Yes and the past few articles I've seen about these have actually been largely (and pleasantly) impartial. Unfortunately this hasn't stopped my from reflexively scrutinizing them for some angle.
I wonder whether the people who develop them think "I'm doing good for the world, developing highly targeted killing machines that reduce collateral damage". Perhaps they're even somewhat partially correct in thinking that?
It's a question of ethics. Utilitarian ethics make it easy to give a formula for assessing this, whereas deontological ones (meaning rule-based, eg Kant's) state that don't do something you know is wrong, because the act itself has moral value, no matter the consequences.
Of course the fusion of consequentalist ethics with rule based ones have been proposed, and there is some data suggesting people do think like this. (Depending on the context we will either have strict rules or we'll become more analytical.)
War, weapons, violence, death/life, quality of life, are always nasty problems in terms of moral philosophy. What's worse, creating life and then taking other lives, or not creating any nor taking any? There's path dependence, sure, the arrow of time cannot be really ignored, and intent matters, and so on, yet we know humans always viewed war/fighting/conflict as a two sided thing. The just wars and the unjust ones.
So the question becomes what is justice? How to reconcile everyone's personal concept of justice?
John Rawls proposed fairness, and a very clever yet simple (even if maybe ultimately unworkable) method to determine what's fair: thought experiments that consider every possible life (a beggar's, a king's, and everything in between), and as people elaborate in what each one should do in various situations people's views should converge. (See reflective equilibrium.)
... and then there's virtue ethics too, which focuses on, kind of a personal best. Be excellent to each other. And this sounds like utilitarianism with an utility function that has already built in targets that clean up a lot of abstract nonsense from it and place a big emphasis on agency (and thus it kind of captures intent too - because it talks about the virtues and vices of agents' overall character too).
I hope that both does and doesn't answer your question. :)
The accompanying 'explanation' article suggests such a missile would kill anyone within 3.5 feet of landing.
I'd need to go measure, but it seems the driver of a car and a passenger seated in the back seat (opposite the driver) would not both be killed. So it should be aimed at maybe one or two people, while others in the car might live.
Pretty amazing. Reduced deaths are a good thing, and it diminishes the value of innocent 'human shield' usage.
> The payload area is roughly a foot and a half long and let's say the swords are roughly the same length, this would provide about a three and a half foot diameter kill zone, which is similar to what we see in the images of the vehicles that have been struck.
So it seems like 3.5ft diameter is The Warzone/The Drive's best guess based on the length of a standard Hellfire and the vehicle damage.
OK I missed that part, makes sense. Realistically you could probably skip the blades and still kill all the occupants in the vehicle with just the seeker/body/motor. That's a lot of kinetic energy getting dumped into an enclosed space.
Even an inert missile hitting a car stands a pretty good chance of killing everyone inside. It is going to feel like a small explosion, there will be shredded metal car parts everywhere, a hot rocket motor, and, as a bonus, an impending car-crash. The NHTSA doesn't test cars to protect occupants from injury in a crash after a missile has hit the car, but I bet the outcomes are worse.
I'm sure that blades improve the lethality of such an instrument, but it may be more psychological than essential. If such a thing hadn't worked as well as it appears to, I'm sure that engineers could have found another way to make it a little more lethal.
Hopefully it'll result in fewer innocent deaths. Though I can still see ways for this to go wrong. Become overconfident in our ability to hit a target and then miss. Not to mention, a lot of the innocent casualties of American bombing haven't come from using bombs but from just picking the wrong target to begin with.
Oh sure. I'd rather they shoot this at someone than a fricken hellfire missile. But how much did it cost to develop? We still have the possibility that just assassinating people from the sky at all creates more terrorists than it kills. In which case we're expeding a lot of effort to solve the wrong problem.
In the absence of any really really convincing evidence to the contrary, it seems like remote control assassinations by a foreign power actively work against winning the hearts and minds of the local populace. Unless the locals getting assassinated are truly despised by everyone around them. After all, they have to take it as a matter of faith that they themselves can't possibly be "wrongly" targeted, and precedent suggests otherwise
It’s definitely a less-bad thing than explosive missiles, but is it really a good thing? The option to not fire the missile, to not meddle with other countries, to not kill another person is always there.
Completely agree. People are sternly labelling this "a good thing" with no further consideration, almost like a preemptive challenge to any other viewpoint. The tone is disturbing.
I'm not a fan of targeted assassinations, but if the US is going to do them, at least with a weapon like this they can largely avoid the injury and death of innocent bystanders.
I know targeted assassination is frowned on but I don't know why. Surely leaders trying to assassinate each other is better than sending teenagers to die by the thousands while the leaders stay home and benefit.
Throughout human history, ~10% of humans have been killed by other humans. You even see the same in many ape populations.
I'm not even sure we have the power to change that.
Having said that, the percentage has perhaps been the lowest ever in the past century (neither world war was that deadly), so maybe we're making progress towards your goal.
In theory, requiring full scale war disincentivizes war, so a peaceful solution is more likely. If targeted assassinations became the norm, you'd probably end up in a scenario where the country with the most advanced assassination techniques could exert much more influence since they wouldn't have to try and justify it to their own population. The most powerful country would basically be a vengeful god; completely untouchable and capable of smiting anyone that doesn't fall in line.
As opposed to the amazing world where the nation with the ability to field the biggest and best conventional force is the hegemon. I'm struggling to see the ethical difference.
the assumption that we are assassinating leaders is based entirely on the claim by the US government, shown to be false many times, that they are leaders.
We don't need to assassinate political leaders with robots to do it. One thing we could do is maybe stop creating these terrorist organizations in the first place.
It should be important to note how some of these signature strikes are decided,
> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
I don't really understand how it works. Do the blades move? Are the blades deployed just before impact or after? Or is it basically a sword-wielding boring machine that cuts through the target with sheer speed?
It's likely something similar to how mechanical broadheads work. The blades are situated so that in flight they are held closed with a small plastic retaining ring but on impact with the target the blades cam open. It's very low-tech but very effective. Here's some slow-mo shots of mechanicals in action:
An anti-tank kinetic energy round (non-explosive) can penetrate foot-thick armor when fired horizontally, much more when fired straight down from an aircraft.
The best defense would be to ensure no one knows which car you're in. I think we can assume that these HVTs have already employed stringent RF security for themselves and their minions via battery removal and securing all devices in Faraday bags. Yet U.S. intelligence is somehow still able to track them. It must be quite unnerving.
I suspect some new techniques are being leveraged that are apparently having some success.
If one assumes some level of constant or near-constant surveillance, I think there's likely some facial recognition or perhaps some kind of matching of your "bio signature" that's going on. These guys swap SIM cards all the time, and are pretty wise to RF tracking at this point.
I agree. With 24/7 wide-area drone surveillance being recorded and a neural net automating 'vehicle of interest' tracks both forward and backward in time, it's not even necessary to tag vehicles with trackers. I've suspected that they're also using hidden surveillance cams that do license plate and make/model capture along with occupant facial recognition.
Assuming you have some additional mobile tracking cameras hidden in vehicles so they can be relocated once a day, the neural net could pretty easily infer guesses about where to put them.
Pretty sure they sweep for cameras now too, but I absolutely expect a neural net could do most of that work anyway. It’s an interesting problem of finding good enough instruments to track.
Nobody is firing an anti-tank KE round out of a drone. If an AC-130 is shooting at you well then you have other problems. For someone who is particularly concerned about this threat model it wouldn't be hard to stick a concealed plate in the roof. Probably won't stop the missile but will probably prevent the "blades" from coming through or at least prevent them from coming through expanded.
I was mostly lampooning the threat model implied by base-model Hyundai with 4-inch solid steel roof, but why can't an MQ-9 fire a KE weapon? Aren't they light and compact compared to the 500-pound munitions the MQ-9 is capable of delivering? People think "drone" and don't realize the MQ-9 is bigger than the A-10.
They can. They can also fire "bombs" but we're talking about this particular weapon. It all depends how it was designed, for all we know it was designed to just penetrate a normal car roof. It might be a cat and mouse game for a while, and the cost of adding some sort of armor is virtually zero for them. Who knows, it might work.
Pretty sure they can also make a missile that fires 20 30mm rounds, 10 yards or whatever distance is needed to pepper the entire car, before crashing in the car.
The Hellfire's original job was killing tanks. Short of reactive armor, that strategy is extremely limited against the standard variant.
Since the point appears to be limiting collateral damage, though, the blade-missile probably works okay coming through the windshield or back window, too.
The article's assertion that a man-guided weapon would somehow be more accurate and consistent than a computer-guided weapon following a target-designating laser strikes me as needing some supporting arguments.
It isn't that a manually guided weapon is inherently more accurate, it's that manual guidance requires real-time video, which allows more eyeballs.
When the spotter identifies a building, and someone else tries to correlate that description to a set of coordinates, and then a GBU is dropped to those coordinates... human error can lead to target mismatch, resulting in terrible tragedies like the Kunduz hospital incident.
The old one was really overkill for a couple of guys in a car, more designed to be used against tanks and probably sent shrapnel a considerable distance.
It can be, but I've seen people walk away from a Hellfire vehicle strike. My guess in that particular video is that there was a secondary explosion from the gas tank.
My guess is that it wasn’t a HEAT warhead but a fragmentation or a MAC warhead, the HEAT warhead was designed to defeat armor it isn’t effective against soft targets.
The fact that the hellfire missile was designed to destroy tanks doesn’t make it an effective weapon against soft targets.
In fact the anti-tank (HEAT) warhead would not do that much damage to a car and unless you would be directly under it you’ll be able to walk off from it as the tandem charge doesn’t do much damage when it doesn’t hit hardened armor.
The warhead in question in the video is likely a MAC (thermobaric charge) or a fragmentation warhead which were designed to hit soft targets and kill personnel.
The hellfire also has DIME warheads which use metal powder instead of larger shrapnel to reduce collateral damage as well as kinetic warheads as shown in the article.
Regarding man in the loop: if you're a bystander, (and not the target) you want a drone attacking the primary target as opposed to a manned platform.
With a manned platform, you have a chance of getting hit by a platform with a rear weapons officer, (F-15E, F/A-18) to verify minimal bystanders. But they're probably concentrating on not missing. Or you can get hit by a single occupancy aircraft (F-16, F-35) who will be dropping pre programmed ordinance.
With a drone, you have three separate teams of people watching the video steam. Anyone in that loop can say, "hey there are a lot of civilians here" and everything's on pause until the target moves.
And now we have an explosiveless munition with limited opportunities for collateral damage and this outlet is falling over themselves talking about gruesome it is.
Having worked in the field makes me really sick of ignorant journalists reporting on it. The outrage the antiwar press tends to carry makes their ignorance more annoying than the journalists talking about AGI, quantum computing, or deep learning.
I want to agree with you, insofar as that being outraged over what appears to be a more precise weapon makes very little sense.
On the other hand, it still seems horrible to kill people by remote control. Supposing it becomes possible to very, very precisely kill exactly who you want, from far away, with no judicial process, etc., is this good?
War should be painful for both sides, because if it is not, what stops us from engaging in it?
Why is it different or worse than low tech ranged weapons like a mortar or cannon that are also safe(ish) for the person firing, but also risk killing innocents bystanders?
Same question to you: Should I feel differently if foreign countries fire a cannon, flies a plane and drop a bomb, or shoots a sniper rifle vs a drone strike? I don't want any of that, but if, for example, Putin decided he wanted to assassinate a Russian defector in the US, I'd rather he do it with a precision drone strike than a car bomb, or dispersing some poison that might affect bystanders.
It's like suggesting laser guided bombs are worse than unguided bombs.
This war is painful for both sides nonsense is immoral as the only way it works is if you put ISIS on the same moral level as a coalition of western democracies. What would keep these weapons from being abused would be the ability to arrest these criminals. But since we can’t arrest them, killing their generals is the next best option. And killing their generals without risk to our soldiers is mind bogglingly better.
Aerial bombardment of places known to be in use by civilians has been par for the course for most the 20th century and so far all of the 21st century. I think the ship has long sailed on death by remote control. The subject has been studied and the gap between the destruction a bomber pilot causes and how they feel about it is well documented.
What is new is the use of signals intelligence to choose whom to target in a non-combat zone. I think that's the novel piece that should horrify people.
Right. Roughly my concern. In the immediate, not killing civilians is great.
In the longer run, being able to take out who you want without killing innocents modifies the moral calculus. You don't have to justify the turpitude of your target against the lives of innocent bystanders.
So eventually the question approaches: how do you hold steadfast moral red-lines regarding the use of such weapons as PR costs and blowback approach zero?
> insofar as that being outraged over what appears to be a more precise weapon makes very little sense.
There is a rational sense to be outraged over more precise weaponry: precision incentivizes super-states to use it more, which in turn incentivizes things like surveillance. At the long tail of this shift of incentives one can see a a quite spooky/sinister picture emerging.
> Supposing it becomes possible to very, very precisely kill exactly who you want, from far away, with no judicial process, etc., is this good?
This is only possible if the killing happens in total secrecy. The court of public opinion is a judicial process, and an important one, despite having only informal procedures.
The court of public opinion is open to desensitization and gaming. You can actually reach the point where people are killed merely to test limits within a safe backlash or to keep the public desensitized.
Anti-war? Ignorant? That’s a weird take of one of the most in-depth military newssites out there. Also not the impression I got reading the article, more like a military geek describing every detail of this new ‘toy’ than anti-war.
Agreed, I think the article says "beware gruesome" because you normally don't expect a Twitter video to be of a dude that's been mangled by some flying knives into some horrible mess.
Agreed. While I believe the article points out the gruesomeness, it also carefully notes how much less collateral damage is likely.
I came away from the article a bit sickened by the concept, yes, but also proud we have a weapon whose purpose is to avoid accidental civilian deaths. And I have to admit, as gory as this weapon sounds, it's no worse than explosives.
I don't like war. I figure no one in their right mind should. I do acknowledge there's a time for it, and even a time for assassination (i.e. al Qaeda and similar).
I pray our leaders are able to make the right decisions regarding when these things are needed, and I'm nervous that some of our leaders don't fit that bill (moreso, that a future crop of leaders might abuse these powers to terrible ends).
If you’re a bystander, what you want is for foreign governments to stop firing ammunitions at you. No ones saying that precision targeting isn’t the lesser of two evils, but the “anti war press” is outraged for a reason: the number of innocent people the United States should be murdering is not “fewer,” but zero
I mean sure, precision is one way to get that. Not firing missiles is the other way. I like my way because it doesn't cost millions of dollars and assume that the US government is qualified to judge who should live and die in other countries.
Perpetual, pan-colonial war killing people almost at random from the sky without police or criminal justice due-process or a shred of HUMINT. It's viewed as acceptable because they're not Americans, so they're not human beings. And if you question it, you're dismissed as "just a lefty" because murdering people at random is apparently okay and good for the military-industrial complex economy.
> this outlet is falling over themselves talking about gruesome it is.
But they're not. The warning they gave was a trigger warning in regards to the video, where it quite prominently showed a man beheaded. The article itself was level-headed and seemed to portray the developments with interest and a healthy dose of respect.
I understand your general sentiments and while I would usually agree with you, it seems your criticism is misplaced here.
I don't think any bystander wants to see that typ eof actoin go down in front of them. And the effect of drone tech hasn't been to lower casualties, but allow us to bomb and blast more and more people without the heavy logistics tail of a manned platform.
> The aim of the missions was to track, and when the conditions were deemed right, kill suspected insurgents. That’s not how they put it, though. They would talk about “cutting the grass before it grows out of control”, or “pulling the weeds before they overrun the lawn”.
> And then there were the children. The airmen would be flying the Predators over a village in the tribal areas of Pakistan, say, when a series of smaller black shadows would appear across their screens – telling them that kids were at the scene.
> They called them “fun-sized terrorists”.
[..]
> Toward the end of his service, Haas switched to training new recruits in the technology of drone warfare. That shocked him anew, as he discovered that many of the younger intake were gung-ho about the power they wielded at their fingertips. “They just wanted to kill,” he said.
> He remembers one training session with a student in which they were flying live over Afghanistan. The student said that a group of people on the ground looked suspicious.
> Why? Haas asked. Because they look like they are up to no good, the student replied.
> Would you act on that? the instructor asked. Sure, the student said.
> Haas immediately pulled him from his seat, took over the mission himself, and promptly failed the student. “I tried to get the students to understand that preservation of innocent life had to take priority.”
> Because he failed the student, Haas was later rebuked by senior officers. They told him that they were short of bodies to keep the drones flying, and they ordered him to pass students in future so that there would be a sufficient number trained and ready to go.
If I'm a bystander I don't want a country that I have literally never been to, or a country that's thousands of miles away from me operating drones in my country.
I can't imagine how these same people would react if china started killing civilians in the US that they deemed to be terrorists through a secret process.
It's not ignorance. Drone strikes are outright illegal under international law and quite frankly are unethical. Also they're extrajudicial killings when used against citizens.
Pretty sure they don't have permission to fly in other people's airspace. Pretty sure you need permission to kill people in other countries unless you have a declaration of war.
The outrage is justified. Syria is on the other side of the world, and poses no threat to us. How many Americans can even locate it on a map?
Stated reason for involvment was chemical weapons attack--which is strongly reminiscent of Iraq's imaginary WMDs. To anyone who believes the official story on our involvement, I have a bridge to sell you.
According to who? The OPCW? The UN? All of these organizations are compromised.
Per Wikipedia:
It was argued by The Guardian's columnist George Monbiot that Director-General José Bustani was being forced out by the U.S. government, despite the convention insisting the OPCW "shall not seek or receive instructions from any government"; the US had tried to persuade Brazil to recall Bustani. Monbiot wrote that the U.S. had tried other measures, although the convention also indicates that states should "not seek to influence" staff.
...
The removal was subsequently determined to be improper by an Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organization and consequently Bustani was awarded €50,000 in moral damages, his pay for the remainder of his second term, and his legal costs
Bellingcat has received grants from Adessium, Digital News Initiative, Open Society Foundation, Pax, Porticus, National Endowment for Democracy, The Dutch Postcode Lottery, Zinc Network (funded by British foreign office)
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a U.S. non-profit soft power organization that was founded in 1983 with the stated goal of promoting democracy abroad.
Bellingcat also receives funding via PAX which is directly funded by Netherlands Foreign Ministry.
Soft-power apparati for three NATO members, funding some rando to look at videos and offer opinions on them... still have that bridge to sell.
We know for certain that none of the pasty fucks at the NYT spent enough time in Syria to do their own actual investgation.
If anyone has time to trace funding for the other orgs, I'm sure that even more gold will be struck.
[Elliot Higgins] previously worked in finance and administration. In 2012, when Higgins began blogging the Syrian civil war, he was unemployed and spent his days taking care of his child at home
So I guess we're every bit as qualified to look at warzone videos in our underwear, make claims about whodunnit, then send off to the NYT?
What would it take to persuade you that chemical weapons attacks were made? What would it take to persuade you that the government of Syria wanted/controlled/launched those attacks?
There seems to be lots of sources that think these things are true. The top search result for `George Monbiot chemical weapons syria` yields [0] in which the third paragraph starts : "There is nothing surprising about this. The Syrian government has a long history of chemical weapons use, and the OPCW’s conclusions concur with a wealth of witness testimony. But a major propaganda effort has sought to discredit such testimony, and characterise the atrocity as a “false-flag attack”."
It would take a first-hand report from an entity that I trust. MSM deserves zero trust.
For the entire postwar period, we move from one false flag intervention to another--Korea, Iran in '53, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Iraq & Afghanistan, Libya--all mortal threats to the United States of America.
Tell me, in which one of these instances did the media tell us to hold our horses at the outset, rather than the aftermath?
Just to be clear...the war zone writes pieces that are almost universally positive towards the military and are often targeted at military porn type folks. They write for their audience...who love the military and want to know all the details about their cool toys so they can feel closer.
I'm unclear if you are referring the them specifically in your final paragraph, but if you are, you are way off base.
I was absolutely with you until you broadly referred to the "anti-war press" and their "outrage" and "ignorance", and then I was absolutely against you. Being "anti-war" is not the issue of pragmatism you were originally criticising, and spreading hatred for generalized groups of people is the foundation from which arises anything and everything reasonable people criticise in the first place (this principle is especially important when the target is journalists, who have been murdered in a nation as "developed" as the US as a direct result of people who don't like what they print encouraging others to hate them).
Being sick of something does not equal hatred. This comment contains amplification of emotion and black-or-white thinking that is more apt to cause defensive responses than anything else. It's best to argue against the best interpretation of a post instead of the worst.
For better or worse, each US drone strike requires an in-the-loop officer to authorize each weapon release. So whether it's a targeted assassination of HUMINT-confirmed high-value terrorist or the indiscriminate slaughtering of a funeral procession of innocent villagers based on HUMINT-free AI speculation, the US military's policies stipulate that, theoretically, there should always be someone to hold accountable for these successes and these crimes.
Glad it's more precise in theory, but a) why are we fighting again? b) So often they kill the wrong person anyway because it's so easy for them to kill, why bother with being extra careful on the confirmation? c) Trump, in 2017, loosened further the already weak safeguards on conducting strikes, so the number of civilian casualties has increased. d) Why are we fighting again?
Turkey is complicated... however, the US backing awful sides while doing realpolitik is famous, we've even backed Al Queda (!!) which undermines entirely the thin public justifications for even being there which seems to be more about securing oil, militarizing a central economically important region, and preventing Iran from gaining influence (why?) and failing given they took control of Iraq following the (baldly illegal) US invasion. Meanwhile we back an absolute monarchy that did 9/11 (probably) and threatened to do it to Canada on Twitter (lol). [0]
The narrative direction for "drone strike tech" doesn't really allow us to ask "what is this for again". The main direction of the narrative is supposed to be "wow, look at how many more "terrorists" we can kill without killing civilians". Of course, the whole process for who and how someone gets slapped with the plastic term "terrorist" and how it's decided they should die isn't to be brought into the picture.
Yea, that's why it's so important to remind people when these gee whiz tech articles come out that this is just literally war propaganda for a 100% illegal war.
Don't most air to air (or surface to air) missiles operate on a similar principle? The explosive warhead itself is not usually what destroys the enemy aircraft, but rather, the warhead is set to detonate within proximity of the enemy plane, releasing a bunch of metal shrapnel that acts like a spinning buzzsaw and literally shreds nearby aircraft to pieces (look at pictures of the recovered MH17 wreckage for evidence of this pattern).
I think this weapon is a direct hit kill vehicle, which isn't very common. In fact the ATA missiles are more like traditional HE munitions (like artillery shells), spraying fragments to kill the target.
This isn't shrapnel. Most bombs involve some kind of killing power via shrapnel. This one doesn't even seem to explode. It just extends six, 3 foot long swords from the main body prior to impact, dicing everything in the immediate radius. Precisely because of the lack of shrapnel/explosion, the risk of collateral damage to nearby people is supposedly greatly reduced. As long as you aren't within the killing radius of the blades, you theoretically shouldn't be harmed.
116 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadOf course the fusion of consequentalist ethics with rule based ones have been proposed, and there is some data suggesting people do think like this. (Depending on the context we will either have strict rules or we'll become more analytical.)
War, weapons, violence, death/life, quality of life, are always nasty problems in terms of moral philosophy. What's worse, creating life and then taking other lives, or not creating any nor taking any? There's path dependence, sure, the arrow of time cannot be really ignored, and intent matters, and so on, yet we know humans always viewed war/fighting/conflict as a two sided thing. The just wars and the unjust ones.
So the question becomes what is justice? How to reconcile everyone's personal concept of justice?
John Rawls proposed fairness, and a very clever yet simple (even if maybe ultimately unworkable) method to determine what's fair: thought experiments that consider every possible life (a beggar's, a king's, and everything in between), and as people elaborate in what each one should do in various situations people's views should converge. (See reflective equilibrium.)
... and then there's virtue ethics too, which focuses on, kind of a personal best. Be excellent to each other. And this sounds like utilitarianism with an utility function that has already built in targets that clean up a lot of abstract nonsense from it and place a big emphasis on agency (and thus it kind of captures intent too - because it talks about the virtues and vices of agents' overall character too).
I hope that both does and doesn't answer your question. :)
I'd need to go measure, but it seems the driver of a car and a passenger seated in the back seat (opposite the driver) would not both be killed. So it should be aimed at maybe one or two people, while others in the car might live.
Pretty amazing. Reduced deaths are a good thing, and it diminishes the value of innocent 'human shield' usage.
> the missile, which is roughly three and a half feet wide when its blades are extended
That really sounds like a diameter and not a radius. But on the other hand:
> Supposedly, three people were killed in the vehicle when the bladed weapon smashed through the roof of the vehicle.
> The payload area is roughly a foot and a half long and let's say the swords are roughly the same length, this would provide about a three and a half foot diameter kill zone, which is similar to what we see in the images of the vehicles that have been struck.
So it seems like 3.5ft diameter is The Warzone/The Drive's best guess based on the length of a standard Hellfire and the vehicle damage.
[0] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31310/this-photo-prove...
I'm sure that blades improve the lethality of such an instrument, but it may be more psychological than essential. If such a thing hadn't worked as well as it appears to, I'm sure that engineers could have found another way to make it a little more lethal.
The amount of precision required to kill a moving vehicle without harming other vehicles is impressive.
I'm not even sure we have the power to change that.
Having said that, the percentage has perhaps been the lowest ever in the past century (neither world war was that deadly), so maybe we're making progress towards your goal.
Hypothetical: would you would be OK to let ISIS conquer the globe by force because killing is bad?
> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...
https://youtu.be/6dv1QySWQ6I
https://youtu.be/PZjEhk-CkKc
Now that this thing is out in the Wild we’ll see all sorts of attempts, however futile, to defend against it.
I suspect some new techniques are being leveraged that are apparently having some success.
Assuming you have some additional mobile tracking cameras hidden in vehicles so they can be relocated once a day, the neural net could pretty easily infer guesses about where to put them.
Pretty sure they can also make a missile that fires 20 30mm rounds, 10 yards or whatever distance is needed to pepper the entire car, before crashing in the car.
Since the point appears to be limiting collateral damage, though, the blade-missile probably works okay coming through the windshield or back window, too.
When the spotter identifies a building, and someone else tries to correlate that description to a set of coordinates, and then a GBU is dropped to those coordinates... human error can lead to target mismatch, resulting in terrible tragedies like the Kunduz hospital incident.
The old one was really overkill for a couple of guys in a car, more designed to be used against tanks and probably sent shrapnel a considerable distance.
Could be a gas tank though.
In fact the anti-tank (HEAT) warhead would not do that much damage to a car and unless you would be directly under it you’ll be able to walk off from it as the tandem charge doesn’t do much damage when it doesn’t hit hardened armor.
The warhead in question in the video is likely a MAC (thermobaric charge) or a fragmentation warhead which were designed to hit soft targets and kill personnel.
The hellfire also has DIME warheads which use metal powder instead of larger shrapnel to reduce collateral damage as well as kinetic warheads as shown in the article.
With a manned platform, you have a chance of getting hit by a platform with a rear weapons officer, (F-15E, F/A-18) to verify minimal bystanders. But they're probably concentrating on not missing. Or you can get hit by a single occupancy aircraft (F-16, F-35) who will be dropping pre programmed ordinance.
With a drone, you have three separate teams of people watching the video steam. Anyone in that loop can say, "hey there are a lot of civilians here" and everything's on pause until the target moves.
And now we have an explosiveless munition with limited opportunities for collateral damage and this outlet is falling over themselves talking about gruesome it is.
Having worked in the field makes me really sick of ignorant journalists reporting on it. The outrage the antiwar press tends to carry makes their ignorance more annoying than the journalists talking about AGI, quantum computing, or deep learning.
On the other hand, it still seems horrible to kill people by remote control. Supposing it becomes possible to very, very precisely kill exactly who you want, from far away, with no judicial process, etc., is this good?
War should be painful for both sides, because if it is not, what stops us from engaging in it?
(Edit: this happened to be submitted earlier today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21738908 )
It's like suggesting laser guided bombs are worse than unguided bombs.
What is new is the use of signals intelligence to choose whom to target in a non-combat zone. I think that's the novel piece that should horrify people.
In the longer run, being able to take out who you want without killing innocents modifies the moral calculus. You don't have to justify the turpitude of your target against the lives of innocent bystanders.
So eventually the question approaches: how do you hold steadfast moral red-lines regarding the use of such weapons as PR costs and blowback approach zero?
There is a rational sense to be outraged over more precise weaponry: precision incentivizes super-states to use it more, which in turn incentivizes things like surveillance. At the long tail of this shift of incentives one can see a a quite spooky/sinister picture emerging.
This is only possible if the killing happens in total secrecy. The court of public opinion is a judicial process, and an important one, despite having only informal procedures.
I came away from the article a bit sickened by the concept, yes, but also proud we have a weapon whose purpose is to avoid accidental civilian deaths. And I have to admit, as gory as this weapon sounds, it's no worse than explosives.
I don't like war. I figure no one in their right mind should. I do acknowledge there's a time for it, and even a time for assassination (i.e. al Qaeda and similar).
I pray our leaders are able to make the right decisions regarding when these things are needed, and I'm nervous that some of our leaders don't fit that bill (moreso, that a future crop of leaders might abuse these powers to terrible ends).
But they're not. The warning they gave was a trigger warning in regards to the video, where it quite prominently showed a man beheaded. The article itself was level-headed and seemed to portray the developments with interest and a healthy dose of respect.
I understand your general sentiments and while I would usually agree with you, it seems your criticism is misplaced here.
> The aim of the missions was to track, and when the conditions were deemed right, kill suspected insurgents. That’s not how they put it, though. They would talk about “cutting the grass before it grows out of control”, or “pulling the weeds before they overrun the lawn”.
> And then there were the children. The airmen would be flying the Predators over a village in the tribal areas of Pakistan, say, when a series of smaller black shadows would appear across their screens – telling them that kids were at the scene.
> They called them “fun-sized terrorists”.
[..]
> Toward the end of his service, Haas switched to training new recruits in the technology of drone warfare. That shocked him anew, as he discovered that many of the younger intake were gung-ho about the power they wielded at their fingertips. “They just wanted to kill,” he said.
> He remembers one training session with a student in which they were flying live over Afghanistan. The student said that a group of people on the ground looked suspicious.
> Why? Haas asked. Because they look like they are up to no good, the student replied.
> Would you act on that? the instructor asked. Sure, the student said.
> Haas immediately pulled him from his seat, took over the mission himself, and promptly failed the student. “I tried to get the students to understand that preservation of innocent life had to take priority.”
> Because he failed the student, Haas was later rebuked by senior officers. They told him that they were short of bodies to keep the drones flying, and they ordered him to pass students in future so that there would be a sufficient number trained and ready to go.
If I'm a bystander I don't want a country that I have literally never been to, or a country that's thousands of miles away from me operating drones in my country.
I can't imagine how these same people would react if china started killing civilians in the US that they deemed to be terrorists through a secret process.
Stated reason for involvment was chemical weapons attack--which is strongly reminiscent of Iraq's imaginary WMDs. To anyone who believes the official story on our involvement, I have a bridge to sell you.
Not to justify US targeted killings, but it's not the same as Iraq's CIA-invented WMDs.
Per Wikipedia:
It was argued by The Guardian's columnist George Monbiot that Director-General José Bustani was being forced out by the U.S. government, despite the convention insisting the OPCW "shall not seek or receive instructions from any government"; the US had tried to persuade Brazil to recall Bustani. Monbiot wrote that the U.S. had tried other measures, although the convention also indicates that states should "not seek to influence" staff.
...
The removal was subsequently determined to be improper by an Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organization and consequently Bustani was awarded €50,000 in moral damages, his pay for the remainder of his second term, and his legal costs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2X84JZINcI
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a U.S. non-profit soft power organization that was founded in 1983 with the stated goal of promoting democracy abroad.
Bellingcat also receives funding via PAX which is directly funded by Netherlands Foreign Ministry.
Soft-power apparati for three NATO members, funding some rando to look at videos and offer opinions on them... still have that bridge to sell.
We know for certain that none of the pasty fucks at the NYT spent enough time in Syria to do their own actual investgation.
If anyone has time to trace funding for the other orgs, I'm sure that even more gold will be struck.
[Elliot Higgins] previously worked in finance and administration. In 2012, when Higgins began blogging the Syrian civil war, he was unemployed and spent his days taking care of his child at home
So I guess we're every bit as qualified to look at warzone videos in our underwear, make claims about whodunnit, then send off to the NYT?
There seems to be lots of sources that think these things are true. The top search result for `George Monbiot chemical weapons syria` yields [0] in which the third paragraph starts : "There is nothing surprising about this. The Syrian government has a long history of chemical weapons use, and the OPCW’s conclusions concur with a wealth of witness testimony. But a major propaganda effort has sought to discredit such testimony, and characterise the atrocity as a “false-flag attack”."
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/15/lesson...
For the entire postwar period, we move from one false flag intervention to another--Korea, Iran in '53, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Iraq & Afghanistan, Libya--all mortal threats to the United States of America.
Tell me, in which one of these instances did the media tell us to hold our horses at the outset, rather than the aftermath?
I'm unclear if you are referring the them specifically in your final paragraph, but if you are, you are way off base.
For better or worse, each US drone strike requires an in-the-loop officer to authorize each weapon release. So whether it's a targeted assassination of HUMINT-confirmed high-value terrorist or the indiscriminate slaughtering of a funeral procession of innocent villagers based on HUMINT-free AI speculation, the US military's policies stipulate that, theoretically, there should always be someone to hold accountable for these successes and these crimes.
See also: Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars (2013)
EDIT: 2018 -> 2017, my how time flies.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170414143558/https://www.nytim...
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-arabia-appeared-to-thr... (candidate for best tweet of the decade)