4 ms·

I dunno, I guess it's because people don't understand that drones aren't autonomous, and think Skynet or robot overlords fly them and pull the trigger.

by bane 12y ago

jjoonathan 12y ago
No need to guess, the reason why people are uncomfortable with drone strikes is in the title: "U.S. Is Often Unsure About Who Will Die in Drone Strikes" If you're a soldier on the ground you have useful heuristics for determining who is an enemy combatant ("are they shooting at me?") that drone operators don't. You also have mechanisms for limiting collateral damage that drone operators don't. Which isn't to say that these tools are employed all the time, but at least they exist, whereas with drones the official strategy for limiting collateral damage is "re-define 'enemy combatant' to mean anyone of military age killed by the drone."
- bane 12y ago
  how is that different from any air strike?
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    It's not, but I doubt that the people complaining about drone strikes are perfectly OK with air strikes. Drones are the most visible and most rapidly expanding facet of the problem so it's not unreasonable to focus the discussion around them.
    - bane 12y ago
      Right, so it seems like a distraction to me to focus on one facet of something not to agree with rather than the whole problem. Turned around the problem with this argument is that it's solved by getting to know the people you are about to kill. Which sounds rather silly if the point is to protest killing people at all. Or if we stay focused on drones, just kill them with one of the other dozen remote methods we have at our disposal.
      - jjoonathan 12y ago
        Drones make indiscriminate killing more economical (in terms of U.S. lives and $). Politically attacking drones is a pragmatic, reasonable strategy with which to oppose indiscriminate killing.
  - skywhopper 12y ago
    It's not. But drone strikes are far more common currently, and are killing far more people than any traditional air strikes being used lately. If we were currently carpet-bombing Tehran and killing thousands of civilians, I would be more upset about that. But right now, drone attacks are one of the least defensible things our government is doing.
    - bane 12y ago
      > But drone strikes are far more common currently I here this from time to time, but I wonder how true this actually is. My guess is that most military actions are not publicly reported, so we don't have number to compare. My understanding is that there are a few ways to reach out and kill people from far away: - snipers - artillery - ground-to-ground missiles/rockets - air-to-ground missiles/rockets - ship-to-ground missiles - aerial artillery/cannon (Spectre, A-10, Apache) - air-to-ground bombs (for argument let's assume only "precision" munitions) - drone strikes (which are a kind of air-to-ground missile, but we'll beak them out as distinct for fiscussion) Before drones became common, all of the rest of the above were used frequently in both Iraq and Afghanistan (and in every previous modern conflict), yet there wasn't this kind of "let's have a problem with this specific method" and plenty of wedding parties and civilians were killed. Yet with the exception of snipers, none of these involve getting personal with the targets, and collateral damage is well known to happen with all of these methods. In context, drones aren't really any different, yet they seem to be singles out because...? My guess is that it's a fundamental lack of understanding of what drones are and how they work. My guess is that most people out there who specifically have a problem with drones, but don't comment on the rest of the methods, have a niggling suspicion that they work by showing a picture of a bad guy to a drone or letting it sniff a captured sock or something and sending it out on a kill mission and this cold computer killer terrifies them because of too many movies. But they effectively work the same as any of the other methods. The same missiles, probably the same cameras/sensors and the same operators, ordered by the same command chain with the same legal oversight make the same decision to shoot-to-kill in the same way. Arguments about not wanting to put U.S. pilots in harms way also ring false since nobody the U.S. is shooting at has an effective airspace denial system in place. The only thing the drones bring to the table is loiter time, and I'm not sure that "as loiter time approaches balloon or kite" crosses some kind of moral threshold that wasn't already crossed by any other listed method. There simply wasn't this kind of anti-AC-130H or anti-A-10 movement around when they were chewing up people. Nobody came down on Helicopter gunships, as a class of killing devices, even after Wikileaks' Collateral Murder came out. It seems to me that the moral problem that should be addressed is killing people from far away, not the specific method you use to do it.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  Soldiers in Iraq mostly died from IEDS, car bombs and ambushes where you have no way to identify the enemy before he attacks you. Heck we levelled Hamburg and Dresden, burned Tokyo to the ground and nuked two Japanese cities. Why even talk about drones?

I dunno, I guess it's because people don't understand that drones aren't autonomous, and think Skynet or robot overlords fly them and pull the trigger.

by bane 12y ago

I dunno, I guess it's because people don't understand that drones aren't autonomous, and think Skynet or robot overlords fly them and pull the trigger.

jjoonathan 12y ago

No need to guess, the reason why people are uncomfortable with drone strikes is in the title: "U.S. Is Often Unsure About Who Will Die in Drone Strikes" If you're a soldier on the ground you have useful heuristics for determining who is an enemy combatant ("are they shooting at me?") that drone operators don't. You also have mechanisms for limiting collateral damage that drone operators don't. Which isn't to say that these tools are employed all the time, but at least they exist, whereas with drones the official strategy for limiting collateral damage is "re-define 'enemy combatant' to mean anyone of military age killed by the drone."

bane 12y ago
how is that different from any air strike?
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  It's not, but I doubt that the people complaining about drone strikes are perfectly OK with air strikes. Drones are the most visible and most rapidly expanding facet of the problem so it's not unreasonable to focus the discussion around them.
  - bane 12y ago
    Right, so it seems like a distraction to me to focus on one facet of something not to agree with rather than the whole problem. Turned around the problem with this argument is that it's solved by getting to know the people you are about to kill. Which sounds rather silly if the point is to protest killing people at all. Or if we stay focused on drones, just kill them with one of the other dozen remote methods we have at our disposal.
    - jjoonathan 12y ago
      Drones make indiscriminate killing more economical (in terms of U.S. lives and $). Politically attacking drones is a pragmatic, reasonable strategy with which to oppose indiscriminate killing.
- skywhopper 12y ago
  It's not. But drone strikes are far more common currently, and are killing far more people than any traditional air strikes being used lately. If we were currently carpet-bombing Tehran and killing thousands of civilians, I would be more upset about that. But right now, drone attacks are one of the least defensible things our government is doing.
  - bane 12y ago
    > But drone strikes are far more common currently I here this from time to time, but I wonder how true this actually is. My guess is that most military actions are not publicly reported, so we don't have number to compare. My understanding is that there are a few ways to reach out and kill people from far away: - snipers - artillery - ground-to-ground missiles/rockets - air-to-ground missiles/rockets - ship-to-ground missiles - aerial artillery/cannon (Spectre, A-10, Apache) - air-to-ground bombs (for argument let's assume only "precision" munitions) - drone strikes (which are a kind of air-to-ground missile, but we'll beak them out as distinct for fiscussion) Before drones became common, all of the rest of the above were used frequently in both Iraq and Afghanistan (and in every previous modern conflict), yet there wasn't this kind of "let's have a problem with this specific method" and plenty of wedding parties and civilians were killed. Yet with the exception of snipers, none of these involve getting personal with the targets, and collateral damage is well known to happen with all of these methods. In context, drones aren't really any different, yet they seem to be singles out because...? My guess is that it's a fundamental lack of understanding of what drones are and how they work. My guess is that most people out there who specifically have a problem with drones, but don't comment on the rest of the methods, have a niggling suspicion that they work by showing a picture of a bad guy to a drone or letting it sniff a captured sock or something and sending it out on a kill mission and this cold computer killer terrifies them because of too many movies. But they effectively work the same as any of the other methods. The same missiles, probably the same cameras/sensors and the same operators, ordered by the same command chain with the same legal oversight make the same decision to shoot-to-kill in the same way. Arguments about not wanting to put U.S. pilots in harms way also ring false since nobody the U.S. is shooting at has an effective airspace denial system in place. The only thing the drones bring to the table is loiter time, and I'm not sure that "as loiter time approaches balloon or kite" crosses some kind of moral threshold that wasn't already crossed by any other listed method. There simply wasn't this kind of anti-AC-130H or anti-A-10 movement around when they were chewing up people. Nobody came down on Helicopter gunships, as a class of killing devices, even after Wikileaks' Collateral Murder came out. It seems to me that the moral problem that should be addressed is killing people from far away, not the specific method you use to do it.
tomjen3 12y ago
Soldiers in Iraq mostly died from IEDS, car bombs and ambushes where you have no way to identify the enemy before he attacks you. Heck we levelled Hamburg and Dresden, burned Tokyo to the ground and nuked two Japanese cities. Why even talk about drones?