What Happens In Vegas Happens In Afghanistan 522
theodp writes "After the morning commute from his Las Vegas apartment, Air Force captain Sam Nelson sits in a padded chair inside a low, tan building in Nevada, controlling a heavily armed drone aircraft soaring over Afghanistan, prepared to kill another human being 7,500 miles away if necessary. Welcome to the surreal world of drone pilots, who have a front-row seat on war from half a world away. 'On the drive out here, you get yourself ready to enter the compartment of your life that is flying combat,' explained retired Col. Chris Chambliss. 'And on the drive home, you get ready for that part of your life that's going to be the soccer game.' No wonder why the Air Force is interested in the Xbox LIVE crowd and the Army's opened a new arcade recruitment center!"
So you wanna join the Air Force and Fly? (Score:1, Informative)
So, you wanna fly jets in the Air Force and be in the sky?
Read it and weep.
Drones: much much cheaper than a manned jet and you don't have to worry about pilots being beheaded on TV. And one day, they'll be completely automated.
I wonder if this will cause a decline in Air Force recruiting?
Not everyone can fly the F-22 or F-35 - there's only so many jets. And as I pointed out above, the politicians have incentive to send in the drones.
I'm surprised the Navy hasn't picked up on this more.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:3, Informative)
And if you actually *read* the article, you'll see that many of the people involved feel that this is *more* "personalized" than the old way of doing it (a bomber 30-40k feet in the air).
Re:Latency? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:1, Informative)
If we ever get Bin Ladin in the sights of one of these things, it'll be well worth the investment.
Just like before, right? [timesonline.co.uk]
The pictures are part of a mass of evidence now emerging of the missed opportunities to kill or capture Bin Laden and his associates before they launched the terror attacks on America in 2001.
They include at least three further occasions in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2000 when the CIA had Bin Laden in its sights but was prevented from acting. There were divisions between the agency and the White House over who would have the authority to fire and the legality of killing the Al-Qaeda leader.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:3, Informative)
The rules of war have changed... the enemy isn't a state, it's a force of people loyal to a cult that believes a corrupted religion.
If you think the only reason they're attacking the United States is "corrupted religion" then you have no clue WTF has been happening for the last few decades.
AFAIK almost every Mid-East country from which terrorists come has very specific historical gripes with US foreign policy.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:2, Informative)
I have very little respect for the crossbowman, who kills his enemies from the safety of the castle walls.
I respect more the lowly grunt, who actually fights with his life during combat, with his sword and pike.
Cowards should not be held up as heroes.
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:2, Informative)
It is very tempting to imagine that we can wage a war that is bloodless on our own side.
However the fact of the matter, at this point, is that there are still soldiers fighting street to street under a hail of sniper fire and rpgs. These troops certainly gain something from the new close air support, but they still have to kick down doors, peer around corners and walk through mined fields.
We must not allow ourselves to be wowed by new technology and forget about the plight of our soldiers. They are paying the full price for our actions and we must recognize their bravery and commitment
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:5, Informative)
John Wayne... George Patton... Same thing, really...
Re:People problem. (Score:2, Informative)
From TFA:
Just like troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, drone crews have access to chaplains, psychologists and doctors. They are taught to keep an eye on one another for signs of stress.
So I'd say the military thought about this and is trying to handle it. They might not do it well, but they're definitely doing something in this respect, and I would expect they would manage to reduce psychological damage to reasonable levels.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:4, Informative)
And that's why the US can not "win" this war. The reason Japan surrendered is not that the allies were defeating their armies down to the very last man, but because we were firebombing and nuking entire cities. When the suffering became too great, the persons in charge knew the war had to end.
The significant difference between then and now are that the enemy is already not in power, and the enemy has no concern for the well being of the civilian populations in which they hide.
If the US were to switch to a carpet-bombing strategy in Afghanistan, things would be almost no different from a battle point of view. A few civilians might even cooperate with turning over the combatants out of sheer terror of the bombers. But the world opinion would turn against America, certainly to punitive isolation and perhaps even to the point of invasion. Which would be exactly what both the hawks and xenophobes of the extremist right wing want.
So the US plods along, killing a Taliban here and a Taliban there, never making much progress. It's a quagmire, plain and simple.
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:1, Informative)
He's not describing it in terms of ethics or moral standing, he's referring to the advantages of the system for fighting. In war a soldier's purpose is always to reduce the enemy's fighting capability, typically in any way possible. Killing a pilot is much more effective than just shooting down an aircraft, because training a pilot is a much more expensive and time consuming prospect. This system effectively denies the enemy the ability to kill the pilot, unless they want to come to the US and do it, which significantly increases risk to their own fighting capability (ie getting caught)
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:5, Informative)
"Why did the American Civil war soldiers line up and fire at each other? Because to hide behind trees, bushes, and hills would be unethical."
Everyone who modded this up deserves a (virtual) throat punch for gross and spectacular historical ignorance.
Slowly for the short-bus crowd:
Civil War weapons were not accurate or long-range by modern standards, so the way to obtain high volumes of fire was by massed formations of troops. That didn't have anything to do with ethics, but everything to do with making the best use of (usually muzzle-loading) muskets and rifles.
Massed fire required lots of troops, performing different stages of the process to ensure something like steady fire:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doqgPsmT7tc&feature=related [youtube.com]
Contemplate doing this while under musket and cannon fire you can't usually move to dodge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z5kr2EmRIo&feature=related [youtube.com]
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:5, Informative)
Why? At the risk of quoting John Wayne, war isn't about giving your life for your country - it's about making the other bastard give his life for his.
That was not John Wayne, it was George C. Scott in the movie Patton. The whole quote is "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
Movie Quote [imdb.com]
Re:Murder by remote control and other ways, too. (Score:4, Informative)
If by in some ways you mean barring the Red Chinese, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandans, Imperial Britain, or just for Godwin's sake the Nazi's then yes you are correct. Otherwise you're a troll.
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:3, Informative)
My double-standard sense is tingling.
The Geneva convention was set to clearly divide militaries from civilians. If there is a double-standard in there, is it that States agreed to follow these rules but not the rebels.
If you are wearing a military uniform, using an aircraft with military marking, and target enemy militaries, you are doing war.
If you disguise yourself as a civilian, you are a spy or a terrorist, and outside of the convention.
Although completely unfair, your Afghani rebel is free to openly charge to Vegas in his non-existent plane, wearing his non-existent uniform to kill the remote pilot. But he cannot cowardly hide behind a disguise to kill. Maybe unfair to non-States, but those are the rules.
Once you come to accept that, you will see that you post was, maybe unwillingly, a troll.
(And yes, I am throwing away mod points because no one had the smarts to make that point.)
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:4, Informative)
That's not entirely true... the Civil War saw huge advances in weaponry, and was really the first war to be fought with what we would now consider to be modern weapons in terms of both range and accuracy. It was also one of the bloodiest wars ever fought, with enormous losses suffered by both sides, largely as a result of the fact that the tactics in use WEREN'T optimized for their weapons.
By the end of the Civil War, most soldiers were equipped with combat ready battle rifles utilizing jacketed cartridges and fully rifled barrels (rifling had existed for decades, and was fairly common on high-end firearms, but the technology to effectively mass-produce them came into being during the war... this is one of the reason that Confederate volunteer forces, with their heirloom quality guns so heavily dominated in the first few years, they were much more experienced and better-armed than their conscripted Union counterparts). Semi-automatic revolvers, repeater rifles and carbines, as well as early machine guns, were deployed among certain elite units and officers. These guns were quite accurate, even at range, and even the single round breach-loaded models carried by basic infantrymen had a decent rate of fire that made mass fire line battles obsolete and unnecessarily brutal.
Now the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, those required mass fire at point blank ranges, and the only forces to employ guerrilla-style tactics were local militias acting primarily to impede the progress of real forces. The Americans never could have won the Revolution if they'd kept using Minuteman tactics firing from behind cover and fleeing from return fire.
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention their suicide attacks within Afghanistan which typically kills far more civilians than it does military.
The US goes to great length to prevent civilian casualties - for the latest offensive they warned people about a month before. They may not be perfect but I really don't like this idea that they are somehow as bad as the Taliban in their regard for human life.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:5, Informative)
Not just that, it's an actual quote of Patton [military-quotes.com].
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:5, Informative)
In WWII the US did intentionally slaughter a couple hundred thousand civilians in Dresden and Japan (nukes). Without even entering the issue of whether that was justified, it's just not true to say we always avoided targeting civilians.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:4, Informative)
Rawls served with the Marines in the pacific theater of WW2. After witnessing the aftermath of Hiroshima, he turned down an invitation to officer candidate school and went back home to earn a doctorate in philosophy.
It's probable that Rawls knew more about war than you did. It's almost certain he knew more about ethics.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:1, Informative)
Wasn't it that they usually sat in a tent on some kind of hill and commanded the army from there? The risk of dying is much smaller there, and let's not forget that the overall perceived value of human live was much lower back then (people were dying left and right from diseases)
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:3, Informative)
I have to disagree to some extent. The problem of respect for the occupying forces (which arises through the perception of fairness) is at the center of the strategy of "winning hearts and minds" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Regardless of the military merits of this strategy, which are worth debating separately, the practical consequence
of adopting the strategy is that the perception of fairness is important, both in the occupied countries and at home for political reasons. Right or wrong, fairness is not merely for sporting events.
The hearts and minds are being won. How? By giving cold hard cash to the folks over there. Welcome to the western world where cash is king and all else is secondary. Not that I totally disagree with this philosophy, for I too have bills to pay and desire creature comforts. War is only unfair if you don't get paid.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/28/afghanistan.taliban.pay/index.html [cnn.com]
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:1, Informative)
Pikes were the weapon of the grunts. Cheap, easy to make, and simple to use, a great democratizer. Prior to their invention soldiers on horseback were largely immune, except perhaps to each other. Drag them off their horse with a long hooked pole and things begin to look a bit more even.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:3, Informative)
Since when has fighting a war ever had anything to do with fairness? The whole point is to kill more of the enemy than they kill of your own guys. Anyone who focuses too much on "fairness" in that situation is going to get a lot of his men killed.