Living Under Drones
livingunderdrones.org
livingunderdrones.org
Anything which is permissible for a piloted bomber to destroy is surely okay for a drone to destroy as well, yes? Why the focus on drones per se?
Yes, civilian deaths are bad. Yes, war is bad. Yes, perhaps the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan should be ended tomorrow. So why don't we discuss those?
Drones seem utterly irrelevant:
1. Do drones cause more civilian casualties than traditional air strikes? If anything it seems that they inflict fewer. Thus focussing on this aspect actually hurts their case.
2. Do drones terrorize civilians more than a traditional infantry occupation, such as that prosecuted by the US in Iraq? I honestly have no idea, but the answer doesn't seem obvious.
3. Do drones make the US less safe than a traditional infantry based occupation? Again, I've got no idea.
4. This point is silly. In war you needn't get clearance before killing one's enemies - attempting to do so constitutes an increase in respect for human life.
Yes, since drones are used IN ADDITION to traditional air strikes, and for different kind of attacks. If anything, with drones getting cheaper, smaller plus not needing pilots and not having any casualties on the operating side, etc, they will also be used more than "traditional air strikes" which are much more difficult to approve and costlier.
Technological changes are enablers and multipliers -- they change what we can do and how often we can do it.
>2. Do drones terrorize civilians more than a traditional infantry occupation, such as that prosecuted by the US in Iraq?
Yes, since suddenly you have essentially small planes taking over the area and killing people, especially when they can be used to occupy and have almost zero casualties from the occupying site.
>4. This point is silly. In war you needn't get clearance before killing one's enemies - attempting to do so constitutes an increase in respect for human life.
There's also the fact that those are not even used in a properly declared war, and are even used against sovereign countries.
"Traditional" air strikes haven't been going on since 2001 (for Afghanistan) and 2003 (for Iraq). Do you really think that fighter jets are just roaming around randomly in Afghanistan bombing random things? There are plenty of aircraft, sure, but they are doing missions like CAS (close air support of ground troops) or delivering bombs to precise targets.... the same kind of thing drones are doing. Except drones carry smaller bombs than 500lb JDAMs, which helps drones reduce collateral damage (and civilian casualties) from the equivalent strike directed by a manned attack fighter.
But either way, being used for "different kinds of attacks" is not even close to illegal. If anything using drones with lower-payload ordnance to perform different missions instead of manned fighters with cluster bombs or JDAMs is a noted improvement in the U.S. military's efforts to reduce CIVCAS and collateral property damage.
> If anything, with drones getting cheaper, smaller plus not needing pilots and not having any casualties on the operating side, etc, they will also be used more than "traditional air strikes" which are much more difficult to approve and costlier.
Drones are, sadly, not getting any cheaper. They are cheaper to train pilots for, that much is true. But again, "it's not quite as sporting" isn't an argument against drones.... the same argument was used about long-range artillery in the Russo-Japanese war (some British fogies actually said they would never personally use artillery if they couldn't personally see the aimpoint, an attitude which didn't last long on the Western Front). The Germans used the same argument to complain about Americans using a brutal, evil weapon in WWI... that's right, the shotgun, the "OMG drones!!" of 1917.
So? If there's an operational need for them, they'll come back at an instant. They haven't stopped because drones, just because that part of the whole operation was over. You usually do those at the first stage of a "war", not at the "ocuppying force" stages.
>The Germans used the same argument to complain about Americans using a brutal, evil weapon in WWI... that's right, the shotgun, the "OMG drones!!" of 1917.
Is that said as if things turned all the better for the increased arms race? If anything I'd like to see those things controlled and restricted, like with do with other kinds of weapons with international treaties.
There's an hypocrisy involved in all this, that usually the persons saying it's all OK will be all tears and patriotic songs if it's even a person on their land that gets the same treatment, wheres the lives of 100s of innocent people on foreign lands are somehow not worth much.
Yes, they will come back if they're needed. The reason they're not needed is because drones are available.
> Is that said as if things turned all the better for the increased arms race?
It's said as in shotguns were not the horrific inhumane weapon they were made out to be, in comparison to all the more innovate and brutal ways we've figured out how to kill each other in the decades since. At least the shotgun stood a good chance of putting someone hors de combat instead of killing them outright; rifle ammunition was and is designed explicitly to cause massive trauma leading to death.
> wheres the lives of 100s of innocent people on foreign lands are somehow not worth much.
The Taliban kill far, far more Muslims than the West could hope to match. The same was (and now is) true in Iraq. The lives of innocents abroad are worth something, which is one of the reasons why America risks her own blood and treasure: Having a reasonably stable and secure Afghanistan, without Muslims killing Muslims every day, is flat-out good for America too.
Likewise for nearby Pakistan, a possessor of nuclear weapons (and victim of recent Taliban attacks at Karachi airport); the insurgency there isn't just bad for the innocent peoples of Pakistan, it's bad for the rest of the world including America.
The act of using a drone versus a plane to drop the missile is surely not in of itself controversial. The main issue as to the use of drones is that the lower cost of flying these machines means the US can a) afford more sorties which further terrorises the civilians (as it is not a war, it is by definition terrorism) and b) the lowered risk to US life and 'shot down plane' stories means the US media is less likely to give a shit and report on it.
That is part of what makes the use of drones there scary. If military jets were bombing areas in Pakistan, there would be an outcry. Drones for some reason are different. They feel like a slippery slope towards a new way of thinking about an almost casual and less invasive military violence that is somehow more permissible than "traditional" (jets, troops) forms of military engagement.
Now that I think about it, maybe the above is just because most countries share no experience with being the _victims_ of drone strikes. Most countries can relate to a physical invasion or of planes bombing from above. But drones are so new and so specifically tied to the fight with terrorists that perhaps there is a feeling that drones are something that happens to "other people's countries" (so to speak), and that is what makes them less bad some how.
A good recent Rolling Stone article on the Forever War:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/three-troubling-le...
That literally just happened the other day, after Pakistan Taliban forces attacked the airport at Karachi. Where was the outcry? Did we miss it? Or do people not notice Pakistani civilians dying when it's Pakistani aircraft dropping the ordnance?
If it's OK for Pakistan to bomb people that the U.S. is also at war with then I don't see why it is wrong for Pakistan to allow the U.S. to bomb people that the U.S. is at war with. That was, after all, the story of WWII in the European Theater of Operations.
It's called the "free market", and it is the antithesis of government.
The problem with dollars is that some people have more. Many, many more.
So while I agree in principle that we should close the gap between citizens and decision-making, I'm not confident the right way to do it is with currency.
[1] http://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/WebART/365-570030?Ope...
If it's true that distinctively marked medical personnel were deliberately targeted then you're right that it would be a breach of the law of war.
This is a fairly old tactic.
For example, the Columbine school shooting (15 years ago) involved several (badly wired) bombs that were intended to go off in crowds of survivors and rescue workers.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2...
Unfortunately Gen. Sherman's quote about war is just as applicable in 2014 as it was after the American Civil War.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-ns...
Doubling down on the carnage by killing medics/family/bystanders who hurry to the rescue of the victims whenever the CIA makes a mistake is just sick, sick, sick.
I wonder what the Geneva Convention has to say about Nation States relying on the same shady tactics.
The Geneva Conventions specifically require belligerents to ensure that their combatants are distinctively uniformed, carry weapons openly, not to use civilians as human shields, not to engage in perfidy, and to be under the command of a responsible officer.
The Taliban only generally fall under one of those (command and control).
But even assuming you extend Geneva Convention rights unilaterally since we are "better than them", as long as the attack (first or second) is directed against a military target (i.e. actual Taliban troops coming into to retrieve the bodies of their fallen and wounded), has military value, and does not cause harm to civilians out of proportion to the military value to be gained, then it would be just fine under not only Geneva, but the international law of war (customary and otherwise).
I mean, you're referring to the same Geneva Conventions that governed U.S. conduct in Vietnam for crying out loud, Conventions explicitly tailored to the idea of people killing people, so how sunny and cheery did you think the Geneva Conventions are?
I was under the impression that, under Geneva Conventions, non-combatant, medical units should not be the subject of disproportionate enemy "attention", in spite of the obvious greater military value of nullifying a multiplication factor for the enemy (each doctor can treat and potentially send back to the front a great number of combatant units that would otherwise result in casualties).
I am not talking about an operation assuming any risks in order to spare enemy doctors, but if the whole point of the operation is to take down the doctors in the first place, I'd call that shady. It is equivalent to gunning down unarmed civilian peasants in order to deny food to the enemy's forces. I do not think that was allowed in Geneva Conventions either, though I am well aware that US people has an incredible and almost infinite capacity to look the other side when their forces engage in that kind of issues.
Targeting doctors would be flat out illegal, if marked as doctors. But recovering wounded (which is what's being described here) is not a job performed by doctors or medics in these specific cases. Even for U.S. forces, the initial extraction of wounded soldiers is almost always performed by other soldiers on the battlefield so that the the medic (normally only one) can work in a somewhat safer spot while they stabilize the casualty for MEDEVAC.
If there are cases where a second shot is launched without militarily actionable intelligence that reasonably indicates the follow-up shot is also against military targets (i.e. not doctors, chaplains, civilians, etc.) then that would be a crime too. I'm not trying to say second shots are always permissible just because there have been times when Taliban have committed perfidy, you'd still need good intel each and every single time that tactic is used for it to be legal.
But what I am saying is that often the story you read about actions in war are completely one-sided to make you believe that people are really going around doing things "equivalent to gunning down unarmed civilian peasants in order to deny food".