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The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we kille

• dreamfactory 13y ago
  Not to justify any of this business, but why on earth wouldn't they apply 'beyond reasonable doubt' in their own minds when summarily executing somebody in the first place?
  • ck2 13y ago
    Because everyone hides behind "just following orders" up the chain. It is also somewhere along the line of why police feel it is okay to try to shoot suspects on a busy street and often shoot the wrong innocent person and mess up their lives.
  • vinceguidry 13y ago
    One of the best books to read to get a feel for how America commits its war crimes is Kill Anything that Moves about the Vietnam war. http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American-ebook/dp/B008FPSTOQ/ http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American-eboo...
  • dspeyer 13y ago
    That sort of standard works when the executor has massively more power than the executee. For the US versus an ordinary criminal, we can do it. Facing something that looks more like a war, applying standards of justice generally results in losing.
    • makomk 13y ago
      In this case, the executor has more power than the executee. The US can reduce people to bloody smears from drones that are almost invisible to their victims, with all the actual humans safely ensconced in bases hundreds of miles away. The people they're targetting have nothing like that - they cannot fight back without putting themselves straight in the line of fire.
      • dspeyer 13y ago
        Not massively enough. If the US tried to arrest these targets and bring them to trial, the arresting forces would get killed.
  • jaekwon 13y ago
    The more civilians you kill, the more enemy you make, the more you need the military.
• neals 13y ago
  I think the innocent victims that we make today will get us on track to developing better drones with more resolution and less errors and doubt. I imagine a perfect drone without any human controller, doing it's business by AI, actually making the world a better place. [edit] lots of hate and naive comments. Fact remains that human progress has always come through sacrificing some of us for the greater good. Innocent people have always died and will keep dying until we get to a point where robots take over for us. I am not being sarcastic. I stand by my opinion.
  • fit2rule 13y ago
    What a disgusting point of view. The only thing that would make the world a better place is if the funding for death-machines was instead being used to deliver water purification plants, schools and education packages, medical supplies - to those human beings living in the 'foreign lands' who really need it. For the cost of a single Hellfire, many Afghanistan villages could've been given power, for the first time, to charge their phones, making it possible for them to communicate, to educate themselves. But instead: BOOM! There goes some kids leg. What a pity that the desire to create such technology is not, instead, being directed by the government towards truly peaceful technologies..
    • giardini 13y ago
      fit2rule: "the funding for death-machines was instead being used to deliver water purification plants, schools and education packages, medical supplies - to those human beings living in the 'foreign lands' who really need it." And what happens when people who accept those plants, schools and education are killed by people who don't want them to accept those gifts from us? Back in the Vietnam era I made the same argument you do (for awhile). But the VC learned to kill villagers who accepted aid. The same thing goes on today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. In a better world, one without war, I would agree with you. But that is not the world we live in. Sometimes you have to think things through to second-order and higher effects.
      • fit2rule 13y ago
• yummyfajitas 13y ago
  You act as if the alternative to drones (20 year old kids with guns) never kills the wrong person. Yvain's essay asking "what if drones came first" is highly relevant here. http://squid314.livejournal.com/338607.html?thread=9878703 http://squid314.livejournal.com/338607.html?thread=9878703
  • deleted 13y ago
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  • ihsw 13y ago
    The 'kids' part deserves emphasis. In recent times the military has been lowering its admission standards, and as such all manner of emotionally immature and mentally unstable are being allowed in. This isn't new, but it's been on the rise. The soldiers we're sending over there aren't trained professionals, they're glorified mall-cops with sub-machine guns. The ones with special training are involved in special operations and they're few and far in-between, and personally I'd prefer we maintain a group of highly specialized individuals rather than an army of meat shields.
    • pc86 13y ago
      This true, except for the part where the US military is cutting forces[0] and it is becoming harder and harder to join[1]. It's probably easier to pretend the majority of the military is comprised of barely pubescent country bumpkins with no training past the Boy Scouts, but that's just not the case. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/army-to-cut-its-forces-by-80000-in-5-years.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/army-to-cut-its-forces-... [1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/15/news/economy/military-recruiting/index.html?iid=SF_E_River http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/15/news/economy/military-recrui...
      • jessaustin 13y ago
        Well that is good news.
  • 1457389 13y ago
    The alternative to drones is counterinsurgency. For example, the wedding party in Yemen, if it were a target of actual importance, would have been captured and interrogated, with suspected insurgents detained for further questioning. The problem is that we don't have the manpower or the political latitude to do that in all these regions, so we send in killer robots instead and hope we hit the right people. This is a recipe for high false positive rates, even with the best equipment, because the HUMINT and SIGINT that underlies target identification is shaky to say the least.
• deleted 13y ago
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• bdg 13y ago
  As a human analogue to the drones, it is not unrealistic to imagine that phones, shovels, or other objects have been mistaken for guns by an observer in a tense situation (for example: a SWAT raid). Granted, one is clear visual cues that are confused by a human mind in the heat of the moment, while the other is bad quality readings. We're talking about two different implementations of the error. This drone project could go one of two ways (ending the project is highly unlikely). The first way is upgrading the video quality, but this brings a number of issues with it such as latency (quite important in combat as any on-line gamer will tell you). The second is to provide AI to the drones... which frightens me when we can't get a voice recognition phone system to work. Google cars are just driving now after years of research (not flying, evading, identifying IEDs, identifying shovels, and engaging targets strategically on any given battle zone)... I don't expect the drones to fair better at this task because they're funded by the gov. The only way the drone program would be pulled for a while is if the back doored encryption protocols were routinely exploited. We won't see an end to drones, or any end to proliferation at home or at war, and I'm skeptical we'll see drones get "better" any time soon.
  • 1457389 13y ago
    The crucial difference is that drones are used in contexts where they have a very high false positive rate. It doesn't matter how accurate your missiles are if you are operating in an area where it is impossible to accurately identify targets. Considering the total lack of oversight and regulation on these secretive programs, it is unsurprising that they have the latitude to cause large amounts of civilian damage without inviting any limits on their activity.
    • dspeyer 13y ago
      Do drones have a higher false positive rate than human-piloted air support? Numbers are going to be hard to come by -- the military doesn't want to reveal anything. Qualitatively, the Collateral Murder video that wikileaks posted a while back (in which a US helicopter gunned down a pair of Reuters reporters because they were carrying objects that could have been weapons) sounds very similar to what's described here.
• ppod 13y ago
  The word 'drone' should be excised from the discussion. Whether the pilot is sitting in a trailer outside LA or in the cockpit has very little to do with morality of the rules of engagement. The US has been repeatedly killing the wrong people in another country since before the age of robotics. The issue we need to focus on (after the issue of whether we should be fighting the war in the first place), is the rules of engagement. For example: "Positive identification (PID) is required prior to engagement. PID is a reasonable certainty that the proposed target is a legitimate military target." http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/11.htm http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/11.htm How are operators trained to interpret "reasonable certainty"? How do we balance protection of local civilians with protection of US troops and the aims of the war? These issues are old, outside of the context of drones or even aircraft.
  • ppod 13y ago
    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/26/rules-of-engagement-bind-us-troops-actions-in-afgh/?page=all http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/26/rules-of-eng...
• reinhardt 13y ago
  > If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed. A little perspective could prevent such knee-jerk reactions. The ambiguity of drone targets is still miles ahead from basically blind carpet bombing a whole area that was (and still often is) the rule for the last century or so of modern warfare.
  • sleepyK 13y ago
    The thing is, the convenience of drones has made it much easier for countries to carry out strikes without any regard to the damage they will cause. In the past, the possibility of your soldiers dying on the ground was a huge deterrent to frivolous strikes. Today, drones conduct major strikes without paying any heed to international borders. Drones conduct missions nobody would have imagined possible a few years back. While there is a huge benefit to the invading army in terms of reduction of fatalities, there is also a cheapening of war that lets commanders order strikes at their whim. I'm sure nobody in the US or NATO armies in Afghanistan admits this, but this happens in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
    • MoosePlissken 13y ago
      Drones may cheapen war in the way that you describe, but that still doesn't negate the fact that they kill less innocent people than the weapons and tactics that we used to use. You seem to argue that the expense of a war can act as a deterrent. And yet, history is filled with bloodbaths that have failed to bring an end to war as we know it. Vietnam was horrific but it didn't keep us out of Iraq. I don't think getting rid of drones and forcing people to fight mano-a-mano will help prevent war. Deterrence only seems to work when the costs are astronomically high (e.g. nuclear weapons).
    • mikeash 13y ago
      Isn't that an aspect of air strikes in general, manned or unmanned, not something specific to drones?
      • throwaway2048 13y ago
• atrus 13y ago
  But the same thing happens with soldiers on the ground too. There confusion and accidents when people are shooting at each other all the time. That entire article could have easily been replaced with a marines perspective, a bombers perspective, or a sailors perspective.
  • deleted 13y ago
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  • 1457389 13y ago
    The difference is that we don't deploy our soldiers in the contexts and use-cases that we do with drones, because the risks are too great. Drones are expendable, so they are used in hostile conditions where the intelligence isn't as clear. That's why in practice they lead to high false positive rates. The real question is whether we should be using this technology to be waging war in areas where we wouldn't have done so otherwise.The choice between risking blood vs. risking electronics leads to a dangerous degree of latitude in how these weapons are deployed, that leads to a subsequent increase in civilian casualties which need not have occurred. Public health researchers face the same issue every day when they decide whether or not to deploy a new treatment with unwanted side effects. If the false positive rate of your diagnostic heuristics is too high, then the overall damage to society can easily outweigh the effectiveness of the treatment, no matter how technologically advanced or curative it is.
    • opinali 13y ago
      Well said. Removing risk implies removing accountability.
• melling 13y ago
  There you go again ck2. One of your classic comments. We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible. The real solution, of course, is to avoid wars, and violence, in general. Supposedly, the world is more peaceful now than ever, even with Syria, the train station suicide bomber is Russia today, etc. Personally, I don't want to see the US be the world police. There's a high cost in both money and American lives. Still, for the foreseeable future, the world needs to address the problems and try to solve the remaining problems. Otherwise, decades from now, people on HN will be complaining about how future weapon systems are killing innocent people.
  • k-mcgrady 13y ago
    >> "There's a high cost in both money and American lives" There's a high cost in both money and human lives - nationality should not be a consideration.
    • prometheuspk 13y ago
      Hear Hear
    • sleepyK 13y ago
      But unfortunately, it always is. American life, and American citizenship is more precious than any other life. I know it's not the same issue, but throughout the whole NSA snooping revelations, Americans have only been concerned by the legality of spying on their own citizens. All of us foreigners are fair game. This is similar. The value of an American life is much more than that of a foreigner's life.
      • RankingMember 13y ago
        Rest assured that not all of us Americans think it's a-ok that the NSA is spying on other countries' citizens either.
• deleted 13y ago
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• rickdale 13y ago
  I don't understand how we can have a the technology for a drone but we can't fly it close enough to get a good quality photograph. I am all for limiting casualties for the US, but how is it not a war crime to just kill people without 100% proof they are the enemy? And seriously, if cell phones are going to 39 megapixels, why can't a drone send back a good photo?
  • rwmj 13y ago
    The advantage of a drone is it can "lurk" too far away to be easily seen. Building a camera that can take very clear pictures from a long way away is impossible (because of distortion from the air and weather). If you make the drone itself smaller, then you hit the Rayleigh limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_criterion#Explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_criterion#Explanation
    • stevenrace 13y ago
      Additonally, bandwidth needs to be taken into account. Even military satellite uplinks are slow and in many cases feeds are being sent to a ground station and then converted into digital for uplink.
    • dchichkov 13y ago
      Actually you are sort of wrong in both cases. Because a) drone is moving; b) drone can take multiple pictures; c) multiple drones can take pictures simultaneously. In case of multiple drones taking pictures, these can be synchronized using GPS time, down to a microsecond. And knowing the GPS coordinates of each drone you can recover the image. Pretty much with arbitrary quality. (& If you are really good at it and the object is stationary, you can do it even through heavy fog. I'm not kidding, you really can - I can point you to some fancy research in computer vision, that allows you to do just that.).
      • im3w1l 13y ago
        >I can point you to some fancy research in computer vision, that allows you to do just that. Please do
• tbarbugli 13y ago
  We need an international ban on harmed US citizens
• 6d0debc071 13y ago
  > If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed. Mistakes are going to happen whatever you use. It's not clear that sticking better cameras on the things wouldn't give you enough information to make it comparable with other attack vectors.
• AndrewKemendo 13y ago
  The problem with this is that it doesn't give any context for the capabilities of other platforms. In reality it is the best we have, by far for attempting to identify friend or foe on the battlefield. When I say by far, I mean it. It is several orders of magnitude better, oh and it has a memory (DVR) so that the users can improve their capabilities. So the whole things couches it wrong. You could have just as easily have written this: Despite the feed often being highly pixelated, the video feeds offer far better resolution on suspected enemies than any other method, day or night, often including close quarters combat
• rayiner 13y ago
  The asymmetry of people getting killed in your country versus people getting killed in enemy countries is as old as human history. The bedrock of international relations is killing people in other countries. That won't change. We won't become a world of pacifists anytime soon. Given that, do drones make more mistakes than armed soldiers or bomb drops or cruise missiles? That's the relevant question. And there is good reason to believe they do. The drone operator may not have as good a view as a soldier, but also doesn't risk his own life on a false negative.
• coldtea 13y ago
  >Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA? Third world lives are cheaper. They are dark skinned and have different customs. They also dont value democracy. It serves them right. /s
• dhughes 13y ago
  > The feed is so pixelated,... I read that but farther down I read "but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end." seems to contradict. I understand what's meant, pixels and detail are different, but it's a poor choice of phrasing.