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U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

eminetra.co.uk

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Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#201

Post by queuesorcs »

robertlagrant wrote: post #198
whydid wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much accountability do remote pilots have for incidents like this? I.e., is there an ammo budget? What happens if a pilot decides to "go GTA" and destroy things for fun?

> "go GTA" Is this an actual thing people think drone operators do? Surely the same that would happen to any military personnel who did the same with their weapons, except with a drone there's perfect camera footage to evidence it as well.

One of the other major things that made me want to offer any information I can is the lack of knowledge on the topic I’ve seen posted on here and places like Reddit. I just would never attempt to have an actual discussion on Reddit though. When you have a topic so shrouded in secrecy and the only articles that people see about them are articles like these, it’s not too surprising though. There’s just so many variables to account for from the administration in office during the strike, to the human managers that happened to be on the clock at the time.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#202

Post by juanani »

queuesorcs wrote: post #157

As much as I love to check hackernews, I’m not normally able to chime in with relevant information on most topics. I feel like this may be one where I can actually do that though as I’m former military and my job directly related to drones on a daily basis. Depending on what’s asked, I may not be able to answer but I’d love to help by sharing any knowledge or information on the subject that I can as I’ve gained so mu…

What's the mood like? Are people excited to plug in and kill the baddies? Or is it just another day in the office yada yada Mondays are the worst? Do you prefer operators with previous gaming experience? Were there ever any operators that refused mission orders? how hard would it be for someone(higher ranking) to override an operators mission?

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#203

Post by voakbasda »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #191
dTal wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nestled in between "malice" and "honest mistake" is "criminal negligence". When you put yourself in that position - when you invade a country - every resulting civilian casualty is on you. You do not have the moral standing to decide what is and is not acceptable "collateral damage". War is hell, but you chose to make war there. The civilians didn't. >the Taliban and its allies were responsible for 76% of civilian ca…

And every time we slaughtered a family in the middle east over the last 20+ years we've given a man or a son or an uncle with no remaining family a reason to hate the US and to revolt against it. There are almost certainly more Taliban and other terrorist group members who have a legitimate reason to dislike the US than there were 20 years ago.

The “war on terror” was not meant to stop terrorism. It was meant to fan the flames and give the US an endless war that can be fought for generations. And it worked.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#204

Post by CapricornNoble »

lifeformed wrote: post #176
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never malice. Nobody goes, "hey, this compound is 100% only women and children, let's bomb it." Reality: "A patrol nearby said they took fire from the compound at such and such grid coordinates" It gets bombed. Turns out the unit on the ground was mistaken. War is hell. War criminals should be punished. But it's not a war crime to make a mistake. I love seeing these posts because it's clear that almost nobody he…

Maybe not malice but also not just simply accidents - more like negligence. We can't dismiss mistakes in war as simply a cost of doing business. > But one side tries it's best to be accountable and limit human suffering while still carrying out missions. Is that side really doing their "best"? I feel like a lot of these mistakes are avoidable with better procedures, training, and reducing being in situations where mi…

>>>We can't dismiss mistakes in war as simply a cost of doing business.

When you are putting fallible human beings into the most stressful and demanding situations imaginable, it's unreasonable to NOT factor in a baseline level of human error.

>>>I feel like a lot of these mistakes are avoidable with better procedures, training,

What specific procedures would you like to adjust? Escalation of Force? Rules of Engagement? The entire Joint fires killchain?

https://warontherocks.com/2017/05/its-about-time-the-pressin...

>>>I'm not expecting a war to go perfectly but is tens of thousands of accidental civilian killings the best we can do?

Against adversaries that actively use the civilian population as human shields, or who pretend to be civilians themselves to exploit our ROE? Yeah, that's a decently low casualty rate for TWO DECADES of dropping bombs on a country, across countless thousands of aircraft sorties.

It's still led to some technical solutions to the problem of collateral damage, which is why we have the Small Diameter Bomb family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-39_Small_Diameter_Bomb

and also the R9X variant of the Hellfire missile: https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/ag...

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#205

Post by Splendor »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #170
ricardobeat wrote: post #71

Having watched a few documentaries on the war, from multiple periods, my first thought was “who did they target with these drone strikes?” seeing as they usually had no idea who or where the enemy was. The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes.

> These should be considered war crimes. It's not a war crime unless you lose the war.

The US didn't exactly "win".

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#206

Post by DangitBobby »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #131
blitzar wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “We killed two innocent men and a charger,” the U.S. official wrote in a personal journal that day, using the military jargon “charger,” which means child. Got to wonder why the need to replace a 5 character 1 syllable word with a longer 7 character 2 syllable word, a little easier to stomach than saying, writing, or feeling like you just killed a child?

Just a guess, but it could also be because "charger" is easier to decipher over a bad radio connection.

My guess is saying you killed a child makes you sick to your stomach and it's easier to say charger.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#207

Post by bzbarsky »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #75

You know the worst thing about this, and everything else that's happened in Afghanistan in the past 20 years? The Taliban unconditionally surrendered in 2001: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/08/18/taliban-surren... Talk about a waste: of lives, of money, of time, of effort that could have gone to far more productive purposes.

Per https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/07/news/rumsfeld-rejects-pla... which I think is describing the same incident it was not an "unconditional surrender", though it was somewhat close: the conditions were about immunity from prosecution or punishment for Mullah Mohammed Omar (Taliban's leader at the time).

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#208

Post by DangitBobby »

EMM_386 wrote: post #128
Laremere wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a similar vein, I wonder if medical privacy laws are hurting us in this pandemic. If every time the hospitals filled up with patients, camera crews went through and documented all of the people suffering and dying, would those who aren't taking the pandemic seriously have their mind swayed? Obviously those medical privacy laws exist for a reason, but perhaps there should be more effort to ethically document suffer…

There are many documentary videos inside ERs during the pandemic. They blur the faces of everyone who has not consented to be on camera. In one I recently saw, they interview some very sick patients. They have to use walkie-talkies to speak to them from outside the room. Some of them are having a lot of trouble breathing but still say they don't regret getting the vaccine as they don't trust it. Videos like this. htt…

Wow, the comments on that video. We are just so clueless.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#209

Post by CapricornNoble »

enriquto wrote: post #151
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never malice. Nobody goes, "hey, this compound is 100% only women and children, let's bomb it." Reality: "A patrol nearby said they took fire from the compound at such and such grid coordinates" It gets bombed. Turns out the unit on the ground was mistaken. War is hell. War criminals should be punished. But it's not a war crime to make a mistake. I love seeing these posts because it's clear that almost nobody he…

> But it's not a war crime to make a mistake. I suppose that you are from the USA and your family is living there. Imagine that some afghan-controlled drone intended to kill some U.S. soldiers (a legitimate target because they are enemy combatants). But instead they kill your family. If it was a mistake, by the own account of the drone operator, would you still maintain that the killing of your whole family was not a…

>>>If it was a mistake, by the own account of the drone operator, would you still maintain that the killing of your whole family was not a war crime?

That's not a war CRIME, that's just war. If/when the shooting eventually starts with the Chinese (or the North Koreans), I and my family live down the street from some of the likeliest theater ballistic missile targets in the region. If an errant TBM levels my apartment building, I'll absolutely do everything I can to terminate the enemy soldiers with extreme prejudice...but I recognize that they are doing their jobs, and unless it is proven they were clearly aiming for a civilian target (such as a sports event), then no, I wouldn't consider their acts CRIMINAL.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#210

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

voakbasda wrote: post #203
AlwaysRock wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And every time we slaughtered a family in the middle east over the last 20+ years we've given a man or a son or an uncle with no remaining family a reason to hate the US and to revolt against it. There are almost certainly more Taliban and other terrorist group members who have a legitimate reason to dislike the US than there were 20 years ago.

The “war on terror” was not meant to stop terrorism. It was meant to fan the flames and give the US an endless war that can be fought for generations. And it worked.

Source please.
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