Note that he doesn’t say “accurate.” Precision means a high degree of consistency, but not necessarily a high degree of accuracy. Seems to me that if it were “precise,” it would only kill the same number of people (say, one) that it set out to kill. It may not be accurate though, and that one person may be the wrong person. I imagine this happens occasionally. However, if you kill 10 civilians as you kill that one terrorist, you have accuracy but low precision. If you kill 11 civilians but miss the terrorist, then both your precision and accuracy suck.
So he should really say the drone program is occasionally accurate, but the precision is iffy. Whether it’s effective or not is a whole other question.
Well sure. But then they’ll be shooting down the occasional aircraft full of innocent people. The terrorists win.
And that’s just for aircraft coming across the border. For aircraft taking off within the country, well, they’d pretty much have to shut down civil aviation.
Because a drone be loaded up and left off to the side of a runway for a few days before it takes off and heads towards a target stadium, government target or IHOP. Those responsible can be on the other side of the planet before the engine automatically fires up.
Granted, Google is making sure that cars can do this in a few years too.
If even one of those civilians had been a mid-to-upper-class white American citizen the streets would be filled with angry protesters demanding “never again.”
Also so down with nations and people choosing to fight one another with targeted precision strikes on super important stuff and assassinations and whatever else.
Whatever lowers the death toll the assholes in charge take against their citizenry in their simian power struggles.
Mostly war is some prick you’ll never meet arguing with some other prick you’ll never meet about who gets to beat you up and take anything that belongs to you for their own.
I thought tha Humans lacked the intelligence to understand Skynet. It would be akin to earthworm trying to understand why a human might use it for bait.
It’s as if he’s never heard of police, rule of law, courts, or criminal justice. Sure, that kind of stuff is slow and messy and inconvenient. It’s also how civilians protect ourselves from people like him. No wonder he doesn’t consider that an option.
Sigh - every time I see an article like this, it makes me sad, because the issue is not “drones” - it’s “Killing”.
If you think drones are the problem, go google “my lai massacre”. We don’t need drones to commit atrocities, although they do make it a lot easier.
Remote robotics in general are awesome - they let us explore the solar system, and the deepest parts of the ocean. Military drones have the potential to let us project power with far less risk to our troops. If they were used selectively, and responsibly, with proper oversight, the could alter the face of warfare for the better (for us, anyway).
Unfortunately - they are not. They are overused, indiscriminately, and without accountability, because once you get a really good hammer, everything is a nail. The issue is not the tool, it’s how it is used.
No, drones are also the issue. As I wrote above, there’s an argument about gun control that applies to drones:
“Handguns are available for self protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy.”
Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World
Drones are cheap compared to F-16s and F-22s. They’re FAR cheaper to operate. The drone pilot if FAR cheaper to train. You don’t risk a pilot. You don’t risk the political fall-out of a pilot being captured.
Consider the US’s first Predator drone murder, back in 2002. Three men in Afghanistan. Murdered because one of them was tall, so obviously he must be Osama Bin Laden.
Drones make impulsive killing easy.
Unlike the My Lai massacre, drones also add a large element of anonymity - in both directions. Think of how internet anonymity - and a lack of direct contact with the target, dehumanizing them - turns some ordinary people into monsters.
[quote=“Blaze_Curry, post:2, topic:73989, full:true”]In other news, the “drone program” lost the majority of it’s air force sourced pilots early on to “burn-out”, otherwise known as “not sleeping at night because of all the civilian murders”, and now the program is building (has built?) a new “school” near their central command to somehow train new pilots to not fall prey to such human frailty.
[/quote]
To be fair: the most likely culprit for the high burnout rate of UAV pilots is the continuous wartime/peacetime transitions they experience. They aren’t bombing civilians at a notably higher rate than the pilots of conventional attack aircraft.
Psychological symptoms for veterans tend to peak when they return to civilian life, not while they’re stll on the battlefield. Stateside-based UAV pilots are essentially going through that transition every day.
