7 ms·

US Air Force destroys ISIS HQ building after spotting it through social media

33 points by ub 11y ago

principal22 11y ago
good job hahahaha
josefresco 11y ago
It's worth noting that the US Air Force knows exactly where all of the command posts are for ISIS but due to situations beyond their control (political, civilian populations etc.), they cannot engage. These media stories are cute, but are a mere snapshot into a very complicated world of engagement.
- hippo8 11y ago
  Genuinely interested to know why, isn't the US and the rest of the civilized world at war with these pieces of shit? So why not end it asap? The US managed to take out bin-laden when they got the chance. So why not the isis? These shits are even worse.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    It costs money and it's basically going to be like fighting the Somalis or the Viet Cong or indeed the Iraq/Afghanistan occupations; they're so decentralised that air bombing is ineffective, and they have enough local support that a ground campaign will be grinding.
  - fixermark 11y ago
    It's complicated. For starters, the sovereign nations surrounding / occupied by this rebel government don't want to be seen as needing help to maintain their sovereignty (that kind of weakness encourages the next ISIS to try their hand at regime change).
  - tanderson92 11y ago
    > The US managed to take out bin-laden when they got the chance. Only if you take everything the White House tells you at face value, which is not a wise course of action these days.
  - mason240 11y ago
    In this specific case, it's largely because sending troops back into Iraq would an admission that it was a mistake for President Obama to pull out of Iraq before their military was completely ready.
    - x0x0 11y ago
      Yeah, because training them from 2003 to 2012 to the tune of $25 billion plus didn't make them a competent army, so another 3 years would clearly have gotten the job done. In reality, President Bush is an utter moron responsible for the largest foreign policy debacle in the last 50 years. He upset the jenga tower that is middle east politics and we're going to be living through knock-on effects for a long time. In particular, Iraq isn't a single country; it's 3 countries held together by military force papering over long running ethnic/religious/tribal feuds. Plus oil. Also, when Paul Bremer dismissed much of the iraqi military, one of his generals essentially founded Isis [1]. More idiocy courtesy of George Bush. [1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3028529/Saddam-Hussein-s-revenge-grave-ISIS-s-land-grab-Middle-East-orchestrated-former-Iraqi-dictator-s-generals.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3028529/Saddam-Husse...
- remarkEon 11y ago
  It's probably more accurate to say that the DoD has a reasonable level of confidence for the location of most of the ISIS command posts. The "situations beyond their control" would also include those confidence intervals. These things are dynamic and complex, like you pointed out. As such, it's unwise to declare absolutes about things like this in warfare.
  - josefresco 11y ago
    You're right - I won't edit my post but I agree. I went overboard to contrast the article which might make it appear as though the US military lacks this intelligence.
cryoshon 11y ago
So based off of the article, they bombed a building based off of a selfie accompanied by some text... am I the only one that sees this as a horrendously awful idea?
- CPLX 11y ago
  Yes, what could possibly go wrong with a policy of bombing every building that an ISIS member posts a selfie in front of? Of course in real life this is probably some sort of misinformation campaign to try to misdirect from the fact that they have some sort of informant or other means of figuring things out that they want to cover for.
- philip1209 11y ago
  I imagine that the building was remote and likely marked as a suspected terrorist site. The person who posted the photo was likely flagged as a terrorist based on previous data and was identified by facial recognition in the photo. Having a known terrorist at a suspected terrorist facility was likely enough justification to label the site as malicious and bomb it. The implications of something like this are interesting - it's just a graph theory problem, and hypothetically the computer could be programmed to automate a drone strike when a location reaches a certain score threshold.
  - ackalker 11y ago
    Have you watched the movie "Eagle Eye"? How about "WarGames: The Dead Code"? If not, please do. Both, in their own way, have some interesting points regarding the risks involved in using A.I. in warfare, as well as the reduction of complex social interactions to mere graph theory and statistics.
- kaybe 11y ago
  Even if more went into it, it looks awefully gameable, a more extreme version of swatting.
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    This is my thought as well. This incident has created the need for ISIS to have disinformation campaigns disseminated on social media by people who would be targeted by the strikes-- they can easily implement a policy in which they allow themselves to have a digital footprint in certain irrelevant areas in order to bait an attack, creating civilian casualties and bringing in new recruits.
88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago
So let's ask the question: why did they announce this to the press? That sounds like a whole series of classified things. It sounds more likely to me that the US wants to weaken ISIS' influence on social media, and by planting the idea that posting pictures results in buildings exploding, they'll be less willing to show off images of anything interesting.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  Alternatively, the guy in charge of releasing things to the press gains points for doing this, and the guy who loses points by having it released to the press is someone else who didn't have control over it. As with all organisations, there is politics and point-scoring and competing agendas and just plain incompetence.
  - kelvin0 11y ago
    Well I guess that ISIS selfie guy won't get that promotion after all ...
- Thriptic 11y ago
  It also hurts their credibility by portraying them as a bunch of amateurs who a superior force (the US) can destroy with ease.
- onezeno 11y ago
  Perhaps they already knew about the location, but were looking for some appropriate cover to protect an asset. Further, the US military may wish to make ISIS fearful of using social media, which has been a powerful tool for them.
- jobu 11y ago
  It depends on how stupid the selfie guy was. He could've accidentally left his GPS coordinates in the EXIF data of the image (many phones do this by default). Not much classified sleuthing required to track that down.
- smanatstpete 11y ago
fintler 11y ago
I wonder if they used something like Hunter to find it. Seems unlikely that someone just recognized what the building looked like. http://www.sri.com/work/projects/hunter http://www.sri.com/work/projects/hunter
- justaman 11y ago
  Where's the open source alternative :(
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
danso 11y ago
Could the mods remove the blogspam link and link to the source? http://defensetech.org/2015/06/03/us-air-force-targets-and-destroys-isis-hq-building-using-social-media/ http://defensetech.org/2015/06/03/us-air-force-targets-and-d... > “The guys that were working down out of Hurlburt, they’re combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command. And in some social media, open forum, bragging about the command and control capabilities for Daesh, ISIL. And these guys go: ‘We got an in.’ So they do some work, long story short, about 22 hours later through that very building, three [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] take that entire building out.” As with many things, the devil is in the details...in this case, the "long story short" part. And I don't see what the big deal is; social media is just another way that information gets accidentally leaked...because it came from a "selfie" or whatever, doesn't make it inherently less "truthy"...it just may require different levels and methods of verification before discovered information becomes actionable information. And honestly, I don't think this kind of information is much more inherently flimsy than information that comes from a paid informant, or through tortured confessions.
- latchkey 11y ago
  Even worse is that the photo at the top of the article is clearly a photoshopped image of a plane over the desert. The landing gear is down. It makes the entire thing sound like US military propaganda.
  - dm2 11y ago
    This is the image from the original article, completely different airplane too. http://defensetech.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ISIL-Airstrike-490x331.jpg http://defensetech.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ISIL-Airst... It's all stock images either way, nothing I saw even mentioned what kind of jets were deployed.
    - Frompo 11y ago
      Also of note is that the airplane pictured in the original article (a F-35) is not used in combat yet, nor is it likely that the limited numbers delivered by now will be rated for combat any time soon unless the US gets into a serious peer fight and actually need all their planes.
vfclists 11y ago
Does it make sense that the USAF will reveal their true tactics and sources of intel to ISIS, or do they want to help ISIS along by showing them where they are making mistakes? The whole story seems plain stupid.
dm2 11y ago
Did anyone find the tweet or a screenshot of it?
dba7dba 11y ago
During 2nd Iraq War, some newly arrived Apache helicopters were mortared while they were in hangar area and destroyed. US commanders were mystified because they were in the middle of a huge base and the insurgents couldn’t have know the exact area they were kept in. And than they discovered that some troops has taken selfie with Apache in the background. The photos unfortunately has GPS location embedded. Insurgents found the photos on social media, figured out the GPS data, and figure out exact location of the Apaches.

33 points by ub 11y ago

good job hahahaha

It's worth noting that the US Air Force knows exactly where all of the command posts are for ISIS but due to situations beyond their control (political, civilian populations etc.), they cannot engage. These media stories are cute, but are a mere snapshot into a very complicated world of engagement.

hippo8 11y ago
Genuinely interested to know why, isn't the US and the rest of the civilized world at war with these pieces of shit? So why not end it asap? The US managed to take out bin-laden when they got the chance. So why not the isis? These shits are even worse.
- pjc50 11y ago
  It costs money and it's basically going to be like fighting the Somalis or the Viet Cong or indeed the Iraq/Afghanistan occupations; they're so decentralised that air bombing is ineffective, and they have enough local support that a ground campaign will be grinding.
- fixermark 11y ago
  It's complicated. For starters, the sovereign nations surrounding / occupied by this rebel government don't want to be seen as needing help to maintain their sovereignty (that kind of weakness encourages the next ISIS to try their hand at regime change).
- tanderson92 11y ago
  > The US managed to take out bin-laden when they got the chance. Only if you take everything the White House tells you at face value, which is not a wise course of action these days.
- mason240 11y ago
  In this specific case, it's largely because sending troops back into Iraq would an admission that it was a mistake for President Obama to pull out of Iraq before their military was completely ready.
  - x0x0 11y ago
    Yeah, because training them from 2003 to 2012 to the tune of $25 billion plus didn't make them a competent army, so another 3 years would clearly have gotten the job done. In reality, President Bush is an utter moron responsible for the largest foreign policy debacle in the last 50 years. He upset the jenga tower that is middle east politics and we're going to be living through knock-on effects for a long time. In particular, Iraq isn't a single country; it's 3 countries held together by military force papering over long running ethnic/religious/tribal feuds. Plus oil. Also, when Paul Bremer dismissed much of the iraqi military, one of his generals essentially founded Isis [1]. More idiocy courtesy of George Bush. [1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3028529/Saddam-Hussein-s-revenge-grave-ISIS-s-land-grab-Middle-East-orchestrated-former-Iraqi-dictator-s-generals.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3028529/Saddam-Husse...
remarkEon 11y ago
It's probably more accurate to say that the DoD has a reasonable level of confidence for the location of most of the ISIS command posts. The "situations beyond their control" would also include those confidence intervals. These things are dynamic and complex, like you pointed out. As such, it's unwise to declare absolutes about things like this in warfare.
- josefresco 11y ago
  You're right - I won't edit my post but I agree. I went overboard to contrast the article which might make it appear as though the US military lacks this intelligence.

cryoshon 11y ago

So based off of the article, they bombed a building based off of a selfie accompanied by some text... am I the only one that sees this as a horrendously awful idea?

CPLX 11y ago
Yes, what could possibly go wrong with a policy of bombing every building that an ISIS member posts a selfie in front of? Of course in real life this is probably some sort of misinformation campaign to try to misdirect from the fact that they have some sort of informant or other means of figuring things out that they want to cover for.
philip1209 11y ago
I imagine that the building was remote and likely marked as a suspected terrorist site. The person who posted the photo was likely flagged as a terrorist based on previous data and was identified by facial recognition in the photo. Having a known terrorist at a suspected terrorist facility was likely enough justification to label the site as malicious and bomb it. The implications of something like this are interesting - it's just a graph theory problem, and hypothetically the computer could be programmed to automate a drone strike when a location reaches a certain score threshold.
- ackalker 11y ago
  Have you watched the movie "Eagle Eye"? How about "WarGames: The Dead Code"? If not, please do. Both, in their own way, have some interesting points regarding the risks involved in using A.I. in warfare, as well as the reduction of complex social interactions to mere graph theory and statistics.
kaybe 11y ago
Even if more went into it, it looks awefully gameable, a more extreme version of swatting.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  This is my thought as well. This incident has created the need for ISIS to have disinformation campaigns disseminated on social media by people who would be targeted by the strikes-- they can easily implement a policy in which they allow themselves to have a digital footprint in certain irrelevant areas in order to bait an attack, creating civilian casualties and bringing in new recruits.

88e282102ae2e5b 11y ago

So let's ask the question: why did they announce this to the press? That sounds like a whole series of classified things. It sounds more likely to me that the US wants to weaken ISIS' influence on social media, and by planting the idea that posting pictures results in buildings exploding, they'll be less willing to show off images of anything interesting.

EliRivers 11y ago
Alternatively, the guy in charge of releasing things to the press gains points for doing this, and the guy who loses points by having it released to the press is someone else who didn't have control over it. As with all organisations, there is politics and point-scoring and competing agendas and just plain incompetence.
- kelvin0 11y ago
  Well I guess that ISIS selfie guy won't get that promotion after all ...
Thriptic 11y ago
It also hurts their credibility by portraying them as a bunch of amateurs who a superior force (the US) can destroy with ease.
onezeno 11y ago
Perhaps they already knew about the location, but were looking for some appropriate cover to protect an asset. Further, the US military may wish to make ISIS fearful of using social media, which has been a powerful tool for them.
jobu 11y ago
It depends on how stupid the selfie guy was. He could've accidentally left his GPS coordinates in the EXIF data of the image (many phones do this by default). Not much classified sleuthing required to track that down.
smanatstpete 11y ago

fintler 11y ago

I wonder if they used something like Hunter to find it. Seems unlikely that someone just recognized what the building looked like. http://www.sri.com/work/projects/hunter http://www.sri.com/work/projects/hunter

justaman 11y ago
Where's the open source alternative :(
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

danso 11y ago

Could the mods remove the blogspam link and link to the source? http://defensetech.org/2015/06/03/us-air-force-targets-and-destroys-isis-hq-building-using-social-media/ http://defensetech.org/2015/06/03/us-air-force-targets-and-d... > “The guys that were working down out of Hurlburt, they’re combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command. And in some social media, open forum, bragging about the command and control capabilities for Daesh, ISIL. And these guys go: ‘We got an in.’ So they do some work, long story short, about 22 hours later through that very building, three [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] take that entire building out.” As with many things, the devil is in the details...in this case, the "long story short" part. And I don't see what the big deal is; social media is just another way that information gets accidentally leaked...because it came from a "selfie" or whatever, doesn't make it inherently less "truthy"...it just may require different levels and methods of verification before discovered information becomes actionable information. And honestly, I don't think this kind of information is much more inherently flimsy than information that comes from a paid informant, or through tortured confessions.

latchkey 11y ago
Even worse is that the photo at the top of the article is clearly a photoshopped image of a plane over the desert. The landing gear is down. It makes the entire thing sound like US military propaganda.
- dm2 11y ago
  This is the image from the original article, completely different airplane too. http://defensetech.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ISIL-Airstrike-490x331.jpg http://defensetech.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ISIL-Airst... It's all stock images either way, nothing I saw even mentioned what kind of jets were deployed.
  - Frompo 11y ago
    Also of note is that the airplane pictured in the original article (a F-35) is not used in combat yet, nor is it likely that the limited numbers delivered by now will be rated for combat any time soon unless the US gets into a serious peer fight and actually need all their planes.

vfclists 11y ago

Does it make sense that the USAF will reveal their true tactics and sources of intel to ISIS, or do they want to help ISIS along by showing them where they are making mistakes? The whole story seems plain stupid.

dm2 11y ago

Did anyone find the tweet or a screenshot of it?

dba7dba 11y ago

During 2nd Iraq War, some newly arrived Apache helicopters were mortared while they were in hangar area and destroyed. US commanders were mystified because they were in the middle of a huge base and the insurgents couldn’t have know the exact area they were kept in. And than they discovered that some troops has taken selfie with Apache in the background. The photos unfortunately has GPS location embedded. Insurgents found the photos on social media, figured out the GPS data, and figure out exact location of the Apaches.