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The casualties at the other end of the remote-controlled kill
- thematrixturtle 4y ago> There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy. Why is the article focusing on the goon pulling the trigger, as opposed to these actual killed-dead casualties?
- Ygg2 4y agoGood question. My guess, the plight of a remote assassin just hit closer to home (no pun).
- mattzito 4y agoDid you read the whole article? It actually covers a scenario where the wrong person was killed-dead due to some bad intel. In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best. This is a completely valid journalistic subject, separate from the people who were killed.
- zeruch 4y agoYou are asserting a critical thinking skill that really, most folks don't have. You are John LeCarre, most are Tom Clancy.
- saargrin 4y agohey whats wrong with tom clancy now? (except all that jack ryan trash)
- zeruch 4y agoLe Carre wrote about the fact that espionage or s an allegory for all human interaction) is "all gray" with lots of moral ambiguity and nuance. Clancy's stuff makes for a decent plot for an action movie adaptation, but his ideas and characters are almost all one-note, one-dimensional "popcorn" nutrition conceptually.
- bayindirh 4y agoTo add, I find the parts which mention the people who were killed or otherwise affected by these strikes deeply moving despite being short and concise. In other words, the painted picture is much broader and deeper than the man itself seemingly put into the focus. In reality, he's just used as an anchor point to tie the big picture, and might be also used as a so-called decoy (or bait) in a narrowly starting, but deeply expanding story. This doesn't make his tragedy lighter, however. To be honest, I feel sad and disturbed for everyone involved in this.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago> there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people Who isn't manipulated in situations like this? Remember Iraqi soldiers killing babies? And Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? The first to get manipulated are always the general public. After that it just matters who does the killing... if it's "our guys", then every bombed wedding and reuters reporter is foreing militant or a terrorist, and if it's "them", then it's a poor civilian. If you bomb a hospital, a civilian train, bus, building, bridge or whatever... again, if it's "our guys" it was "bad intel" or "a mistake", but if it's "them", it's "war crimes for intentionall killing civilians".
- Aeolun 4y agoTo be fair, in light of recent events, I think it’s mostly a matter of scale. Indiscriminately bombarding cities feels somehow worse than this targeted killing, and somehow better, because it’s nothing personal.
- stanfordkid 4y agoI mean... it is highly likely such events happened at much larger scale than the US public was made aware of in Iraq. How "precise" was shock and awe? I doubt the incentives are aligned for anyone to know. Even Obama had several instances of drone killings inadvertently killing large groups of civilians -- for example: https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral/us-drone-attack-marriage-procession-yemen# https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral...
- zardo 4y agoFallujah and Raqqa were pretty large scale destruction. The official civilian casualties were only in the thousands, but it's not like we dug up the cities afterwards to find all the bodies.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago> In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best I'm pretty sure that's basically standard operating procedure in the military though? Harder to get soldiers to kill people if they think of them as people and not as the enemy.
- VictorPath 4y agoHence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler--who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself--was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders! Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
- missedthecue 4y agoWow this is interesting. Is that a hypothesis or is that according to Himmler's own account?
- watwut 4y agoHimmler killed himself right after being captured, before being investigated right after WWII. So, safe guess is that it is hypothesis. It can not possibly be after war reflection. Himmler was horrified and mentally affected after mass shooting he seen. So, he started to figure out how to kill Jews differently, out of worry for mental health of German soldiers. So, the above is at best him figuring out how to kill more effectively. Definitely not some kind of guilt or regret.
- fweimer 4y agoI think it's a reasonable inference from a speech Himmler gave at Posen in October 1943. That speech was both frank and well-documented, and it was used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials, so Arendt must have been familiar with it. Himmler speaks of the challenge of remaining a decent person despite witnessing and committing atrocities (the section around “Dies durchgehalten zu haben, und dabei – abgesehen von menschlichen Ausnahmeschwächen – anständig geblieben zu sein”), showing the kind of reversal at work that Arendt describes.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kieroda 4y agoThese stories are not mutually exclusive, The New York Times covers a lot of the victims' stories too (and there was at least one daily podcast on the subject within the past few months).
- gatvol 4y agoSounds a lot like war crimes to me.
- FpUser 4y agoThey do not recognize ICC and had threatened sanctions and criminal charges should it ever decide to go after the US nationals
- muro 4y agoI am a patriot, you made a mistake, they are war criminals... It's "hilarious" when anyone in the US says about anyone else they are war criminals, since they don't recognise ICC. (Also, hello India and China)
- zardo 4y agoMore than that, we have pre-authorized military action against the ICC to extract any US detaniees. https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
- taylorius 4y agoOr indeed, the "customer" who is ordering that these dubious strikes go ahead.
- elvis10ten 4y agoA bit off tangent: Why do we still use the phrase “women & children” in 2022 in times of war? That language seems to exclude men that aren’t involved. Why not innocent adults & children?
- woodruffw 4y agoI think it’s a convenience phrase, meant to impart unambiguous innocence. But it’s definitely a little dated, in both directions.
- rayiner 4y agoIt’s not “dated.” The mechanics of why you try to preserve the lives of women and children in war haven’t changed at all. I can’t imagine the thought process that says “humans have had a visceral reaction to the killing of women and children specifically in war, across millennia and across cultures, but surely such thinking is obsolete in our generation.”
- stanfordkid 4y agoIt's a biological reality that's gotten lost in our modern world. It's kind of funny no one seems to blink an eye that women and children are allowed to leave Ukraine but men have to stay and fight. The idpol segments seem to think that trans men shouldn't have to stay and fight and that is the true outrage. Personally I think men (or any human being that chooses) should be allowed to flee. Honor shouldn't be enforced by the state.
- gunfighthacksaw 4y agoHonour in this case is being imposed by the state, but Slavic cultures and national pride are 100% driving this too. Some nations just won’t tolerate their men fleeing a crisis leaving women and kids behind, state or no state. Western Anglo/EU culture skews towards this, but not as hard. Hence the broad support for them.
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- k1m 4y agoYour comment reminded me of this bit from Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOLq82m2Ks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZOLq82m2Ks
- Biologist123 4y agoFrankie Boyle. No man says it straighter.
- Aeolun 4y agoI think the point of the article is that the current strategy causes needless casualties on both sides?
- FpUser 4y agoHow about calling murder what it is.
- d0mine 4y agoBecause it is how propaganda works: dehumanize the enemy, and the opposite for your side: make your hangman as human as possible. It is aimed at people who don't believe there were no war crimes and therefore the spin is necessary to get sympathy for the killers. A similar spin was with the Abu Ghraib: torturers were humanized and their victims dehumanized.
- Aeolun 4y agoIt’s also good for your psychological wellbeing. If you’re just ‘destroying goods’ so to say, you don’t really have to worry about the fact they have wives and children. Conversely, what is described in this article is the worst of both worlds. After spending days looking at their lives you are most definitely killing a human/father/grandfather.
- elzbardico 4y agoWhen America kills women and children, they are not humanized. Institutional racism goes beyond borders.
- akhmatova 4y agoThe thing is they're not "goons". They're good, solid people. Who thought they were actually going to be saving lives, first by going after, you know, the Bad Guys. And then by using (what they were told was) "precision weaponry" to do so. Why is the article focusing on [an uncomfortable but lesser-known side aspect of war], as opposed to [the more obvious bad aspects of war we already know about]? Because war is what you call "complicated". It is this complexity that the article was attempting to address.
- x86_64Ubuntu 4y agoIt's behind a paywall, but I was able to find it here. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/uw-grads-story-reveals-the-unseen-scars-of-those-who-kill-via-remote-control/ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/uw-grads-story-rev... Looks like it was more the drug policy of the U.S. Air Force that lead this man to fall apart more than the droning of people far away.
- Animats 4y ago
- s5300 4y agoDruggie is an utterly disgusting term. I urge you to indulge in some form of empathy. Btw. Everybody I’ve met in above average positions of our (US) military do drugs. Often, lots of them. In my anecdotal experience, it’s typically amphetamine stimulants, excessive alcohol, & various forms of sleeping pills. Opioids in those who have seen multiple combat tours or received injuries in various ways. Talking O-4’s and above.
- lostlogin 4y agoBy and large, excessive drinking is seen completely differently to ‘drug taking’. One is ok, or funny. The other isn’t.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoNo...you know what, everything can be funny in the context of gaining control of suffering. And anything you delegate living your life to can destroy you. I've met alcoholics in rehabilitation, it's no joke, they generally received a masochistic pill called...Antabús. It just punishes you for drinking even a tiny bit. It's a sneaky habit, every chemical is unique and has its own beauty and darkness. Makes me grateful for drug control, yeah the DEA gets pimped by subhumans like the Sackler brothers to reduce competition for their scams, and reducing ADD medication availability (also the Sacklers in fact) leads very vulnerable people to substitute miracle drugs with crack and cocaine, but they also protected me from being coerced to use cocaine, which would have enslaved me completely. It's too tempting to get a really clean kid in your high school to just try this little bit, just so obviously vulnerable and afraid of drugs clearly addict material, and then well if you want more you know where to get it, oh it doesn't do the trick it's just you it's the same as before, oh was it extra strong you got lucky, and there's commissions from the dealers so they can pay for theirs, they want to harm you there's that, and then you can't tell your parents but like for real the initiators say its a bad move and they're totally right, and the impossibility of receiving medical attention because all the psychs want to exploit you much more than the dealers even, more coercive and more violent. And because it's so close to being good for you, it's a dangerous drug that's so close to what people with ADD truly organically legitimately need. It's a fork in the road, very easy to end up on either side but they lead to very different places. But they have to protect your ability to say no. In my case it was critical not to try cocaine a single time, nothing. It's difficult, initiators carefully plan ahead of what they'll do if you say no, Just Say No doesn't work. You have to just say no and have backup. Not just letting you be coerced and punishing you when you became addicted to a terrible drug out of literally no fault of your own. I met people that I can't assign any blame to for their cocaine addiction, it wasn't a moral failing, drug enforcement and especially shrinks failed them. Drug enforcement needs to punish coercive initiation, and you get whatever you don't punish, so DEA has its own beauty and darkness too. They're a mixed bag of those two things. Sacklers aren't a mixed bag though, just sacks of crap. There's no words, like if you want to know what they did you have to take Oxycontin exactly as they prescribed, it lasts 7 hours but you take it every 12. You withdraw 10 hours a day, I mean I think so because I got lucky with that drug too and never had it. And you need to have underlying chronic pain too. Follow their doctors orders. The judges judging them need to do that, they can't do their job otherwise, yeah it's obviously an addicting drug that will fuck your life up but how else will they have any idea what they did? Just try it one week, Your Honor. Any judge could have tried it over twenty plus years and known for certain what this was, any regulator could have said give me a taste of your medicine, I gotta see for myself, but apparently nobody did. And there's a chance it actually will do what it says on the box for the first time ever, they claim as much by pleading not guilty, everyone has the right to a fair trial, gotta give them a chance, right?
- Fargoan 4y agoI have no sympathy for the cowards who murder with drones. They know that what they're doing is wrong and nobody is forcing them to murder.
- spoonjim 4y agoRemember that half the population has an IQ under 100 and half of those live in places where the American Soldier is still venerated as a paragon of virtue and sacrifice. They’re not victims like the Yemeni kids they’re killing, but they are being manipulated into the situations they choose for themselves.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoMcNamara’s Project 100,000 did not stop at 100,000.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> Remember that half the population has an IQ under 100 It's more than half.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- revscat 4y agoI do not know how to put it into words, but the simplistic morality expressed here makes me uncomfortable. While I also find remote controlled war to be abhorrent, nevertheless this attitude seems… overly simplistic?
- kqr 4y agoOf course it is overly simplistic -- which is also why it bears repeating. Anyone can be made to commit atrocities in an environment shaped the right way. If I grew up like these people, I'm sure I would pull the trigger in exactly the same situations. But it still would take my cooperation. I can only pull the trigger if I'm somehow made to want it, at some level. Or at least if I'm made to think I have no choice. By emphasising our individual ethical responsibilities -- the simple fact that it takes some amount of cooperation for a person to do anything at all, we are creating a small obstacle in the way of creating a dangerous environment that can turn me into an assassin.
- paganel 4y agoReally now? I know Western newspapers like the NYTimes have become very, very enamoured with the military-industrial complex, and I get that, de facto, the US is at war, but why should anyone feel sorry for the people mentioned in the article, people whose mission is to kill some poor peasants herding their goats in the mountains of Yemen or who are attending a wedding somewhere in Afghanistan?
- goldenkey 4y agoThe same reason that the workers at slaughterhouses deserve pity. Even vegans understand they undergo PTSD and injuries to keep a machine going. No person is suited for these jobs.
- torbTurret 4y agoI buy that argument maybe during a draft, but not for those volunteering for such duties.
- goldenkey 4y agoThese are well paying jobs with health insurance and benefits. It's not simple to switch jobs without the requisite degrees or skills. Referring to working a job as "volunteering" is incredibly naive.
- pvaldes 4y agovolunteering can mean working for free but also 'willing to do the job', 'applying for the job'.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Jarwain 4y agoPeople volunteer for a number of reasons, whether because they Want to be a part of a military machine or because it's the best way to pay for school. Either way they do so with some expectation that the intel is sound, that they're helping to protect America/American values, that they're attacking Threats and not random civilians. To have that trust & expectation violated can be traumatic, and nobody deserves that. Even if they volunteered totally aware of what they would be doing and what would happen, it's one thing to Know and another thing to Have Experienced.
- alanwong 4y agoCan someone change the title to the actual headline please?
- drno123 4y agoIf we boycott Russian products, and do not hire Russian people, should we start doing the same with US products and american engineers?
- b3nji 4y agoIt seems this is a logical path that has now been set, doesn't it? I've been deeply ashamed of my own countries invasions, and wars along side the U.S. People didn't care about that though. Should we cancel ourselves, as we have done to Russia?
- chrischen 4y agoThe problem is that the US has for a very long time pretty much unchecked global power. All our free-speech, what is it good for, if it cannot effect change? Look where Snowden is. Even the captain mentioned in the article pretty much told people what he did, and so is The New York Times now, but if people don't bat an eye what's the point? Heck the whole NSA spying thing was leaked something like 5 years before Snowden, and nobody cared. I think most American's won't really care about what our government is doing to others thousands of miles away so long as we can buy our iPhones, watch our movies, and browse our TikTok. I think the only practical thing that can be done is to encourage competition from America's equally-sized rivals (pretty much just China at the moment). That being said, these other countries are often not saints themselves (looking at you China), but competition is really the only thing that can check the abuse from any single party. While there are smaller "better" countries they are still within America's sphere of influence and even if you move there and avoid contributing to US taxes, you still end up contributing to that ecosystem that essentially powers the American system (most US allies participated in the war in the middle east).
- erklik 4y ago> That being said, these other countries are often not saints themselves (looking at you China). Depends on who you are, isn't it? Ask the Chinese. I am sure they love their government (I believe surveys have shown that there is high level of approval) Ask the Afghans. The Chinese aren't bombing weddings and schools. Ask the Yemenis. The Chinese aren't funding the Saudis which are causing a man-made famine in their nation. Ask the Americans. Ooooh. China is terrible. I mean, there's a bias, no? They're the ones at risk of losing their spot at the head of the table. Makes sense they wouldn't like them.
- naoqj 4y agohttps://i.imgur.com/LV4GI3M.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/LV4GI3M.jpeg
- dr_dshiv 4y agoIf my kids play a lot of realistic drone strike games, does it increase the likelihood of their being recruited as child soldiers for the Great Drone War? Asking as a concerned parent.
- InCityDreams 4y agoYes.
- Trouble_007 4y agoMore likely their online 'Killz n Skillz' are being sucked up to train AI.
- roschdal 4y agoCaptain Kevin Larson was a murderer.
- MarcoZavala 4y ago
- elliotloglog 4y ago> Starting in 2015, the Air Force began embedding what it called human performance teams in some squadrons, staffed with chaplains, psychologists and operational physiologists offering a sympathetic ear, coping strategies and healthy practices to optimize performance. “It’s a holistic team approach: mind, body and spirit,” said Capt. James Taylor, a chaplain at Creech. “I try to address the soul fatigue, the existential questions many people have to wrestle with in this work.” Just amazing to read this, I mean after hearing all about the innocent lives taken, and then to be presented with their attempts to optimize the teams involved with it.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoThe air force really isn't interested in wasting multi thousand (or more) dollar bombs on people that don't deserve them and in a manner that just makes more people hate them and makes their job harder. They also aren't interested in burning out their teams of expensive professionals. Just because you're hearing about them address the latter doesn't mean they stopped caring about the former.
- pmoriarty 4y ago"The air force really isn't interested in wasting multi thousand (or more) dollar bombs on people that don't deserve them and in a manner that just makes more people hate them and makes their job harder." If only that were true, they wouldn't wage all of the senseless wars that the US has fought since WW2.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago>If only that were true, they wouldn't wage all of the senseless wars that the US has fought since WW2. Take your low effort trope and shove it somewhere unpleasant. Of course the war machine is gonna war. That's what they do. You don't see Newport making their cigs kill their customers faster unless there's something in it for them. The air force is the same way. They might be in the death business but they're not gonna go around wasting bombs on people who are no threat to anyone unless they think that's how they're gonna accomplish their goal, which you can pretty much guarantee they don't after 'nam. Are you really so blinded by ideology that you can't see that no military wants to spend resources in a manner that does not help them achieve their goal? Spending the fewest resources to get the most done while forcing your enemy to waste his is one of the most basic concepts in military strategy.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoThe obvious quote apropos here is Max Frisch "Technology is a way of organising the world so that we don't have to experience it.", which I probably cite a bit too often. But I'll offer a quote from Digital Vegan which I think is not out of place here, and I hope conveys a deeper message; "" An immanent problem with enabling technologies, is that they enable all connected parties and carry their values. Stare into the abyss, and the abyss stares back at you. When picking up a technological tool you had better know what it is for. What is connected to the other side of it? And you should do so with the intent of mastering it, and using it kindly. As Andre Loesekrug-Pietri, a founder of European JEDI ('The European DARPA') project put it, unless the people of Liberal democracies take control of technology "other people or other political systems will impose their values on us". "" The rationale for remote weapons is risk reduction. Despite the apparent diffusion of responsibility and decoupling of action and consequences, the operator remains connected to the target. Blurry pixels turning red on a screen are still lives being extinguished. Unless you have a generally low IQ and very poor emotional intelligence that fact is still inescapably bound to your actions and will haunt you as if you had seen the whites of their eyes and body parts. Indeed the trauma may be worse, because you now have to fill in the gaps with your imagination, somewhere between dispassionate official EKIA reports and gruesome media accounts. You'll never know, and so you'll never get closure. Each technological action has an equal and opposite reaction.
- FpUser 4y ago>"And sometimes what the customer wanted did not seem right. There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy" All nice and dandy. And the world looks the other way.
- H8crilA 4y agoIn addition to the morality of such ops, keep in mind that those drones (such as the Reaper) are nearly useless against an opponent that has a proper air defense setup (SAMs). Having high price tags and carrying lethal weapons would make them a priority. Their only practical application is to "bully" an unsophisticated enemy. For example, had Russia tried this kind of a weapon against Kiev or Lviv then the s300 and Buks would have taken them out in a matter of minutes. Also, thinking that a remote pilot has different level of empathy vs a pilot that's inside the aircraft is a little deranged from the reality of military operations. A weapon is a weapon, it is meant to eliminate/kill targets.
- _3u10 4y agoIf you’ve flown in a plane and flown a flight sim of the same plane you’ll understand the difference in visual acuity. A pilot in the seat has huge informational advantage over a remote pilot. This informational advantage can and does influence decision making, go / no go scenarios.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bayindirh 4y ago> For example, had Russia tried this kind of a weapon against Kiev or Lviv then the s300 and Buks would have taken them out in a matter of minutes. However, when supplanted by electronic warfare and decent intel, we've seen how Azerbaijan's TB2s destroyed a lot of Armenian SAM sites, without blinking. Even they took out a S300 site by marking it with a TB2 and destroying it with missiles. So, it's not as clear cut as it seems.
- H8crilA 4y agoOk, yes, you can plan a modern mission where this kind of equipment, alongside some electronic warfare, other crafts and good intel, results in a success against a high level enemy. You are right. Although a good old f16 or f18 would be a lot more useful in such a role I just meant to say that something like "we fly this drone, alone, here, make a quick kill and come back" only works against very under-armed military groups. Ukraine, as an example, is well above that level of defense. Also, I am eagerly awaiting reliable information on how did it happen that TB2s were such a force against Russian tanks. I suspect extreme levels of Russian bardak while covering their own forces with air defense layers.