It continues to baffle me why the fact they're drones matter in the slightest.
They're not autonomous, they're flown by pilots who just happen to not be sitting in the aircraft they're flying.
Manned aircraft have killed huge groups of innocent civilians more than once, but apparently that's fine because the pilot was sitting in the aircraft.
It matters because it changes the fundamental nature of combat. If a pilot is in the plane you're risking an American life, not to mention a very expensive piece of equipment with numerous safety features etc.
Now take away the risk to American life and lower the cost of the attack significantly, and viola, you've got a much itchier trigger finger now. If you've played MW3, which would you rather do, use the drone to take out enemies or risk your character dying?
A drone totally changes the dynamics of the fight. If we were able to get tons of drones and "mechwarriors", I don't think wars would be quite as difficult to justify. As technologists we are often blinded by the coolness of things. As someone who has worked on AI for drones early on in my career (for the US govt), I shudder to think that I may have contributed in some ways to a terrible technology for humanity. At the time, I had friends deployed and in my head, I thought that it's better we have UAVs than my friends coming home in bodybags...
I doubt that. It would seem that a pilot sitting in a cockpit would be a lot more trigger-happy.
Both pilots can make two types of mistake: don't recognize an enemy for what he is, or do the same thing with a civilian. If plane pilot mistakes an enemy for something else and said enemy succeeds in his efforts, the pilot will lose his place and may be his life. The drone pilot, on the other hand, will only lose the drone, which is also cheaper then a plane. But the cost of the other mistake is the same for the both of them.
So, it seems that plane pilot has actually much more reason to shoot on targets he's not sure about.
Clarification: I don't mean that the pilot has an itchy trigger finger, I mean the system or decision maker. I see how the two might be confused based on my original comment.
The commander/politician/leader is answerable and responsible for his soldiers, as such if the risk to the soldier's life is taken out of equation an attack suddenly begins to make more sense as it carrier lower risk & lower costs, therefore requiring less justification.
The reaper/predator and other drones cannot survive in contested airspace; any pilot(s) in modern combat aircraft would be at almost no risk of being shot down.
This isn't about the pilot, it's about the decision making process within the higher command structure.
Remember the downed F-117 pilot in Serbia? The repercussions of Somalia? Drones carry no such risks. The risk of political and public fall out is minuscule compared to traditional operations. Public outrage over "collateral damage" is negligible, because frankly, there is no public outrage about civilian deaths. Especially if "suspected Al-Qaeda operatives" were among the killed.
Look at it this way: it makes killing people with targeted missiles that much cheaper, which means they will want to do more of it, not just to "important targets", but to "associated targets", too.
It's basically the NSA equivalent of mass spying. If spying becomes so cheap that they can just do it to everyone, then they're thinking "why not"? Same with drone striking. If it ends up costing them only like $10,000 per target - why not kill the associated forces, too? You know...just to be on the "safe side".
> it makes killing people with targeted missiles that much cheaper
Killing people is already really cheap. What's not cheap is deciding _not_ to kill them on the battlefield, given incomplete information. Drones are helping with information and making _not_ killing people cheaper.
Neither the pilot of a fighter/bomber or a drone gets to decide on the targets. They're given orders from above based on the intel provided to the commanders. So the issue isn't itchy trigger finger of the pilot, but itchy trigger finger of the commanders. The commanders have demonstrated over the last decade a willingness to send drones into situations they would not send fighters/bombers. There are few instances of US incursions with fighter aircraft over the last few years compared to the number of incursions with drones.
Much of that spy aircraft predating the widespread use of satellites, and certainly predating modern drone-style aircraft. The options available were different, so of course the option selected was different.
The thinking is it is easier to dissociate consequences when they are nothing but pixels. It become more of a video game than a reality when sitting in a safe gaming pod flying the drone. It isn't fully transformed to a game, but it is to an extent.
Compare internet forums vs f2f discussion - it is much easier to end up in a flamewar saying hurtful things on the internet when your opponents are faceless words on a screen than when it's a person sitting across from you.
Look, I don't have a position in this discussion, but your argument is prototypical for much of the others in this thread and it just seems so flimsy. Here is another totally made up argument just the other way around: for a UAV pilot, and their commanders, the 'kill order' is much more rational. Soldiers get to make decisions that are not influenced by the hate against the person who 2 minutes ago shot their buddy next to them in the head. Nanking massacre? Would never happen with drone pilots.
See? I'm not saying that argument is right. It is only just as neat, simple and (probably) wrong as the 'killing through a joystick causes more casualties because it dehumanzes the process' argument.
> It matters because it changes the fundamental nature of combat.
Said about literally EVERY SINGLE change in warfare over the centuries. I am talking all the way back to armor and catapults to gunpowder based munitions, the blitzkrieg, rockets, planes, bombs, and of course nuclear weapons.
The thing is -- it is absolutely true, but it is always true, and therefore meaningless.
Lets look at the Gulf War for example -- the US lost 113 soldiers to the enemy (an addition 35 to friendly fire)... they killed "at least" 20,000 -- some estimates go as high as 35,000+(and an additional 3,500+ civilians). The asymmetry of modern warfare is nothing new, pointing to drones as some line in the sand is just, IMHO, silliness.
Words like "worse" and "should" are very loaded in this context. Was the blitzkrieg "worse" than the trench warfare of WW1? Was using nuclear weapons "worse" than firebombing (see: Firebombing of Toyko, Dresdon).
"Should" used to mean "probability or expectation", then yes, it "should" continue to to get "worse" (read: change).
War is a horrible endeavor at its very core. It will always be, we try to "civilize" it via rules that are always broken as soon as things become dire. It isn't the implements or efficiency that are the problem, but the waging of combat itself.
In fairness, US owned and piloted planes are very, very, very unlikely to be shot down. There is probably more risk of a crash landing on an aircraft carrier than any of those countries shooting one down. There is essentially no American Life risk.
Someone should have seen this coming a long time ago and called them multistage-guided-missiles or some other name.
The term 'Drone' is basically used as link bait and confuses the argument... If we replace 'drone' with 'stealth bomber', is it now OK to bomb a wedding?
> At the time, I had friends deployed and in my head, I thought that it's better we have UAVs than my friends coming home in bodybags...
But that's the thing: in my mind more human soldiers means less potential for outright slaughtering of civilians. So more drones might end up raising the body count. in the long run; not for US soldiers, but for people you'd miss just as much if you'd happen to be born as their friends.
To be specific, the impossibility of retaliation is what differentiates drone attacks from direct human attacks. The reason it is significant is exactly what the article points out. As the article says:
> Our policy persists because we put little value on the lives of foreign innocents.
Suppose, for argument's sake, that this is true: that America puts nearly no value on the lives of foreigners in the pursuit of foreign policy. Nevertheless, attacking so indiscriminately that weddings are targeted unknowingly would be unthinkable because of the tiny chance of retaliation. But with no chance of retaliation it becomes possible for depraved indifference to foreign lives to influence policy.
Now, you may not agree that American foreign policy is depraved in this fashion, but the REASON that many feel that drone strikes are morally different is because if it WAS depraved in this fashion, the use of drones would be different from the use of other military force.
doesn't have "civilians" as a game mechanic (unlike Counter-Strike or a lot of arcade shooting games, for example), so the comparison doesn't really work.
Very interesting point, one might argue that the soldier on the ground has more of a "justification" if civilians are killed than a drone, since in the former case the soldier's life was in potentially more danger.
When a robotic combat bot/UAV is used, it is significantly harder to justify civilian casualties as it then becomes a much more cold/calculated decision. Guess it then boils down to the "precision" that is available. I don't suppose a drone can take out a single occupant in a vehicle so it's minimum quantum attack size is an entire vehicle and hence the additional casualties.
This bot driven warfare is some scary ass technology with a huge potential for abuse. Even if a future UAVs could target a single individual, that type of technology would have any aspiring dictator salivating at the thought...
Regular aircraft are "expensive." They're literally expensive, in dollar terms, but even ignoring that they're logistically and operationally resource-intensive to operate. You only have so much airpower at your disposal, you're limited by flight deck space and pilot availability, you want to keep some in reserve, and aircraft are a bitch to maintain. Like, a week in service per day of flight time.
Basically, you default to not using them. You don't bust them out unless you have good reason to. You don't just cruise around looking for people who look suspicious, because that would be a tremendous waste of resources that could be better-spent elsewhere. Like transporting supplies for the troops on the ground. You only bust out the planes when you have solid, definitive, verified evidence that there is something that should get blown up.
Drones flip that around. You can't quite go cruisin' around just looking for stuff, but it's worth the time & effort to check out quite a few of your semi-sketchy tips. Now you're doing a lot more operations, on less-reliable intel, and the risk of cock-ups rises significantly. But because the drones are remote, none of that risk is borne by any member of the military performing the operations; all the extra risk falls on the local civilian population. I don't think many people partaking in these operations are intentionally heartless, but this is a classic case of moral hazard, and on the margin more aggressive, risk-taking behavior is incentivized.
Additionally, putting a drone in the sky is faster than putting a regular plane in the sky. This means that planes tend to be used only against 'static' targets, which gives you an opportunity to scout & verify. Drones allow you to hit 'time-sensitive' targets, which means you are now making time-sensitive decisions. A wedding party got hit because some dude had literally minutes (or less) to decide if a collection of vehicles was a wedding or an armed convoy. I take it as axiomatic that the added time-pressure increases the number of wrong decisions.
When you read hours of maintenance per flight hour, you should remember that much of the maintenance is done on parts which are being rebuilt off the airframe.
>Now you're doing a lot more operations, on less-reliable intel, and the risk of cock-ups rises significantly.
Please provide a citation for this claim, as it is not self evident. Many claim that the increased loiter time of UAVs allow for better timing and targeting, and there has been video evidence of this. You may be correct, but you still bear the burden of evidence when you make this claim.
>putting a drone in the sky is faster than putting a regular plane in the sky.
This is untrue, as the USA has had B1 and B52 bombers continuously in flight over Afghanistan for weeks on end at many points in the war, to provide air support for ground forces. Most strike aircraft and bombers are also much faster than the UAVs.
I think the point is that the drone strikes are happening in places where the US isn't even at war. They're just bombing any place they feel like and apparently not having a pilot sitting there seems to make it ok, or something...
I would think that it matters because the drones make killing more efficient (both in terms of financial costs and life-risk to the pilot). In other words, if manned aircraft were killing huge groups of innocents on their own, it would stand to reason that drones open the floodgates to exacerbating that problem.
That's a really good point, and I think that it come in the name "drone." These aircraft are NOT "drones." They do not perform menial labor and they are not "thoughtless." They do not perform automated attacks. These are units of force projection that the U.S. military uses as part of a psychological warfare campaign against citizens that it deems to be a threat (or, in other words, pretty much the entire planet).
We deploy drones in places where there are perceived terrorist threats. As you can see in collateral murder, all you have to do to be perceived as a threat is to be alive. This tells me that the U.S. government is overly paranoid.
Next, we are or will soon be deploying drones right here in the U.S. That tells me that the government perceives its own citizens as a threat or as a possible threat. This is backed up by the fact that they 'accidentally' collect U.S. citizen electronic communications.
The U.S. government makes far too many "accidents" for them to all be truly accidental.
Suppose I ask you how you feel about murdering babies. Then I ask you how you feel about terminating fetuses. The way that I phrase the question is going to influence how you respond. There is a difference between "job creators", "business owners", and "fat cats", even though each of them refers to the same thing.
Words are important, and language frames every issue. "Drones" as opposed to "unmanned aircraft" or "unmanned assault aircraft" is a huge difference in perception.
Which is exactly my point of course, "drone strikes" has a certain, extremely negative connotation. Making a big fuss how they "arnt really drones you see, its just force projection" smells a lot like "enhanced interrogation" and other attempts to euphanise atrocities behind some neat, sterile sounding language.
No I'm not arguing, my point is that the terminology is what makes people so comfortable with it. It's a lot easier to be angry about a pilot or a gunner accidentally killing someone than it is to get angry about a drone, because I think a lot of people believe that drones are autonomous craft that fly around without being piloted. It's in the name "drone."
I think that's why the U.S. military popularizes the term drone over "unmanned aircraft" which even then isn't true - it's a remotely manned aircraft.
Actually, the world isn't burning. Everyone should be glad if we're talking about a wedding party bombed as a single, rare incident - if the same pilots were doing proper bombardment instead of those drones, as in previous wars, then we'd have a bunch of wedding parties killed every day and they'd be invisible in the total casualty list of a major city firebombing or napalming of a few villages.
The 'world burning' today is ten times less of actual burning than in, say, US actions in Vietnam or Korea, and hundred times less than ww1/ww2 - I'm glad that the scale of suffering is shrinking so much.
I think this is the point. Because we're not putting our own lives at risk, we're actually getting more callous about it. This seems paradoxical, but I believe it's true.
This is an interesting point... I think it matters - possibly for a different reason. If you imagine from the ground: a terrorist car bomb VS a drone strike, they're virtually indistinguishable. Both are explosions without warning by the 'enemy.' It's almost a joke that people condemn terrorist acts and respond in kind.
That is exactly what they are doing. Terrorism is all about relatively minor, cheap, covert strikes against somebody perceived as the enemy.
The USA wont kill everyone that opposes them with such a campaign, but the point is the same as "terrorism", to send a message of fear if you dare oppose us, or associate with people who oppose us, damn the "collateral damage".
Make no bones about it, this is exactly the same kind of asymmetrical warfare that the USA itself condemns as terrorism.
I mean, yeah, that's what we're told. But the fact remains - drone strikes create terror. And on the other side, believing terrorist acts are simply to create terror is naive.
Who says that it does matter? I think the reaction would have been very similar if a manned aircraft had bombed the wedding party. Do you have any recent instances of mass civilian casualties resulting from a "conventional" bomb strike that got ignored?
Would you think we can apply this same argument when it happens to be an american wedding?? Hell no. drones or no drones, we will definitely have some policy changes and definitely some heads will roll.
It is probably easier to get pilots to bomb civilians with a Playstation controller in what looks and feels like a video game, than an actual person present.
It's not a question of "ease". Military pilots take orders; COs tell them how high to jump, and that's what they do. Either they follow orders or they are relieved of duty (and possibly face court martial).
Some drones are operated by a division of the CIA and are out of military control, however. This is probably the most worrisome aspect of the program.
However, as long as 99% of their targets are bad guys, Americans are going to continue supporting the program. It's zero risk for American pilots, and everyone likes to read about more dead terrorists with their morning coffee. More points to whoever's in charge.
Governments like Yemen's will also support it because #1 it does their dirty work for them, and #2 they can blame an evil foreign power. Win-win.
"However, as long as 99% of their targets are bad guys, Americans are going to continue supporting the program."
The problem here is that 100% of the targets are bad guys while seemingly a very low percentage of the casualties are. Americans continue to support the program because the media does not do it's job. Instead they act as a mouth piece, a cheer leader, instead of doing actual journalism.
The War on Terror, much like the War on Drugs, is a utter failure. It has ZERO chance of being successful because of tactics like this.
> Military pilots take orders; COs tell them how high to jump, and that's what they do.
Do you really think that the disconnection doesn't have an effect on some level? Whether it's the number of people signing up at all, being ready for a mission, or actually following orders?
How many people would follow the order of shooting from a controlled plane to unsuspecting people in a convoy -vs- an order to take a knife and kill an unarmed not resisting person in front of them? The end result is the same. Giving them enough distance just makes it much much easier.
I recently stumbled upon an excellent, but slightly dark, browser game which explores these kind of themes. You play the role of a military drone pilot going about his everyday menial tasks.
> Military pilots take orders; COs tell them how high to jump, and that's what they do. Either they follow orders or they are relieved of duty (and possibly face court martial).
Even so, and despite all the training, some do refuse orders. They're also at least theoretically obliged to refuse illegal orders (i.e. war crimes), at least in my country.
Different countries have different definitions of what constitutes a war crime, depending on what international treaties they are parties to. Bombing wedding parties would come under what is often referred to as the Principle of Proportionality, as laid out in Article 51 of Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions and Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
The United States is not a party to either treaty.
Protocol I and Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 are later agreements that added to the 1949 Conventions, the United States is not a party to either Protocol, though it is a party to all four of the 1949 Conventions.
I think the previous commenter was speaking on the level of disconnect between a drone pilot and their intended targets. It's much, much easier for someone to go through with clicking a button and watching an explosion on a screen than it is to say, murder each of those people if they were in the same room.
Tens of millions of civilians died during the two wars.
Tech equivalency is a meaningless concept and it is completely stupid to apply it in particular to WW2 where the majority of civilians never asked or wanted a war to begin with.
Soldiers do have trouble killing on the battlefield; have a read about "operant conditioning", a psychological technique used in modern training to overcome it.
General Marshall discovered after WW2 that only 15% of front-line soldiers even fired their weapon at the enemy. Even soldiers don't like to kill enemy troops in the middle of a battle!
Well, first, his claim was 25%, and while my understanding is that it did end up leading to changes in training, you should at least acknowledge the large disputes on how he reached that number (e.g. based almost entirely on interviews available to him opportunistically, no documented methodology, etc).
If terrorists disappeared tomorrow. Let's say we use our surgical strike weapons to target every cell every member, and in one hour they are gone. What would happen? Billions of dollars disappear from the pockets of everyone in the chain. Military contractors, drone maintenance, promotions, bonuses, career advancements, no more completed missions, medals, no job to go to.
So the direct financial and career incentive for everyone in the chain is to always make sure there is a stream of new terrorists, new cells, new intelligence chatter about "the Great Satan". And that is indirectly accomplished by indiscriminately bombing civilians. Everyone who is involved in picking the target and knows it is a funeral, will know civilians will die. I can't help but think they also know it is job insurance as well. They would be stupid not to.
American public via media has been tested enough during releases of so many atrocities, torture tapes, lies, monitoring that by now, I think they've built an accurate model of how much outrage will be generated and how much will actually threaten future operations, funding, reelection and so on (so far not much).
The bottom line, I don't even know and 100% believe them when they say these are all "mistakes". The incentives and the motivation, especially in the long term, is for them not to really care if civilians get bombed.
You realize that the fiction of a coherent "Military Industrial Complex" has been debunked several times right? One by the General Accounting Office showed that military contractors actually had higher profits in peacetime than wartime because they got money for 'research' and didn't have to actually produce any product.
Not that I necessarily buy in to the idea of "a coherent Military-Industrial Complex", but this doesn't really debunk much. It seems to me that peacetime profits for military contractors are dependent on the assumption that there's going to be wartime usage of the research they're doing in the short- to medium-term. Surely if we went a significant period without any military engagements, there would be far less of a push to fund the research of military contractors (I know that military research tends to make it into the consumer sphere and make us all better off, but that's definitely not what motivates the funding).
Except we don't live in that fantasy world. In reality there always is, and always has been, war looming on the horizon. Maybe we'll someday achieve a utopian, Star Trek like existence, but I don't imagine it will be anytime soon.
You misunderstand my comment. I'm not talking about a world in which war doesn't exist, but one in which a given country doesn't have constant military engagement. There's no need to think about whether this is possible, because there are plenty of countries for whom this is already true. Obviously many of these countries (Europe et al) are able to do this in large part _because_ of the US military, so I'm not suggesting that it's as simple as "we should stop having military engagements entirely". It's naive to think that we don't also reap benefits from being in a position of what's essentially military hegemony. But this doesn't really debunk the theory one might have about industry's role in ensuring that the US stays in this position.
EDIT to add: The binary way you're looking at it is also way off from reality; It seems self-evident that the more often one has military engagements, the easier it is to convince those in charge that more money should flow to military expenditures (which includes peacetime research). It's not the simple case of "constant war = military spending" vs "utopia = no military spending" that you're describing.
It's not a matter of knowing that a specific war is coming, it's a matter of preparing for what may come. Wars (or, at least, situations which require military intervention) happen all of the time. As such, we will always be preparing for the next one.
The point is that humans are always fighting with one another. Until that stops there will always be a war looming.
That's cute that you think there is an inherent existential threat imposed by the rest of the world that wasn't deliberately exacerbated by those interests who stand to profit from such conflict.
Well I'm flattered that you think I'm cute, but I'm not sure where you pulled any of the other nonsense you wrote from (I have an idea). I never made any of the arguments that you claim I have.
If you read the parent, he doesn't buy the debunking of the industrial military complex because, in a theoretical world where war is not a common occurrence, the conclusion doesn't hold water. Well, that's nice, but in the real world, war happens. A lot. It always has and it still does.
The reason for this is irrelevant. You talk about war being manufactured for personal gain (with no proof I would add, but whatever). True or not, it's irrelevant. We're talking about human nature here. Do you really think a time will come in which everyone is moral and good and wars cease to occur?
If you do then you believe that we will somehow alter whatever it is that brings people like this into existence. I hope you're right, but for now you're living in a fairy tale. I prefer to deal with reality as it is, not what I wish it were.
I didn't say it is coherent. Systems sometimes seem coherent, which feeds simplistic conspiracy theories (also serve as a straw man counter-argument). In reality complex systems are decentralized but often are evolving according to some rules. Those rules make it seem as it is a coherent large system. Think of an ant hill, a beehive, how large organizations are structured bureaucratically.
Chomsky, for example, analyses this in respect to the media. Large media ends up acting in sync with government's propaganda because there are set of constraints and incentive s built in. From outside they often act _as if_ they are centrally controlled by a single government party.
You know what would help "debunk" such a thing; if there was a site where every single investment made by any member of congress was required to be listed.
That sounds extremely unlikely. Most research projects don't get hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, while a single F-22 costs upwards of $150 million.
The total program cost of the F22 is $66 billion. On a Pentagon spending request site they put the per unit cost as $354 million if you include R&D and procurement costs. So maybe it's more likely than you might think.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You have made these accusations without any evidence. Be responsible and ethical and show us something real, if you have it. (note: I am not taking sides.)
There's really nothing extraordinary here; it's just boring old business-as-usual American politics.
Consider reactions to the idea that we cancel the Joint Strike Fighter program. Long story short, every politician who had a contractor working on the project in his constituency started making noise about all the jobs that would be lost if we were to shut down the program. No secret conspiracy; that was an open debate that happened in the public sector, and which many Americans were talking about over dinner.
Even the actual influencing of decisions to engage in hostilities is so everyday as to be unremarkable. For example, the big defense contractors spent a whole lot of money lobbying members of Congress to convince them that the 2009 Afghanisatan surge was a good idea. I think some wonks wrote columns about it in Foreign Policy magazine, but otherwise the news was barely even noticed.
As for how that leads to a sort of "continuous warfare" policy where we're always on the lookout for new enemies. . . I think that just emerges. If you've spending billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer money on some new toy, then at some point someone's going to start asking why. And of course if your job is tied to a project, the very last thing you're going to say is, "No reason, actually this is a pretty silly lark if you ask me." So folks start coming up with hypothetical adversaries, and starts inventing war games and conducting exercises built around these hypotheses. And things just sort of roll along from there.
We know that people go after profits. Nothing extraordinary here. What is extraordinary is the assertion that people acted unethically and (probably) also illegally.
Wall street traders were confronted with the proof that their speculation on produce futures was causing famine and actual, real deaths. They were aware, they just didn't care.
People acting unethically for profit is pretty much the American way, isn't it? It seems to me that if there's a buck in it and it's not illegal (or you can get away with it) it's pretty much justified in the US.
I don't think direct written orders have been issued to bomb civilians. What I believe is that it is left to be decided verbally or via other non-verbal signaling. Ex. "Make sure the job gets done well, wink, wink". Or just pay more per missions flown, and don't really bother punishing past mistakes. Pretty often "mistakes" become routine. Those in the chain very quickly assimilate incentive structures.
“They actually like deploying. So when you go visit them in Afghanistan, in the western Pacific, you don't get questions like, ‘Oh, shoot, what's sequester going to do to me?’ They know how to spell it, but that's about it. They want to know, ‘Hey, Commandant, you know, is this going to be the last deployment I'm going to get on, or am I going to actually be able to go to combat again or be able to go to WESTPAC (western pacific) again,” Amos said. “So our morale's pretty high right now, and I think it's going to stay high as long as we give them something to look forward to. The reorientation to the Pacific has just reenergized a lot of Marines as they think about Afghanistan: ‘My gosh, we're coming out of there in 2014. What's left?’ Well, we talk about Darwin, Australia. We talk about Japan. We talk about Guam. And their eyes light up.”
For how many years were people dismissed as nutjobs and "conspiracy theorists" when they talked about NSA spying? Now we know it was all true. Would you like to make a bet as to whether or not the US military-industrial complex acts in its own self-interest when comes to the "War on Terror"? When it comes down to it, there is nothing particularly "extraordinary" about these claims.
> You have made these accusations without any evidence.
The evidence is circumstantial and based on past behavior patterns of the US government. Read "Decent Interval" and its follow-up "Irreparable Harm" by Frank Snepp, or "State of War" by James Risen (for something more recent) to get started on this history. Again, there is nothing "extraordinary" about the previous poster's claims.
I don't really have one but if you must, it's probably someone with a dissociative disorder. I'm just noting that you don't have to be sane to be right.
>given that you would apparently apply it even to people who are correct about all of their theories.
It's a simple economic analysis. People tend (this word is important) to follow their incentives. If a person on welfare faces a high effective marginal tax when they start working (due to paying taxes plus losing benefits) they will not start working. If a CEO is compensated exclusively based on short-term share price, they will ramp up the share price even if they have to hurt the company to do it.
We have seen mountains of evidence that people follow their incentives even when those incentives lead to perverse, counter-productive behaviors. It's basically what the entire "Freakonomics" franchise is built on, for example.
We also know that the incentives faced by the military establishment are pushing toward more war, more violence. This is obvious, just look at the early '90s when we thought the world was going to be more peaceful. We cut back on military spending, military contractors howled and screamed.
So, while we have no direct evidence that anyone in the military establishment is willfully disregarding civilian casualties, we do have extremely strong inferential evidence that some people in the military establishment are likely to do so, now, in the past, and in the future.
Yes, the argument is logically wrong... but logic is not the only mental resource we have to make sense of the world. By example, if we agreed that the truth can only be called "truth" if it is derived by "logic", there would be no scientific method, and we would still be killing each other with swords because there is no logical way to figure out, let alone unmanned flying devices, but any sort of flying machine heavier than air. Instead, you would be arguing that it is "illogical" for a simple peasant to be able to kill a noble knight that has been training in the art of war for his whole life... so those damned crossbow mercenaries are cheating and ought not to exist.
And for the example you offer, judges' very job description require them to narrow down on a case by case basis, and to make a decision based on the evidence available, beyond reasonable doubt. The ethical principle that requires this to be so is that the asymmetry of power between the individual and the State is so big that it is most fair for the whole process to start with a bias in favor of the individual.
Other situations require a different kind of analysis. And the consequence to apply this level of precision to political analysis is that no analysis (and no criticism to the de-facto policies that are guarantied to emerge anyways in this vacum of knowledge) is ever possible.
Why is this logically wrong? I think it's a given that people/corporations follow economic incentives. We even have a legally binding phrase for that to protect shareholders. No one is making explicit accusations, just pointing out that privatizing certain industries (prisons, military, etc) can lead to perverse incentives.
Please explain why it is logically wrong, and also explain why an economic analysis of a situation has anything to do with being a judge. Judges don't use pure logic, they apply logic, and a whole bunch of other tools, to the law. My comments had nothing, repeat NOTHING, to do with the law. I was merely commenting on the reasonableness of assuming that certain things are happening behind (intentionally) closed doors within the military community.
This is not a question of whether some specific person is a bad person. It's a question of whether the current incentive scheme leads to certain aggregate behavior.
Care to point out which part of argument you find logically wrong ? I mean I find it correct and I find your hint actually hinting that you are not getting it.
Blowing up a wedding is not extraordinary? 'Not taking sides' doesn't cut it - you're either doing your bit to end drone strikes like these, or you are morally bankrupt. There is no fence sitting when civilians are being blown up.
Civilians are blown up in every war, drones did not create this problem, and eliminating UAVs will not end it. If you want people to be "doing your bit to end drone strikes", you should consider that the probable counter-factual is not an end to non-combatant (civilian) deaths; civilian mortality may increase, decrease, or stay the same, depending on what tactics are chosen to replace drones.
Sorry - by drone strikes I was actually incorrectly implying the broader picture. I mean end attacks on civilians in countries you are not even at war with. There really is no moral justification for blowing these people up. Even if they were terrorists, there is no way they could have done as much damage as the slaughter of a whole wedding. The 'cure' is far worse than the illness.
There were more civilians deaths thatn this. If you are saying that expected number of people killed by expected number of terrorists this wedding could possibly be 14 or higher then no, it couldn't. As side effect by blowing up civilians you are creating more resentment leading to more terrorists.
> If you are saying that expected number of people killed by expected number of terrorists this wedding could possibly be 14 or higher then no, it couldn't
Thanks for the clarification, I now understand your position. I will not address the normative moral views, because everyone should make up their own mind; and I have no evidence to either prove or falsify your statement about the likely consequences of the deaths, but it seems reasonably likely (to me).
Yes, but this isn't a war. It's a bunch of crude assassinations. There are no meaningful military objectives regrettably costing some civilian lives; these drone strikes are the primary act of war, and they accomplish nothing of value. They just breed more enemies.
Presumably the one that was either (a) initiated by the 9/11 attacks and formally recognized as already existing by Congress in Public Law 107-40, or (b) was provoked by the 9/11 attacks and declared by Congress in Public Law 107-40, depending on how you choose to look at it.
> What is the objective?
"to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by" "those nations, organizations, or persons [the President determines] planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001".
> What would have to happen for this 'war' to end?
Given the rather fluid definition in PL 107-40, it is not clear that it could formally and completely end absent a subsequent resolution of Congress terminating it.
The AUMF is not a declaration of war; it expressly avoids being called a "war" in much the same way as ye olde Vietnam. What it is is probably illegal under international law, but nobody has the standing to make the United States back down.
It most certainly is an exercise of Congress' Constitutional power to declare war. It may not be a formal declaration of war under international law, but those are two very different things.
> it expressly avoids being called a "war" in much the same way as ye olde Vietnam.
Vietnam was also a war for which Congress exercised its Constitutional power to declare war. See, e.g., Orlando v. Laird, 443 F.2d 1039 (2nd Cir., 1971).
> What it is is probably illegal under international law
Please cite the provision of international law (either a treaty to which the US is a party, or a generally accepted provision of customary international law -- and, if the latter, please also provide evidence that the cited principle is a generally accepted provision of customary international law) under which the AUMF itself is illegal.
So, as a New Zealander, I can hire some people to gun down innocents in the US and be on the moral high ground because I'm conducting a 'war' and not terrorism? Neato.
But they can take place in them, and, more to the point, the problem that needs to be addressed in the legalities of modern war is that modern wars, increasingly, don't have "zones" at all.
If you were actually at war with Pakistan, then civilian deaths there might be explainable as collateral damage. But last time I checked, they're a US ally. Killing innocent citizens of your allies is not an act of war, it's terrorism.
Well we'd need someone like Snowden that might leak or expose the decision process. We bomb people in countries we are not even at war with. We sentence people to death, and we keep tight control over how we do it. There is no public trial happening, no jury.
It seems to me that the incentives structure rewards a continued War On Terror. Everyone directly involved in it, tends to profit from maintaining it.
Also I refuse to blindly believe in the inherent goodness or extraordinary purity of heart of those involved. You ask for extraordinary evidence that they are incentivized to kill. Ok, I can also turn it around and take the point that those involved are by default bad, don't have pure motives, are evil and are motivated by money or desire to inflict pain and require extraordinary evidence to prove the opposite.
We have seen them lie time and time again. To the people, to Congress. At this point they have the burden of proof that their have good and pure motives at the core of their decision making. Sorry, they lost the confidence that once might have been placed in them.
Let me guess, you think there's a cure for cancer but the doctors are withholding it and Exxon Mobil bought the patent for a combustion engine that would achieve 100+ mpg.
Any industry that is built on addressing problems that people naturally have is going to generate lots of revenue.
It has been proven that people naturally fight with each other. People fight over race, religion, sports, politics, and territory. Nations do the same thing.
If you think it would end terrorism by killing all current terrorists and if you think it would even be possible, I think you're misguided.
It doesn't matter what he or you think is likely happening right now. The fact is there is a conflict of incentives and in such situations people act according to the ones the closest to their personal ones. We can't expect people to be heroes against their own personal interest.
It won't change until people in the chain have incentives to avoid war.
Now let's think how to accomplish it: maybe there should be huge tax on profits for military contractors in the time when operations are going ? Maybe private for-profit military contractors have to go in the first place ? Maybe we shouldn't pay them for every piece of equipment but only for time spent working ?
As to people in the field, there are some ideas as well like freezing all bonuses during the military operations and such. The thing is it has to be profitable for individuals involved to seek peace not war. The war machine is never going to stop otherwise. The balance should be such that once high command in charge feel it's necessary to start military operations they should meet at least some resistance from rest of the chain not "fuck yeah sir!" as it is now.
Hmm, now that is really interesting! My initial reaction to your question is, "Of course they're separate entities." But then the person I'm replying to probably thinks, "Of course they're a single entity."
Is that the true division between conspiracy-minded people and others?
I don't agree with rdtsc's either, and I am not "conspiracy-minded" just because I point out that your einstein-clown argument is fallacious.
Therefore I would not like to draw that line. I would however say it's a division between our views. I do believe that a government can be considered a single entity. Care to explain why you disagree?
The government is a collection of a lot of different entities with different views, resources, and goals. It doesn't make sense to me to say that e.g. the FDA and the NSA are part of the same entity.
Furthermore, what's being discussed involves non-government actors too. Exxon, doctors, and defense contractors are entities outside the government.
"Any industry that is built on addressing problems that people naturally have is going to generate lots of revenue."
And in the meantime, if they can make people think they have those problems, that would be even more revenue.
Like the pharmaceutical industry that sell you drugs for diseases you didn't even know existed. Or cigarettes manufacturers that want to solve your problem of not being addicted to nicotine...
I have to agree. Someone out there benefits from every single bad thing that happens out there: securities fraud, child abuse, cancer, money laundering, murder, etc, etc.
Using the same logic, nothing should ever get better because those who benefit from "bad things" will never allow them to be stopped.
The difference is, in the OP's argument, the people whose job it is to stop these bad things are also the ones who are benefitting from it. Normally, it is the police's job to stop child abuse. However, if the police force happens to be running the child abuse ring, they are not going to do anything to stop it themselves. In such a situation, there is no incentive for these things to stop.
(Note: I'm not convinced war profiteering is the driving motivator for the NSA, just pointing out the fallacy in your argument.)
> Using the same logic, nothing should ever get better because those who benefit from "bad things" will never allow them to be stopped.
Thats not true because it ignores existing structures of power.
A common thief benefits from the bad things they do, but has no power to influence those that might seek to stop him, and so is convicted.
A banker who committed fraud (read: stole) during the recent financial crisis has the power of capital and lobby behind them, and walks.
The existing structures of power in place are actually designed to stop many of the bad things you describe, however there is nothing intrinsically moral about them so they can be corrupted by capital and lobbyists.
Back in the 80's and 90's, people who insisted the NSA did all this or that really couldn't explain how the technology would work to do all that. People insisted spy satellites could read my newspaper, yada yada.
About 5 years ago, the chips, scale-out HW, storage and Linux (thanks submitters!) reached the point where the known daily capacity of information stream or their meta could be stored by someone like the NSA or Google.
One just needs to assume technical capabilities is what defines reality.
Usenet, before Sept 1993, carried the rumor that "the CIA" was archiving all Usenet posts.
I don't think that was too off-the-wall, even in 1988 or '89.
I can recall, although not google up, at least one back-of-the-envelope effort to figure out if some organization could store all internet traffic. I think the answer was "yes", and this was done maybe 5 years ago.
They might be, but that doesn't change the fact that they have the full legal power to pull the plug on this and that nobody else on the list has that.
I will continue to refuse to believe American military personnel choose to strike otherwise-collateral civilian targets.
You're talking about moral humans, here. Our soldiers/airmen/marines/sailors are not soulless automatons, nor are officers that develop strategy and provide direction. Nor would I consider their pay to be either incentive or motivation.
Then you're a fool. Operation Northwoods[1] talked about killing American civilians on American soil. It had the backing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the Secretary of Defense. So let's not think that there isn't precedent.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but there are immoral individuals in the US army, especially in the high ranks (where sociopath usually meet), like everywhere else.
They didn't choose to strike civilian targets. They played Xbox, high-fived then went home to their nice lives. That is why drone warfare is so terrifying. It makes evil into something banal.
Go watch one of those helicopter/drone/warthog strike video and listen to the guys talk. There is no compassion, no remorse, nothing. They are kids playing a video game, chuckles and trash talk included. If they could teabag them, they would.
What does your first sentence mean? Otherwise-collateral civilian targets? Let's say for arguments sake that no civilians were intentionally targeted. Why is it ok to kill civilians at all? And what civilian death rate is acceptable to you?
For once there are a lot of unethical humans as other posters point out but it really doesn't matter. The actions to kill people are often result of many relatively innocent decisions: increase funding here, agree to some military testing there, give a bit more secrecy to some people, some more decision making power to others, write some more allowing, aggressive sounding policies and suddenly everybody does what's "necessary" and people are killed.
If incentives are in place, nature will find the way even if you can't point to one single person who actually pulled the trigger.
Do they escape culpability if they do not ever choose to intentionally "strike otherwise-collateral civilian targets" but instead choose to take part in a process where there's a known error rate, and a certain amount of collateral damage will happen no matter what the intentions are?
A choice is being made in either case. Innocent people are being killed in either case.
Read this. Follow orders or get court marshalled. Its no surprise that after objections from pilots that they started singling out people who didn't give a shit about things like ethical objectives other than shooting their target accurately.
Possibly the first but its not like the USA is using indiscriminate area bombing like they did in Vietnam or the British using poison gas pre ww2 in Iraq.
What you say is absolutely true. But another large problem here is that the targeted countries' governments are ok with those strikes for the most part. Have you noticed that those strikes only happen in poor countries with little means of retaliation?
A large finance source for the Al-Nushra front in Africa is Jordan/Saudi Arabia. But those countries are allies to the US, so there are no drone strikes there. There are also no strikes in Iran or Syria.
Yemen government is very complicit to those strikes and it should at be mentioned in such articles.
Killing innocents from the air indiscriminately is pretty much terrorism by any definition of the word. The problem with this approach is that it turns moderates into people who hate you. If the someone bombed my family, I would hate them. It's pretty much human nature.
The article's premise is silly -- pure and simple. If you believe war is justified in some cases, then there will be casualties. If a wedding had been hit in Germany toward the beginning of WWII, would we say US involvement should have ceased?
Not a whole lot of choice - you want the US to just let the targets run around? Send a strike team in each time? Drop a real bomb or cruise missile (even more civilian casualties - those weapons are larger)?
What would your answer be if the "targets", instead of mysterious and scary terrorists in foreign lands, were regular boring murderers living in the US?
You know what? Yes. I do. Arrest them, try them, when they reach US soil and pose a risk to the security of the US. Until then, they aren't your problem.
It's very easy to not agree with the way the US government handles these sort of things, but you have to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are not doing this for shits and giggles.
It might seem nationalistic to some but it reminds me of a quote from "A Few Good Men" -
Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.
It's very easy to not agree with the way the North Korean government handles many things, but you have to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are not doing it for shits and giggles. After all, they have been at war for over 60 years now. It must be obvious to any patriotic Korean that the danger posed by American imperialists who still occupy the southern half of the country is ever-present and growing. Someone must guard those walls.
These types of comments are becoming the norm on HN. Perhaps someone should write a script that can generate the reciprocal of the parent like this... it'd be a neat weekend project :d
It's very easy to put it in terms of "Yeah, some civilian deaths are a necessary evil which we burden our conscience with. But we do it because we have to protect our civilians", but I think it's intellectually lazy.
Because the next question that should inevitably spring up is ok, ok, but why the fuck would someone in Yemen want to kill US citizens?
Once you start answering that question, the question of morality in drone strikes becomes a lot more difficult to answer.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of Al Qaeda type jihadists in Yemen who would very much like to kill U.S. citizens. Otherwise I'd agree with you that we shouldn't be there.
I think the point is that those jihadists in Yemen are the direct result of this sort of thing happening in their home towns. It's very easy to recruit someone when they just saw a whole bus of their friends and family being blown off by reasons they can't understand, from a robot in the sky, being controlled by someone miles away.
Taken at face value, US should go and bomb with these drones a whole lot of other people too. And no, they wouldn't be "jihadists". I'm sure there is many many people in the states that very much want to kill other U.S. citizens.
Feel good nothings like this that ignore both the power and profit of the defense industry are hopelessly naive.
I also don't see how blowing away teenagers in an Afghan village who have no idea what 9/11 is, is some kind of macho statement against oppression. Pretty soon, if not already, we'll be killing young people born after 9/11. Not sure if this is the big win the GOP 'defense first' voter thinks it is. Sounds like yet another failure in policy, much like the profitable war on drugs.
When we give the nation state carte blanche on both a moral and budgetary level, expect nothing but endless abuses of power. There are 150,000 Iraqi graves that wouldn't have existed if Bush was honest. Lets not forget that. If there's a global bad guy in Nicholson's speech people should defend against, its probably the US military, and I say this as a US citizen.
saves whose lives, and why should a few of "our side" be more valuable than many of the "bad guys" (which happen to include entire families including innocent women and children)?
It should be noted as well that the entire premise of the film wasn't "the ends justify the means" but rather the exact opposite. People can do great evil while believing that every action they take is fundamentally correct and for some kind of nebulous greater good.
you understand that Nicholson's character in that movie was intended to illustrate the hubris and dysfunction of militarism, right? Sorkin would be amazed (actually, probably not) to see that speech being used as an actual argument...the intention was the opposite.
Eh, saves lives inside, disregards lives outside.
I know it's a complicated matter, but that reasoning can't be used to justify atrocities such as this one.
Terrorism is a idea, it cannot be killed with bullets or drones.
The Terrorist we know today are a pretty much related to those people who were supported by American Intelligence agencies in the mid70-80s, against the soviet. The "Barbarians" among those folk were given advanced weapons, that America possessed, those weapons might be outdated, and America may have a upper hand, but that is only a matter of time. Sadly, this has became a chicken and egg problem.
The circle of REVENGE is a continuous one, you kill more people innocent or not, you sprout a new rebellion. They will eventually hurt you back, today or tomorrow. and the process will continue.. presidents, prime ministers would come and go by.
The only way to stop this is to actually STOP. Stop interference in ways like espoinage, drone strikes, killing of "Suspected" militants.. never given any right to appear before court.. everything. The root problem is the so called intelligence that does more than just collect information about "suspected" enemies.
Someone has to rise up and stop it. for both sides, perhaps it escape us humans sometimes, the very fact "those who are hurt are the ones who can forgive or take revenge." Thats about there it is to this.
Really sad to hear about that nameless bride/groom & family. May they R.I.P.
Not all that surpising. As was made clear during the Snowden leaks the USG doesn't consider human beings who aren't US citizens to have the same rights as Americans.
This is what I find the most troubling. I used to think the US was trying to still spread democracy worldwide but apparently internally they feel if you are foreign that means there arent any laws as to what we can and cant do.
What happens when a nation's revolutionary document becomes counterrevolutionary?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
There are two opposing views of the Declaration and the Constitution.
One view considers these documents to be the expression of the inclusive rights granted to the citizenship.
The other view considers these documents to be the definition of the extents and limits of federal and state powers.
The first view currently prevails but that was not always the case. Under the second view you can not waive your right to remain silent, or waive your right to unreasonable searches. In other words, being Mirandized doesn't grant the right. It's simply informing you of what you always have.
That's something important for you to realise. The next step is to understand that the US government didn't change much lately meaning that idea you had in your mind was never true since at least the end of the second world war. Then you get to wonder how you got to believe that in the first place.
You're right maybe it was a misunderstanding and maybe its misinformation but I couldve recalled Bush saying something along these lines about Iraq. I also believe some of my grade school teachers may have put these ideas in our head. I dont not fault them for it they were just trying to paint a rosy picture of America abroad.
Just so you anyone knows, not all americans feel the same as our govt. does.
Democracy is grown (locally), not "spread" by foreign intervention. The US didn't become a democracy itself by getting invaded. If anything, it was the opposite, it threw away the external power controlling it.
Here's something that will blow your mind. EVERY country considers its own citizens to have more rights than other countries. Otherwise we wouldn't have millions of people dying every year by preventable means. And there wouldn't be widespread despisement of refugees.
It's not all US citizens. Only well-connected, wealthy US citizens have rights. The rest of the US citizens are semi-disposable like the rest of the world.
While the above parent tree of comments is mostly correct, I can't help but feel like the commenters are just regurgitating sound-bite memes. I wish there were less of an echo chamber around here.
> Five of those killed were suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda, but the remainder were unconnected with the militancy, Yemeni security officials said."
> The New York Times reported in 2013 that the Obama Administration embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties, which in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.
So 5 people were of military-age and male? Given a size of 22 people, it sound reasonable. I wonder how many were children.
The business of considering all military-age males as combatants is really not all that surprising to me. I live in New York and here, in some neighborhoods, the police consider all minority males 14-40 (I really have no idea of the top end) to be suspected criminals worthy of a random search while simply walking down the street. This is the way we treat people. We deem one group of people to be a threat and they immediately lose their rights.
Edit: I seemed to have forgotten that it is black and hispanic males in New York who are stopped.
A minority male between 14 and 40 is more likely to mug someone than a 70 year old caucasian woman; that's not something made up by racist conservatives. But if there's such a thing as rights, they must apply even to higher-threat demographics.
One interesting exercise is thinking about base rates of mugging, and likelihood ratios for mugging, and discerning your own personal "4th amendment suspension" breaking point for each percentage.
I didn't call anyone a racist conservative. Also, I dont have a breaking point for "4th amendment suspension" in the case of people not suspected of a crime walking on a public street.
> people not suspected of a crime walking on a public street.
But they are suspected of a crime, because of their demographic category.
I should have explained the thought experiment more: Suppose future sociologists identify some identifiable cluster of traits that corresponds with a 99.9% likelihood of committing a mugging on any given day--if you see someone with these traits, it's overwhelmingly likely that they've either just mugged someone, or they're just about to mug someone.
With that level of certainty, you're either in favor of unreasonably searching them and seizing their mugging weapons (or some other intrusive measure like constant monitoring), or you're in favor of unnecessary muggings.
The reason this is a thought experiment is that no real-world identifiable group is that likely to commit crimes. But there is a measurable likelihood ratio, even if treating everyone equally is more important than it.
> The New York Times reported in 2013 that the Obama Administration embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties, which in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.
How fascinating.
Obviously we need to re-count the number killed during the 9/11 attacks - surely all military-age males killed were combatants - they were just fighting in a war they didn't know had started yet.
I think it is time for a world-wide ban on armed drones, period.
Just like we have international treaties for other horrible things like mustard gas.
Do all the reconnaissance you can get away with. But I don't want a tired, overworked, morally disconnected 20-something sitting in a trailer somewhere in the US, pulling a trigger to kill unquantifiable targets anywhere in the world. Or any other country doing it to anyone else for that matter.
I don't really understand the outrage over drones specifically. This constant bombing of foreign countries is terrible, but I don't understand why the "drones" part of it is also considered bad. Why is a tired, overworked, morally disconnected 20-something sitting in a trailer somewhere in the US worse than a tired, overworked, morally disconnected 20-something sitting in a cockpit of an F-16?
From a political point of view, drones are much more attractive than traditional methods. You won't see the corpses of dead Americans being dragged through Mogadishu with drones. You won't see captured pilots being paraded in front of a camera with drones.
We won't see captured pilots being paraded in front of a camera with regular piloted aircraft either, not ones flown by the US against any likely current target.
I suggest googling "how to make points in a less irritating and confrontational way than telling people that you suggest googling something".
In any case, I remember it fairly well, no need to look it up. Which current likely target is a heavily-armed state with a strong air defense system?
(North Korea is a possibility, although I have to wonder just how good their air defenses are these days. It also strikes me as a target where drones would be a great idea if it ever comes down to a shooting war.)
I'd also like to note that the F-117 shootdown didn't involve the pilot being captured, much less paraded in front of a camera, although he certainly could have been.
Cheaper, no risk to personnel, personnel don't need to leave the country and families, less public opposition in general means that drone strikes are far more likely to be used compared with conventional attacks even though logically there isn't much of an ethical difference (except for a breach of Geneva conventions by having drone operators stay in civilian areas) given that a strike occurs.
This is simply not true, the US has both signed and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention [1], though it still has to destroy some of their stockpile [2].
This piqued my interest. The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which outlaws the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons, was signed by the United States on the same day it was opened, January 13th 1993 [1]. It came into force in 1997.
I was cast into doubt by the same comment. The United States military does not make use of even things like pepper spray as a non-lethal weapon specifically because of being a signatory of treaties against use of any chemical warfare.
Pepper spray is useless in a combat situation. Wind and other factors mean that it could benefit your enemy more than you (same with other chemical weapons). Also, why bother when we have flash-bang grenades, sonic weapons, and white phosphorous. Not to mention, in war deadly force is authorized under even the most trivial of circumstances. Why pepper spray a guy and take a risk when you can shoot him and not take a risk?
If civilian police uses mace for small-scale arrests during riots, MP's could do the same thing for example during protests around embassies in non-war-but-dangerous circumstances. Except they don't.
I don't think the GP was suggesting dropping pepper gas bombs, or using mace cannons while storming an enemy outpost.
Then the military can call in the civilian authorities if its not a military matter and they can use whatever methods they deem appropriate. This isn't some kind of wonderful humanitarian gesture by the US military, its just proper role separation. If the shit hits the fan, its deadly force. You don't roll out soldiers for fun. They're trained to kill, not be cops.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the concept of banning armed droned, but I don't think the operators actually get to pick and choose the targets. I don't think the operators have much discretion at all. Those orders, especially orders to fire, likely come from a commanding officer. The same probably applies to fighter and bomber pilots too, though they may have more discretion when it comes to defending the aircraft.
As opposed to a wired fighter jock inbound in a fast mover who has only one pass before he bingo's and might have .5 seconds to decide if he should abort or not - having less pressure will result in better decisions.
It is articles like this that asks the reader to pierce media bias, and take a honest look at a conflict.
If an Qaeda militant had gone to US city and bombed a wedding where they suspected harbored US officer, how would that play out? 22 injured, 17 killed by Qaeda militants in boston. Terrorists mistakenly targeted a wedding, trying to go after 5 US officer.
If there were no propaganda in media, surely this would play out identical as this drone strike. No world leaders expressing their condemnation of the attacks, condolences, and solidarity. Military strikes kills huge groups of innocent civilians all the times in wars, so nothing to write about.
America's new moral standard? Better than Al Qaeda.
We should be striving for much better standards if the west is to have any moral authority. Not as bad as Russia, China or Al Qaeda is not good enough.
Then there are practical issues that indiscriminate attacks are liable to create as many enemies as they kill as sons, brothers and fathers are bereaved and decide to join the fight.
[Edit: I'm British not American and I'm not saying Britain is any better but I really hate the "we aren't as bad as something really bad" as a defence for either country's actions. We should do better].
What's your talley of innocent people killed in drone strikes and as "collateral damage" by the US. Do the people affected by those atrocities have the the right to act "in direct response" against the US? If this revenge motive justifies the US, does it not also justify the terrorists?
A great book to read on the decline of violence in the world:
The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined by Steven Pinker.
The Hacker News community should like it as it focuses on the stats and facts rather than anecdotal stories the media slings.
The main thesis: Violence (in nearly every form) has been on a precipitous decline in the modern era. War deaths (and civilian causalities) are at all time lows and still declining.
You're asking me if the US's geopolitical and military operations currently are increasing or decreasing total violence in the world. A tremendously complex question to answer accurately.
My answer (opinion) is this: On the whole I think the US has contributed to a decline in total violence in the world. Not to say there haven't been bad decisions along the way. Advances in military tactics and foreign aid policies have been aimed to decreased violence. As for an exact figure, that is impossible to know.
How many future wars were averted when the US won the nuclear arms race? How many civilian casualties are minimized with each advance in precision bombing over the last ~75 years of military aviation? How many wars have been averted through foreign political action (aid, coups, treaties, etc)?
Obviously those are unmeasurable in each discrete instance but the book I referenced above provides some aggregate statistics which, when correlated the US's rise as a world power, show a huge decline in worldwide violence (and not just in 1st world countries).
Just like a startup tries new tactics so does the US military and foreign policy organizations. And just like startups, some of those ideas fail miserably and look like ideas that should have never been tried in the first place :)
Would anybody be surprised, even sympathetic, if the families of the deceased joined Al Qaeda as a direct result of this? Americans killed their friends and family on a sacred day, and nothing would be more appropriate than seeing they pay for it. Such an atrocity is almost comical when you think that the reason it occurred was to stop Al Qaeda, ends up bolstering it. It's appalling on so many levels.
This certainly seems to be the way it plays out in countless ethnic and sectarian conflicts. I suppose my government is just arrogant enough to believe it's always going to be faster to the drone trigger than the terrorists are at reaching their objectives. I don't think it's a sustainable approach.
I dont know which is tarnishing the American image worse the use of drones strikes or the Snowden leaks. What happens when our allies start to even say enough is enough.
Exactly this. I'm not a US citizen and I can not remember the last time someone spoke about the United States as something we should emulate or as a country we should support. Political panels with topics like "Are the US still our allies?" are popping up around me and I personally wouldn't affirm that statement. There is an overall feeling of meddling in other people's affairs associated with most US actions nowadays.
Germany already has declined participating in the attack on Iraq, but still provides plenty of passive (possibly also some active, even though that would be illegal) support (logistics, allowing air bases) and most people still perceive it as the right action.
It is hard to find recent surveys on the topic and especially Transatlantic Trends seems to refuse to ask the question if Europe should continue to support US military actions further and focuses mainly on the NATO (neither drone strikes nor the Iraq War are NATO operations).
As someone not from the US, I despise what the NSA does (warrantless spying), but it's not even in the same league as these drone strikes. Not even close.
I don't understand why the rest of the world is OK with this. I really don't.
Now go and explain the difference between this incident and a terror attack without using the fact the the former has been carried out by a state while the later has been carried out by civilians.
A terror attack would have deliberately targeted the wedding convoy because it's a soft target and because of the fear it would inspire among civilian non-combatants.
Lets be honest here, if Bush were doing this the press and every damn Democrat in Congress would be up in arms and demanding halts and immediate investigations.
so a better title would be, If Bush were President we'd ground out fleet.
Really? My recollection of most of the Bush administration was that the Democrats were complete and total doormats for him. They basically laid out the red carpet for him to invade Iraq, which was far worse and far less justified than drone strikes.
Your recollection is correct. He caught a lot of heat for a lot of things but most of the military stuff was just accepted. Perhaps not quite as much as it is now however.
Bush continually did much more heinous shit on a constant almost daily basis than just a semi-accidental strike somewhere.
So no, not really. Republicans are the ones halting congress in every single way and doing what you just suggested. It is the entire point of the party. Regressivism is extremely easy, just fight against any changes and if someone ever actually manages to change anything your platform is to change it back. Republicans and Democrats do not do the same thing, I am so tired of hearing about this.
No, we'd insist that every wedding have a security drone to protect that wedding from other drones. When you ground drones, then only the terrorists have drones.
Drones aren't autonomous. They don't target anything. Weapons officers do.
Besides being plain wrong and bad reporting, dehumanizing (attributing it on the drone) shifts responsibility and makes it seem like problem is solvable by "fixing" drone or by grounding them.
I don't see why the author thinks we would ground our fleet. Police routinely and deliberately kill innocent people in the US, and we don't "ground our police force."
I seem to recall that the Obama Administration was going to restore America's image with the rest of the world -- the image that was presumably destroyed by W.
And just to make drive a little bit the point home: there are quite a few people suspected of terrorism in the US, like one French spy who blew the rainbow warrior, quite a few people from Viña del Mar, US citizen who passed through ESMA in Bs As, probably a few assassins from the mossad etc. And if a pressure cooker is a weapon of mass destruction, I'm pretty sure a hellfire is, too.
> Does anyone believe that, if not for our lethal drone program, the United States would've sent the Air Force or ground troops to fire on this wedding party?
The premise of the article is non-sensical. If we didn't have drones, would the airforce be bombing targets in Yemen? Undoubtedly.
Ok, although I fundamentally tend to disagree with much of American military policy - if there were people on that bus who had ties to Al Qaeda and american intelligence knew this...and those people were to cause further destruction if they weren't killed...then I just don't know.
I kind of imagine this like all of those movies about drug cartels where these incredibly rich families are leading semi-normal lives and then during a normal family event like a wedding, are attacked by the rival drug cartel. It sucks and looks really bad, but if you got involved in something illegal like Al Qaeda or the drug trade on a massive scale...didn't you kind of bring it on yourself?
Either way, more evidence needs to be shown for these kinds of attacks and why they are necessary?
They could have waited until after the wedding, when the Al Qaeda suspects were apart from the non-suspects, avoiding the risk of collateral damage. Just a thought.
Maybe, maybe not. We don't have all the intelligence...I guess we just have to hope that was the best call given the circumstances. Not saying that I'm happy that this happened though
Concretely, at our level, what could be done to prevent those things from happening? voting doesn't seem to be working (esp. for those of us who aren't american).
The problem is that our democracies are broken. Most people aren't well informed or unconcerned, and those who are don't have enough weight to make a difference.
Maybe we could find a way to make our democracies functioning better via public discussion on the internet.
We could imagine some kind of big political forum where logical reasoning would be enforced. Critical thinking would be encouraged. Rhetoric would be banned. Facts would be checked, politician would confront the public and each other on long and deep debates. Decisions would be taken collectively...
It's a fine dream. I've read about a few politics startup attempts but they disappeared off the face of the earth quickly (though I did see some guys asking for funding recently). It would be nice if some could share their stories, where they failed and what they did well.
Some people will always have more clout than others. Even here on Hacker News you have people with (I believe deservedly) more weight than others.
And that's where both the press and government seem to have a blind spot. Flying a drone autonomously for thousands of miles has been done in university-level projects, years ago. How long before some cheap drone launched from heck knows where drops a small explosive on a government building in the US? What will we do? Launch a global war, lashing out against an unknown assailant? Put drones over our skies to hunt unknown Bad Guy drones?
Drone warfare is the worst kind of undeclared war: It's highly prone to backlash, but so cheap it is irresistible to politicians and military leaders.
I strongly agree with this article, but is this the kind of article that belongs on HN? Is this political article really part of some new trend or otherwise noteworthy, or is it just an editorial that most of us agree with?
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
There's nothing intellectually gratifying about this story - it's an "outrage story".
That doesn't mean it's not important, just that it's not HN material.
I wouldn't count on it. The US govt has enough media lapdogs who would shout down any calls to ground the fleet. I predict we won't have much longer to wait before the hypothesis is tested.
He has loads of options other than that. Use some imagination.
- Employ soft power / carrots instead of sticks such as foreign aid and literacy education.
- Take actions that make people hate you less instead of more.
- Equip/arrange for the locals or neighbours to do your dirty work.
- Get a UN vote saying whatever you want to do.
- Arm the government, conditional on a transition to democracy over the course of ten years.
- Employ targeted bombings only on terrorist training camps, not on weddings.
- Convince, bribe or threaten local cultural and religious leaders to guide their followers away from whatever you want them away from.
- Divide the country along race, religious or class grounds and install a minority government that serves your interests.
- Place bounties on the heads of people you want killed and increase the payout until the free market takes care of things for you.
- Just let them take care of their own internal political issues and wait for the terrorists to reach the US or one of its allies before whacking them.
- Increase employment rates and workloads so people are too busy/tired to devote attention to trying to destroy america.
- Free bread / circuses / fast food / TV.
- Drugs in the water supply.
- Nuke the whole place as a warning to others.
- Adopt a realistic foreign policy that admits the inevitability of civilian deaths, occasional bad apples engaging in torture and executing prisoners etc. and just agree to monitor and set realistic targets regarding the number of civilian deaths etc.
- Do something low impact and ineffective and let the next president deal with it.
Killing innocent people at weddings does far more to create people who want to destroy the US than it does to reduce their numbers. Just think about it for a few seconds. Nothing short of complete genocide would be an effective actual implementation of this "justification".
FWIW, the correct response to terrorism is to do nothing militarily, and treat it as a crime problem with an intelligence aspect nationally. People in faraway lands have little capability to do the US any harm.
Doing nothing is a very good option, esp. versus sending bombs on weddings where maybe, according to "intelligence reports" (which should rather be called "reports from retards") a couple of "suspected terrorists" could be present.
Putting troops on the ground would be worse than doing nothing, but still better, less cowardly and maybe less error-prone than bombing from drones.
Using conventional weapons would actually be the worst option.
So out of (his own set of) four, he picked the 3rd worse.
Lets see our options are 1: do nothing, 2: involve the military through use of force.
I wonder what happened to plain old diplomacy. I guess that is too slow and seems ineffective. So is training the locals to fight their war. After all they all live in dark ages and only know how to use stones and sticks to fight. But we cannot put forward these options to general public so we are left with just two.
Even then I feel that more than Obama or any other politicians or military official it is the general public to blame. The public wants democracy but does not understand that democracy does not work out of the box. One needs to get involved to make it work properly. It is a good system but needs fixes. The problem with democracy is it treats my stupidity same as your intelligence and my apathy same as your concern. And as long as people like me hold majority there is not much others can do.
You can bet that someone in that group is already making plans for revenge, 10 years from now, when everyone has completely forgotten this incident ever happened.
We might pull out of other countries, but we'd pull over our own for sure then. "Well, we can't keep other countries safe... so we'll have to keep our own."
The day that we realize that all human beings are worthy of the same fundamental protections we take for granted, and act on this impulse, will be a great one indeed.
No, the message is "This is how much we treat innocent civilians who have done nothing wrong, so stop to think about how we treat people that we actually dislike."
It's nothing more than a form of terrorism, primarily against the American people.
@Waxjar - I'm saying that these drone strikes are not accidental. That they did not kill innocent people by accident. And that the point of the U.S. drone fleet has got nothing to do with stopping terrorists and that, in fact, the very existence of the U.S. drone fleet is itself an act of terror because it exists for no real purpose other than to frighten people who make the U.S. government angry.
I think it could, but I don't think so in this case. MAD, for instance, isn't an act of terror because it is only an existential threat. Most nuclear capable countries won't use their weapons because of MAD, and thus it actually provides a safety net.
No one, though, can really do anything about drone strikes. They just happen, seemingly at random, wherever we decide they should happen. And if we take out a civilian then we say "oops, these things happen" and so there are no repercussions, no one gets punished and it just keeps happening.
"Let us hit you with this stick, because if we start hitting you with the bigger stick, all the other ants will come teaming out of the woodwork and then there will be a real war going on".
This kind of argument just makes me want to violently throw up. There is absolutely no honor in using a remote drone to kill people from a distance. It is among the most despicable things a human being can do to another human being.
How about we make America take a really honorable position and say this to our American military friends: you are not allowed to kill anyone unless you've attempted, directly, to communicate with them - in their language - and discussed the reasons for their hostility directly, person to person. Only after this has occurred, and all other efforts to resolve the persons aggression, is the right to kill granted.
I'm sure we'd see all those fascist US military personnel take another look at their chosen career path if they did, indeed, have to use the mighty power of American technology, to communicate and make direct peace with the targetted individuals instead of decapitate them, fill them with lead, murder their children, injure and maim their relatives, disfigure the strangers who were simply in the area, at the wrong time ..
Weddings and funerals are actually targeted specifically because those events are two that even highly sought-after targets attend despite the dangers. Also, the subsequent funerals for those killed at the targeted wedding would then be targeted as well.
You can either agree or disagree, but if you feel the target is accurate based on your intelligence the venue doesn't really matter IMHO. Civilians will be killed no matter if it's a wedding, funeral or some other random day.
Would we have cared if bin Laden was attending a wedding?
Blackstone's formulation is one of the most important parts of English and American common law. At the point where it becomes acceptable and legal to knowingly murder innocent people in order to punish the guilty, all legitimacy is forfeit.
If Bin Laden had been attending a wedding, then ground troops would have been sent in, who would have made sure they killed him and left unarmed civilians alone. We know this, because that's what actually happened when they found him.
The question is why is this not being done in the same way in other cases, given that random killings of civilians are perhaps the best terrorist recruitment tool ever devised.
The question is why is this not being done in the same way in other cases, given that random killings of civilians are perhaps the best terrorist recruitment tool ever devised.
That's what happened the last time we found him (we tried airstrikes before) and it wasn't because we were worried about killing civilians, it's because we needed the job done, verified, more-so than your average middle-ranking terrorist.
Also, not an easy task to fly a Navy SEAL team around the world constantly to do operations like this. Not only does it risk their lives, but sometimes it's not even possible to get there physically or in enough time.
Also, somehow the terrorist were able to recruit before the US and it's allies "retaliated" with drone strikes. Sort of a chicken-and-egg problem but it would be crazy to blame terrorism on the killing of civilians that only took place.. because of actions of the terrorists.
>Weddings and funerals are actually targeted specifically because those events are two that even highly sought-after targets attend despite the dangers.
Or that's the BS excuse they say to support their actions.
Not to mention, that's not an excuse in the first place. Only someone brainwashed by constant BS spin would accept that.
If those "suspected targets" (hit in a sovereign country which is not at war with anyone, without due process and UN approval, not given a chance to surrender, and not doing anything at that specific time) gathered at kindergardens would it be OK to hit there? How are weddings any different?
We (speaking as a US citizen) are not the good guys any more than we're the bad guys, we're just guys doing our best to protect the interests of the country as a whole. Just as one day the Japanese were the bad guys and are now one of our closest ally's, morality and the high ground change as time and circumstances change.
They're not the bad guys anymore because they're not bombing and invading countries. They're good guys because they're peaceful with us and supply us with goods and services.
The morals of bombings and war didn't change. Their behavior changed. So yes, we could be the "good guys" if we stopped spying and shooting at every foreign nation. We could be the "good guys" if we stopped spying on every citizen, and stopped creating a domestic military force out of municipal police.
I expected down votes so I'm cool with the negative karma. However my point was not to agree with the tactic, only to point out that it wasn't like we (the US) hit a wedding convey by accident but rather it was targeted because it's (weddings/funerals) exploited by terrorists to travel and keep their movements concealed.
For some this would make the actions worse, however I appreciate the debate as it's worth having. Should we care about our enemies traditions and cultural beliefs when waging war?
What if we had bombed the heck out of them 20 min before\after the wedding? I understand you got to get them when you can, but it also seems like they could be a little nicer about it. They could let the wedding draw them out of hiding then start surveillance, and follow them back to their hiding place rather than start shooting immediately.
Sounds like they kind of already did this. Most news reports I read describe the target being hit on convoys heading to a wedding, I haven't heard of many that happen at the wedding site itself. Why don't we assume that all safeguards to protect civilians were ignored when planning and executing a strike?
While hitting a car in a convoy is relatively self contained, I would still consider that being engaged in wedding activities with many civilians in close proximity. If we find them at a wedding why not follow them for 10-24hrs take them on their way back to hiding. I am just saying shooting at targets in a crowd might make for a good action flick but poor real life as seen in the article where they killed 3x the number of people they were targeting and injured 4x the number of people they were targeting. Also remember those targeted were suspects not confirmed bad guys.
But America isn't a failed state with a UN task force in place and it is not common practice to take large amounts of weapons to a wedding.
This is a ASB (alien space bat) type of argument as used in many a sea-lion argument "obviously Hitler could have invaded the UK" (only if the ASB's destroyed the royal navy from orbit)
They're not autonomous, they're flown by pilots who just happen to not be sitting in the aircraft they're flying.
Manned aircraft have killed huge groups of innocent civilians more than once, but apparently that's fine because the pilot was sitting in the aircraft.