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Drones and the rise of the high tech assassins

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Re: Drones and the rise of the high tech assassins

#151

Post by hereonbusiness »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #109
hereonbusiness wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The beginning of the 21st century shall always be remembered as the moment humanity became really sophisticated at killing poor people who live in mud houses from far far away.

Realistically, I think that will be a footnote to the explosion of computers and the Internet - and not because the "winner writes history"(which is rapidly becoming moot as time goes on) but because in the grand scheme of things it's nearly inconsequential compared to developments in doing the exact opposite of killing. Your notion also ignores the fact that the reason this exists in the first place is partially the…

> Realistically, I think that will be a footnote to the explosion of computers and the Internet.

> Your notion also ignores the fact that the reason this exists in the first place is partially the desire to eliminate collateral damage, not perpetuate more of it.

Well we'll see, human lives do seem like they're not worth much, especially those in the 3rd world, out of sight out of mind like another poster said. I mean you could probably kill a lot more of those people with the world standing idly by as long as you have some kind of justification, they can be invaded, bombed, displaced, held indefinitely and tortured with impunity, but now they are trying really hard to only kill as many of them as they really want to, are they not merciful ...

But what is the end goal here, what do they hope to accomplish, when will the killing end?

I think that the US government is in somewhat of a pickle, the war on terror is now being fought for more than a decade, has cost trillions of dollars and thousands of soldiers lives, and for what? There's no end in sight, no easy way out, heck we may be even worse off than before, we have an Al Qaeda offshoot building a state of their own as we speak. You can't just pull out completely and cut your losses because this might come back to haunt us all. The only thing they seem to be able to come up with right now is to further streamline killing to prolong the status quo as long as possible, and even that doesn't seem to be going well.

How the hell are we going to resolve this?

Or maybe I'm just crazy and this will all just blow over after a couple more years of targeted killings, all those islamists may just give up and go home to live peaceful lives, who knows.

Re: Drones and the rise of the high tech assassins

#152

Post by hereonbusiness »

josefresco wrote: post #100
hereonbusiness wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The beginning of the 21st century shall always be remembered as the moment humanity became really sophisticated at killing poor people who live in mud houses from far far away.

...poor people with incredibly wealthy friends who fund their misdeeds. So yeah, relatively speaking they (the foot soldiers) may be poor but those controlling all sides are not. And I'd say the 90's was the beginning of the "cruise missile" guided bomb era of warfare.

So you're saying we should just go and kill those incredibly wealthy friends of theirs instead of bothering with the foot soldiers?

Re: Drones and the rise of the high tech assassins

#153

Post by knowaveragejoe »

dalke wrote: post #148
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worth making the distinction among the people killed in addition to the target. These guys aren't just sitting alone in some hut, nor are they exclusively surrounded by innocent families. They're on top of a hierarchy of militants. I say this worth knowing because even if we assume these were all 100% innocent civilians, this rate of collateral damage is far better than has ever been achieved in an armed…

We don't know these numbers. The US government uses numbers with a horrible baseline, or at the very least, one that is very different than used for previous wars. In the recent ISIS bombings, for example: > Washington also continues to insist it cannot confirm a single noncombatant death from more than 1,100 airstrikes against Islamic State targets — despite a number of apparently well-documented cases of error or c…

> I know that you are over exaggerating when you say "this rate of collateral damage is far better than has ever been achieved in an armed conflict" because there have been had wars with no casualties at all ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodless_war ).

I'm not sure why you even included this. Of course we're talking about conflicts where there is bloodshed.

> Even in wars with casualties, the first Gulf War had some 3,500 civilian casualties in Iraq, and about ~25K military casualties. That's 1 civilian killed for every 10 military.

The first gulf war was against an organized military and it lasted for roughly 4 months. It wasn't a long term occupation with ISAF essentially playing peacekeepers within the country. The US basically destroyed most of the Iraqi military and then withdrew after a peace agreement was struck.

The Iraqi military the US faced during the invasion in 2003 was a shadow of its former self, and during the occupation obviously they were fighting an insurgency. It's a terrible comparison. A more suitable example might be the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which is similar in many important respects, but the doctrine followed by each military was vastly different. The Soviets killed indiscriminately during their occupation. Their strategy was generally to seek out and kill every person in the direction from which they were shot at. This very article shows that there are multiple levels of approval that must be sought before the order to kill is given. Obviously, it has flaws, but it's not even in the same ballpark was the "conventional" way of doing things.

Re: Drones and the rise of the high tech assassins

#154

Post by [deleted] »

sergiosgc wrote: post #14
newman8r wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the question to be asking - it's only a matter of time. I think the only way to fight it is if the good guys are smarter and create the tech to protect us from these potential murders just like our immune system protects us from intruders

This is not the question to be asking. Not at all The robotic fly question describes a future danger of unknown magnitude. We, western societies, must ask the same question the article hints at: How can we be murdering innocents in the name of democracy? It's happening now, not in some future, it is actionable by us and it affects innocent lives both directly and indirectly.

[deleted]

Re: Drones and the rise of the high tech assassins

#155

Post by newman8r »

sergiosgc wrote: post #14
newman8r wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the question to be asking - it's only a matter of time. I think the only way to fight it is if the good guys are smarter and create the tech to protect us from these potential murders just like our immune system protects us from intruders

This is not the question to be asking. Not at all The robotic fly question describes a future danger of unknown magnitude. We, western societies, must ask the same question the article hints at: How can we be murdering innocents in the name of democracy? It's happening now, not in some future, it is actionable by us and it affects innocent lives both directly and indirectly.

I wasn't referring to the fly per se - but at the thought of privately owned drones committing crimes in the united states.

You are right that military use is a real and existing problem and thus clearly deserves more actual resources + action

I think the idea of this happening domestically in the US is just terrifying. I know that's a selfish thing because we are essentially doing it to other nations but it seems like more of an inevitability than something to put off before it becomes a problem.

Re: Drones and the rise of the high tech assassins

#156

Post by newman8r »

jessaustin wrote: post #74
newman8r wrote: post #10

I have been talking about this a lot with my friends. The question I raise is: when is the first private drone murder going to happen in the US and what will the implications be? There was a great ted talk on this http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_suarez_the_kill_decision_sho... It's really not even something that's technically difficult. I am just thankful the best minds in the US tend to have plenty of healthy outlet…

...when is the first private drone murder going to happen in the US... Can we really assume it hasn't happened already? Of course we can imagine some users of killerdeathdrones that would be proud of themselves and would want to make it clear that no person is truly safe. Other purposes would be predicated on secrecy and uncertainty. At least until they work most of the bugs out, the first drone murderers will probab…

true, maybe it has already happened. I guess we probably wouldn't really know until one messed up.

Re: Drones and the rise of the high tech assassins

#158

Post by dalke »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #153
dalke wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know these numbers. The US government uses numbers with a horrible baseline, or at the very least, one that is very different than used for previous wars. In the recent ISIS bombings, for example: > Washington also continues to insist it cannot confirm a single noncombatant death from more than 1,100 airstrikes against Islamic State targets — despite a number of apparently well-documented cases of error or c…

> I know that you are over exaggerating when you say "this rate of collateral damage is far better than has ever been achieved in an armed conflict" because there have been had wars with no casualties at all ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodless_war ). I'm not sure why you even included this. Of course we're talking about conflicts where there is bloodshed. > Even in wars with casualties, the first Gulf War had so…

You said "has been achieved in an armed conflict". That's an exaggeration because 'armed conflict' is so very broad, and includes bloodless wars. You've qualified it now with "has been achieved in long term occupation by peacekeepers." I agree that if you narrow the definition enough, you can make it be correct.

(I should have included the Falklands War as a war with few innocent/non-combatant civilian deaths compared to military deaths. Argentina lost 649 people as part of their military force, the UK 255, and three Falklands civilians died, from friendly fire.)

There's little need to look towards Soviet occupation for a comparison. We did long term occupations of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924) (http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a491390.pdf is the best document I found on the occupation; most other references are to the 1965-1966 occupation) and Haiti (1915-1934), which was publicly described as a mission to 're-establish peace and order'. We also controlled the Philippines from 1902 to 1946. There was insurgent opposition in all three places. By comparison, the US response in Iraq is indeed much better than General Smith's order to "KILL EVERY ONE OVER TEN" as part of the American atrocities in the Philippines.

In any case, when you talk about long-term peacekeeper forces, you need to include things like the UN peacekeepers on Cyprus, who have helped prevent sectarian conflict between ethnically Greek and Turkish Cypriots. And done so with very few casualties. (Go ahead and add another qualifier, in that the UNFICYP has only 1,000 people.)

But put all that aside. When you write "this rate of collateral damage is far better than has ever been achieved in an armed conflict" ... how do you know? How do you measure collateral damage? Whose numbers do you trust, and why?

Re: Drones and the rise of the high tech assassins

#159

Post by shangxiao »

shangxiao wrote: post #115
outworlder wrote: post #59

I don't really think the drones are the problem. The problems are: - Lack of intelligence. The drone may be hovering overhead, but you still need local intel. Which is unrealiable - The weapons are not designed for the task. A hellfire missile is not the right weapon to target a single individual. There will be collateral damage unless the target is standing in a deserted area by himself. Also, while the hellfire may…

Let's not ignore the disgusting gun-ho attitude of these "pilots" who are looking for any excuse to pull that trigger and ignoring any possibility that these were civilians. "I was hoping we could make a rifle out. Never mind." "Yeah, review that shit . . . Why didn’t he say possible child, why are they so quick to call fucking kids but not to call shit a rifle."

I guess the people who downvoted this like to ignore the facts hey.

Re: Drones and the rise of the high tech assassins

#160

Post by knowaveragejoe »

lucio wrote: post #157
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also an advertisement for a Call of Duty game.

I know, but it is actually viable with current technology.

Well, sure, but with major caveats. That quadrotor would never work, there's no way it could carry a machine gun and much ammunition with a battery powered motor. Not to mention the problems of recoil in a (relatively) frictionless environment, telemetry, etc. It would look a lot more like the MQ-8 firescout, which is a hell of a lot bigger/louder/expensive than that. A small drone like that carrying lethal weaponry and being effective is still a ways off.
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