We all know war is hell. We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm. So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific. Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war? I suspect they decrease it with smaller more targeted bombs vs prior more traditional larger bombs. Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village. Maybe they increase it because we're carrying out a lot more sorties than we did prior when a jet and a pilot were needed/at risk. However, I'm not sure and this article goes nowhere close to helping with the discussion.
"The view is so pixelated it makes decisions tough" Can you imagine military people who fight/fought on the ground in real combat and order in strikes reading that? Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?
The military is aware of the impact on these operators. From a February 20013 article sighting a Defense Department study: “Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”
Lastly, imagine how you'd feel reading a similar opinion piece on Fox News from a gun ho former operator talking about all the American lives he saved by observing and taking out "the bad guys". What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives and dramatically reducing the number of innocent civilians killed vs how we would have approached the same problem just 25 years ago.
War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate. Biased ones feed their viewership what they know they'll eat up and do little, maybe even damage, the search for truth.
Your comment is so full of really good unbiased views that I just wanted to tell you how much non-manipulated I felt by your comment.
I especially enjoyed your notion that the Guardian is "serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion." You are so right. I always fell that the White House and the American military are always providing really insightful information that is really backed up substantiated by information.
I really felt the links in the article regarding the reporting of drone casualties were just pure manipulation. The manipulation was very strong as I read how credible people were debating the lack of information that was being provided:
http://www.voanews.com/content/resaercher-most-civilian-dron...
http://web.law.columbia.edu/human-rights-institute/counterte...
Please take some time and provide us some real links regarding what you consider "the search for truth".
So, personally: please don't do that.
I believe I replied pretty much in the same manner as jusbin1369.
My hope is that for people that look at comments only they will actually read the article instead of reading jusbin1369's comment and skipping it because they wouldn't want to be "manipulated" or consider the article another "propaganda" piece.
I also get very wary of questioning the intelligence of HN's crowd. I would gather readers are smart enough to know when they are being manipulated or not. I don't feel I need to be told or tell anyone how to be careful.
This issue is complex. I for one am grateful that we have newspapers outside the US that are willing to do this type of reporting. We all love technology on HN and I am sure we all love drone technology (I certainly do) but personally I feel the use of technology is more important than the technology itself. I definitely think in this debate, there does seem to be room for much much more information that needs to be put out there.
Why don't you do the same rather than conflating "things I don't agree with" and "not really constructive discussion"?
It also tries to equate drones use against individual targets (a couple individuals generally) with large scale bombing, which is highly disputable, given that it is used more in an assassination sense. The "manipulation" in the comment is pretty blatant.
Viewed from another lens the comment can be considered guilty of the the same charge that the article is being accused of doing.
To use a loaded example, would you say that someone railing against Stalin was a supporter of Hitler? Probably not.
The article in the Guardian is not done by a fly by night newspaper without any credibility. The newspaper was started in 1821 and is considered a leading newspaper. It does identify itself as a liberal voice but so what. When did reading about the life experience of a UAV analyst who actually provides some real context to her discussion by providing external links become a source of manipulation and a "biased" view. Frankly, I learned more about UAW operations from her article than any release done by the "official" sources. There is no reason for me to believe that Heather is not who she says she is or that she was influenced into saying what she says.
It's not about taking sides on the drone issue. It's about an article being attacked that was written as commentary by someone who is a thousand times closer to the situation than most of us ever will be. I will gladly read more of these. If Heather stated how great drone attacks were, my thoughts would still stand. Let's have all the information out there without attaching the information as manipulation or biased. Personally, I would like to decide what's manipulative and biased without being told so.
By whom? The people telling us their experience with the program, or the people who tell us nothing about what they do for our own protection?
> The military is aware of the impact on these operators. From a February 20013 article sighting a Defense Department study: “Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study.
Can you give more context on the quote you cite? I'm not sure how staring at the ground addresses suicide risk, as I do not believe anyone is dying of boredom here.
> War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate.
All the more reason to listen to those who present their own direct experience with it, no?
First i thought that was the idea, but I think "the ground" is "the aftermath" here, as in bodies and carnage on the ground.
The Guardian commentary appeals to emotion while making it clear where its sympathies lie. That is perfectly acceptable and proper for a commentary.
It's also quite relevant to the debate to bring emotion into it. You hinted at it when you asked whether "we're carrying out a lot more sorties than we did prior," but you only mentioned the military cost of it.
A key issue that the commentary highlights -- and perhaps the HN reactions to it as well -- is that we may be flying more drone sorties because the American populace is more comfortable with them.
It's a variant the old "smart bomb" argument from Desert Storm. If the U.S.'s only option was to carpet bomb Baghdad, then there probably would be more domestic opposition to the war and it may not even have happened. But the warmongers argued that we have smarter, more precise weaponry, which perhaps moderated opposition, leading to more horror and death.
Thus highlighting the actual horrors that drones inflict, and the widespread terror they instill in an entire population who live in constant fear they could be annihilated at any moment, is a very valid contribution to the debate.
Prior to today, I was on board with the "smart bomb" argument. I think people arguing against the use of drones really need to focus on how they're worse than traditional warfare, otherwise people who hold the views I held will just tune out.
How is that in any way a negative result?
In this case, the criticism was that the Guardian argues against drone strikes (and perhaps this particular war), by using some poor arguments e.g. that drone strikes are especially likely to kill civilians.
What is sad now in the USA is that there are very few politicians who speak the truth and very few news outlets that don't just cooperate in the propaganda.
There never were any. Name this mystical time when he U.S. government was some benevolent force for good and not constantly lying to the civilian population to push them to unwanted wars.
Let me tell you something: based on my experience it is far easier to believe the source for the linked article than to take anything you wrote seriously.
I'm not sure why anyone, like anyone at all, is getting worked up over what jusben1369 wrote, which wasn't even expressing an opinion on the matter so much as just advocating critical thinking. It's just as important to apply critical thinking to sources of information that provide conclusions that you agree with as it is to those you disagree with. The more significant and emotionally charged a topic is, the more important it becomes to not slip up and abandon basic reasoning.
Don't admonish people to not abandon basic reasoning when you yourself have done so. It's petty.
> We all know war is hell. We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm. So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific.
> Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war?
Agreed. Let's start with the basics: WTF is doing a UK/USA-driven drone in the middle east anyway?
And this "war is hell" stuff is just so tiring and intellectually barren. If someone told me "x is hell," and I know that x is entirely optional, I would say "okay then, don't do x." I will never understand how the mantra "war is hell" is used to justify or excuse war.
Right from the start the author veers of into things that have absolutely nothing to do with the viability of drone warfare.
Using the authors logic, every single piece of equipment we have that wasn't designed specifically to prevent death by IED should be abandoned. Guess we don't need guns, uniforms, canteens, body armor, etc.
The author does have some valid criticisms, but they are obscured by ridiculous tangents like this one.
As for my own thoughts, I think that drones are a valid tool, but I also think that our government needs to use them in a far more responsible manner.
The lies of omission by the US government in reporting any data on civilian casualties tells the real story, in my opinion. Drones are probably the sickest manifestation of the US Department of War. I used to be a defense contractor a few decades ago and was mostly proud of what I did, but what we are doing now it all seems so very wrong.
The idea that those police helicopters, which already make me feel like a mouse stuck in an open field surrounded by owls, could be replaced by unmanned drones armed with missiles fills me with abject terror. Not only would I have to worry about myself getting falsely targeted, I'd have to worry about the next door neighbor being falsely targeted.
Now, if the police helicopters were replaced by drones, that would be scary. Imagine if they were replaced by drones operated by another country. Scary times ten. Now it isn't a question of if I'm a criminal, or if I look like a criminal, it's a question of whether or not I'm near enough to someone acting against the national interests of that country.
The abject helplessness of being in the eye of an unmanned drone, the complete and utter impotence of being unable to strike back at it... that is a special kind of terror that the drones bring. We talk about 'terrorism' a lot. Obviously all warefare inspires terror--but what makes an attack a terrorist attack? From the American perspective, 9-11 was a terrorist attack and Pearl Harbor wasn't, even though they both inspired terror. 9-11 inspired terror because there was nothing to fight back against--it was people who were quite demonstrably willing to get killed in order to achieve their objective. In fact their objective was to be killed. Once they died, there was nothing tangible to fight back against. The inexorable nature of that kind of attack inspires a particular fear, and attacks specifically designed to inspire that fear are considered terrorist attacks. Drones are similar--there is literally nothing to fight back against, and their distant, silent nature means the possibility of death is ever-present.
That said, yes. If a platoon of Marines were to attack my house, my death would be as inevitable as my death would be if a drone strike hit my house. And as an American I do live with a particular type of fear, which is that of the DEA and SWAT team escalations. At any point, a no-knock warrant could be incorrectly issued for my house and I could have paramilitary troops attack. And I could get killed because the wrong SWAT officer got startled by the wrong thing (As a follower of statistics I fully understand I'm more likely to die of a heart attack, but we're talking about semi-rational fear--if everyone were a truly rational operator we wouldn't nearly the issues we have now). And that happens frequently in the US and is the sad product of an erosion of due process brought about by a mixture of racial fear and the Drug War (well, the two are often the same thing).
But there's two ways of interpreting the escalation of SWAT raids and the concurrent escalation of incorrect shootings. One is that it's a problem of due process, and needs to be rolled back in frequency. Two is that it's a problem of precision. The second argument is where people start talking about the supposed benefits drones, because they're in theory more precise. There are certainly people trying to argue to the public that a drone strike is highly precise, clinically correct, and technologically accurate. The article is arguing against that. And I would add to the article's argument that the amount of general fear (and therefore hatred of government, and therefore terrorism) inspired by escalation will be increased by drones.
To me, the relative precision of drones vs SWAT or ground troops is beside the point and obfuscates the real reason why populations get radicalized against US policy. Simply put, there is no precision until there has been a trial by jury. Even then precision is in question, which is why there's such an argument about the death penalty. When due process is undermined, the population becomes more alienated from the government, and more individuals become radicalized, and more terrorism happens.
How many lives of soldiers would be risked and how much money would be spent for operations to 'capture' the terrorists in foreign nations? And will nations like Pakistan allow military (or law enforcement) operations on their soil by foreign govts to capture the terrorists? No of course not. Drone operations take place in Pakistan/Yemen and other nations because of the inability of such nations to police their population adequately.
The real problem is NOT the drones but the failed (or almost failed) nations where groups of terrorists can operate in OPEN essentially, whose goal is to hurt/topple another nation.
If some Chinese or Russian 'freedom' fighters decide to train militarily in US with the goal of toppling current govt of China/Russia and did actually cause deaths/damage in China/Russia, would US govt sit back and let them train in US? Probably not.
All this 'omg, the drones are terrible' is useless. You don't want to see drones operating in foreign nations? Use your energy helping NGO and the local govt overcome corruption, ignorance, and backbone shattering poverty. Give no space for terrorists to operate in. Sure it's near impossible task. But that's the only real solution, and real solutions take real work.
The drones are a 'perfect' tool for rich nations for warfare whose population don't want to see their own getting hurt/killed. It's not going to go away.
The line of argument is so simplistic it boggles my mind. Lets get few facts straight:
a. Goal of terrorists is not to topple US government. You can't draw parallels between things without understanding their motive. Primary goal of a terrorist organisation operating out of Islamist state is to flex muscle and create terror. Often it is - revenge killings so as to deter state forces (of US, India, NATO). So far with each drone strike - make no mistake US is creating more terrorists. As a Indian, I detest each time our government kills/arrests a law abiding citizen of India - for just being a Muslim. Terrorists win each time. If you can accept those innocent people as collateral damage, you should be ready to accept 9/11 or Mumbai bomb blast victims as collateral too?
b. Deep down I believe some US citizens simply do not understand how terrorists work. They think, if you drone strike a bunker with important terrorist leader - problem will simply go away.
c. Look up Operation Cyclone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone). CIA trained and financed Taliban when it suited them. Did Russia drone strike key CIA administrators? India is similarly accused of training LTTE (http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2013/07/28/india-armed-tr...). A terrorist Organization which oddly enough killed our prime minister. Did Srilanka drone stike India?
The truth is - there is power and power allows powerful countries to make rules and let them get away with it. US uses drones strikes against Pakistan because they know they will get away with it. They dare not do the same against, Russia, China or even India. Assuming that drone strikes help reduce terrorism is just too naive.
In my opinion the real issue here is that innocent civilians are getting killed in a nation America have no official presence in, and certainly no state of war with and where there is no chance of recourse. Are civilians in failed or almost failed (whatever that really means) nations fair game? Is there any precedent for killing civilians without either declaring war or at least putting a presence on the ground?
Actually, there probably is - and it's probably best referred to as terrorism.
Anyway, I agree that arguing here isn't going to change anything - but I disagree that these people are fair game just because of where they are and what goes on there. I don't think it's venturing far to say some are justified in hating America, that doesn't justify terrorism.
Ah yes, this is the shit I just love about these arguments. Stop complaining about these things that kill thousands of innocent people. Your only appropriate action, according to some guy on the internet, is this utterly insane task he has made up. You are allowed to do that, but you're not allowed to object to drones killing people...
How? How does your brain get to this point? I'm just sitting here floored that I live in a country where a non-zero amount of people feel the way you do.
As long as you keep murdering just goatherders, you may indeed still get away with this kind of impunity. You fail to understand, however, how vulnerable the ones doing the killing are, to reprisals and retaliations.
It only takes a small bit of serious hacking and/or data mining to figure out the home addresses of everyone involved in these massacres, and from there to schedule them one by one for termination. The 40 million Target credit cards were much more difficult to obtain than that.
There is a tremendous asymmetry of information between your centralized murder engine and your decentralized enemies. The database of everyone involved on your side exists and can be stolen. The other way around is not true, regardless of all the surveillance that the NSA does. Therefore, the murderers are guaranteed to lose this conflict.
You do understand that many people in here argue that drones are a pretty good instrument to create terrorist..?
A terrorist part of the 26/11 attacks on Bombay who was an informant for US DEA.
Which NGO should I contribute to for the DEA to realise that human life has value beyond the territorial borders of United States? White Men's burden is back.
I disagree that this is something to be all that worried about. It detracts from the rest of your argument.
"Perhaps no one was more victimized by the battlefield mentality that had set in at the NYPD than Walter and Rose Martin. The Brooklyn couple, both in their eighties, were wrongly raided more than fifty times between 2002 and 2010. The couple filed numerous complaints with the police department. They wrote letters to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. They were ignored. In 2007 they at least got someone at the NYPD to try to wipe their address out of the department’s computer system. But the raids continued. It wasn’t until the couple went to the media in 2010 that the city finally looked into the problem. Back in 2002, someone had used the Martins’ address as a dummy address to test the department’s new computer system. When the new system was implemented, no one removed their address. So anytime NYPD cops in certain precincts used the system for a warrant and forgot to remove the dummy address to put in the correct one, the police would end up at the Martins’ door."[1]
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americ...
It's not just a question about remote vehicles - it's about the moral issues of blowing things up that are not physically proximate (and thus not a direct threat) to yourself.
Why is your post not an attempt at manipulation? Reads like it to me. "Hell" and "horrific" require value judgements, manipulations.
Oh, and even if you are being told the 100% truth, what ever that is, you are still being manipulated.
That's the whole point, and drones make this divide even larger.
"We all know war is hell"--No, we don't. Because we're not actually there.
Just because they're not in the US, or US citizens, doesn't mean they're not human beings, with families and a desire to be free from danger, happy, healthy and comfortable.
How can you even begin to make such arguments from the comfort of your desk chair, about people on the other side of the world being attacked by your flying robots? Oh, how aware you must be of the shitty situation they're in!
You can tell me that I'm wrong, or believe that this is mad, but please have a look at these few resources first. Let's make our decisions objectively and with critical thought as the parent thread's op said.
[1] http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/peace/conflictmap/
[2] http://gizmodo.com/5875194/all-the-worlds-wars-and-conflicts...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts
[4] http://www.warsintheworld.com/?page=static1329446051
Interesting recap of the last 23 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_(1...
But is this really a good thing? it seems to me the only thing that the american public really cares about is the number of US casualties. Without any, the US will have even less restriction to pursue their wars.
Fwiw they also published an op ed by a defence minister and linked to it twice in this article so I don't see the manipulation angle on a newspaper wide scale, although obviously the guardian editorial board has some strong opinions. Stronger than other newspapers? You'd have to make that case.
Incidentally, while I appreciate your attempt to keep a clear head, your comment that things are complex applies to almost any situation worth discussing.
Yes, but the drone attacks are unlawful systematic assasinations that are turning peace time living into hell. As there are no declared war zones (afaik, as I understand it the situation in Iraq is in a peculiar state of limbo, and there are presumably interventions in some of the civil wars that could be accepted as "wars", even if not decleared as such) were the US (or NATO) is involved.
So your comment is doing quite a bit of manipulation, itself -- accepting the use of leathal force against foreign civilian and paramilitary targets as equivalent with waging regular war.
I think history will show the push by the US in normalizing this type of terror to be a significant blow against the geneva conventions and agreement on the "rules of war" (which have never been followed to the letter, but have at least held the hope of bringing war criminals to justice and be used as a sound basis for refusing illegal orders).
I can't see how this stance by the US can't be used for justifying attacks on senators and lobbyists on US soil (for "their role in funding and facilitating illegal terrorist attacks against civilian targets").
Its not peace time living. Its a war -- on which seems to be permanent and global, which is a problem, but a different one than you describe.
> As there are no declared war zones
Wars -- even the most formally declared ones -- rarely have declared zones. They have declared belligerents.
As for declared war zones (vs declared wars), that was an unfortunate slip in editing on my part (text fields and smart phones don't mix well imo).
The (supposed) ability to make surgical strikes leads to different decision-making than when dropping bombs meant wiping a while village off the map. It makes it easier to call for more bombings increasing the likelihood of more false-positives (i.e. bombing the wrong house). Hell, SWAT teams have a horrific record of storming into the wrong house guns-blazing, and they are not in life or death situations (i.e. they have enough time to plan / make sure that the address is correct).
I would be interested in the statistics you base this on. How many strikes are fire support strikes vs. "lone" drone strikes? My impression up to your comment was that most drone strikes are not fire support strikes.
That's a strange takeaway. Manipulated into what? Not liking drones? Not liking war? Being skeptical about drones? Opening to other points of view beyond the official narrative (or non-narrative)?
And, "manipulation" would imply that there is something untrue in the article. It's irresponsible to assert as much without any substantiation on your part.
The article is out now. If there is something to refute, then the powers-that-be can do so.
>We all know war is hell.
War is hell, but the distinction here is that drone activity is not "sold" as such.
>Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific.
If it was offered in a vacuum, then yes. But, it is being offered as a counter-argument to the current drone-narrative. Or, perhaps more accurately, a counter to the lack of information being made public.
>The military is aware of the impact on these operators.
The military may be aware, but this article is specifically addressing public awareness. Part of the title reads "The public should know what really goes on".
Currently the public don't seem to consider drone strikes as being like other military attacks. Drone strikes aren't replacing traditional bombing campaigns. If there was a public outcry and drone strikes were stopped, the US wouldn't start dropping conventional bombs on houses in Pakistan.
This article should be more even handed, but it is important that the public understand that these new weapons are not completely clean and consequence free.
I had some of the same reactions that it seemed like some of it was hijacking anti-war for anti-drone. I would be upset with the guardian if they received this and did not run it. I don't know what their back-and-forth process would be in editing this.
> We all know war is hell. We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm. So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific.
Right, so let's not be too quick to accept that drone warfare and traditional warfare are the same thing. It's very important to distinguish and consider what is new. You can read into a bit and see she's not just listing the effects of weaponry on humans. Considering her vantage point through a screen, and mental state during and after the attacks, her "how many X have you seen" questions are very drone specific. For one thing, she probably has orders more Xs than anyone in a traditional combat position. For another, the non-threatened state in which she killed another is important. I think her questions help me see her witnessing the carnage.
> Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war? I suspect they decrease it with smaller more targeted bombs vs prior more traditional larger bombs. Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village. Maybe they increase it because we're carrying out a lot more sorties than we did prior when a jet and a pilot were needed/at risk. However, I'm not sure and this article goes nowhere close to helping with the discussion.
I would say they increase human suffering and hide horror. I think that your suspicion that it decreases horror goes along with horror being hidden. "A lot more sorties" needs to be discussed before dismissing this as not helping. When you bomb an entire village, it's in a war zone and everyone on both sides is damned certain of what happened and the outcome. Here we bomb several more houses, in areas that aren't even war zones, because our intel is "better" and our strikes are more "precise". The enemies, locations, and outcomes are undefined and unchecked, hard to see. And since the attacks are smaller and more secretive, visibility is reduced. There is little public visibility or scrutiny on our side. It's not war as usual. It starts to tend toward the whole planet being a theater of war rather than any one specific place. It's horrifying.
So drones are used outside of designated war zones and in non-traditional combat. Then i'm not convinced that "Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war" is the right question. But the article adds firsthand account that the feedback systems are very low bandwidth and easily make mistakes. It adds firsthand experience of psychological damage that operators suffer. These both help with discussion around that question.
> "The view is so pixelated it makes decisions tough" Can you imagine military people who fight/fought on the ground in real combat and order in strikes reading that? Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?
Exactly, "maybe not caring". I think justification would be easier in a situation like that: in battle, with smoke around, on something resembling a battlefield, a well-defined enemy. I think i that the less i was threatened, the more guilt and psychological damage i would suffer later for an incorrect kill.
Add in to the mix the fact that we are serving hellfires to peoples faces using the same low-bandwidth, inhuman triggers we might use to serve ads to their faces (signature strikes), it's really a new problem. Precision in space and time doesn't matter much without precision in intelligence. The bandwidth, confidence, and human involvement must be very high on killing system like this, as they're used in scenarios that have little to do with traditional battlefields. The "so pixelated" argument helps us see this and should not be dismissed in the way that you are dismissing it, by saying it's harder for boots in combat to make decisions in limited visibility.
> Lastly, imagine how you'd feel reading a similar opinion piece on Fox News from a gun ho former operator talking about all the American lives he saved by observing and taking out "the bad guys". What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives and dramatically reducing the number of innocent civilians killed vs how we would have approached the same problem just 25 years ago.
> War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate. Biased ones feed their viewership what they know they'll eat up and do little, maybe even damage, the search for truth.
Firsthand experience of the suffering caused is good to hear about. Repeatedly stating "War is hell" seems to accept that we are only discussing legitimate war situations. It's not so easy to skip to "War is hell" in the war on terror. Without visibility or even statistics about what's going on, i'm ok with seeing anything that raises awareness. I'd like to see the pot stirred a bit on this one. With human beings, i'd like to err on the side of caution. Worst case is it's biased as heck and it causes discussion and justification. I wish one of my concerns was that We the People could accidentally dismantle or harm a highly effective and necessary drone program.
Edited to fix an assumption about author.
"Heather Linebaugh served in the United Stated Air Force from 2009 until March 2012. She worked in intelligence as an imagery analyst and geo-spatial analyst for the drone program during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan."
(Not supporting drone strikes, but just making a general statement)
Your argument comes down to this: people should not be reminded that war is hell. That's it. That's the entire crux if your poorly considered post.
If you're a pro-war sociopath, then you have a point. If you prefer a well-informed populace, then you have no point at all.
Worse than that, you're attacking people who can add additional perspective solely because they're not providing every perspective simultaneously. It is morally disgusting that you claim The Guardian damaged the search for truth by adding counterpoint to existing propaganda efforts.
It is truly sad that you felt the need to attack The Guardian for writing this. You are eloquent, but deeply misguided.
Right now we have one major source of news about drone programs: government PR. It is biased and one-sided.
The Guardian has found a legitimate source of an additional perspective and they are adding it to the public's understanding. And you are somehow claiming that this makes things worse. That is bullshit.
The only people hurt by this are pro-war assholes who view reminders that war sucks as being problematic to your twisted causes.
>I'm not here to argue for or against the drones.
Congrats on being a mediocre person who doesn't believe in anything or have any opinions. This is the most offensive thing I think, even more than me disagreeing with you. Just picking middle of the road bland boring contrariness.
>We all know war is hell.
Apparently "we" don't because people continue to wage war.
>We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm.
No, making it into a game complete with an Xbox controller abstracts the realness from it.
> So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific.
It isn't about drones, its about killing people. Who gives a fuck if it is a drone or a spoon. It is clearly an article about shitty wars being pursued by shitty people, not about how technologically advanced drones are.
>Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village.
What a false fucking dichotomy. How about not bombing fucking anyone? And who the fuck is "we"? I didn't bomb anyone and will continue to not bomb anyone.
>"The view is so pixelated it makes decisions tough" Can you imagine military people who fight/fought on the ground in real combat and order in strikes reading that? Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?
Again, false dichotomy. It does not have to be grainy drone feeds or confused soldiers on the ground. There are more options than A or B.
>The military is aware of the impact on these operators.
That doesn't mean they give a shit. I am aware of the drug addict a few houses down. I don't care.
>Lastly, imagine how you'd feel reading a similar opinion piece on Fox News from a gun ho former operator talking about all the American lives he saved by observing and taking out "the bad guys".
I wouldn't care. I don't care about "American lives" and I don't care about insurgency lives. I care about people regardless of nationality. I feel bad for the jack asses on both sides that eat up the lies of their leaders and kill each other in the name of nothing.
>What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives and dramatically reducing the number of innocent civilians killed vs how we would have approached the same problem just 25 years ago.
Its amazing how redefining anyone that is an adult male who dies as an enemy combatant reduces civilian deaths as well.
>War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate. Biased ones feed their viewership what they know they'll eat up and do little, maybe even damage, the search for truth.
Being a boring middle of the road stick in the mud does more damage than anything.
War will be around until humans work harder to understand each others perspectives and evolve socially as quickly as we have with technology. You can help us all to that end by not being name calling anonymously on the internet.
It's phenomenally rude, emotionally charged, wildly unfocused, and somehow actively advocating being loud and uninformed. It's hard to engage with a post like this in any sort of rational way.
Posts like this crowd out people like me from participating at all on HN by creating an unhealthy environment for discourse.
False. This is exactly what the article was addressing: unreported suicides and clinically depressed drone pilots. It definitely doesn't feel like a video game to those people.
Perhaps this person felt they didn't want to pick a side because they wanted to avoid the flame war.
It's just a stupid online forum, where the arguments are meaningless and the points don't matter; have little affect or influence in the real-world can have little to no value, other than the smug satisfaction one obtains from patronizing another person into the fetal position with their oh-so-superior logic an rational skills.
Congratulations, you now have 1000 internet points. Spend them wisely, son; don't let people see your real power levels.
I agree with the other poster, political posts bring out the partisans and assholes.
If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed.
Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA?
We need an international ban on armed drones before it is too late.
We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible.
The real solution, of course, is to avoid wars, and violence, in general. Supposedly, the world is more peaceful now than ever, even with Syria, the train station suicide bomber is Russia today, etc.
Personally, I don't want to see the US be the world police. There's a high cost in both money and American lives. Still, for the foreseeable future, the world needs to address the problems and try to solve the remaining problems. Otherwise, decades from now, people on HN will be complaining about how future weapon systems are killing innocent people.
There's a high cost in both money and human lives - nationality should not be a consideration.
I know it's not the same issue, but throughout the whole NSA snooping revelations, Americans have only been concerned by the legality of spying on their own citizens. All of us foreigners are fair game.
This is similar. The value of an American life is much more than that of a foreigner's life.
When the US government decides a US citizen's communication patterns makes him a terrorist, the US government is free to knock down their door in the middle of the night and whisk them off to Guantanamo, and NO ONE except the US government can do anything to stop them.
When the US government decides a foreigner is a terrorist, they have to ASK your government to cooperate, and if they don't, the US has to be ready to go to war to kill/capture him.
The difference between the NSA spying on an American and a foreigner is that only the foreigner has a government that can protect them from the US government.
Americans feel this way, sure. But Americans are only 4% of humans, and soon 100% of humans will be on the Internet.
This worldview is not an economic survival trait.
I suggest relaxing, brewing some tea, and waiting for this to play out in the global market. Either they'll change, or they'll go out of business.
Here's a sobering thought: The way super-villains are portrayed in movies is basically how leaders were expected to act up through the 1600's. Screw over and kill your neighbors to benefit your side? Just business as usual. Torture and gruesome and spectacular executions? Just business as usual. Kill prisoners and animals in large part because of the entertainment value? Just expected behavior.
I wonder if the way leaders and the national security apparatus behaves now will be viewed as super-villainy in the future? Probably.
BTW, when was the last time B52s were used to bomb weddings to kill one suspected, not convicted, terrorist? Drones are used for that, in place of human assassins, or, heaven forbid, a judicial process. Remember that? The law?
This is the difference. With drones, governments think they can get away with it. They claim it clean and use the same false equivalents you use.
Tell me, if you are to be stopped in the streets, do you want that to be by a person, or robot? In the end, that is where these cowards will end up.
So, I'm going to say "2010", but it might actually have been 2011 or 2012 or even 2013 (I haven't kept up).
All weapons are the weapons of cowards. It isn't fair that almost all the weapons we use in Afghanistan are superior to our enemies, and it isn't fair that they resort with IEDs and suicide bombs.
If you have equal weapons then you look for superiority in numbers or tactics. Long gone are the days when "honourable" war meant agreeing to fight pitched battles on terrain that suited neither side and both sides knew was coming. Those "honourable" wars were also the most brutal to both prisoners and civilians.
I'm not particularly sure about the concept of "cowardice" here, I just had to point out this logical flaw.
Oversimplification. Domestically, the US is still paying the cost of using, eg, Agent Orange in Asia, today (children of service members born deformed).
"The number of conflicts (both international and civil) fell from over 50 at the start of the 1990s to just over 30 in 2005 (definitions are obviously fluid; these are the ones used by scholars at the universities of Uppsala and British Columbia for a project called the “Human Security Report”). On their definitions, the number of international wars peaked during the 1970s and has been falling slowly since. The number of civil wars continued to rise until about 1990 and then fell precipitately. In total, the death toll in battle fell from over 200,000 a year in the mid-1980s to below 20,000 in the mid-2000s."
The Economist, 28 June 2008: http://www.economist.com/node/10564141
What war are we in currently?!
Anyway, let's try not to run into the weeds playing games. It adds no value to the conversation.
Maybe. The 'declared war game' has several nice properties:
1) It provides a definite start and end to hostilities. 2) Clearly identifies a target. 3) Has relatively clear rules of war, especially with regards to treatment of POWs and civilians.
You don't want to play that game. Ok. So what are we left with?! We have not-really-POWs at Guantanamo. We drone-strike targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and apparently Yemen. There is no clarity around who the targets are, why they are targeted, who sentences them to death and what the procedure is, how long this will last, and any other information that would introduce some sort of accountability. Just a few weeks ago, a wedding convoy was mistakenly targeted and 17 innocent people died. Clearly there was some MASSIVE lapse in intelligence. Worse, why is a convoy EVER targeted given that more than likely most convoy-travelers are either innocent or not-deserving of a death sentence even if a known terrorist is among them. So...why did this happen? who was responsible for the 'mishap'? what was done to make sure this doesn't happen again? Who was fired/disciplined/court-marshaled?
I have no power to change any aspect of the US military, but that doesn't mean I can't decry it as evil.
The one initiated by the 9/11 attacks and declared by Congress via Pub.L. 107-40 (September 14, 2011)
Using this Act almost 15 years later to justify drone attacks against targets that had nothing to do with 9/11 stretches the interpretation a little. No? I mean, surely, you're not suggesting that this act means the office of the president has perpetual authorization and apparently such a huge leeway in its interpretation.
Dirty Wars [1] is a fine piece of investigative journalism by Jeremy Schaill about exactly this.
Except there's not really a war. There's just poorly-targeted killing, or let's just call it what it is, murder.
Weddings, funerals and restaurants are not war zones.
If you know are in a war zone, you can at least do your best to avoid it or flee as a war refugee. Should all citizens start fleeing all countries being targeted by drones?
Drones are used outside of declared war zones in "targeted killings". This is an important distinction.
> There's a high cost in both money and American lives.
Likewise, there's huge financial opportunities in a war for the military-industrial complex which just so happens to have strong ties with our political leadership.
I don't war a war at all. I want sovereign countries to be left to their own.
If there is a cross-country attack, then it can be handled either by the country's police (if it was by individuals acting on their own) or by a proper war operation.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/02/us-syria-crisis-to...
By some accounts, 1 in 10 killed was a child. Why don't we ever discuss this on HN?
Until after the WWII, the US really didn't involve itself in much of the world's conflicts. Our tradition is to pretty much leave the world to fix its own problems. We joined WWI during the last year of the war and WW2 was already 3 years in before we officially joined.
Yes.
How many have died in the US Civil war? I read ~215K combat deaths and ~500K civillian deaths.
Should someone had intervene, e.g Britain or France, aiding one side over the other (and pushing their own agenda)?
>Until after the WWII, the US really didn't involve itself in much of the world's conflicts. Our tradition is to pretty much leave the world to fix its own problems. We joined WWI during the last year of the war and WW2 was already 3 years in before we officially joined.
Actually, in historical terms, joining WWII was an already made decision, not something the US was "dragged on". The Pearl Harbor was just a pretext, and they worked quite hard on provoking that kind of aggression from the Japanese. They US (not the people, the policy makers and large interests) saw the decline of the old colonial powers, and reached for the opportunity to get a large slice of the post-colonial pie.
Plus, it had a long colonial/invasion history of its own, from Philipines to Mexico and beyond by that time.
This is war against terrorism. We are not in war with Pakistan. In fact we send them billion of dollars as aides. Then as reasonable Citizen it is my duty to ask - hundreds of billions of dollars we are spending in war against terrorism, are we anywhere close to winning it? Are we even using a winning strategy? If not, why spend american lives and money pretending world police where we should leave it to the UN?
Aha, your theory of history is of a teleological bent. Not really my cup of tea, as it requires ignoring nearly the entirety of human history...
The US has been repeatedly killing the wrong people in another country since before the age of robotics. The issue we need to focus on (after the issue of whether we should be fighting the war in the first place), is the rules of engagement.
For example: "Positive identification (PID) is required prior to engagement. PID is a reasonable certainty that the proposed target is a legitimate military target."
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/11.htm
How are operators trained to interpret "reasonable certainty"? How do we balance protection of local civilians with protection of US troops and the aims of the war? These issues are old, outside of the context of drones or even aircraft.
Yvain's essay asking "what if drones came first" is highly relevant here.
Drones have the advantage of loiter time, they can spend ages in situ gathering intelligence and analysing whether to shoot or not. This does generate the mental health problems for the analysts the articles describes - the same as for snipers, they watch the person they are going to kill.
Aircraft and the infantry that call in air strikes and artillery do not have loiter time, usually the enemy know they're out and about (certainly in Afghanistan) and thus they are "reactive".
This is just another example of how the convenience of drone strikes has led to the belittling of war.
Mostly because the people in charge of approving that in the Yemeni government have approved it [1]
[1] http://www.presstv.com/detail/2012/09/30/264233/yemens-hadi-...
The soldiers we're sending over there aren't trained professionals, they're glorified mall-cops with sub-machine guns. The ones with special training are involved in special operations and they're few and far in-between, and personally I'd prefer we maintain a group of highly specialized individuals rather than an army of meat shields.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/army-to-cut-its-forces-...
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/15/news/economy/military-recrui...
This drone project could go one of two ways (ending the project is highly unlikely). The first way is upgrading the video quality, but this brings a number of issues with it such as latency (quite important in combat as any on-line gamer will tell you). The second is to provide AI to the drones... which frightens me when we can't get a voice recognition phone system to work. Google cars are just driving now after years of research (not flying, evading, identifying IEDs, identifying shovels, and engaging targets strategically on any given battle zone)... I don't expect the drones to fair better at this task because they're funded by the gov.
The only way the drone program would be pulled for a while is if the back doored encryption protocols were routinely exploited. We won't see an end to drones, or any end to proliferation at home or at war, and I'm skeptical we'll see drones get "better" any time soon.
I think we should look at this in terms of whether or not we should even be operating with outright force in the hinterlands of Yemen or AfPak, where there are very high concentrations of civilians. "Kinetic operations" with high explosives are, in my opinion, highly inappropriate for dealing with insurgents hidden among the population. Our intelligence isn't good enough, and is often gleaned from huge leaps of SIGINT logic, leading to entire families being killed over nameless metadata correlations to suspected terrorist nodes.
Drones already have long latency times, their "flight" which is the bit that requires potentially quick response times is already "AI" controlled.
People don't move so quickly you can't handle latency in terms of targeting. Vehicles can be identified and the weapon system can handle tracking them - latency doesn't come into it.
A little perspective could prevent such knee-jerk reactions. The ambiguity of drone targets is still miles ahead from basically blind carpet bombing a whole area that was (and still often is) the rule for the last century or so of modern warfare.
In the past, the possibility of your soldiers dying on the ground was a huge deterrent to frivolous strikes. Today, drones conduct major strikes without paying any heed to international borders. Drones conduct missions nobody would have imagined possible a few years back. While there is a huge benefit to the invading army in terms of reduction of fatalities, there is also a cheapening of war that lets commanders order strikes at their whim. I'm sure nobody in the US or NATO armies in Afghanistan admits this, but this happens in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
You seem to argue that the expense of a war can act as a deterrent. And yet, history is filled with bloodbaths that have failed to bring an end to war as we know it. Vietnam was horrific but it didn't keep us out of Iraq. I don't think getting rid of drones and forcing people to fight mano-a-mano will help prevent war. Deterrence only seems to work when the costs are astronomically high (e.g. nuclear weapons).
And seriously, if cell phones are going to 39 megapixels, why can't a drone send back a good photo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_criterion#Explanation
In case of multiple drones taking pictures, these can be synchronized using GPS time, down to a microsecond. And knowing the GPS coordinates of each drone you can recover the image. Pretty much with arbitrary quality. (& If you are really good at it and the object is stationary, you can do it even through heavy fog. I'm not kidding, you really can - I can point you to some fancy research in computer vision, that allows you to do just that.).
Please do
It is also somewhere along the line of why police feel it is okay to try to shoot suspects on a busy street and often shoot the wrong innocent person and mess up their lives.
http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American-eboo...
That entire article could have easily been replaced with a marines perspective, a bombers perspective, or a sailors perspective.
Public health researchers face the same issue every day when they decide whether or not to deploy a new treatment with unwanted side effects. If the false positive rate of your diagnostic heuristics is too high, then the overall damage to society can easily outweigh the effectiveness of the treatment, no matter how technologically advanced or curative it is.
Third world lives are cheaper. They are dark skinned and have different customs. They also dont value democracy. It serves them right.
/s
Given that, do drones make more mistakes than armed soldiers or bomb drops or cruise missiles? That's the relevant question. And there is good reason to believe they do. The drone operator may not have as good a view as a soldier, but also doesn't risk his own life on a false negative.
I read that but farther down I read "but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end." seems to contradict. I understand what's meant, pixels and detail are different, but it's a poor choice of phrasing.
Mistakes are going to happen whatever you use. It's not clear that sticking better cameras on the things wouldn't give you enough information to make it comparable with other attack vectors.
So the whole things couches it wrong. You could have just as easily have written this:
Despite the feed often being highly pixelated, the video feeds offer far better resolution on suspected enemies than any other method, day or night, often including close quarters combat
I imagine a perfect drone without any human controller, doing it's business by AI, actually making the world a better place.
[edit] lots of hate and naive comments. Fact remains that human progress has always come through sacrificing some of us for the greater good. Innocent people have always died and will keep dying until we get to a point where robots take over for us.
I am not being sarcastic. I stand by my opinion.
For the cost of a single Hellfire, many Afghanistan villages could've been given power, for the first time, to charge their phones, making it possible for them to communicate, to educate themselves. But instead: BOOM! There goes some kids leg.
What a pity that the desire to create such technology is not, instead, being directed by the government towards truly peaceful technologies..
And what happens when people who accept those plants, schools and education are killed by people who don't want them to accept those gifts from us? Back in the Vietnam era I made the same argument you do (for awhile). But the VC learned to kill villagers who accepted aid. The same thing goes on today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc.
In a better world, one without war, I would agree with you. But that is not the world we live in. Sometimes you have to think things through to second-order and higher effects.
Drop books not bombs!
As alwasy, the military leads the way in science with their limitless budget, funded by fear.
Peaceful spinoff project is where the benefits for everybody will come from.
A nice thought, but anyone who has spent time in rural AFG/PAK or Yemen/Somalia (where most of this is happening) will tell you that that is not what would happen. More typical, the power would be diverted to or ripped out by the local warlords to maintain their own power over the population - and most of the "regular" citizens go along with it because it meets cultural demands of the religiosity and tribalism that has been baked in for.
Liberalism (classic) can't be forced on a region or a group of people.
If you are like me, you are easily able to divorce the appalling human costs to obtain the raw data of cause and effect. I have had to force myself to temper my observation, given that most people do not want you pointing out unique anatomical facets whilst a person lays bifurcated. Pay them no mind, fellow freak. It was our lot that were the first barber-surgeons and grave robbers, and it is through our collective twisted perspective that we will continue to stick our little babby fingers in the wall socket of the unknown.
There's a whole world of applications for AI and machinery that we could be pooling our resources into, but instead we're funding a continuing war on "terror" abroad. There's no reason why the war is necessary, no reason why technological progress would be made faster in the art of killing vs anything else.
Perhaps you believe that perpetual war is unavoidable and necessary. We could argue that.
But the way I see it, war isn't necessary, and the technological progress we make by funding war is a slim silver lining at best on a double edged sword with no handle. So you see, I find this thread ridiculous. I think you guys are psychopaths. And you're outnumbered by the rest of us.
War may not be necessary from an emotional standpoint, but from a technological standpoint it is the only game in town. The recent developments in peaceful IT are unique in human history, and they themselves are predicated on war technology and research. In fact, i challenge you to name one area of technology that is not based on war research and military development. I don't think you can name a single device that is not built off of something war related. I have a special place in my heart for the myth of pure science and research. I also believe it could become a reality. I posted ITT about how it might be possible to counter the militarization of our air. I think a few successive generations of scientists who are not affiliated with war making could bring about peaceful advancement, but as it stands now, technology absolutely requires mistrustful nations, reckless generals, and politely amoral science and tech workers.
All of that AI and "machinery" has a military background. They control the purse, so they dictate the purpose.
Surely you are canny enough to know that petty appeals to my "intelligence" only serve to make you seem desperate to be right. All 3 of those things, hell all things, are neither good nor bad. They are merely titles given based on context. Context is everything. A civilian sees a RPV as a killing machine. A EOD tech sees a drone as an insurance policy. A president sees a Predator as a solution. I see a way for normal people to enhance their effect in shaping their world. All of us see the same toy, but we all have a different use for it. Surely you are intelligent enough to understand that context can bring new light to any topic or situation...
Stop investing in start-ups and a couple of people will be a little less wealthy. Stop investing in the military and we and/or our way of live dies within a decade.
Methinks you just like killing people. That's pretty psychopathic. Don't you have any friends?
Violence is not the key difference.
Dying when a plance crashes into your home or dying from a rocket fired from a malfunctioning drone are just as violent and just as "meaningless" to the next of kin. However, in both cases we learn something and we progress.
I'm sorry, but the world does not work in the way that Disney has made you believe.
I'm not exactly looking forwards to it.
Among other things, human history is the combined evolution of sociological and technological progress.
Societal progress has peaked a while ago.
Technology has been riding the curiosity and mental ability of the most brilliant among us, and is currently busy building its next vehicle.
The tragedy of the commons means that it will be very, very difficult to impede that trend, assuming it is possible at all.
1) The government acquires drone technology. Rather than use it to kill a few known terrorists it operates massive drone programs which result in the deaths of 100's of innocent people in multiple countries.
2) The government develops advanced surveillance technology. Rather than use it on a few identified potential threats it decides to scoop up virtually all electronic communications of both its own and foreign citizens with regard for neither the letter nor the spirit of the US Bill of Rights.
3) The government enacts ridiculously heavy penalties for "crimes" whose negative impact is debatable then uses these laws and its virtually unlimited legal resources to terrorize individuals who engage in activities it doesn't like.
I would like to think that some of the better president's in this nation's history: FDR, Kennedy, etc., would have acted to reign in these abuses but in any case that isn't relevant to our current generations which seem devoid of any concept of collective well-being or spirit of disinterested public leadership.
The beast is clearly out of control.
During WWII, the US purposely burned down entire cities (not just small villages, some of the biggest cities in the world) just to scare the shit out of the other side.
In Korea and Vietnam millions of civilians were killed by artillery and air raids on villages and cities. By some accounts nearly all buildings in N. Korea were destroyed by bombing.
Even in Iraqi and Serbia, the US was bombing civilian targets like bridges and power plants.
LOL at FDR being against drones. He was overseeing the purposeful destruction of as many German and Japanese civlians as possible.
During war, as accepted by every politician going back to the dawn of civilization. On the plus side, for the past several hundred years, we've started to make efforts to minimize.
> there are no qualms around civilian collateral damage.
Really? That seems to be all anyone is talking about when it comes to drones. From the perspective of anyone from more than a century ago, we're obsessed with it (and conversely, from the perspective of today, Dresden and Hiroshima would be war crimes.)
I'm seriously disgusted by some people capacity to accept brutality as normal and worse defend it too.
Except the US isn't at war with any of the countries where these drone strikes are taking place.
What war?!
>That seems to be all anyone is talking about when it comes to drones.
Just a few weeks ago, a wedding convoy was mistakenly targeted and 17 innocent people died. Why is a convoy EVER targeted given that more than likely most convoy-travelers are either innocent or not-deserving of a death sentence even if a known terrorist is among them. That's what I meant. Furthermore, where is the accountability?! Who was disciplined for this MASSIVE intelligence failure?!
America.
All that aside, the one aspect I don't see getting resolved is the psychological effects of someone relatively "normal" & smart watching the horrors and carnage of war and then heading to the grocery store for some ice cream after his/her shift. Unlike being in a miserable (i.e. battlefield) place where your body is filled with adrenaline and a good chunk of your mental resources are dedicated to keeping yourself alive and getting the hell out of there alive. Having the time to reflect on the serious inequities in the world that you've just been witness to can't easily be swept under the rug. Even if the systems are mostly automated and pictures have a higher resolution, provided that the person/analyst/commander behind the screen is a somewhat sane and intelligent member of society, the psychological tolls might be worse when you're experiencing carnage thru relative safety.
I took a similar job once, sold on the awesome technical challenge (aeronautical mapping, gyro/sensor input, camera control, etc). But over the time I worked there, I became more and more ethically conflicted about some of the potential applications of the technology I was developing. Was it wrong to continue working on this, given the potential for it to be abused? Personally, I believe developers are a lot like doctors in that we have a power that most lay-people consider to amount to magic, and with that power comes an obligation to do no harm. On one hand, if I wasn't working on this technology, they'd just hire someone else to do it, so leaving would not stop the program. On the other hand, while one person can't have an effect, if we all made the ethical choice, it might ultimately become difficult for these types of programs to exist.
In the end I decided I wanted to be in the group that avoided such ethically questionable projects, lucked into a great opportunity to move into mobile development, and the rest is history.
I moved on to hacking car ecu's and making them go faster. Utterly meaningless compared to my previous job, but a good fun couple of years of what amounted in my mind to toy-building after what I'd previously worked on. You can say I joined your group as well. I can only imagine what the poor sobs in the article go through, they don't exactly have the option to join said group. Not to mention watching real people dying in near real time must have a crazy impact that I can't ever compare to my own experience.
I still wonder how much less existential strife an operator might experience by delegating the killing to an AI machine, especially if one can still see the faces (better resolution) and the carnage following "Siri" carrying out orders.
If there is hope, it lies in the proles.
But, anyway, not exatly for everybody but those things will become cheap someday, up to the point that a person can build one, and stay as lethal. If that threatens us, it also threatens the people controlling today's drones.
(And, just to be clear, I'm making no moral judgment here.)
After a flood, the Taliban helped to rebuild villages in Pakistan. People felt that the state did nothing for them, thus again strengthening support for the insurgency. I feel as though, if the US instead invested the money from war to rather rebuilding, infrastructure, healthcare, education, that the insurgency would fade on its own.
People join the insurgency because they are motivated by hate and anger. Attempting to eliminate it through extermination is futile: the collateral damage only multiples the numbers wanting to fight. The way to win a war is by winning hearts and minds, as the cliche goes.
I wished she had pushed the questioning even further:
Even if it's a weapon, that doesn't mean the person is a threat. I mean it's full of people carrying weapons in the U.S., they are not presumed a threat.
And even if the person is deemed a threat, maybe the he would surrender, but now he is not even offered this choice.
"Now, all right we killed some innocent civilians, but that happens in war and we're at a constant war against terror now so there you go. Lets not jump to any conclusions about drones before all the facts are in!"
All I can say is that these people will probably shut up and at least moderate their views as soon as the police in their country starts deploying drones en masse.
Most of it is the impact of using drones on drone operators and the soldiers who have them on THEIR side. How about the impact of drones to the OTHER side? You know, the one under attack? Even giving them both 50% share of the article is a disservice to them, and here it's even worse. How about them breaking international law? How about them being used for murder operations in a no-war situation? How about them used already and even more down the road against a country's own citizens?
Another part of the article is about how they have low fidelity screens and radars and such. As if, if they had better tech (which they'll get down the road) all would be well with them.
Not much touching the actual ethical, human, political and diplomatic implications of their use.
I think this is still a somewhat useful (even if unfair) approach. So much of the conversation is already centered on how the "other" side effectively has no rights because they're not in America and are suspected of terrorism, and how drones are so much safer and cheaper for "our" side. I view this approach as saying "OK, so you want to believe those non-American deaths really can be written off as an 'unfortunate but necessary cost of war.' Let's see how horrific this still is for our troops that have to run these things and watch people die day after day; how IEDs still slip through screening and our troops have to watch, from thousands of miles away, their own comrades bleed out on the side of the road, through an oversight they may feel responsible for."
Most of the politicians are spinning this as something precise and safe for our troops. It makes sense for the counterpoint to focus on how it's not precise and has hidden human costs to the troops. And it is clear the author understands the immorality of the deaths themselves, but that's not the focus because there aren't many people willing to argue in that arena.
You have to make peace, it doesn't just happen. Same with war, incidentally ..
I'm not sure I agree with that, but if that's what you think it doesn't make sense to try and keep the "good" students away from military contractors. If they're going to build weapons (that use/require code) I'd rather they have the best developers available. Hiring bad programmers certainly isn't going to decrease civilian casualties.
I've worked on the ground in Afghanistan on a Mechanized Infantry Platoon. There's nothing more calming than hearing the buzz from a drone keeping an eye on the terrain from above and reporting to the TACP while you're on the ground. We where saved multiple times from running into ambushes and IEDs thanks to drones. Sure, Apache's could do the job as-well, but when they run out of fuel, and they do more often than a drone, you're on your own.
Sure, that's another mission from flying a drone to a compound in Pakistan and dropping some explosive on it, that I can not comment on since I have not seen the Intel behind those missions.
I'm pretty sure the intel needed to carry out a drone-strike is insanely high.
Drones are also great when the insurgents flees on their motorcycles, as often happens when the ground forces come in.
Which is probably in the interest of the NSA. How else can they justify their dirty work if their is no more perceived "treat".
To me, the whole discussion about drones is a big misdirection that uses people's irrational fear of "killer robots" to make detractors forget that ultimately, there's a human pulling the trigger.
Who cares if Obama authorized a drone strike to kill a US citizen abroad? What I care about is that he authorized an assassination of a US citizen, not that he chose "drone strike" as the method.
I am pretty sure it's easier to dehumanize people when they are merely pixels on a screen.
1) Yes, absolutely UAV based jammers don't block all IEDs. Ground jammers like WARLOCK also don't block all IEDs. One thing they did do was force a lot of command detonated IEDs to go to command wire systems, instead of various wireless systems, which meant we then had a man with a switch in his hand within a few hundred meters (tops), who we then lit the fuck up before or after the attack. Sure beats someone being in another city with a cellphone!
Just because something isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it's worthless.
2) Yes, UAVs are offensive combat weapons, particularly the programs in Horn of Africa and Pakistan. OTOH, I don't see a huge difference in getting killed by a Hellfire from a drone vs. having guys from JSOC show up at your door. There's a legitimate concern that UAVs lower the threshold to engage in ongoing low intensity conflict, but in the cases where they do have the right targets, I see no difference between drone, manned aircraft, or on the ground trigger-pullers.
3) The vast majority of drones are pure Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) missions. DOD didn't even arm their drones for a long long time, it was CIA (who operate in those places) who pioneered armed Predators (then the other armed drones). Part of this is internal politics (pilots = officers), part of it is that when you've got manned aircraft armed with diverse weapons systems orbiting overhead, you can just use a smaller/cheaper/lighter drone for pure ISR, then when you develop a target, send the manned aircraft with a full suite of weapons to choose from to do the actual attack mission.
4) The grainy image of a UAV camera, over a 4h monitoring mission, is probably way beyond the standard of proof of a combat shooting in general. The UAV defaults to "no shoot". A soldier in combat who is threatened defaults to "shoot". You don't need high precision on a single image if you're able to spend a long time watching, gathering supporting information (knowing the area, vehicles that approach, etc.). This isn't law enforcement or civilian self defense; it's war. It's totally legitimate to question whether we should be at war, but the actual conduct of the war is less debatable IMO.
That's about all I got from this. And yes, it does suck. There was a third claim, that the public is misinformed/misled, but I take issue with that one. I think most people understand that somebody, somewhere is pushing the button.
This essay didn't go into the rationale for drone warfare, or the situation that brought the west into armed conflict in the first place. So it's not hitting on a lot in terms of talking about the geopolitical issues, it's just a plea for more empathy about what's actually being done.
I share that concern. We should be more empathetic. However -- and this is a big deal -- feeling more fully the terrible things we are doing does not in any way make those things less necessary. Those are two separate subjects.
I think we are going down a bad road with armed robots, but I don't think essays like this are helping the discussion much. Still, it was good to hear this voice.
True - though the mislead part I feel largely relates to claims of surgical strikes and claims of minimal 'collateral' deaths and injuries.
" the terrible things we are doing does not in any way make those things less necessary" What is being done is indeed terrible - though I have yet to see the necessary bit backed up by any coherent numbers.
Honestly, it has always been seen as a weapon. The whole point of drone is to carry out mission 24/7 as much as possible, because a pilot can't fly back and forth without sleeping. Also, humans have emotions they don't always follow orders.
> incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure
I have always thought the military fly drones to carry out specific mission, such as taking photos or launching an attack. And the latter is usually confirmed by some "intelligence". I want to see how many drone attacks were performed without a single human intelligence confirmation.
> But here's the thing: I may not have been on the ground in Afghanistan, but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end
This is best seen in the movie Black Hawk Down (2001), based on true story.
Humans are still required to fly the drones. The "whole point" is that drones can accomplish the same mission without risking a pilot and at a fraction of the cost of a manned aircraft.
Civilians got killed by manned aircraft too. A-10s launching Hellfires at a wedding party, or AH-64 Apaches gunning down farmers in a field. It happens. And whether the pilot is sitting in the aircraft or a thousand miles away makes no difference. It's the same imperfect people making the same imperfect decisions based on imperfect information.
Don't expensive manned aircraft with (the same) expensive precision guided munitions allow rich people to do exactly the same thing?
A manned aircraft could perform these missions with the same level of "collateral damage" and minimal risk to the pilot.
I heard an interesting interview on NPR with a retired CIA chap. He was legal council to some alphabet soup within Central. He pointed out the irony of the controversy over the "Enhanced" Interrogation Techniques" and the relative quiet on the part of the American public about the Dispassionate Remotely Piloted Death Eagle Master Plan[This is the official name of the CIA's RPV program. look it up.]. I found it poignant. he has a book. I believe the title is Company Man.
Modern democracies know this well and try to hide the horrors of war from their citizens. To have the freedom to wage war for as long as possible (or as long as needed) before public outrage forces them to stop.
Citizens are at fault for not knowing history and not paying attention.
"We are at war with Yemen?"
How can citizens be at fault when they don't even have a representative choice in the matter?
The whole "war is hell" thing is trite as all get out. As a metaphorical answer: "If war is hell... Don't court the Devil."
Think of completely power-autonomous drones, the size of a wasp, swarming by the millions in the sky. The swarming feature alone would render most people helpless against an attack, or their sheer presence. To this, add distributed intelligence features, and networked control. The swarm becomes something akin to an intelligent, flying, all-seeing liquid.
Then think of the drop in price that will enable this to become the dominant method of surveillance, policing, and military operations. There will quickly be nothing stopping dictatorships from buying billions of them, making them ubiquitous and all-pervasive. Killing, threatening and controlling billions of people suddenly becomes quite cheap, efficient, easy and cost-effective. Don't like those people demonstrating in your city? Send the swarms.
This is precisely what the Oculus Rift folks and the people working on the helmet that goes with the F-35 are working against. Biological senses are freaking amazing. The outliers on the upper end of the scale are downright incredible. Synthetic substitutes need to be really well engineered to be comparable or surpass them. (Which is precisely what happened with RADAR. Did you know that modern radio telescopes developed from technology we used to eavesdrop on Soviet EM emissions reflected off the moon? Did you know that the energy gathered by all of the radio telescopes, ever, is less than that of a single snowflake hitting the ground?)
It's never ok when innocent people die, innocent civilians of the US don't want innocent civilians of other nations to die. The fact of the matter is it's not these civilians who are pulling the trigger.
The way I see it we all follow a pattern. In the US you have 2 big political parties, democrat and republican. I mean no one ever questions why we let these dickheads stay in power? Why isn't there a third, fourth or a fifth party? They have fabricated a world and a media were they have basically brain washed the entire world. I mean honestly do u think having 2 parties take turn in power is a democracy? What it all comes down to is to not give them the power. I think in every nation all around the world not voting is as powerful as voting. Breaking that pattern and having that critical thinking, to call the politicians bullshit, and impeach the shit out of them when they fuck up and lie, that conviction to get up and do the right thing. But that will never happen, because it's too hard, because we've all been brain washed, becuase everyone is busy living their lives.
I think the American people have forgotten that their government exist to serve them not the other way around, when you pay tax your paying for a service, when you not getting the service you asked for, you should get up and do something.
http://www.dancarlin.com//disp.php/hharchive/Show-42---(BLIT...
I feel like merely having access to another tool should never make things worse unless the leaders are incompetent.
Drones are here to stay. Maybe like nuclear weapons, they will be something we try to eradicate later, but for now, we must accept and incorporate them, as companies/governments will make it happen regardless of our [read:citizenry(...of the world, of course)] concerns or opposition. In light of this, it is me earnest and sincere belief that control of the sky over our heads is up for grabs. Bothered by kill bots flown over your head by sme assholes in Nevada? Start building aerial jammers, yo. Think those pigs in your 'hood are corrupt? Set up video surveillance and make it open/free access online. Take pictures of cops using their mobiles whilst driving. Say nothing unnecessary at traffic stops; be happy to join them for a free ride to the station and a front row seat to how paperwork is an unbiased weapon in the hands of informed folks. I am so sick of soccer moms and military assholes telling me what is "safe", what "security" means, and how freaking precious our nation is. There is no one coming to save us, not in the US, not in Europe, and especially not in China (India... well we will see). But that is cool, because we have Internet. Seriously, in a stand up arms race, who is going to win, they people paying 100 million per drone or the people paying 1000 per drone. We dont need ordinance. We don't need permission. We have all the know how required [the OP/author sounds like a soldier of conscience if there ever was one]. This is not some Occupy circus. It is not a call for revolution or insurrection. It is just one person, trying to point out the facts...
We, as the armchair scientists and tech inclined folk of the world, have the balance of insight, experience, funding, and motivation on our side. what is more, we need not kill anyone. we dont need to blow anyone up. Most importantly, we get to be honest, and we get to work by choice.
We as people need not sit idly by while politicians and constables decide our fates and the fates of our brothers and sisters around the world. i long for a day when my country, because we kick ass, carpet bombs africa and the middle east weekly with well made books, toothpaste, and ruggedized tablet computers. I do not think this is a fantasy, but i am very aware of the other options.
...shit, this isn't the meeting at the docks...
Who is profiting from death?
Saving troops on the ground is great marketing and saves political capital.
Tribalism wins; WE GOOD, you Bad.
Someone always makes up the math: X innocent goatherders = 1 US grunt
Such a sad petty waste of and for humanity.
Also, they pixelate the feed on purpose, to remove hesitation when hitting the trigger.
Any proof for this?
But we in the 'normal' society don't have a clue what those in the 'murdering business society' really think about us. More often than not, you'll find that the 'official killers' really don't care about human life - or else they wouldn't be devoting their time on earth to the singular purpose of killing, maiming, destroying life.
Its a simple fact that if you get up in the morning with the intention of taking a human life, if ordered to do so, then you no longer belong to the human race. You belong to something else. Not a single one of us in the 'normal society' can entertain the thought of killing someone, on a daily basis, and not suffer consequences. How is it then for those who spend their entire lives working to be the best possible killers they're allowed to be?
Do you really see it as black and white as you describe it?
A very much black-and-white description of the current war. "Evil" is actually the most descriptive form about an enemy that can't be specified, a war that selects its foes arbitrary and which lacks any specific goals for winning. Lacking all that, all a person can say is: "we are protecting the good side that is us from the evil that are them". There is no more specific way to describe it, which also means it can never actually end.
There is something ironic in there.
That's not true. Many joined the military because they believe in their version of patriotism. They are also trained to adopt to utilitarianism as much as possible. The part they are missing when they follow deonotology, as a solider, at least to the Kantian, using someone as a merely mean to an end is not right. So killing 20 villages to kill 2 terrorists is not acceptable (and Nagel's absolutism argues this). But they try to justify their action by remembering they are soldiers and they are fighting terrorists. So killing a few innocent may justify the end.
I doubt he gives a shit, and the reason we are in this mess is because most people think people like him do give a shit, they are just "misinformed."
Nothing happens. Nothing. The reason those people are pissed is because of the U.S. government constantly fucking with them and poking them. Over throwing governments, secret renditions, locking up loved ones in Guantanamo with no trial indefinitely. I'd be fucking pissed too.
Obviously not much happens in the short term if we don't interfere in the affairs of Pakistan and neighbours. In the long term they might rebuild their terrorist training camps, but .. meh so what. Only a few people have been killed by terrorists, it's not a big deal and not a fundamental threat to civilisation.
You couldn't say that there would be no consequences for not engaging in the 1930s. Many more countries could have been overrun by fascism for decades.
Drones kill civilians? Yeah, we know. Collateral damage is a reality of war.
Drones are weapons? Is that really a revelation?
I think there is a lot to criticize about the drone program, but it shouldn't read like this.