The other day a drone in Afghanistan killed 30 civilians. Rather than being ISIS members holding a meeting, they were pine nut farmers gathering around a fire to relax after their day's work.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-drones...
I don't really give a fuck about the psychological condition of the drone pilots except insofar as it puts their children at risk. They and their commanders should feel ashamed to look other people in the eye.
Then you really lack perspective on what any warfare is: it's always critical, life or death decisions that have to be taken without sufficient information. US civilian to combatant casualty ratio in the recent conflicts have been significantly better than any other modern wars as well.
Goldstein is dead. The war is over. Stop killing Afghans. Let me sort their own issues and politics out. If you are worried about them coming to your country and messing with you then stop all Saudis from coming to your country... you can also ban Afghans if it makes you feel better. It's like really what are the hoping to gain from all of this. The people resent you as much as anyone can resent anyone else. The government is a puppet government. The country is fractured beyond repair. It's highly lawless. It's like yes if we can just prevent people from gathering in the Middle of nowhere they can't conspire against us. While most of their enemies came from their greatest ally in which country they can do as they please. This war is a massive Orwellian joke.
The US did overreact and attempted to do nation building in Afghanistan. But your prescription for letting them sort things out on their own has already been tried, and it was a colossal failure. The government hosted terrorist organizations who killed thousands of people in the US and mounted attacks on civilians of many nationalities around the world.
You mean the US has been sitting there since the 70s. Trained a bunch of militants there who eventually turned on their colonial masters using them for brute force to fight the Soviets, don't you? The government who hosted the terrorist organization in Afghanistan then could be said to be the US.
I'm not sure that's a fair characterization. Regardless of whether the US should have gotten involved or should have seen future problems coming, my understanding is that at the time that the US was supporting the Mujahideen they were attacking military targets and where therefore guerrilla fighters, not terrorists.
It's funny how brainwashed most Americans are about this conflict, we might as well as be living in 1984's world. Have you heard the ancient saying one man's freedom fighter, another man's terrorist? What would happen if no terrorists had been trained by the US (and their Islamic puppet that wags the dog, Saudi Arabia)? The Soviet Union would have fallen and Afghanistan would be a normal country like its neighbors.
> After Taraki was murdered the new Afghan Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin repeated requests for Soviet military support, at least to protect his residence. Finally, in December the Politburo decided to deal with the situation in Afghanistan,[8] and in early December sent special forces which attacked Amin's palace and killed him, putting the exiled Babrak Kamal in his place. These forces were subsequently reinforced by the 40th Army which entered Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. As the Kremlin foresaw, this intervention would cause problems around the world for the USSR, with the policy of detente and, not least, at the forthcoming Olympic Games due to take place in summer 1980 in Moscow.[9] The result was a far-reaching boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, supported not only by the United States but by many of the 65 other invited countries that did not take part.
> At its greatest extent the Soviet military contingent in Afghanistan numbered 100,000 personnel. This presence remained for a decade and kickstarted U.S. and Saudi funding for Islamic Mujahideen groups opposed to both the Afghan government and the Soviet military presence. The local Mujahideen, along with fighters from several different Arab nations (Pathan tribes from across the border also participated in the war; they were supported by the Pakistani ISI), fought the Soviet forces to a standstill. On 24 January 1989 Gorbachev's Politburo took the decision to withdraw most of the Soviet forces,[10] while continuing to provide military assistance to the Afghan government.[11] Eventually, in-fighting within the Mujahideen led to the rise of warlords in Afghanistan, and from them emerged the Taliban.[12] The Soviets left behind the only highway in the country as well as many concrete structures built in the major cities, and airfields that are still in use (e.g. at Bagram).
Nothing in your post contradicts what I said. I'm arguing that the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is whether they target civilians. So when fighting the Soviets or later the US, the Taliban where not terrorists; although that doesn't necessarily mean that they were good people.
> The mujahideen favoured sabotage operations. The more common types of sabotage included damaging power lines, knocking out pipelines and radio stations, blowing up government office buildings, air terminals, hotels, cinemas, and so on. In the border region with Pakistan, the mujahideen would often launch 800 rockets per day. Between April 1985 and January 1987, they carried out over 23,500 shelling attacks on government targets. The mujahideen surveyed firing positions that they normally located near villages within the range of Soviet artillery posts, putting the villagers in danger of death from Soviet retaliation. The mujahideen used land mines heavily. Often, they would enlist the services of the local inhabitants, even children.
Mujahideen praying in Shultan Valley, 1987
> They concentrated on both civilian and military targets, knocking out bridges, closing major roads, attacking convoys, disrupting the electric power system and industrial production, and attacking police stations and Soviet military installations and air bases. They assassinated government officials and PDPA members, and laid siege to small rural outposts. In March 1982, a bomb exploded at the Ministry of Education, damaging several buildings. In the same month, a widespread power failure darkened Kabul when a pylon on the transmission line from the Naghlu power station was blown up. In June 1982 a column of about 1,000 young communist party members sent out to work in the Panjshir valley were ambushed within 30 km of Kabul, with heavy loss of life. On September 4, 1985, insurgents shot down a domestic Bakhtar Airlines plane as it took off from Kandahar airport, killing all 52 people aboard.
> Mujahideen groups used for assassination had three to five men in each. After they received their mission to kill certain government officials, they busied themselves with studying his pattern of life and its details and then selecting the method of fulfilling their established mission. They practiced shooting at automobiles, shooting out of automobiles, laying mines in government accommodation or houses, using poison, and rigging explosive charges in transport.
In May 1985, the seven principal rebel organizations formed the Seven Party Mujahideen Alliance to coordinate their military operations against the Soviet army. Late in 1985, the groups were active in and around Kabul, unleashing rocket attacks and conducting operations against the communist government.
So if an armed organisation in Afganistan targets exclusively American troops, they will not be considered terrorists and we will be letting them into bars in France?
These violent lunatics have killed and tortured thousands of civilians in Afganistan before and during the war. Funding them was definitely immoral and illegal, as any lawyer will tell you.
You barely hear about it because western media reports on western things, if a thousand people die in Kenya, they barely get a footnote.
Taliban hosted AQ, gave us 9/11. We may be stuck in a quagmire, but there’s more to the Taliban than banning heroin and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous.
US gave itself 9/11, it's like the scene from Game of Thrones where Cersei uses religion to increase her power and then that power structure she created fucks her up after gaining power.
The same thing is now happening in India and China.
Where in India a nut job racist, inspired by Nazi ideology of Hindu racial purity, is running the country and the West is down with it because you know fuck Muslims and their rights... you know after encouraging their religious power structures by protecting Kohmeni in France until he could go in and take over Iran, and disposing of the democratic Iranian government in favor of a dictator. Encouraging Islamic nut jobery in Pakistan to fight the Soviets. Creating Saudi Arabia to control Muslims out of a bunch of backwards nomads that have never led any civilizations in their history.
In the case of China, they used China to enrich them and distributed a bunch of technology and know-how to them to increase their own power and now China is basically turning the tables on them.
It's like West loves to abuse its power to increase it and then always shies away from taking any responsibility for its action and instead blames the ideology they were exploiting to increase their power.
I'm not saying the Taliban is reducible to banning heroin, I'm relaying the actual history of US foreign policy toward Af chiefly hinging on that dilemma. When the Taliban is out of power, heroin production goes up. We know this. For decades.
I don't see Taliban or heroin (or "opium") in that article, but sure, if you want to expand the relationship to being between theocratic rulers and vice production I'm fine with that. I didn't read the article to see if that's actually what was going on 200 years ago, but I'm assuming you aren't posting an offtopic reply.
Not only does your logic bending (to for some reason avoid the basis of wartime morality?) fail in its own premise as the Taliban is not allowed to meet your standard as they are not a sovereign nation able to be a signatory, the convention itself does not work as you imply:
"this Protocol must be fully applied in all circumstances to all persons who are protected by those instruments, without any adverse distinction based on the nature or origin of the armed conflict"
I'm not sure that I understand your argument. War consisted of making life or death decisions based on insufficient information both before and after the Geneva conventions.
Of course on the battlefield incorrect decisions must be made. However, drone strikes like the Afghan farmers do not fit that criteria. The decision did not /have/ to be made. It was a voluntary assassination.
Shooting people from a drone is definitely not a life or death decision. And doing it just because they look like criminals is not a casualty of war, it's outright murder.
Any cop would be in death row for pulling something like this in American Soil.
Soldiers in an active military zone would almost certainly not be subject to any scrutiny or investigation for fatally shooting someone who they believed to be armed in the same situation.
I would be more concerned with the classification of any male over 16 killed in a strike as an automatic combatant than a single given operation gone wrong. This is an unavoidable aspect of war.
Thankfully, we can be concerned about more than one thing at a time.
And this isn't a single operation gone wrong, there's been 10s if not 100s of these incidents. Framing it as a "single operation gone wrong" is ignorant at best.
Why was a bunch of dudes sitting around a fire a "critical, life or death decision" that couldn't wait for "sufficient information"?
Total war was justified in WW2 when the Allies were facing a potentially existential threat. It was us or them. That has never been the case in Afghanistan.
If another nation's military had accidentally murdered 30 American civilians because they didn't wait for sufficient information, you'd be crying out for blood.
I've been in multiple life and death situations thanks, and I am acutely aware of the complex calculus of war. I don't think drone warfare should be used against civilian targets, military ones are OK.
If you want to assassinate people outside of regular military conflict, do it in person.
You know what definitely is a valid military target? The drone operators and the facilities they work out of.
If you care about them so much, maybe you should bend your efforts to reducing their moral culpability and think about the strategic logic of the entire mission, which has now killed 10 times more Afghan civilians than died on 9/11, in a country with 1/10 the population of ours, so as to lower the probability of their being selected as a target.
How much longer is the US going to continue trying to win hearts and minds by throwing the most highly equipped military force on the planet at lightly armed peasants, while ignoring the fact that they probably feel just as pissed off about their friends, family, and selves being blown up as we do about ours, and by now have suffered far more than the original injury we are still attempting to retaliate for?
There are now kids old enough to sign up for the military who were born after 9/11 and for whom the US has always been at war with Afghanistan, and your moral gymnastics serve only to perpetuate that while foreclosing any inquiry they might conduct as citizens rather than soldiers.
Don't act like we don't kill huge numbers of civilians. We've killed more civilians in Afghanistan in the last 3 years than there are ISIS fighters in the country.
Your comment strikes me as textbook dehumanization of the drone pilots.
"Dehumanizing the enemy involves denying the enemy’s humanity by negating in the enemy the characteristics normally associated with human beings, such as morality and compassion, and instead associating the enemy with acts of evil and depravity that merit forceful action and retaliation."
Have the drone pilots not thrown their humanity away willingly?
I think there's s difference between doubting humanity of someone because of skin color or sexual orientation or natinality or whatever, and someone who voluntarily became a murderer as a day job.
The pilots can stop killing people any day. They continually chose not to.
I don't think that we have sufficient evidence to draw that conclusion. It is likely that the drone pilots believe that they are fighting on the right side.
Perhaps a more profitable line of discussion would be:
On what basis would you say that this constitutes murder?
Well, self defence and protection of loved ones is the obvious one.
Then goes the spectrum. Suppose someone is taking your property, can you employ violence to protect it? What if there is 1% risk of death to the thief? What if its 10%?
That's an excellent question, I'd say that's the kind of assessment that most likely needs to be made in the moment.
I'd prefer the people whose job it is to make those assessments on a daily basis to have a strong moral and ethical framework, and to have the psychological and institutional support to maintain a connection with their humanity.
I would say that even humans who decided to become monsters (say, Unit 731, Mengele, Breivik, various serial killers, etc) deserve human rights and humane treatment in eyes of the law, because taking those away is a bad precedent for society.
The state should consider them people because the state has to consider everyone people, and making exceptions is very dangerous.
That doesn't mean we as individuals have to morally consider them as anything other than the monsters they are.
You don't have to, but doing so is a strategy to prevent yourself from going down that same path.
When you cast people into the realm of inhuman monster, you're also telling yourself a story that there is no possible way that you could potentially commit the same acts.
Which is, 99% of the time, a total lie. Humans are exceptionally good at creating moral justification for whatever the hell we want to do.
If you're convinced you are constitutionally incapable of committing monstrous acts, then you're not likely to engage in the self reflection that would allow you to catch yourself if you start heading down that path.
I think the process of dehumanization occurs on all sides of the equation, and it's something to be questioned and examined whenever it happens.
Engaging in the same process and behavior damages the intellectual credibility of an argument because it allows you to ignore potentially relevant information. It also significant diminishes any moral authority you may be laying claim to.
I am perfectly comfortable judging people on the basis of the actions they willingly carry out. People who are at absolutely zero physical risk from the people they are directly and personally responsible for killing are morally culpable in my view, and I am not obliged to care about them.
I'm inferring from your statement that you believe that the only justified use of deadly force is a situation where someone is themselves at risk of physical harm, is that accurate?
As far as caring for them, I don't think anyone is obliged to care for anyone or anything (free will and all that). I do think that the more people that you choose to place into your own personal out-group of "gofuckthemselves", the more of your own humanity you lose touch with.
Your concern is touching. If only you had any left over for innocent people killed or bereaved with no warning, by people whose might at worst suffer some psychic pain pursuant their own actions.
The immediate and generational trauma and pain that's being caused by this violence is fucking horrendous and something that enrages and saddens me.
I choose to focus my ire on those responsible for creating the policies and making the decisions to create the situation, not the people at the bottom of the ladder who are responsible for enacting them.
What it got to do with drones? assuming the report is correct which I doubt, a lot of civilians got killed in wars even before drones got into the arena. If anything, overall drones helps a lot with verifying viable targets compared to times when commanders didn't have those eyes in the sky.
>I don't think they recruit with "bombing Afghan farmers is great fun!"
Why would you not think that???!?! "Recruited at video game fairs by military leaders who know the value of games that glamourise 'militainment' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGA8RFB0VSw
The title should be more explicit about the fact that they're talking about "military drones" as opposed to quad-copters, which was my first thought. It's pretty obvious at first glance after the first click, but still...
As far as the article itself, it feels somewhat worrying that the people who implemented these programs didn't think people would be bothered about killing other people. Someone had to have thought of that.
For "quad-coptor" substitute multi-rotor (not all are quads).
The fact that you associate the term "drone" with hobby aircraft is a sad inditement of todays "press", who, in their attempt to demonise said multi-rotors (or to downplay the rise of the military drone?) have managed to confuse the general public as to the difference.
I think you ascribe too much malice to the press here. Drone is what the public understand them to be called. I fly a drone and that's the term used by everyone who raises the topic with me. I don't know that they led by the press, though it'd obviously be a feedback loop.
Reading "drone pilot" along with "sniper" instantly gave me the idea that the article was talking about military personnel and not hobbyists, long before I clicked.
Before reading the article, I assumed it was about hobbyist drone pilots and how we might judge situations from a detached perspective. I suspect the detachment changes the way I view risk in subtle ways when flying.
Well the US government, bastion of freedom and human rights can't have this can they? Time to replace people with AI and machines and Google is here to help.
I doubt it. Google seems to be on an inexorable path towards becoming a corporate nation state. They’re going to need those weapons when the time for secession arrives.
Love how the perspective of this argument is that instead of drone pilots succumbing to a real sense that what they are doing is unjustifiable, this guy is an "ethicist" that is attempting to say that we need to find a way to train morality out of people so they can push remote kill buttons and feel fine.
that reminds me of a suggestion of where to keep nuclear codes:
> My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, "George, I'm sorry but tens of millions must die." He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It's reality brought home.
> When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, "My God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President's judgment. He might never push the button."
> — Roger Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1981
I think what we are seeing is people with different moral values that thought they wouldn't have a problem having a problem, so I'm not sure your suggestion would help (and you may want to consider that before volunteering yourself for something that might affect your mental health).
I can't help but view this as similar to someone offering to work as a nurse "because they don't get sick".
Yes, there are certainly people like that. But I'm referring to people with different moral value who really are wouldn't have problem. Its not that rare isn't it?
Its different, because everyone can get sick. The more accurate analogy is someone offering to work as nurse because they are not afraid of blood.
I think you'll have to prove to me that people like that exist, at least in a state that is acceptable enough that they can be employed by the military and not excluded because of those same problems.
I suspect people like that cause far more problems than they solve. How many war atrocities do you need to make the entire idea cost more than its worth?
And before someone jumps in that these are already atrocities, there's a huge difference between a mistake killing innocents or the idea of acceptable losses and slaughtering every man, woman and child in a village, because we've seen that before.
while I'm fairly certain I am that people, I'm not sure how to prove it to you.
The war atrocities is either the issue of the leader making wrong decision or the soldier not following order.
Assuming the leader made the correct decision of killing and the solider who execute that order is a solider who doesn't have moral qualm about the killing then what is the issue ?
Well, unless you've killed 10+ innocent people, I don't think there's a way to prove it, nor do I think you should be so sure of yourself.
Beyond people having problems killing others, the nature of the job in question is that you will have visuals on people you are responsible for terminating, and there will be mistakes made, often on Intel you've provided ("it looked like a terrorist meeting to me, how was I to tell it was guys shooting the shit around a campfire?")
I used to think of myself how I think you think of yourself, where I thought I could view killing and death rationally. Since then I've had a few points where I had to deal with the death of people I knew and while I was somewhat clinically detached most the time, there were instances, sometimes months later, where I was overcome with emotion for the first time regarding that incident. There's a fine line between being able to rationalize your decisions and being in denial, and the human mind doesn't always act as you want or expect. And besides making people accidental murderers, how do you test for this? Seems like many people in the army would probably identify just as you are, yet we still have this problem.
Yes, mistake do happen but you can acknowledge it, made improvement plan and move on.
I think the issue is you are viewing the killing solely from your own perspective and your own morality. While I understand it can be emotionally traumatic for you, for others it won't.
Just like killing animal, for some people it can be devastating and highly traumatic but for some other people it was nothing.
I'd say it's absolutely vital to have the responsibility in the hands of do have problems with "pushing the kill button", and then provide them with psychological support services to handle that duty.
Giving people with no qualms or moral struggles with taking human life the tools to do so on a massive scale is an absolutely terrifying idea.
Well, it depends on what the main objective of the job is. If it to kill someone then do you really want to give it to someone that have moral struggle?
I'd argue that the main objective of the job is to achieve the strategic objectives of the country engaged in armed conflict. Indiscriminate killing completely devoid of a moral or ethical framework definitely does not accomplish that objective.
Thats more of a higher level objective and sometimes to achieve that objective, killing people is required.
Yes Indiscriminate killing is a problem but that is a different problem. The article is in regards of actual pushing the button, I'm assuming the killing is already decided after careful judgement .
It doesn't matter how much care was taken in making the initial judgement if the information using it to reach it is flawed, or if the situation changes in the time between the decision being made and it's execution.
I'd imagine that someone with no qualms about taking human life would be far less likely to confirm the validity and accuracy of those justifications.
I don't think anyone wants drone operators who dismiss a group of children playing near a target because they don't place a value on human life.
>It doesn't matter how much care was taken in making the initial judgement if the information using it to reach it is flawed, or if the situation changes in the time between the decision being made and it's execution.
Of course, thats the leader job to make sure that the information is not flawed and take into account the time decision being made and it's execution.
>I'd imagine that someone with no qualms about taking human life would be far less likely to confirm the validity and accuracy of those justifications
Sure but the solider, during actual combat situation, can't always second guess and debate your commander. There might be simply no time.
The solider utmost job is to execute the action that the leader has ordered.
Thats why you have chain of command, separation of concerns.
If every soldier or drone operator has to do the job of making strategic decision and operating drone at the same time, I think that would be too much cognitive load.
TL;DR; DoD Manual says subordinates have an obligation to question morality of orders. Lack of empathy is a severe handicap and liability for a soldier.
The DOD is pretty clear on this point ( https://tinyurl.com/yxqfwyrx [link to PDF of the DoD Law of War Manual] )
"""
5.10.2.4 Duty Not to Comply With Clearly Illegal Orders and the Principle of Proportionality.
In the context of the principle of distinction, it would often be clear whether a given situation implicates the duty not to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations – such as the duty of a subordinate to refrain from complying with an order to attack the civilian population. However, the nuances involved in applying the principle of proportionality could make it more difficult to know whether an order given is clearly illegal. The duty not to comply with orders that are clearly illegal also applies to violations of the principle of proportionality, in particular, the case of a commander who orders subordinates to conduct an attack that is expected to result in civilian casualties that the commander himself or herself acknowledges would be excessive
"""
You're absolutely right that the ability to make those assessments in the field isn't always going to be there, but that doesn't mean that there is no requirement or need for subordinates to be able to assess orders and actions.
I'm assuming the type of person who has no issue at all with taking life lacks (or has seriously damaged) capacity for empathy. Beyond the basic issues of morality and human decency, someone without the capacity for empathy is severely disadvantaged when it comes to assessment and awareness.
Being able to conceptualize and examine the intellectual and emotional state of another human provides a huge predictive advantage. Assessing someones potential to be a threat is far easier when you can understand what could potentially cause them to justify violence towards you.
To sum up, If you have no qualms with taking life, and you lack the capacity for empathy, you are not properly equipped to serve in the military.
You say you would find it easy to kill (concerning), but have you been in a similar situation? Have you at least killed a large animal?
I've killed a rat with my own hands, I felt bad even though I never thought I would. It's different when you hear it squeak and bleed, then die in convulsions.
I can't see myself killing a goat, let alone a person, unless I am fighting for my life.
A purely speculative opinion of how you would feel is of little value.
I haven't because I haven't had the opportunity presented. Does a lamb count ? Yes it die squeak and bleed, then die in convulsions. A lot of people like a farmer do this a lot on daily basis, its not that a big a deal.
It's a matter of perspective. For people who believe a strong military is important to protect their own country and in a geopolitical world where military capability is everything that matters, what else is there? If a conflict breaks out, nobody's going to stop just because some military operators could be traumatized. At most you get to choose which military personnel are affected, but overall there's no "good" outcome for anybody involved on a psychological/emotional level.
There's a difference between having problems committing war crimes by employing tactical weapons on civilians and being willing to attack a military force?
Is every drone operator killing civilians? Is the sniper's syndrome limited to the operators who've killed civilians?
Recent headlines about the US killing 30 farmers make it easy to confuse the context. I'm sure the operator(s) involved with that operation are traumatized. But that's not really the discussion here.
As per the article
> The rates of drone pilot burn out were in fact higher than that of traditional pilots.
> Given that the target often posed no direct threat to the sniper, there was a moral dissonance about taking the life of someone who is no direct threat. This has obvious parallels to drone pilots.
> Couple this with the familiarity that the drone pilot might have developed through long-term surveillance, and the target becomes an informationally rich human, rather than simply a blip on a screen.
> Posing a threat to someone is often seen as a moral requirement in order for a solider to use lethal force against a target. However, the drone pilot is acting remotely, and they lose this sense of moral justification for their action.
> One important thing to recognise is that such moral injury is not dependent on the pilot actually committing something morally prohibited.
> For instance, if a soldier must use lethal force to protect an innocent family against an enemy soldier threatening the family's lives, the soldier's actions are typically deemed justified.
> However, given the features of drones, this moral justification might not be properly felt by its pilot.
The former is about operational readiness. If your army is unable to shoot at the enemy for whatever reason, you don't have a functional army. Wars are lost because of this (which leads to political concessions and loss of resources/influence/etc), and it's an important topic to consider when your goal is to maintain a standing army like the US.
The latter is, well, morality.
Of course, these two topics clash. How far do you go to ensure an obedient and effective army, while allowing leeway to refuse orders that are immoral?
In the former case justification for war matters. Compare moral effect of Perl Harbour and compare that to war in Vietnam.
Same army will be far more motivated to fight to defend the homeland than to kill a poor sod in a faraway land for unclear reason. So it's not a static quality.
And every time there is a fuckup from the higher ups it affects morale.
I don't think that's the argument the author was making:
"Further, there needs to be proper counselling and supports for pilots following use of lethal force.
While such pilots might be removed from physical risks, we have a moral responsibility to ensure not just that drones are used in ways that adhere to the ethics of warfare, but that the pilots are adequately supported in their roles."
Open question: why are we done bombing people again? I can't think of anything that is remotely justifiable. Even the "terrorists" excuse comes back to US bombings creating terrorists.
They are human beings killing people on command in an unjust situation. They should feel bad. They should be mentally hurt. They shouldn't just go about their lives like they completed a level in a videogame. This is what it means to be human and what it means to murder someone. All the bullshit justifications aside, it's impossible to keep rationalizing all the killings of the last seventy plus years. At least from a US perspective, we haven't been in a just war since WWII. The operators know this. So good. Maybe this will make the armed forces think twice about deploying such murderous technologies. I doubt it. But at least, hopefully less people will volunteer for sure murderous roles and missions. Once can only hope.
Does anyone have an interesting perspective to discuss, or all we just going to pile on our politicized opinions of the validity of the Afghanistan War?
> ... if a UAV campaign is part of a war that has a justified cause, the use of force is necessary and proportionate to the threat posed by the enemy, the UAV pilot's actions can be seen as potentially justified.
Maybe part of the problem is that the drone killings are occurring in a nontraditional conflict with no formal declaration of war and remote or conjectural threats to the territory of the United States....
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadI don't really give a fuck about the psychological condition of the drone pilots except insofar as it puts their children at risk. They and their commanders should feel ashamed to look other people in the eye.
So, what do you suggest instead?
> After Taraki was murdered the new Afghan Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin repeated requests for Soviet military support, at least to protect his residence. Finally, in December the Politburo decided to deal with the situation in Afghanistan,[8] and in early December sent special forces which attacked Amin's palace and killed him, putting the exiled Babrak Kamal in his place. These forces were subsequently reinforced by the 40th Army which entered Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. As the Kremlin foresaw, this intervention would cause problems around the world for the USSR, with the policy of detente and, not least, at the forthcoming Olympic Games due to take place in summer 1980 in Moscow.[9] The result was a far-reaching boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, supported not only by the United States but by many of the 65 other invited countries that did not take part.
> At its greatest extent the Soviet military contingent in Afghanistan numbered 100,000 personnel. This presence remained for a decade and kickstarted U.S. and Saudi funding for Islamic Mujahideen groups opposed to both the Afghan government and the Soviet military presence. The local Mujahideen, along with fighters from several different Arab nations (Pathan tribes from across the border also participated in the war; they were supported by the Pakistani ISI), fought the Soviet forces to a standstill. On 24 January 1989 Gorbachev's Politburo took the decision to withdraw most of the Soviet forces,[10] while continuing to provide military assistance to the Afghan government.[11] Eventually, in-fighting within the Mujahideen led to the rise of warlords in Afghanistan, and from them emerged the Taliban.[12] The Soviets left behind the only highway in the country as well as many concrete structures built in the major cities, and airfields that are still in use (e.g. at Bagram).
Then what would you call the 9,000 or so civilians killed by US and allied forces in the past 10 years. Or the 30,000 injured civilians?
O'Rly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War#Muja...
> The mujahideen favoured sabotage operations. The more common types of sabotage included damaging power lines, knocking out pipelines and radio stations, blowing up government office buildings, air terminals, hotels, cinemas, and so on. In the border region with Pakistan, the mujahideen would often launch 800 rockets per day. Between April 1985 and January 1987, they carried out over 23,500 shelling attacks on government targets. The mujahideen surveyed firing positions that they normally located near villages within the range of Soviet artillery posts, putting the villagers in danger of death from Soviet retaliation. The mujahideen used land mines heavily. Often, they would enlist the services of the local inhabitants, even children. Mujahideen praying in Shultan Valley, 1987
> They concentrated on both civilian and military targets, knocking out bridges, closing major roads, attacking convoys, disrupting the electric power system and industrial production, and attacking police stations and Soviet military installations and air bases. They assassinated government officials and PDPA members, and laid siege to small rural outposts. In March 1982, a bomb exploded at the Ministry of Education, damaging several buildings. In the same month, a widespread power failure darkened Kabul when a pylon on the transmission line from the Naghlu power station was blown up. In June 1982 a column of about 1,000 young communist party members sent out to work in the Panjshir valley were ambushed within 30 km of Kabul, with heavy loss of life. On September 4, 1985, insurgents shot down a domestic Bakhtar Airlines plane as it took off from Kandahar airport, killing all 52 people aboard.
> Mujahideen groups used for assassination had three to five men in each. After they received their mission to kill certain government officials, they busied themselves with studying his pattern of life and its details and then selecting the method of fulfilling their established mission. They practiced shooting at automobiles, shooting out of automobiles, laying mines in government accommodation or houses, using poison, and rigging explosive charges in transport.
In May 1985, the seven principal rebel organizations formed the Seven Party Mujahideen Alliance to coordinate their military operations against the Soviet army. Late in 1985, the groups were active in and around Kabul, unleashing rocket attacks and conducting operations against the communist government.
You barely hear about it because western media reports on western things, if a thousand people die in Kenya, they barely get a footnote.
Beyond that, what's the international opinion on Erik Prince?
It's almost as if you're looking for excuse to kill people.
The same thing is now happening in India and China.
Where in India a nut job racist, inspired by Nazi ideology of Hindu racial purity, is running the country and the West is down with it because you know fuck Muslims and their rights... you know after encouraging their religious power structures by protecting Kohmeni in France until he could go in and take over Iran, and disposing of the democratic Iranian government in favor of a dictator. Encouraging Islamic nut jobery in Pakistan to fight the Soviets. Creating Saudi Arabia to control Muslims out of a bunch of backwards nomads that have never led any civilizations in their history.
In the case of China, they used China to enrich them and distributed a bunch of technology and know-how to them to increase their own power and now China is basically turning the tables on them.
It's like West loves to abuse its power to increase it and then always shies away from taking any responsibility for its action and instead blames the ideology they were exploiting to increase their power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Afghan_War
(and so on and so forth..)
Sounds like you're describing warfare before Geneva conventions or the somehow permitted US war crimes to me.
"this Protocol must be fully applied in all circumstances to all persons who are protected by those instruments, without any adverse distinction based on the nature or origin of the armed conflict"
(Aside from the fact that the Geneva Convention doesn't work that way, as the other guy pointed out.)
Any cop would be in death row for pulling something like this in American Soil.
That’s a dubious claim.
Because they have entirely different jobs, in entirely different contexts, with entirely different rules, serving entirely different purposes.
Soldiers in an active military zone would almost certainly not be subject to any scrutiny or investigation for fatally shooting someone who they believed to be armed in the same situation.
Thanks for the supporting evidence!!!!
I would be more concerned with the classification of any male over 16 killed in a strike as an automatic combatant than a single given operation gone wrong. This is an unavoidable aspect of war.
And this isn't a single operation gone wrong, there's been 10s if not 100s of these incidents. Framing it as a "single operation gone wrong" is ignorant at best.
Total war was justified in WW2 when the Allies were facing a potentially existential threat. It was us or them. That has never been the case in Afghanistan.
If you want to assassinate people outside of regular military conflict, do it in person.
If you care about them so much, maybe you should bend your efforts to reducing their moral culpability and think about the strategic logic of the entire mission, which has now killed 10 times more Afghan civilians than died on 9/11, in a country with 1/10 the population of ours, so as to lower the probability of their being selected as a target.
How much longer is the US going to continue trying to win hearts and minds by throwing the most highly equipped military force on the planet at lightly armed peasants, while ignoring the fact that they probably feel just as pissed off about their friends, family, and selves being blown up as we do about ours, and by now have suffered far more than the original injury we are still attempting to retaliate for?
There are now kids old enough to sign up for the military who were born after 9/11 and for whom the US has always been at war with Afghanistan, and your moral gymnastics serve only to perpetuate that while foreclosing any inquiry they might conduct as citizens rather than soldiers.
https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2019/09/afghan-offic...
"Dehumanizing the enemy involves denying the enemy’s humanity by negating in the enemy the characteristics normally associated with human beings, such as morality and compassion, and instead associating the enemy with acts of evil and depravity that merit forceful action and retaliation."
https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-wa...
The irony here is pretty intense.
I think there's s difference between doubting humanity of someone because of skin color or sexual orientation or natinality or whatever, and someone who voluntarily became a murderer as a day job.
The pilots can stop killing people any day. They continually chose not to.
Perhaps a more profitable line of discussion would be: On what basis would you say that this constitutes murder?
Then goes the spectrum. Suppose someone is taking your property, can you employ violence to protect it? What if there is 1% risk of death to the thief? What if its 10%?
I'd prefer the people whose job it is to make those assessments on a daily basis to have a strong moral and ethical framework, and to have the psychological and institutional support to maintain a connection with their humanity.
I would say that even humans who decided to become monsters (say, Unit 731, Mengele, Breivik, various serial killers, etc) deserve human rights and humane treatment in eyes of the law, because taking those away is a bad precedent for society.
The state should consider them people because the state has to consider everyone people, and making exceptions is very dangerous.
That doesn't mean we as individuals have to morally consider them as anything other than the monsters they are.
When you cast people into the realm of inhuman monster, you're also telling yourself a story that there is no possible way that you could potentially commit the same acts.
Which is, 99% of the time, a total lie. Humans are exceptionally good at creating moral justification for whatever the hell we want to do.
If you're convinced you are constitutionally incapable of committing monstrous acts, then you're not likely to engage in the self reflection that would allow you to catch yourself if you start heading down that path.
Then think again about who is dehumanizing who.
Engaging in the same process and behavior damages the intellectual credibility of an argument because it allows you to ignore potentially relevant information. It also significant diminishes any moral authority you may be laying claim to.
As far as caring for them, I don't think anyone is obliged to care for anyone or anything (free will and all that). I do think that the more people that you choose to place into your own personal out-group of "gofuckthemselves", the more of your own humanity you lose touch with.
I choose to focus my ire on those responsible for creating the policies and making the decisions to create the situation, not the people at the bottom of the ladder who are responsible for enacting them.
I find your lack of empathy disturbing.
I don't think they recruit with "bombing Afghan farmers is great fun!"
Why would you not think that???!?! "Recruited at video game fairs by military leaders who know the value of games that glamourise 'militainment' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGA8RFB0VSw
As far as the article itself, it feels somewhat worrying that the people who implemented these programs didn't think people would be bothered about killing other people. Someone had to have thought of that.
The fact that you associate the term "drone" with hobby aircraft is a sad inditement of todays "press", who, in their attempt to demonise said multi-rotors (or to downplay the rise of the military drone?) have managed to confuse the general public as to the difference.
Reading "drone pilot" along with "sniper" instantly gave me the idea that the article was talking about military personnel and not hobbyists, long before I clicked.
"To access this site, please click on all the boxes that contain males over 16 years old".
> My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, "George, I'm sorry but tens of millions must die." He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It's reality brought home.
> When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, "My God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President's judgment. He might never push the button."
> — Roger Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1981
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Fisher_(academic)
I can't help but view this as similar to someone offering to work as a nurse "because they don't get sick".
Its different, because everyone can get sick. The more accurate analogy is someone offering to work as nurse because they are not afraid of blood.
I suspect people like that cause far more problems than they solve. How many war atrocities do you need to make the entire idea cost more than its worth?
And before someone jumps in that these are already atrocities, there's a huge difference between a mistake killing innocents or the idea of acceptable losses and slaughtering every man, woman and child in a village, because we've seen that before.
The war atrocities is either the issue of the leader making wrong decision or the soldier not following order.
Assuming the leader made the correct decision of killing and the solider who execute that order is a solider who doesn't have moral qualm about the killing then what is the issue ?
Beyond people having problems killing others, the nature of the job in question is that you will have visuals on people you are responsible for terminating, and there will be mistakes made, often on Intel you've provided ("it looked like a terrorist meeting to me, how was I to tell it was guys shooting the shit around a campfire?")
I used to think of myself how I think you think of yourself, where I thought I could view killing and death rationally. Since then I've had a few points where I had to deal with the death of people I knew and while I was somewhat clinically detached most the time, there were instances, sometimes months later, where I was overcome with emotion for the first time regarding that incident. There's a fine line between being able to rationalize your decisions and being in denial, and the human mind doesn't always act as you want or expect. And besides making people accidental murderers, how do you test for this? Seems like many people in the army would probably identify just as you are, yet we still have this problem.
I think the issue is you are viewing the killing solely from your own perspective and your own morality. While I understand it can be emotionally traumatic for you, for others it won't.
Just like killing animal, for some people it can be devastating and highly traumatic but for some other people it was nothing.
Giving people with no qualms or moral struggles with taking human life the tools to do so on a massive scale is an absolutely terrifying idea.
Yes Indiscriminate killing is a problem but that is a different problem. The article is in regards of actual pushing the button, I'm assuming the killing is already decided after careful judgement .
I'd imagine that someone with no qualms about taking human life would be far less likely to confirm the validity and accuracy of those justifications.
I don't think anyone wants drone operators who dismiss a group of children playing near a target because they don't place a value on human life.
Of course, thats the leader job to make sure that the information is not flawed and take into account the time decision being made and it's execution.
>I'd imagine that someone with no qualms about taking human life would be far less likely to confirm the validity and accuracy of those justifications
Sure but the solider, during actual combat situation, can't always second guess and debate your commander. There might be simply no time.
The solider utmost job is to execute the action that the leader has ordered.
Thats why you have chain of command, separation of concerns.
If every soldier or drone operator has to do the job of making strategic decision and operating drone at the same time, I think that would be too much cognitive load.
The DOD is pretty clear on this point ( https://tinyurl.com/yxqfwyrx [link to PDF of the DoD Law of War Manual] )
""" 5.10.2.4 Duty Not to Comply With Clearly Illegal Orders and the Principle of Proportionality. In the context of the principle of distinction, it would often be clear whether a given situation implicates the duty not to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations – such as the duty of a subordinate to refrain from complying with an order to attack the civilian population. However, the nuances involved in applying the principle of proportionality could make it more difficult to know whether an order given is clearly illegal. The duty not to comply with orders that are clearly illegal also applies to violations of the principle of proportionality, in particular, the case of a commander who orders subordinates to conduct an attack that is expected to result in civilian casualties that the commander himself or herself acknowledges would be excessive """
You're absolutely right that the ability to make those assessments in the field isn't always going to be there, but that doesn't mean that there is no requirement or need for subordinates to be able to assess orders and actions.
I'm assuming the type of person who has no issue at all with taking life lacks (or has seriously damaged) capacity for empathy. Beyond the basic issues of morality and human decency, someone without the capacity for empathy is severely disadvantaged when it comes to assessment and awareness.
Being able to conceptualize and examine the intellectual and emotional state of another human provides a huge predictive advantage. Assessing someones potential to be a threat is far easier when you can understand what could potentially cause them to justify violence towards you.
To sum up, If you have no qualms with taking life, and you lack the capacity for empathy, you are not properly equipped to serve in the military.
I've killed a rat with my own hands, I felt bad even though I never thought I would. It's different when you hear it squeak and bleed, then die in convulsions. I can't see myself killing a goat, let alone a person, unless I am fighting for my life.
A purely speculative opinion of how you would feel is of little value.
Recent headlines about the US killing 30 farmers make it easy to confuse the context. I'm sure the operator(s) involved with that operation are traumatized. But that's not really the discussion here.
As per the article
> The rates of drone pilot burn out were in fact higher than that of traditional pilots.
> Given that the target often posed no direct threat to the sniper, there was a moral dissonance about taking the life of someone who is no direct threat. This has obvious parallels to drone pilots.
> Couple this with the familiarity that the drone pilot might have developed through long-term surveillance, and the target becomes an informationally rich human, rather than simply a blip on a screen.
> Posing a threat to someone is often seen as a moral requirement in order for a solider to use lethal force against a target. However, the drone pilot is acting remotely, and they lose this sense of moral justification for their action.
> One important thing to recognise is that such moral injury is not dependent on the pilot actually committing something morally prohibited.
> For instance, if a soldier must use lethal force to protect an innocent family against an enemy soldier threatening the family's lives, the soldier's actions are typically deemed justified.
> However, given the features of drones, this moral justification might not be properly felt by its pilot.
Take it to the extreme, and you have nazi atrocities and 'just following orders'.
The former is about operational readiness. If your army is unable to shoot at the enemy for whatever reason, you don't have a functional army. Wars are lost because of this (which leads to political concessions and loss of resources/influence/etc), and it's an important topic to consider when your goal is to maintain a standing army like the US.
The latter is, well, morality.
Of course, these two topics clash. How far do you go to ensure an obedient and effective army, while allowing leeway to refuse orders that are immoral?
Same army will be far more motivated to fight to defend the homeland than to kill a poor sod in a faraway land for unclear reason. So it's not a static quality.
And every time there is a fuckup from the higher ups it affects morale.
"Further, there needs to be proper counselling and supports for pilots following use of lethal force.
While such pilots might be removed from physical risks, we have a moral responsibility to ensure not just that drones are used in ways that adhere to the ethics of warfare, but that the pilots are adequately supported in their roles."
Maybe part of the problem is that the drone killings are occurring in a nontraditional conflict with no formal declaration of war and remote or conjectural threats to the territory of the United States....