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Life as a drone operator
- humbleMouse 11y agoWow, this is heavy. Good article.
- RankingMember 11y agoThe ability to remotely kill and then go home to your family has to make the impact on operators (the ones with a conscience) so much worse. The buffer time of a flight back from a real deployment, however short, at least seems like it'd provide some time for reflection/rationalization/compartmentalization. The fact that these operators get shit on by their associates for being out of harm's way and expressing reservations about their mission can't be helping either.
- pavement 11y agoWe found out in the 1970's that flying home from Viet Nam was still too fast and still too much of an abrupt culture shock for many returning soldiers. Long slow boat rides and a quiet, personal welcome home seem to have the most success in easing people back to normal. That is, of course, as long as the theater/front wasn't actually IN the country you also happened to live in and call home. Small detail easily forgotten.
- 13of40 11y ago> The number was 1,626. Wow, that's more than half as many people as were killed in the 9/11 attacks. We should have this thing wrapped up by Christmas.
- dsfyu404ed 11y agoI'd just like to point out that they don't write an article about the guys that say "yeah, it's war but you carry out your orders whatever they are"
- dba7dba 11y agoIt's called agenda-driven journalism.
- Kristine1975 11y agoAh, the Nuremberg Defense.
- simonh 11y agoAaaand we're Godwined. Soldiers follow orders. The Nazis followed orders. Therefore all soldiers are Nazis. Well done. Congratulations. These people are not following orders 'whatever they are'. They're not attacking schools because the Taliban's leaders children go there, unlike oh, I don't know, say the Taliban who massacred 150 children at a school in Pakistan because soldier's children go there. They have rules of engagement defining how to determine if an order is legitimate and acceptable, which they are following, but of course the article never mentions that. Now fair enough, there are troubling incidents described in the article, but we're only get individual perspectives, nothing is really corroborated. I'd like to see more independent oversight of the drone programs. But flinging about Nuremberg analogies is hardly justified.
- atlantic 11y agoThe problem is that the US is using drones to kill people inside countries with whom they are not at war. If you declare war on a country, that does give you certain rights under the laws of war. But if there is no declaration of war, you can't go around abducting or killing people in foreign countries just because they are deemed suspicious. And declaring war "on terror" won't cut it either; that's basically equivalent to saying, "we are potentially at war with any country any time, when it suits us." Nor will saying "they're the bad guys and we are good," which is kindergarten-level argumentation. Or "we know they're terrorists but we can't share the evidence, just trust us." The media discusses the details of drone operations all the times, but omits to have this much more fundamental discussion about violating the borders of sovereign countries.
- jrcii 11y agoIf you're interested in this topic I highly recommend the 2014 film Good Kill.
- dba7dba 11y agoIf not for these high tech weaponry, A LOT of us who post on this website would be required to serve in an army. And if unlucky, called upon to try to kill someone. And if really unlucky, end up KIA or WIA. Because of these high tech weapons, wealthy western nations are able to maintain their sovereignty without requiring all fit males to serve in uniform for 2-3 years. The alternative to not having these high tech weapons is a man shooting another man to death. War is terrible. But that's life.
- jon-wood 11y agoThe alternative is to stop believing the west has all the answers and should impose them on the rest of the world, by force if necessary. We've been involved in countless wars, and few of them have resulted in the world being a better place to live.
- dba7dba 11y agoNo west does not have all the answers. But war will be with us no matter what.
- jon-wood 11y agoWhy? Your argument at first glance appears to be that there has always been war, so there always will be war. That isn't obligatory. We could decide that we're no longer going to engage in imposing our will by force, and our military will only be used in self defence. How long do you think extremists could keep up recruitment if we stopped pissing people off by killing their friends and family, often for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
- dba7dba 11y agoIt would be extremely naive to think that wars will stop once the conflict with or in ME goes away. Once that ME problem goes away (however unlikely), something ELSE will come up to cause wars to start. It could be water, economy, power.
- pdkl95 11y agoSpeaking of drone operators... If you can take the low-budget effects, I recommend watching the movie Sleep Dealer[1]. It is probably the best cyberpunk[2] film ever made; unfortunately, it never got a lot of attention. The film deals primarily with telepresence, with an emphasis on the remote operation of drones. Not just military drones, either; drones also enable "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" workers. [1] http://www.sleepdealer.com/ http://www.sleepdealer.com/ [2] A lot of people confuse cyberpunk with flashy tech and network shenanigans; Gibson describes cyberpunk as stories about the interstitial - the people caught in the cracks of "legitimate" society (consensus reality).
- Hortinstein 11y agothanks for this recommendation, this sounds really interesting. Would you stay it stands on the level of Primer for quality/budget film making?
- pdkl95 11y agoWhile Sleep Dealer had a bigger budget than Primer's $7000 (I still loved primer), as you can see in the trailer/etc they were obviously limited in the CG they could afford. I think they work around that limitation quite well. A mostly-spoiler-free example might be the "simstim social media" service: by looks it's pretty cheesy, but in concept it's a perfect caricature of modern monetized youtube. (from 2008, well before the modern "youtuber" phenomena). Some people may not like that it's in Spanish (subtitled). As a long-time fan of everything "cyberpunk", I stand by my claim that Sleep Dealer is the best cyberpunk film ever made - even if the filmmakers were dreaming somewhat larger than their budget.
- atemerev 11y agoWell, fully autonomous AI-operated drones are inevitable. Remote operated drones can be jammed. Autonomous drones can't. I think AI programmers won't have even that much concern about kills.
- CodingGuy 11y agoKilling should never be easy!
- simonh 11y agoNot for this kind of work. A self-flying drone isn't that much of a problem. They largely fly themselves already. The human operators are needed to evaluate the images coming from the drones, identify and prioritize targets and take the decision exactly where and when to attack. No AI in existence can automate those tasks.
- huuu 11y agoThere is a Dutch short tv movie about this: http://www.npo.nl/duivelse-dilemma-s/30-11-2011/POW_00416089 http://www.npo.nl/duivelse-dilemma-s/30-11-2011/POW_00416089 About what it takes to kill at work and be a dad at home.
- teddyh 11y ago“At this level of security you didn’t even call them people anymore. And they were probably doing stuff that only operatives would do. When they went home to their families in the evening they became people again, and when their little children looked up to them with their sweet shining eyes and said ‘Daddy, what did you do all day today?’ they just said, ‘I performed my duties as an operative,’ and left it at that.” — Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoI could've sworn I've already seen this same topic written about at least once over the past several years. Why does the Guardian think this is new?
- zelos 11y agoThe drone operators they interviewed are the same guys who wrote a letter to Obama recently calling the drone war "a recruitment tool for ISIS". http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/obama-drone-war-isis-recruitment-tool-air-force-whistleblowers http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/obama-drone-war...