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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 curren

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.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  If we picture the political landscape of acceptable war tactics as a battlefield on which "war hawks" (seeking primarily to maximize military efficacy) and "peacenicks" (seeking primarily to minimize collateral damage) fight each other, then the items 1-7 on your list represent entrenched warhawk fortifications while the 8th represents a recent and relatively undefended warhawk raiding party. The peacenicks are attacking it. In this analogy, your argument is "the peacenicks aren't effectively fighting the warhawks because they are only attacking the raiding party rather than the entrenched defenses." I have an alternative theory: they're attacking the raiding party because doing so gives the best expected ROI.
  - bane 12y ago
    But it also seems hypocritical. Because they aren't being attacked, are the other methods okay? In terms of raw brutality, drones are hardly the worst thing on that list. Points about cost-per-life taken also ring hollow, the U.S. military budget is virtually unlimited, it's not cost sensitive in that kind of way. Drones offer marginally more safety for operators, but no theater the U.S. is engaged in or is likely to be engaged in is likely to offer resistance to any of the other methods. And other methods also offer similar safety margins for operators. Ship-to-ground missiles for example, offer virtually the same risk as drones. I'm not saying fighting drones is a pointless argument to make. Each of the methods is open to criticism, but by only attacking one, it reeks of a kind of protest fadism - of losing the plot. Is the problem killing people, or is the problem killing people with drones? Here's an alternative scenario for why drones are actually popular with hawks, and it's not safety or direct cost: they offer vastly longer loiter time and better real-time surveillance over an area compared to any other method or group of methods, which means they provide greater targeting and attack opportunity on the off-chance a difficult to find target presents itself. To go with your analogy, by not attacking the entrenchments, it signals to the hawks that it's okay to keep sending raiding parties, because they'll eventually end up fortified. I appreciate this discussion by the way.

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.

jjoonathan 12y ago
If we picture the political landscape of acceptable war tactics as a battlefield on which "war hawks" (seeking primarily to maximize military efficacy) and "peacenicks" (seeking primarily to minimize collateral damage) fight each other, then the items 1-7 on your list represent entrenched warhawk fortifications while the 8th represents a recent and relatively undefended warhawk raiding party. The peacenicks are attacking it. In this analogy, your argument is "the peacenicks aren't effectively fighting the warhawks because they are only attacking the raiding party rather than the entrenched defenses." I have an alternative theory: they're attacking the raiding party because doing so gives the best expected ROI.
- bane 12y ago
  But it also seems hypocritical. Because they aren't being attacked, are the other methods okay? In terms of raw brutality, drones are hardly the worst thing on that list. Points about cost-per-life taken also ring hollow, the U.S. military budget is virtually unlimited, it's not cost sensitive in that kind of way. Drones offer marginally more safety for operators, but no theater the U.S. is engaged in or is likely to be engaged in is likely to offer resistance to any of the other methods. And other methods also offer similar safety margins for operators. Ship-to-ground missiles for example, offer virtually the same risk as drones. I'm not saying fighting drones is a pointless argument to make. Each of the methods is open to criticism, but by only attacking one, it reeks of a kind of protest fadism - of losing the plot. Is the problem killing people, or is the problem killing people with drones? Here's an alternative scenario for why drones are actually popular with hawks, and it's not safety or direct cost: they offer vastly longer loiter time and better real-time surveillance over an area compared to any other method or group of methods, which means they provide greater targeting and attack opportunity on the off-chance a difficult to find target presents itself. To go with your analogy, by not attacking the entrenchments, it signals to the hawks that it's okay to keep sending raiding parties, because they'll eventually end up fortified. I appreciate this discussion by the way.