> "They want to kill people with my software that doesn't work"
Let's see, we assassinate people without any trial, in a country we are not even at war with, and the obvious problem is that the software is a little buggy.
What is "buggy" here is the whole assassination system. When Bush wanted to dispatch special ops around the world to assassinate "terrorists", everyone was up and arms about it, When Obama does the same thing using drones, nobody seems to care, and the problem is a couple of bugs in the software.
There was a great piece whose identifying information I'm blanking on that explained how we stumbled into drone warfare. Basically, we tried doing snatch & grabs with commando teams for a while, and that kept generating one negative externality we weren't willing to tolerate. Illegal acts? No. Media pressure? No. Collateral damage? No. Diplomatic reprecussions? No. Prisoners.
Prisoners are a real handful. What are our options? Let them go? Well, no gain there. Put a bullet in the back of their head? Americans won't go for it. Try them in a civilian court? You get to expose sources & methods, they might walk anyhow (evidence tends to be testimony of equally unsavory characters plus something classified to the nth degree and not worth burning on Mook #473), and the successful outcome is they go plot their next terrorist act from a federal penitentiary. Try them in military court? All the fun of a civilian court, and the New York Times editorial board will make it sound like you took the bullet option anyhow.
You know what has never once happened as a result of a Predator drone strike? A live prisoner in US custody.
Interesting anecdote: up until WWII or so, American commanders had little problem dealing with enemy noncombatants on the battlefield. There was a brief trial followed by an execution.
Over time, the whole trial and such got to be counter-productive for the military, all that publicity and such. Warfare became much more a PR game. So commanders started emphasizing killing over capturing.
This trend has nothing to do with the war on terror. Eisenhower back in WWII sent out memos to his commanders saying he didn't want to see a lot of snipers being captured. The implications were pretty clear. Drone warfare is just the continuation of this larger trend.
American commanders had little problem dealing with enemy noncombatants on the battlefield.
Did you mean combatants? Typically noncombatants would refer to medical personnel, chaplains, etc. It'd be interesting to know if people like this were routinely tried and executed.
I suspect he means "spies and saboteurs" (to borrow the language of geneva), i.e. combatants who don't display a distinctive sign recognizable at a distance and openly carry weapons.
(The rationale: if one army can't tell the difference between civilians and soldiers, it puts civilians at greater risk. Thus, Geneva creates an incentive for not doing this.)
Though the Geneva Conventions do not state whether chaplains may bear arms, they specify (Protocol I, 8 June 1977, Art 43.2) that chaplains are noncombatants. In recent years both the UK and US have required chaplains, but not medical personnel, to be unarmed. Other nations, notably Norway, Denmark and Sweden, make it an issue of individual conscience. Captured chaplains are not considered Prisoners of War (Third Convention, 12 August 1949, Chapter IV Art 33) and must be returned to their home nation unless retained to minister to prisoners of war.
> You know what has never once happened as a result of a Predator drone strike? A live prisoner in US custody.
That makes a lot of sense. It is the optimal way of disposing of people on hidden black lists.
The other upside for them -- Americans don't put their lives in danger, unless we consider driving to Langley in DC traffic every day as "danger". So they never have to deal with that PR aspect of the operation.
Dropping a bomb from a plane or a UAV is basically the same thing in these wars. The enemies have no weapons capable of shooting down our fighters. Have we lost a single plane to enemy SAMs in either Iraq or Afghanistan? We've certainly lost some helicopters, but there really is no difference between an F/18 and a Predator.
If anything the UAV allows for more accuracy and a better view of the aftermath, the pilot of a manned plane is trying to get in and get out, the pilots of a UAV are watching before, during, and after the strike. The pilot of a manned fighter sees less of the actual attack and is even further removed.
The same can be said for ships at sea firing Tomahawks, and before that artillery. Once you get beyond the face to face fighting of infantry it just becomes more and more abstract until we are here today where the guys pulling the trigger are 3,000 miles away.
I don't disagree with what you said, but the real abstraction is the ability to shoot and not be shot at.
Even with "beyond the horizon" battles, two ships at sea are hitting each other. The difference between dying from a shell fired 20 miles away or one fired 1/2 mile away is nonexistent.
This whole conversation is way off-topic but the operations happen with the partnership of the Pakistani government (so the bit about "...in a country we're not at war with" is irrelevant) against military targets who are not fighting under any nation's flag.
The days of two armies lining up at opposite ends of a battle-field are gone.
I think not when software is used to kill people. I refuse to sanitize and rationalize that fact away and happily discuss UAV realtime software development patterns.
The story was about UAV software, your agenda is extraneous. Otherwise any story can be used as a jumping off point for politics and righteous indignation.
1. Currently living neither in the US, nor the places it deploys these drones—and therefore unable to affect, or be affected by, the US's foreign policy re: drones;
2. and who rationally values their time;
I can't see any benefit to investing said time in analyzing US drone deployment policy. The technology of drones, however, is fascinating.
There's always the possibility that (1) will one day change. For example, when, in some state of emergency, the US decides to back one political strength over another. I'm not military or historical expert, so I might be wrong, but I could easily see this happening in countries like Mexico.
Good point. The only problem is the Netezza appliance is definitely not used by drones, for controlling drones, or anything directly related to their operations. The Register headline (and the many copies) are typically hyperbolic.
The software is used to determine target locations,which are then fed to the drones for execution. I'd say it's pretty damm relevant when someone decides to hack something up real quick and says they don't mind using it knowing that it's giving erroneous data with several meter deviations. I bet you wouldn't find it hyperbolic if you were, let's say, 10 meters away from someone being located with that software.
Yes, it could be better, but in the grand scheme of things it's a major improvement over what came before. Less than a century ago, in WWII, bombers often missed their target by miles. Miles. We are orders of magnitude more accurate, leading to smaller amounts of explosive used, and fewer people being killed by accident.
No, it's never good when an unintended person is killed, but let's keep things in perspective.
This is not new. Software is also in most components of military weapons and vehicles: in missiles, tanks, submarines, torpedoes, artillery, helicopters and fighter jets, etc. What's different about UAVs?
It's important to remember that neither Bush nor Obama are king of the U.S. government. Our newspapers, universities, and civil servants turned on Bush because of his entry to Iraq, acting out of step with the rest of the government (which includes a lot more than people think). Anything they said to reduce Bush's power was fair game. You, like me, probably fell for it. People in the government generally don't have a problem with the government's power and actions. They did pull off a great trick though, assigning everything bad to Bush for six years.
I'm pretty sure I stole that interpretation from this guy: http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/ - I spent a while looking for the exact article, but didn't find it. Most of them are very interesting anyway. He's a fascinating character, and even if you don't like him, he refers to great primary sources. But do watch out for three of his big biases: 1) assuming everyone is as smart as he is; 2) growing up as a "Brahmin" (his neologism); 3) preferring that the U.S. solve its own problems somehow (patriotic but very difficult).
This is the problem with success, it has many different meanings and some of then are evil. When using technology to kill people it should be carefully studied what is the meaning of success.
Let's see, we assassinate people without any trial, in a country we are not even at war with, and the obvious problem is that the software is a little buggy.
What is "buggy" here is the whole assassination system. When Bush wanted to dispatch special ops around the world to assassinate "terrorists", everyone was up and arms about it, When Obama does the same thing using drones, nobody seems to care, and the problem is a couple of bugs in the software.