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> “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]” At that point I
by mckirk 3y ago
> “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”
At that point I had to scroll back up to check whether this was just a really twisted April's Fools joke.
- tokai 3y agoIts rich when the argument for the system is that the targeting is the bottleneck.
- xyzelement 3y agoWhat part of this upsets you vs a baseline understanding of reality? There's often a criticism of the US military doctrine that our weapons are great but are often way more expensive than the thing we shoot them at (as exemplified in our engagement with the Houthis in the Red Sea.) If anything, the quote you pulled sounds like its talking about highly precise weaponry, and it seems to me that the way to minimize the overall death in a war is to use your precise weapons to take out the most impactful enemy. Which part of this is different than how you see the world so that reading this quote threw you?
- jakupovic 3y agoI'll answer for the previous post. The most disturbing part is stating main criteria is being a male and their models have 10% error rate.
- xyzelement 3y agoI don't think you're parsing the article correctly. There is no allegation that the main criteria for the algorithm is "being male." The allegation is that the human double-checking of the algorithm confirms the target is male (as opposed to woman/child.)
- jakupovic 3y agoNot sure what the difference is given the end result?
- selimthegrim 3y agoThey probably just cribbed off the US algorithm for droning people in the tribal areas and Afghanistan.
- anigbrowl 3y agoCivilians aren't strategic targets like military decision-makers, but describing them as 'unimportant' is a sign of moral vacuity.
- mckirk 3y agoI know war isn't pretty, but I really didn't expect that openly displayed level of callousness. Saying 'we think these people should be dead, but they are not important enough to warrant our "good" bombs', to me, says a lot about the mentality of the people in charge of that military assault: those aren't human lives, those are items on a 'to kill' list, and they aren't surrounded by civilians, but 'acceptable collateral damage'.
- chasd00 3y ago>> “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]” expensive relative to what? a single rifle bullet? jdam kits are not expensive, easy to manufacturer, and there's plenty of 500lb dumb bombs lying around. If a country has access to precision guided bomb tech then I'd say the should be obligated to use it for bombing exclusively.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]