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I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

theguardian.com

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Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#161

Post by coldtea »

dantheman wrote: post #141
rayiner wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fewer drone strikes are not necessarily in the national interest. Taking the horrors of drone strikes out of context is manipulative if we don't also consider the horrors of the alternative ways of achieving military objectives.

What military objectives - we are not at war with any of these countries.

>Why must war be against countries?

Because that's it's very definition.

>The types of activities being carried out in Yemen, Pakistan, etc, if state sanctioned, would be justification for war.

Activities like weddings, hospital operations and schooling?

>Does the fact that Yemen and Pakistan can't police themselves internally enough to stop these activities make military retaliation unjustified?

Is there anything concrete about those activities except "person X met person Y there, and person X is a terrorist" type of "intel", filtered and produced by various military agencies?

Or, let me put it another way: would it be ok to bomb some part of Oklahoma to kill Timothy McVey? Or are third world lives cheaper?

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#162

Post by kevinpet »

This article could just as well describing how war is conducted since we switched from all cotton to cotton-polyester blend utilities uniforms. It lets the reader assume that in some way drones are worse than non-drone warfare, without advancing any argument in that direction.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#163

Post by galois17 »

melling wrote: post #109
macspoofing wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. What war are we in currently?!

Are you playing the we never declared war game? We didn't declare war in Korea either. It was the Korean Conflict. Anyway, let's try not to run into the weeds playing games. It adds no value to the conversation.

USA and its allies are occupying two countries and they are fighting the local resistance. The occupied countries never threatened the offensive forces. Does it reminde you of anything similar that happened 70 years ago? And btw when was the last time that USA was in a war as a defensive force? When did the American soldiers defend their homes and their American soil?

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#164

Post by throwaway2048 »

mikeash wrote: post #116
sleepyK wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, the convenience of drones has made it much easier for countries to carry out strikes without any regard to the damage they will cause. In the past, the possibility of your soldiers dying on the ground was a huge deterrent to frivolous strikes. Today, drones conduct major strikes without paying any heed to international borders. Drones conduct missions nobody would have imagined possible a few years back…

Isn't that an aspect of air strikes in general, manned or unmanned, not something specific to drones?

airplanes are vastly more expensive to fly in terms of monitary risk and investment, and possible personel loss.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#165

Post by coldtea »

ck2 wrote: post #4

The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed. Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA? We need an international ban on armed…

>Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA?

Third world lives are cheaper. They are dark skinned and have different customs. They also dont value democracy. It serves them right.

/s

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#166

Post by wreegab »

neals wrote: post #11
fit2rule wrote: post #6

I think that one thing we 'normals' don't seem to understand, is that when you are in the business of killing, murdering, maiming other human beings, you're no longer really part of society. Society is determined by the survival of its members - start removing them, and you get a lesser society. That is obvious. But we in the 'normal' society don't have a clue what those in the 'murdering business society' really thi…

You seem very opinionated about this. I haven't given this as much thought as you have, but I think that doing something to protect your society from evil must count for something. Do you really see it as black and white as you describe it?

> "I think that doing something to protect your society from evil must count for something. Do you really see it as black and white as you describe it?"

There is something ironic in there.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#167

Post by anderspetersson »

All this criticism against drones. Drones are awesome.

I've worked on the ground in Afghanistan on a Mechanized Infantry Platoon. There's nothing more calming than hearing the buzz from a drone keeping an eye on the terrain from above and reporting to the TACP while you're on the ground. We where saved multiple times from running into ambushes and IEDs thanks to drones. Sure, Apache's could do the job as-well, but when they run out of fuel, and they do more often than a drone, you're on your own.

Sure, that's another mission from flying a drone to a compound in Pakistan and dropping some explosive on it, that I can not comment on since I have not seen the Intel behind those missions.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#168

Post by coldtea »

melling wrote: post #36
ck2 wrote: post #4

The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed. Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA? We need an international ban on armed…

There you go again ck2. One of your classic comments. We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible. The real solu…

>We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible.

I don't war a war at all. I want sovereign countries to be left to their own.

If there is a cross-country attack, then it can be handled either by the country's police (if it was by individuals acting on their own) or by a proper war operation.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#169

Post by dmix »

rayiner wrote: post #149
dantheman wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What military objectives - we are not at war with any of these countries.

Why must war be against countries? The types of activities being carried out in Yemen, Pakistan, etc, if state sanctioned, would be justification for war. Does the fact that Yemen and Pakistan can't police themselves internally enough to stop these activities make military retaliation unjustified? Would you feel better if we just declared war on Yemen and Pakistan?

But at the same time we can't go to war with a group that consists of very weakly affiliated individuals who don't actively threaten us at home.

The concept that Al Qaeda is a homogeneous group with a structured hierarchy ("#3 Al-qaeda leader killed") that threatens America has mostly been manufactured by the military and media:

http://c.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/reawakening-libert...

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#170

Post by 1457389 »

dspeyer wrote: post #97
1457389 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crucial difference is that drones are used in contexts where they have a very high false positive rate. It doesn't matter how accurate your missiles are if you are operating in an area where it is impossible to accurately identify targets. Considering the total lack of oversight and regulation on these secretive programs, it is unsurprising that they have the latitude to cause large amounts of civilian damage wit…

Do drones have a higher false positive rate than human-piloted air support? Numbers are going to be hard to come by -- the military doesn't want to reveal anything. Qualitatively, the Collateral Murder video that wikileaks posted a while back (in which a US helicopter gunned down a pair of Reuters reporters because they were carrying objects that could have been weapons) sounds very similar to what's described here.

The data on both are pretty much impossible to find. Having looked at a number of civilian think tank studies into the issue, even if you come up with a statistic like 3 militants killed per civilian (as reported in some studies) it is very hard to say how that compares to other methods, or if alternatives even exist. Most of the comparisons in support of drone ops are to the wholesale target:CIVCAS for the entire ground forces, which of course is inflated by actual engagements with enemies.

I think we should look at this in terms of whether or not we should even be operating with outright force in the hinterlands of Yemen or AfPak, where there are very high concentrations of civilians. "Kinetic operations" with high explosives are, in my opinion, highly inappropriate for dealing with insurgents hidden among the population. Our intelligence isn't good enough, and is often gleaned from huge leaps of SIGINT logic, leading to entire families being killed over nameless metadata correlations to suspected terrorist nodes.

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