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Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

568 points by 3131s 10y ago

ryanmarsh 10y ago
There's only one way to find out the truth: FOIA the mission logs
- dcposch 10y ago
  hah. you, sir, are either an optimist or a satirist. FOIA responses are routinely denied or heavily redacted even for much more mundane requests than asking for details of unacknowledged drone kills.
  - shard972 10y ago
    Wouldn't it be interesting if the Trump administration was actually better at processing FOIA requests? To be honest it will be difficult for them not to be, can't imagine he will be getting any less than Obama.
  - ryanmarsh 10y ago
    I'm not saying it's gonna happen just that's where the real truth is. No officer wants to get UCMJ for having falsified his logs. I have no idea how weapons releases are counted but I doubt they're from the logs.
desireco42 10y ago
I like methodology they used to estimate number of airstrikes.
cyberferret 10y ago
I understand that for operational secrecy reason, not all action would be published, but I would have thought there should be at least post mission briefings and outcomes being discussed by news sources and political leaders after the fact? For instance, here in Australia I know there has been a squadron of F/A-18s conducting bombing and strike campaigns in Afghanistan, but we don't hear anything at all about the sorts of missions they have been running, nor their effectiveness. Indeed, many Australians I have spoken to actually have no idea that we had a sizeable amount of our Air Force over there conducting operations.
- RileyJames 10y ago
  I had no idea, what (if any) details are reported and where? Do you suggest any sources I can follow to stay more informed of Australian involvement?
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    There is really no public channel that I am aware of. Googling around I see news articles from ABC etc., but those seem to be more of a PR spin on our involvement over there. The reason that I personally know is that my sister in law and her husband are both in the RAAF and have been deployed in the Middle East a few times (though not Afghanistan).
  - megous 10y ago
    Australia is one of the least transparent countries with regards to airstrikes. It would be nice if there was public pressure for them to be more transparent. https://twitter.com/airwars/status/822008554316066816 https://twitter.com/airwars/status/822008554316066816
educar 10y ago
If you still think of the world as divided into good and evil, then I have to break it to you that you have been played. Brainwashed by years and years of media programming. One man's terrorist is another man's hero. The U.S routinely bombs other sovereign countries and this is show cased as a "hero" activity. If the bombed people retaliate, they are terrorists. The truth is not black/white. Same way U.S data surveillance is OK but same thing done by China is seen as backward regime.
- nhaliday 10y ago
  People complain about US govt surveillance all the time. It doesn't always lead to change but there's a healthy degree of dissent.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    > healthy degree of dissent Hardly, to be honest. Most folks dont care about surveillance at all, and ask for more state powers.
    - striking 10y ago
      With the media (and gov't, and everyone else) bombarding non-tech Americans about how dangerous cyberterrorism could be, with the ISIS social media accounts ready to snatch up your children... I'm entirely unsurprised there are many people who would be willing to give up their privacy for "safety." If only there were a way we could inform Americans that they aren't actually doomed.
  - educar 10y ago
    TBH, it is really only in HN threads I hear about any dissent. Snowden hasn't been pardoned and most of US appears against what he did. But China is universally seen as a repressive regime (which it probably is).
- bpodgursky 10y ago
  > The U.S routinely bombs other sovereign countries and this is show cased as a "hero" activity There's a lot of nuance here, because there isn't really a (current) clear-cut case of the US bombing a sovereign nation where the government has not given the US permission. Of the current active campaigns: - Afghanistan - Iraq - Pakistan Each of these countries has a functioning government, even mostly democratically elected, and all US military involvement is with the permission of the host -- if Pakistan told the US to stop using their airbases, it would happen. - Syria There's less explicit permission here, but the US is bombing a current enemy of the Syrian federal government, so there's no real complaining. - Somalia - Yemen - Libya It's completely ambiguous which government you consider to be the sovereign one (arguably, there really isn't one). Either way, at least the publicly backed government is OK with US airstrikes.
jessriedel 10y ago
This is a definitional thing, right? Laymen think of "airstrike" in terms of anything coming from the air, but the military use of the term has always reflected the very different nature of long-range bombing mission and (say) helicopter support of infantry units. > "Apaches for example, conduct close combat attacks as a maneuver element supporting a ground force in contact with the enemy. I would not consider this in the category of 'airstrike.'" This is reflected in the fact that the helicopters are parts of the Army, not Navy or Air Force. So you can certainly criticize the use of this term since it may prey on predictable/reasonable civilian misunderstanding of military language, but it's hard to agree with the author that > The media and others have depended on these figures for years with the understanding they are a comprehensive rollup of all American and coalition activity...no one from the military ever has come forward to clarify that it is wholly incomplete. unless the Army was also failing to include it in something like "groundstrikes". My grandmother might think that the terms "wireless carrier" and "wireless data" should clearly cover WiFi, based on the plain meaning of the words, but it just turns out that this isn't included in the technical definitions. Yes, if someone technical was profiting off this predictable confusion it would be bad and possibly malicious, but it's not accurate to describe someone using these technical names as "inaccurate" or "quietly excluded".
- strainer 10y ago
  >unless the Army was also failing to include it in something like "groundstrikes". The article includes multiple statements from army sources which indicate no such figures are published. If someone could turn them up, that would be something.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    The point is that if there was also a category released to the general public called "groundstrikes" (or better yet "everything but airstrikes") and the Army was not including attack helicopter mission in that either, then there would be a clear intent to decieve. Likewise if these missions were not contributing to public tallies like "total casualties". But so long as it's public knowledge that the Army has large categories of missions that are not included in these public reports, this is plausibly just a definitional confusion, and so it's not very damning.
jackvalentine 10y ago
President Trump wasn't wrong when he said terror attacks are under reported but sadly the underreported ones are committed by the United States and her allies. What exactly is the "big picture" I'm missing here that is achieved by levelling Yemen one mud brick building at a time?
- shard972 10y ago
  And he wasn't wrong when he said in that recent super bowl interview "we aren't so innocent". Everyone is still jumping on him like he was saying the US is just the same as Russia, unable to accept the nuance that America has a lot of crimes to answer for.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    As much as I hate to say it, Trump was right on this one. For every Russian journalist killed by the Kremlin, you could match them with an American anti-Vietnam activist, black activist, and yes, even journalists (Reuters). Still doesn't make it Ok.
  - tremendo 10y ago
    When O'Reilly mentioned Putin, the person, being a killer, Trump answered that the U.S. (not a person) isn't so innocent either, which yes true, also clearly deflecting and avoiding saying or acknowledging anything bad about Putin. What immediately came to my mind was O'Reilly could have followed up with "is the President of the U.S. a killer?". I thought missed opportunity, but of course, that could have never aired.
    - exodust 10y ago
      Missed opportunity for what? Click-bait word games? This is exactly the problem we have with popular news media, they want these "hard-hitting" soundbites for their promos and clickbait. The point was clear enough for everyone to understand. Leaders of countries take military action, and people die as a result on both sides. Russia has killed, America has killed. Whats funny is that O'Reilly said "I don't know of any leaders who are killers". O'Reilly represents the sleeping American who believes USA is good, everyone else evil. Trump woke him up!
rascul 10y ago
Probably just nobody thought to tell the Army to send these numbers in, or possibly even to track them.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  "We don't do body counts"
dcposch 10y ago
i'm disappointed that hardly any members of the media or Democratic party establishment talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program. we have a long list of names. the executive branch of our government curates the list unilaterally and in secret. then, we cross names off the list by killing them. sometimes, they're American citizens. often, they're in countries we're at peace or even allied with. there are children in Yemen right now who are afraid of blue skies. drones fly high enough to be invisible to the naked eye; most strikes are carried out in clear weather. i'm near certain that history will judge us harshly. in any case, it's Trump's drone program now. i hope the technologists who created this infrastructure think about that when they try to sleep.
- nharada 10y ago
  "I just like solving interesting problems, I don't care about politics. And besides, if I don't do it someone else will anyway"
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - striking 10y ago
    See, that quote felt like it applied to me... until we started talking about choosing whether someone lives or dies. The thought becomes really scary when taken to its logical conclusion. After mulling it over a bit, I don't think I could work as a defense contractor.
    - rangibaby 10y ago
      "I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example a lawnmower." - Mikhail Kalashnikov "If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." - Albert Einstein
- kurttheviking 10y ago
  > i'm disappointed that i haven't seen a single member of the media or Democratic party establishments talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program. I have been hearing and reading about the expansion of Obama's drone program for years in "the media". Some quick Googling shows several examples. - http://www.npr.org/2013/04/28/179597464/leading-senate-democrat-has-concerns-with-u-s-drones http://www.npr.org/2013/04/28/179597464/leading-senate-democ... - http://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155389081/are-drones-obamas-legacy-in-war-on-terrorism http://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155389081/are-drones-obamas-le... - http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/23/politics/obama-drone-warren-weinstein-hostages/ http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/23/politics/obama-drone-warren-we... - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-drone-war-is-a-shameful-part-of-his-legacy/2016/05/05/a727eea8-12ea-11e6-8967-7ac733c56f12_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-drone-war-is-... - http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-on-obamas-presidency/obamas-embrace-of-drone-strikes-will-be-a-lasting-legacy http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-o... One can argue that consumers of media have chosen to ignore or accept these stories, but I think it's a little disingenuous to suggest the issues aren't being raised at all.
capex 10y ago
There's a documentary on Netflix[0] that might explain why all the 'extra' sorties are needed. Provocation? Seeding? Who knows, but its an interesting connection. [0] http://dirtywars.org/shop/product/details/538/watch-on-netflix http://dirtywars.org/shop/product/details/538/watch-on-netfl...
sytelus 10y ago
Wow... 1,700 air strikes just last year alone. That's more than 1 air strike every 6 hour for entire year! I'm wondering how much damage is being inflicted on civilians here. Not just people getting killed, but people becoming homeless or their livelihood getting destroyed. If these are not ultra-precise air strikes then we would be giving birth to future heavily disgruntled middle east population.
- megous 10y ago
  https://airwars.org https://airwars.org
- amenghra 10y ago
  Some countries use cluster munition for some of their strikes. The usa last did this in 2009. The opposite of precise...
  - megous 10y ago
    Cluster munitions are bad, but you have to consider that people often try to hide in houses, in cellars during air raids in the city. Cluster munition will not do much to those people, other than being insanely noisy and terrifying. What will kill those people is a bomb that will drop the house on them. Indiscriminate killing is a function of decision making process, not the munition itself.
    - DanBC 10y ago
      > Cluster munition will not do much to those people, Not all of the bomblets explode, so when those people come out of their houses they've got to not disturb any of the bomblets.
      - megous 10y ago
        I understand that. People try to collect the bomblets afterwards though, especially in the city. So the harm is somewhat limited.
    - 10y ago
megous 10y ago
Other thing that is massively underreported on much bigger scale than actual air strikes are civilian casualties. Presumably so that Americans, or Russians or whoever of the other N countries that bomb people regularly can justify killing thousands of civilians in middle east a year by mistake. It is not a mistake though, it's a calculated acceptable collateral murder where the government determines some acceptable ratio of civcas vs combatant deaths and goes with that. Of course, now if civcas are underreported by the order of magnitude, ... https://airwars.org/ https://airwars.org/ Other thing to ponder is that US claims it killed around 50 000 terrorists in the last two years. Think about that. Those are supposed to be people who are said to be threat to US citizens or allies and therefore are OK to be killed by USG even at the cost of killing bystanders. Americans should start asking themselves who are these people they are supporting the murder of. Don't stop at the terrorist label. Humanizing "them" might not be fun though, because you'll inevitably run into your propagandized fellow citizens, and start feeling decidedly not good about their capacity for empathy or nuance in understanding the world.
- ronnier 10y ago
  Over the last couple of weeks we suddenly care about casualties again https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Drone%20strikes%20civilian%20casualties https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Drone%20str...
- breatheoften 10y ago
  The war on terrorism is so bloody pointless -- the military has achieved exactly nothing since 9/11. All I could think about the day after 9/11 was the hundreds of thousands (now millions!) of innocent people which had nothing to do with that attack that were going to be killed for no reason ... It's ironic that the largest part of the us government which has also produced the worst results, gets a free pass from the anti-big-government crowd... I would love for a politician to talk about the war on terror as a failure as big as the war in Vietnam and to start finally talking about ending it ...
- lawnchair_larry 10y ago
  Don't forget that as far as body counts go, the USG defines "terrorists" as any male appearing to be of military age. There is no such thing as a dead civilian male in a strike zone.
rconti 10y ago
> “I can tell you, unequivocally, we are not trying to hide the number of strikes," the official said. "That is just the way it has been tracked in the past. That’s what it’s always been.” That may be true, but I do not have a high level of confidence that there's not someone further up the chain saying "hey, let's use the Army for this one, eh?" with a wink.
montyboy_us 10y ago
Diplomacy alone doesn't afford us the lifestyle we so enjoy. I believe we are lucky to even have the option to ignore the where and how our privileged position in global society is sustained. No one is really hiding this from us, it is that we choose not to look.
kchoudhu 10y ago
So the military faces the same regulatory reporting challenges banks do: ambiguous orders on what to report come down from regulatory committees with no context attached, which you are in turn forced to interpret. When your interpretation is judged (usually unfairly) to be incorrect by some smartass in the press whose understanding of the ground realities is incomplete at best, resulting in a dustup which usually ends up with you being hauled in front of a regulatory committee to grovel, admit fault and promise not to repeat the mistake again. Bitter? Why would you think I'm bitter?
hkjgkjy 10y ago
War! What is it good for?
- stefantalpalaru 10y ago
  Business.
- oniMaker 10y ago
  Profit and population control, mainly.
  - hkjgkjy 10y ago
    Personally, I fail to see how that would be (except for stock holders of arms companies etc). Surely the American state would save a ton of money by having their army shrunk by 1/3. Population control? Is the US worried about there being too dense population of arabs in the world? I don't think that's true - and not for when they waged war in Korea or Vietnam either. Seems to me war is only good for absolutely nothing.
    - oniMaker 10y ago
      https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
fsloth 10y ago
I feel the best popular representation of US military policy is the comic "Addicted to War" by Joel Andreas. http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html Everyone should be offered that as a reference before Chomsky, and then prodded onwards to Chomsky if they want to read more on this topic.
facepalm 10y ago
This is part of how I explain to me the outrage over the travel ban: people have been denial over being at war with certain countries. Travel ban makes it public - people get angry because their self-perception is challenged. (And of course there are the inconveniences of not being allowed to travel - but imo it is not completely nonsensical to limit travel from countries one is at war with).
tadufre 10y ago
this is not hacker news. if I wanted this dribble, I would have stayed on Slashdot.
- grzm 10y ago
  If you feel a submission is inappropriate for HN, flag and move on. If you're new to HN, adding comments like this is just adding noise. Similar to the guidelines regarding comparing HN to Reddit, please refrain from making comments on HN submission quality until you've been around for a while. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
helthanatos 10y ago
This is why the US should get out of foreign affairs and tell hostile nations they are not allowed to communicate with the US unless they want an actual war.
arprocter 10y ago
I was reading this[0] yesterday which fleetingly mentioned "RAND’s data is incomplete, as it doesn’t include statistics on drone strikes and from Army attack helicopters" [0]https://warisboring.com/the-explosive-rise-in-a-10-warthog-strikes-visualized-376ba336b8c https://warisboring.com/the-explosive-rise-in-a-10-warthog-s...
elastic_church 10y ago
They are taking your money to murder people. I'M KIDDING! Murder implies that there's any law to enforce whatsoever! I meant kill with premeditation!
- dang 10y ago
  You've been posting plenty of comments to HN that are either uncivil or unsubstantive or both. Please (re-)read the site guidelines and stop doing that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
  - elastic_church 10y ago
    It was supposed to be thought provoking due to the widespread dismissive nature of the lack of accountability in the US government. I saw which unrelated comments got flagged but using this one to notify me seems like a lack of discretion since this one is substantive. The article is literally about that and doesn't say it There's a trope in several topics where saying murder when you really mean "premeditated killing" can derail a conversation simply because no law currently supports the action in question as an illegal killing.
adjwilli 10y ago
How difficult would it be to create a map of worldwide military strikes, not just by the US, but all countries? Where is data like that available? What other countries are so transparent as the US in publishing that data? Do Russia and China? Could be an interesting project that serves the public interest globally. Sort of like crime maps, but at world scale.
arca_vorago 10y ago
'When war is declared, truth is the first casualty' - Arthur Ponsonby Our issue should focus on the war itself, and less on the many untruths that have propagated because of it. For me, a primary question is one of constitutional power of the president to wage war, and if legislative actions such as the Authorization of Use of Military Force are sufficient enough to meet those constitutional requirements for checks and balances. I've listened to as many debates and talks on the subject as possible, and I think there is a lot of nuance ignored by the more radical right and left than there should be. In the end though, my primary issue (as a combat vet) is the complete misdirection of the American people for the true reasons of the war(s). If truth is the first casualty, that may be to be expected, but at least tell us the truth about the reasons for the war(s) in the first place, otherwise even the founders recognized the dangers of the power of the executive to unilaterally wage war and declare emergencies and in doing so violate individual liberties. I will say this though; I'm tired of hearing Kissinger style realpolitik subscribers abusing Hanlons razor in dismissing the idea of malice in such actions, for at some point not only is incompetence indetinguishable from malice, but incompetence is ripe for manipulation and abuse from malice. The question is then, who is the malicous group, and what are their intentions?
theincredulousk 10y ago
Is there any realistic expectation that there be a news story for every airstrike? I'm not saying we're always the "good guys", but every airstrike looks bad without any context. We never get all of the intelligence that goes into ordering an airstrike, so how are we supposed to make the same judgements about collateral damage, effect, etc.? How many other airstrikes happen flawlessly? Aside from hindsight being 20/20, it is naive to assume that the public is capable of reviewing complex, difficult decisions about military action based on anecdotal information in a 1-page news article.
- sophware 10y ago
  I think they mean unreported as in "not in the database," not "there was a news story."
- wamsachel 10y ago
  Spare me, there's nothing difficult about deciding whether or not to blow up hospitals and children. This mission is not about freeing people from terror and was never about that. Rather, quite the opposite, we are there to terrorize them into being profitable to the hegemony. The propaganda about minimizing casualties is to keep civilians protected from the atrocities that they are sponsoring.
  - theincredulousk 10y ago
    Are you sure there is nothing difficult about that? When you're reasoning against your own hospitals, and your own children? When a nightmare of a human being keeps his own children near him as human shields? If I'm to understand correctly, "We" are there to blow up hospitals and terrorize children, but also create propaganda to protect civilians from feeling bad? Can you describe to me this large, tens of thousands at least, group of people that murders children on purpose but also cares about the feelings of all civilians? Specifically, without reinforcing the point that you'd be responding based on a tiny fraction of the intelligence that goes into these decisions.
    - wamsachel 10y ago
habosa 10y ago
What exactly do we (America) gain from doing a drone strike against your average 'terrorist' (I'll be generous and use their terminology). At this point the idea that we're there to control the oil is past its time. Many of these countries have pretty much nothing we can't get elsewhere. Is it just about projecting power? Paying military contractors? Some sick game. I truly don't believe that our government is stocked with wannabe murderers but clearly we commit murder at a distance with this drone program. I just can't figure out why we do it.
habosa 10y ago
What exactly do we (America) gain from doing a drone strike against your average 'terrorist' (I'll be generous and use their terminology). At this point the idea that we're there to control the oil is past its time. Many of these countries have pretty much nothing we can't get elsewhere. Is it just about projecting power? Paying military contractors? Some sick game. I truly don't believe that our government is stocked with wannabe murderers but clearly we commit murder at a distance with this drone program. I just can't figure out why we do it.
lloydatkinson 10y ago
Deadly airstrikes? no shit

568 points by 3131s 10y ago

ryanmarsh 10y ago

There's only one way to find out the truth: FOIA the mission logs

dcposch 10y ago
hah. you, sir, are either an optimist or a satirist. FOIA responses are routinely denied or heavily redacted even for much more mundane requests than asking for details of unacknowledged drone kills.
- shard972 10y ago
  Wouldn't it be interesting if the Trump administration was actually better at processing FOIA requests? To be honest it will be difficult for them not to be, can't imagine he will be getting any less than Obama.
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  I'm not saying it's gonna happen just that's where the real truth is. No officer wants to get UCMJ for having falsified his logs. I have no idea how weapons releases are counted but I doubt they're from the logs.

desireco42 10y ago

I like methodology they used to estimate number of airstrikes.

cyberferret 10y ago

I understand that for operational secrecy reason, not all action would be published, but I would have thought there should be at least post mission briefings and outcomes being discussed by news sources and political leaders after the fact? For instance, here in Australia I know there has been a squadron of F/A-18s conducting bombing and strike campaigns in Afghanistan, but we don't hear anything at all about the sorts of missions they have been running, nor their effectiveness. Indeed, many Australians I have spoken to actually have no idea that we had a sizeable amount of our Air Force over there conducting operations.

RileyJames 10y ago
I had no idea, what (if any) details are reported and where? Do you suggest any sources I can follow to stay more informed of Australian involvement?
- cyberferret 10y ago
  There is really no public channel that I am aware of. Googling around I see news articles from ABC etc., but those seem to be more of a PR spin on our involvement over there. The reason that I personally know is that my sister in law and her husband are both in the RAAF and have been deployed in the Middle East a few times (though not Afghanistan).
- megous 10y ago
  Australia is one of the least transparent countries with regards to airstrikes. It would be nice if there was public pressure for them to be more transparent. https://twitter.com/airwars/status/822008554316066816 https://twitter.com/airwars/status/822008554316066816

educar 10y ago

If you still think of the world as divided into good and evil, then I have to break it to you that you have been played. Brainwashed by years and years of media programming. One man's terrorist is another man's hero. The U.S routinely bombs other sovereign countries and this is show cased as a "hero" activity. If the bombed people retaliate, they are terrorists. The truth is not black/white. Same way U.S data surveillance is OK but same thing done by China is seen as backward regime.

nhaliday 10y ago
People complain about US govt surveillance all the time. It doesn't always lead to change but there's a healthy degree of dissent.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  > healthy degree of dissent Hardly, to be honest. Most folks dont care about surveillance at all, and ask for more state powers.
  - striking 10y ago
    With the media (and gov't, and everyone else) bombarding non-tech Americans about how dangerous cyberterrorism could be, with the ISIS social media accounts ready to snatch up your children... I'm entirely unsurprised there are many people who would be willing to give up their privacy for "safety." If only there were a way we could inform Americans that they aren't actually doomed.
- educar 10y ago
  TBH, it is really only in HN threads I hear about any dissent. Snowden hasn't been pardoned and most of US appears against what he did. But China is universally seen as a repressive regime (which it probably is).
bpodgursky 10y ago
> The U.S routinely bombs other sovereign countries and this is show cased as a "hero" activity There's a lot of nuance here, because there isn't really a (current) clear-cut case of the US bombing a sovereign nation where the government has not given the US permission. Of the current active campaigns: - Afghanistan - Iraq - Pakistan Each of these countries has a functioning government, even mostly democratically elected, and all US military involvement is with the permission of the host -- if Pakistan told the US to stop using their airbases, it would happen. - Syria There's less explicit permission here, but the US is bombing a current enemy of the Syrian federal government, so there's no real complaining. - Somalia - Yemen - Libya It's completely ambiguous which government you consider to be the sovereign one (arguably, there really isn't one). Either way, at least the publicly backed government is OK with US airstrikes.

jessriedel 10y ago

This is a definitional thing, right? Laymen think of "airstrike" in terms of anything coming from the air, but the military use of the term has always reflected the very different nature of long-range bombing mission and (say) helicopter support of infantry units. > "Apaches for example, conduct close combat attacks as a maneuver element supporting a ground force in contact with the enemy. I would not consider this in the category of 'airstrike.'" This is reflected in the fact that the helicopters are parts of the Army, not Navy or Air Force. So you can certainly criticize the use of this term since it may prey on predictable/reasonable civilian misunderstanding of military language, but it's hard to agree with the author that > The media and others have depended on these figures for years with the understanding they are a comprehensive rollup of all American and coalition activity...no one from the military ever has come forward to clarify that it is wholly incomplete. unless the Army was also failing to include it in something like "groundstrikes". My grandmother might think that the terms "wireless carrier" and "wireless data" should clearly cover WiFi, based on the plain meaning of the words, but it just turns out that this isn't included in the technical definitions. Yes, if someone technical was profiting off this predictable confusion it would be bad and possibly malicious, but it's not accurate to describe someone using these technical names as "inaccurate" or "quietly excluded".

strainer 10y ago
>unless the Army was also failing to include it in something like "groundstrikes". The article includes multiple statements from army sources which indicate no such figures are published. If someone could turn them up, that would be something.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  The point is that if there was also a category released to the general public called "groundstrikes" (or better yet "everything but airstrikes") and the Army was not including attack helicopter mission in that either, then there would be a clear intent to decieve. Likewise if these missions were not contributing to public tallies like "total casualties". But so long as it's public knowledge that the Army has large categories of missions that are not included in these public reports, this is plausibly just a definitional confusion, and so it's not very damning.

jackvalentine 10y ago

President Trump wasn't wrong when he said terror attacks are under reported but sadly the underreported ones are committed by the United States and her allies. What exactly is the "big picture" I'm missing here that is achieved by levelling Yemen one mud brick building at a time?

shard972 10y ago
And he wasn't wrong when he said in that recent super bowl interview "we aren't so innocent". Everyone is still jumping on him like he was saying the US is just the same as Russia, unable to accept the nuance that America has a lot of crimes to answer for.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  As much as I hate to say it, Trump was right on this one. For every Russian journalist killed by the Kremlin, you could match them with an American anti-Vietnam activist, black activist, and yes, even journalists (Reuters). Still doesn't make it Ok.
- tremendo 10y ago
  When O'Reilly mentioned Putin, the person, being a killer, Trump answered that the U.S. (not a person) isn't so innocent either, which yes true, also clearly deflecting and avoiding saying or acknowledging anything bad about Putin. What immediately came to my mind was O'Reilly could have followed up with "is the President of the U.S. a killer?". I thought missed opportunity, but of course, that could have never aired.
  - exodust 10y ago
    Missed opportunity for what? Click-bait word games? This is exactly the problem we have with popular news media, they want these "hard-hitting" soundbites for their promos and clickbait. The point was clear enough for everyone to understand. Leaders of countries take military action, and people die as a result on both sides. Russia has killed, America has killed. Whats funny is that O'Reilly said "I don't know of any leaders who are killers". O'Reilly represents the sleeping American who believes USA is good, everyone else evil. Trump woke him up!

rascul 10y ago

Probably just nobody thought to tell the Army to send these numbers in, or possibly even to track them.

lostlogin 10y ago
"We don't do body counts"

dcposch 10y ago

i'm disappointed that hardly any members of the media or Democratic party establishment talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program. we have a long list of names. the executive branch of our government curates the list unilaterally and in secret. then, we cross names off the list by killing them. sometimes, they're American citizens. often, they're in countries we're at peace or even allied with. there are children in Yemen right now who are afraid of blue skies. drones fly high enough to be invisible to the naked eye; most strikes are carried out in clear weather. i'm near certain that history will judge us harshly. in any case, it's Trump's drone program now. i hope the technologists who created this infrastructure think about that when they try to sleep.

nharada 10y ago
"I just like solving interesting problems, I don't care about politics. And besides, if I don't do it someone else will anyway"
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- striking 10y ago
  See, that quote felt like it applied to me... until we started talking about choosing whether someone lives or dies. The thought becomes really scary when taken to its logical conclusion. After mulling it over a bit, I don't think I could work as a defense contractor.
  - rangibaby 10y ago
    "I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example a lawnmower." - Mikhail Kalashnikov "If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." - Albert Einstein
kurttheviking 10y ago
> i'm disappointed that i haven't seen a single member of the media or Democratic party establishments talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program. I have been hearing and reading about the expansion of Obama's drone program for years in "the media". Some quick Googling shows several examples. - http://www.npr.org/2013/04/28/179597464/leading-senate-democrat-has-concerns-with-u-s-drones http://www.npr.org/2013/04/28/179597464/leading-senate-democ... - http://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155389081/are-drones-obamas-legacy-in-war-on-terrorism http://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155389081/are-drones-obamas-le... - http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/23/politics/obama-drone-warren-weinstein-hostages/ http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/23/politics/obama-drone-warren-we... - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-drone-war-is-a-shameful-part-of-his-legacy/2016/05/05/a727eea8-12ea-11e6-8967-7ac733c56f12_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-drone-war-is-... - http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-on-obamas-presidency/obamas-embrace-of-drone-strikes-will-be-a-lasting-legacy http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-o... One can argue that consumers of media have chosen to ignore or accept these stories, but I think it's a little disingenuous to suggest the issues aren't being raised at all.

capex 10y ago

There's a documentary on Netflix[0] that might explain why all the 'extra' sorties are needed. Provocation? Seeding? Who knows, but its an interesting connection. [0] http://dirtywars.org/shop/product/details/538/watch-on-netflix http://dirtywars.org/shop/product/details/538/watch-on-netfl...

sytelus 10y ago

Wow... 1,700 air strikes just last year alone. That's more than 1 air strike every 6 hour for entire year! I'm wondering how much damage is being inflicted on civilians here. Not just people getting killed, but people becoming homeless or their livelihood getting destroyed. If these are not ultra-precise air strikes then we would be giving birth to future heavily disgruntled middle east population.

megous 10y ago
https://airwars.org https://airwars.org
amenghra 10y ago
Some countries use cluster munition for some of their strikes. The usa last did this in 2009. The opposite of precise...
- megous 10y ago
  Cluster munitions are bad, but you have to consider that people often try to hide in houses, in cellars during air raids in the city. Cluster munition will not do much to those people, other than being insanely noisy and terrifying. What will kill those people is a bomb that will drop the house on them. Indiscriminate killing is a function of decision making process, not the munition itself.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    > Cluster munition will not do much to those people, Not all of the bomblets explode, so when those people come out of their houses they've got to not disturb any of the bomblets.
    - megous 10y ago
      I understand that. People try to collect the bomblets afterwards though, especially in the city. So the harm is somewhat limited.
  - 10y ago

megous 10y ago

Other thing that is massively underreported on much bigger scale than actual air strikes are civilian casualties. Presumably so that Americans, or Russians or whoever of the other N countries that bomb people regularly can justify killing thousands of civilians in middle east a year by mistake. It is not a mistake though, it's a calculated acceptable collateral murder where the government determines some acceptable ratio of civcas vs combatant deaths and goes with that. Of course, now if civcas are underreported by the order of magnitude, ... https://airwars.org/ https://airwars.org/ Other thing to ponder is that US claims it killed around 50 000 terrorists in the last two years. Think about that. Those are supposed to be people who are said to be threat to US citizens or allies and therefore are OK to be killed by USG even at the cost of killing bystanders. Americans should start asking themselves who are these people they are supporting the murder of. Don't stop at the terrorist label. Humanizing "them" might not be fun though, because you'll inevitably run into your propagandized fellow citizens, and start feeling decidedly not good about their capacity for empathy or nuance in understanding the world.

ronnier 10y ago
Over the last couple of weeks we suddenly care about casualties again https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Drone%20strikes%20civilian%20casualties https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Drone%20str...
breatheoften 10y ago
The war on terrorism is so bloody pointless -- the military has achieved exactly nothing since 9/11. All I could think about the day after 9/11 was the hundreds of thousands (now millions!) of innocent people which had nothing to do with that attack that were going to be killed for no reason ... It's ironic that the largest part of the us government which has also produced the worst results, gets a free pass from the anti-big-government crowd... I would love for a politician to talk about the war on terror as a failure as big as the war in Vietnam and to start finally talking about ending it ...
lawnchair_larry 10y ago
Don't forget that as far as body counts go, the USG defines "terrorists" as any male appearing to be of military age. There is no such thing as a dead civilian male in a strike zone.

rconti 10y ago

> “I can tell you, unequivocally, we are not trying to hide the number of strikes," the official said. "That is just the way it has been tracked in the past. That’s what it’s always been.” That may be true, but I do not have a high level of confidence that there's not someone further up the chain saying "hey, let's use the Army for this one, eh?" with a wink.

montyboy_us 10y ago

Diplomacy alone doesn't afford us the lifestyle we so enjoy. I believe we are lucky to even have the option to ignore the where and how our privileged position in global society is sustained. No one is really hiding this from us, it is that we choose not to look.

kchoudhu 10y ago

So the military faces the same regulatory reporting challenges banks do: ambiguous orders on what to report come down from regulatory committees with no context attached, which you are in turn forced to interpret. When your interpretation is judged (usually unfairly) to be incorrect by some smartass in the press whose understanding of the ground realities is incomplete at best, resulting in a dustup which usually ends up with you being hauled in front of a regulatory committee to grovel, admit fault and promise not to repeat the mistake again. Bitter? Why would you think I'm bitter?

hkjgkjy 10y ago

War! What is it good for?

stefantalpalaru 10y ago
Business.
oniMaker 10y ago
Profit and population control, mainly.
- hkjgkjy 10y ago
  Personally, I fail to see how that would be (except for stock holders of arms companies etc). Surely the American state would save a ton of money by having their army shrunk by 1/3. Population control? Is the US worried about there being too dense population of arabs in the world? I don't think that's true - and not for when they waged war in Korea or Vietnam either. Seems to me war is only good for absolutely nothing.
  - oniMaker 10y ago
    https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

fsloth 10y ago

I feel the best popular representation of US military policy is the comic "Addicted to War" by Joel Andreas. http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html Everyone should be offered that as a reference before Chomsky, and then prodded onwards to Chomsky if they want to read more on this topic.

facepalm 10y ago

This is part of how I explain to me the outrage over the travel ban: people have been denial over being at war with certain countries. Travel ban makes it public - people get angry because their self-perception is challenged. (And of course there are the inconveniences of not being allowed to travel - but imo it is not completely nonsensical to limit travel from countries one is at war with).

tadufre 10y ago

this is not hacker news. if I wanted this dribble, I would have stayed on Slashdot.

grzm 10y ago
If you feel a submission is inappropriate for HN, flag and move on. If you're new to HN, adding comments like this is just adding noise. Similar to the guidelines regarding comparing HN to Reddit, please refrain from making comments on HN submission quality until you've been around for a while. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

helthanatos 10y ago

This is why the US should get out of foreign affairs and tell hostile nations they are not allowed to communicate with the US unless they want an actual war.

arprocter 10y ago

I was reading this[0] yesterday which fleetingly mentioned "RAND’s data is incomplete, as it doesn’t include statistics on drone strikes and from Army attack helicopters" [0]https://warisboring.com/the-explosive-rise-in-a-10-warthog-strikes-visualized-376ba336b8c https://warisboring.com/the-explosive-rise-in-a-10-warthog-s...

elastic_church 10y ago

They are taking your money to murder people. I'M KIDDING! Murder implies that there's any law to enforce whatsoever! I meant kill with premeditation!

dang 10y ago
You've been posting plenty of comments to HN that are either uncivil or unsubstantive or both. Please (re-)read the site guidelines and stop doing that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- elastic_church 10y ago
  It was supposed to be thought provoking due to the widespread dismissive nature of the lack of accountability in the US government. I saw which unrelated comments got flagged but using this one to notify me seems like a lack of discretion since this one is substantive. The article is literally about that and doesn't say it There's a trope in several topics where saying murder when you really mean "premeditated killing" can derail a conversation simply because no law currently supports the action in question as an illegal killing.

adjwilli 10y ago

How difficult would it be to create a map of worldwide military strikes, not just by the US, but all countries? Where is data like that available? What other countries are so transparent as the US in publishing that data? Do Russia and China? Could be an interesting project that serves the public interest globally. Sort of like crime maps, but at world scale.

arca_vorago 10y ago

'When war is declared, truth is the first casualty' - Arthur Ponsonby Our issue should focus on the war itself, and less on the many untruths that have propagated because of it. For me, a primary question is one of constitutional power of the president to wage war, and if legislative actions such as the Authorization of Use of Military Force are sufficient enough to meet those constitutional requirements for checks and balances. I've listened to as many debates and talks on the subject as possible, and I think there is a lot of nuance ignored by the more radical right and left than there should be. In the end though, my primary issue (as a combat vet) is the complete misdirection of the American people for the true reasons of the war(s). If truth is the first casualty, that may be to be expected, but at least tell us the truth about the reasons for the war(s) in the first place, otherwise even the founders recognized the dangers of the power of the executive to unilaterally wage war and declare emergencies and in doing so violate individual liberties. I will say this though; I'm tired of hearing Kissinger style realpolitik subscribers abusing Hanlons razor in dismissing the idea of malice in such actions, for at some point not only is incompetence indetinguishable from malice, but incompetence is ripe for manipulation and abuse from malice. The question is then, who is the malicous group, and what are their intentions?

theincredulousk 10y ago

Is there any realistic expectation that there be a news story for every airstrike? I'm not saying we're always the "good guys", but every airstrike looks bad without any context. We never get all of the intelligence that goes into ordering an airstrike, so how are we supposed to make the same judgements about collateral damage, effect, etc.? How many other airstrikes happen flawlessly? Aside from hindsight being 20/20, it is naive to assume that the public is capable of reviewing complex, difficult decisions about military action based on anecdotal information in a 1-page news article.

sophware 10y ago
I think they mean unreported as in "not in the database," not "there was a news story."
wamsachel 10y ago
Spare me, there's nothing difficult about deciding whether or not to blow up hospitals and children. This mission is not about freeing people from terror and was never about that. Rather, quite the opposite, we are there to terrorize them into being profitable to the hegemony. The propaganda about minimizing casualties is to keep civilians protected from the atrocities that they are sponsoring.
- theincredulousk 10y ago
  Are you sure there is nothing difficult about that? When you're reasoning against your own hospitals, and your own children? When a nightmare of a human being keeps his own children near him as human shields? If I'm to understand correctly, "We" are there to blow up hospitals and terrorize children, but also create propaganda to protect civilians from feeling bad? Can you describe to me this large, tens of thousands at least, group of people that murders children on purpose but also cares about the feelings of all civilians? Specifically, without reinforcing the point that you'd be responding based on a tiny fraction of the intelligence that goes into these decisions.
  - wamsachel 10y ago

habosa 10y ago

What exactly do we (America) gain from doing a drone strike against your average 'terrorist' (I'll be generous and use their terminology). At this point the idea that we're there to control the oil is past its time. Many of these countries have pretty much nothing we can't get elsewhere. Is it just about projecting power? Paying military contractors? Some sick game. I truly don't believe that our government is stocked with wannabe murderers but clearly we commit murder at a distance with this drone program. I just can't figure out why we do it.

habosa 10y ago

lloydatkinson 10y ago

Deadly airstrikes? no shit