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I finished watching "13 Hours" last night, a movie about the Benghazi events. The use of drones to kill indirect threats is ubiquitous and yet when it came to s

I finished watching "13 Hours" last night, a movie about the Benghazi events. The use of drones to kill indirect threats is ubiquitous and yet when it came to saving Americans citizens, drones suddenly weren't in use? dafuq.

dogma1138 10y ago
Drone strikes are arranged and approved weeks and even months in advance it's not like the US has an army of drones waiting to strike at targets of opportunity. Also allot of the "drone strikes" that happen over pakistan aren't actually drone strikes it's just more convenient to both Pakistan and the US to claim that no manned aircraft are used but quite a few released/leaked BDA images show craters that are way too big for AGM-114's and even the GBU-12's which is the biggest thing that US drones can currently carry. While some of the craters might be caused due to secondaries many of them don't show the tell signs of being secondary explosions. But onto Benghazi drones wouldn't really help, drones won't stop mobs of 100's of people with AK47's storming a compound, even full on CAS with gunships could had very little effect on the end result as far as US casualties go, the people storming the both the embassy and the secondary "support compound" were doing it knowing that they will most likely die in the process. These aren't regular armies that when they suffer even high single digit %'s force depletion sound the retreat because it would be foolish to stay otherwise.
mtgx 10y ago
What's scary is that most still don't seem to realize how much worse this will be made by autonomous killer robots. They're already killing people essentially based on an algorithm, that may have only a 51% chance of identifying the "right target" (that's the logic they use to spy on Americans, too). They've already admitted to targeting people with drone strikes based on the phone SIM alone, which is not much better than targeting someone based on their IP address. But now they would be able to just build that into an autonomous drone, and allow it to kill anyone it meets that has a 51%+ chance of being a "bad guy". Truly scary stuff, which many still seem to excuse with nonsense such as "yeah, but they would've killed those guys just the same with Apache helicopters!". No, they wouldn't. They would only target the most important targets and the ones they are most sure it's who they think they are. With autonomous killer drones they can just launch 1,000 of them upon a country and allow them to kill anyone on sight that has whatever chance of being a target is implemented into their code. It's also the same BS excuse people used post-Snowden revelations: "But NSA has always spied on a few dictators and rival countries - surely that's just the same as them now spying on everything billions of people are doing every day, storing everything for decades, and from all ally countries as well? Right?!" And that's without even discussing the possibility of these machines being hacked, or having software bugs (which they'll probably use as an excuse everytime they get caught killing innocent people by the media - "Whoopsie, a software bug just killed 20 innocent people - What ya gonna do? - What's important is that nobody takes responsibility and gets punished for it now..."
barneygumble742 10y ago
How would drone strikes have saved the americans inside the compound? How can drones be deployed so quickly at a moments notice, let alone get near their target in a reasonable time? You're thinking of Iron Man. We're not there...yet.

dogma1138 10y ago

Drone strikes are arranged and approved weeks and even months in advance it's not like the US has an army of drones waiting to strike at targets of opportunity. Also allot of the "drone strikes" that happen over pakistan aren't actually drone strikes it's just more convenient to both Pakistan and the US to claim that no manned aircraft are used but quite a few released/leaked BDA images show craters that are way too big for AGM-114's and even the GBU-12's which is the biggest thing that US drones can currently carry. While some of the craters might be caused due to secondaries many of them don't show the tell signs of being secondary explosions. But onto Benghazi drones wouldn't really help, drones won't stop mobs of 100's of people with AK47's storming a compound, even full on CAS with gunships could had very little effect on the end result as far as US casualties go, the people storming the both the embassy and the secondary "support compound" were doing it knowing that they will most likely die in the process. These aren't regular armies that when they suffer even high single digit %'s force depletion sound the retreat because it would be foolish to stay otherwise.

mtgx 10y ago

What's scary is that most still don't seem to realize how much worse this will be made by autonomous killer robots. They're already killing people essentially based on an algorithm, that may have only a 51% chance of identifying the "right target" (that's the logic they use to spy on Americans, too). They've already admitted to targeting people with drone strikes based on the phone SIM alone, which is not much better than targeting someone based on their IP address. But now they would be able to just build that into an autonomous drone, and allow it to kill anyone it meets that has a 51%+ chance of being a "bad guy". Truly scary stuff, which many still seem to excuse with nonsense such as "yeah, but they would've killed those guys just the same with Apache helicopters!". No, they wouldn't. They would only target the most important targets and the ones they are most sure it's who they think they are. With autonomous killer drones they can just launch 1,000 of them upon a country and allow them to kill anyone on sight that has whatever chance of being a target is implemented into their code. It's also the same BS excuse people used post-Snowden revelations: "But NSA has always spied on a few dictators and rival countries - surely that's just the same as them now spying on everything billions of people are doing every day, storing everything for decades, and from all ally countries as well? Right?!" And that's without even discussing the possibility of these machines being hacked, or having software bugs (which they'll probably use as an excuse everytime they get caught killing innocent people by the media - "Whoopsie, a software bug just killed 20 innocent people - What ya gonna do? - What's important is that nobody takes responsibility and gets punished for it now..."

barneygumble742 10y ago

How would drone strikes have saved the americans inside the compound? How can drones be deployed so quickly at a moments notice, let alone get near their target in a reasonable time? You're thinking of Iron Man. We're not there...yet.