U.S. Is Often Unsure About Who Will Die in Drone Strikes
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In summary: :(
Also you'll notice the American and the Italian have names -- Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto.
That is very important, especially because all the Pakistani, Afghan, Iraqi women, children, elderly, by-standers, and other innocents never have names. They are just "collateral damage" or whatever the current PR terminology is.
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old American boy, eating dinner at a restaurant in Yemen while searching for his father. Nobody denies that he was completely innocent, and even the US government simply says he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time"[1].
You'll also notice that the media oftentimes use the euphemism "US-born" to refer to people like al-Awlaki and his father, but refer to Weinstein as American.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki
[1] We can also question why that place was "the wrong place", since (A) we're not at war with Yemen, and (B) the target of the drone strikes (his father) was also a US citizen who had never been convicted of any crime, but that's a separate matter, since it's not analogous to this incident.
It helps if they are the son of a "senior talent-recruiter and motivator who was involved in planning terrorist operations for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda"
That's not really relevant, since the US drone program in Yemen was operating with the approval of the Yemen government.
"[...] Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent." [0]
So in the official language, a "military-age" male Afghan or Yemeni who is killed in a drone strike instantly transforms into a combatant by merit of being in a strike zone. Great.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in...
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/tom-the-dancing-bug-hello.h...
Maybe because you're so far away from that reality -- literally and figuratively -- that you're not experiencing your conscience and the fear of consequences quite the same way, making it easier to take reckless actions that you would otherwise think twice about had it been coming directly from the barrel of your gun, so to speak?
You can actually test that hypothesis yourself very easily. Go look at some of the more gory scenes from Saw, or the Aliens movies. If you're like many typical internet people they won't even phase you. Now go and find some of the typical rotten.com / liveleak content and see how much you can stomach of that. Likely not a lot and not easily at all.
Knowing that something is real makes a MASSIVE difference.
Further, being on the ground with a gun, facing armed and active enemies² makes you more likely and less inhibited to recklessly kill people, because while there may be consequences to killing, the consequence to being killed is FAR greater.
Soldiers need to be trained to not go full auto with their rifles for a reason.
² Just a note to make clear that i edited that part in as clarification.
vvvv For one, that book doesn't seem to cover direct vs remote combat, which is the comparison i was making, and further: Read the reviews underneath.
It's actually the exact opposite. Seeing the person you're about to kill makes it harder to pull the trigger (given a normal psychology, for whatever that's worth). If you're interested, the book linked to below goes into great detail about this.
The view from a Spectre gunship isn't materially all that different than from a drone operator's position. And there's quite a bit of evidence that drone operators do suffer similar psychological problems as in-theater operators.
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/06/a_chilling_new_post_traumati...
""" “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.” """ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-g...
People intrinsically have a problem with the clinicality of technological enhancement.
Imagine an algorithm which could tell a police force who is likely out to commit crimes given observed parameters (time, route, familiarity in area, vehicle, passengers, origin, destination, income, education, criminal history, etc) people would be freaked out. I'm sure some day well have this and people will wish for good old police walking the beat, mistakenly stopping the wrong person, but at least its not an impersonal algorithm targeting you.
Because they're concerned with the change in warfare this heralds, that we're moving to using technologies that explicitly and autonomously target civilian areas, and deciding who 'enemy combatants' are based on presidential mandate, rather than military engagements, thus setting a terrible precedent for future wars (i.e., if we ever were to find ourselves at war with another country, or even not at war, just that one of our citizens did something against a country, and that country decided to use drones to attack civilian sites, claiming they were attacking enemy combatants, what recourse would we have on the international stage)?
Because they're concerned not so much with drones, but with the precedent set by presidentially ordered assassination, and through means known to cause collateral damage (unlike most alleged assassination attempts prior)?
Because the entire policy has led to intense fear in the areas we're flying drones over; not only are we now inspiring terror in our attempt to find and kill terrorists (...), but we're hurting our chances at winning over 'hearts and minds' and such, and likely raising up a generation in these countries that hates and fears us.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_and... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_accidents_and_...
They pretend to care about this change in warfare. And, realistically, even if they could affect US policy, there is absolutely no possibility they'd be able to affect how China Russia or Iran decide to use drones. Yes, the US is the one with drones in the news but not the only nation which will ever use them. The cat's out of the bag. It's not like we're going to go back to having people complain about the undue risk we put pilots under when we have less risky alternatives. It's also more costly to put pilots up there, they tire, make mistakes, etc. Drones can keep flying without need for rest.
I'm being cynical, but that's just how it is.
don't seek out enemies (let bag guys and gals do as they will)
support a network of ground troops and supporting intelligence with consequent monetary and cost in lives and perhaps effectiveness
a multi-decade effort to socially engineer people (address their grievances, if possible, not clear it is, but lets suppose it
good old fashioned carpet bombing
An army bigger than the rest of the world, combined?
Winners to what winners want, losers suffers as they must.
And the tendency is to keep moving to that; even now it's only 'soldier vs civilian' by technicality; as soon as we can replace the soldier at the viewscreen with an algorithm, we likely will.
"U.S. Is Often Unsure About Who Will Die in Drone Strikes"
If you're a soldier on the ground you have useful heuristics for determining who is an enemy combatant ("are they shooting at me?") that drone operators don't. You also have mechanisms for limiting collateral damage that drone operators don't. Which isn't to say that these tools are employed all the time, but at least they exist, whereas with drones the official strategy for limiting collateral damage is "re-define 'enemy combatant' to mean anyone of military age killed by the drone."
Turned around the problem with this argument is that it's solved by getting to know the people you are about to kill.
Which sounds rather silly if the point is to protest killing people at all.
Or if we stay focused on drones, just kill them with one of the other dozen remote methods we have at our disposal.
I here this from time to time, but I wonder how true this actually is. My guess is that most military actions are not publicly reported, so we don't have number to compare.
My understanding is that there are a few ways to reach out and kill people from far away:
- snipers
- artillery
- ground-to-ground missiles/rockets
- air-to-ground missiles/rockets
- ship-to-ground missiles
- aerial artillery/cannon (Spectre, A-10, Apache)
- air-to-ground bombs (for argument let's assume only "precision" munitions)
- drone strikes (which are a kind of air-to-ground missile, but we'll beak them out as distinct for fiscussion)
Before drones became common, all of the rest of the above were used frequently in both Iraq and Afghanistan (and in every previous modern conflict), yet there wasn't this kind of "let's have a problem with this specific method" and plenty of wedding parties and civilians were killed. Yet with the exception of snipers, none of these involve getting personal with the targets, and collateral damage is well known to happen with all of these methods.
In context, drones aren't really any different, yet they seem to be singles out because...?
My guess is that it's a fundamental lack of understanding of what drones are and how they work. My guess is that most people out there who specifically have a problem with drones, but don't comment on the rest of the methods, have a niggling suspicion that they work by showing a picture of a bad guy to a drone or letting it sniff a captured sock or something and sending it out on a kill mission and this cold computer killer terrifies them because of too many movies. But they effectively work the same as any of the other methods.
The same missiles, probably the same cameras/sensors and the same operators, ordered by the same command chain with the same legal oversight make the same decision to shoot-to-kill in the same way. Arguments about not wanting to put U.S. pilots in harms way also ring false since nobody the U.S. is shooting at has an effective airspace denial system in place.
The only thing the drones bring to the table is loiter time, and I'm not sure that "as loiter time approaches balloon or kite" crosses some kind of moral threshold that wasn't already crossed by any other listed method. There simply wasn't this kind of anti-AC-130H or anti-A-10 movement around when they were chewing up people. Nobody came down on Helicopter gunships, as a class of killing devices, even after Wikileaks' Collateral Murder came out.
It seems to me that the moral problem that should be addressed is killing people from far away, not the specific method you use to do it.
In this analogy, your argument is "the peacenicks aren't effectively fighting the warhawks because they are only attacking the raiding party rather than the entrenched defenses." I have an alternative theory: they're attacking the raiding party because doing so gives the best expected ROI.
Points about cost-per-life taken also ring hollow, the U.S. military budget is virtually unlimited, it's not cost sensitive in that kind of way.
Drones offer marginally more safety for operators, but no theater the U.S. is engaged in or is likely to be engaged in is likely to offer resistance to any of the other methods. And other methods also offer similar safety margins for operators. Ship-to-ground missiles for example, offer virtually the same risk as drones.
I'm not saying fighting drones is a pointless argument to make. Each of the methods is open to criticism, but by only attacking one, it reeks of a kind of protest fadism - of losing the plot. Is the problem killing people, or is the problem killing people with drones?
Here's an alternative scenario for why drones are actually popular with hawks, and it's not safety or direct cost: they offer vastly longer loiter time and better real-time surveillance over an area compared to any other method or group of methods, which means they provide greater targeting and attack opportunity on the off-chance a difficult to find target presents itself.
To go with your analogy, by not attacking the entrenchments, it signals to the hawks that it's okay to keep sending raiding parties, because they'll eventually end up fortified.
I appreciate this discussion by the way.
Heck we levelled Hamburg and Dresden, burned Tokyo to the ground and nuked two Japanese cities. Why even talk about drones?
People talk about drones because the vast majority of "blowing people up" that the US does these days is done with drones. Before drones people complained about conventional bombers or cluster bombs or land mines or carpet bombing or agent orange. In most of these cases the issue wasn't the technology itself, it was the fact that the technology was being used for mass killing of random civilians. If the US was flying drones about just to take pictures of things people would talk about them far less.
I hope that addresses your concerns.
It's going to be yet orders of magnitude worse when autonomous drones arrive (they are probably already in testing now) - and make no mistake, autonomous drones is an idea about as irresistible to the government as mass surveillance. Moore's Law will make autonomous drones too hard to resist.
False. Algorithms should form part of a proper investigation of the target. Proper use of computers allows you to rule out innocents and provide intelligence in order to pick better targets. They can perform the grunt tasks, collecting and presenting reports and allowing the humans to focus on all the data available in order to more accurately make the decision.
The algorithms should and do not dispatch the drones and do not make any type of decision like this.
If information derived using computers didn't play a role in the modern militaries of the world, they wouldn't be modern militaries.
It's as though the only thing that bothers the majority is that a terrorist didn't die but someone else. There is a clear divide from the rest of the world which still finds it strange to kill someone without declaring war or having a clear reason. And from the tone of this article i wonder if that divide isn't a lot further than i thought.
The idea of killing someone just because we think they are a threat... sounds like a sci-fi novel to the rest of us.
Not really a sci-fi novel. We've had all this before in a time and place called the Third Reich. Different methods, different Undesirables, same propaganda, same evil mass murdering government military apparatus.
And just like the NSA scandals, the TSA nonense, etc, etc, the public will yawn and then forget about it a week later.
The only thing I can criticize is the technology that makes it so hard for these guys to do their jobs. If Youtube can deliver 4K cat videos then the military with its $500 Billion per year budget should be able to deliver half decent videos.
At least OBL had a valid reason ( for ppl who don't know this - he did it as a revenge to what israel was doing in Lebanon ). Killing civilians without reason is genocide and history will judge US appropriately.
FWIW, I believe many residents of Okinawa Prefecture would be interested in having US military off of their island, should the US withdraw. Should we do that, I suspect Japan would quickly develop nuclear weapons.
I also strongly believe many in Latin America would prefer a strict isolationist policy by the US. Many remember how the US supported right-wing authoritarian regimes in the 1970s and 1980s, don't want the US meddling in their country, and have little to fear from Eurasian threats.
I pointed out some other examples of people who probably would like the US out of the international stage.
Your reply here makes it sound either like you didn't understand your original point - the hope that the US might withdraw - or that you believe the only people who are relevant are the US and those the US considers to be its opposition.
I am certain there are people in Bolivia who would like the US to stop protecting US business interests in that country, and who will not be negatively affected by possible growth in Russian, Chinese, or ISIS power should the US become the isolationist state you says was "tempting to hope".
> At least OBL had a valid reason ( for ppl who don't know this - he did it as a revenge to what israel was doing in Lebanon ).
Not even going to touch that.
The fact is, the US operates out of Pakistan with Pakistan's permission. If Pakistan ordered the US to leave their airbases and stop doing strikes, the US would have to, or lose a ton of forward bases. A few thousand US personnel in Pakistan isn't going to stand a chance if Pakistan tried to forcibly remove these drone bases.
Yes Pakistan's government complaints publicly about these strikes, but that's all PR -- they know they don't have a military capable of maintaining their own sovereignty in Waziristan, and need US support there. But they won't admit that publicly.
Disclaimer: I don't agree in killing innocent civilians to protest US/Israel/etc policy.
Sidenote: the US supported terrorism in Central America, calling them "freedom fighters" in the 80s. Of course, coups and violent overthrows go back to the 50s... even further back in Asia to the 1800s. Also, the US also helped train dictators through the "School of Americas". Michael Moore's "TV Nation" did a report on it on FOX in the early 90s.
The point being: get ready for more killings: by "moderate fighters", mercenaries, or drones... or fighter strikes like Bill Clinton's Balkans and Iraq hi-jinks. Americans won't really make drone kills an issue. Abortion and school funding... now that's something much more important.