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!"
Toys (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:3, Interesting)
Does it really qualify as "murder"? Isn't that just war?
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:People problem. (Score:2, Interesting)
There was a report on NPR about it a while back, and you pretty much captured the issue.
Also, these people watch the missile they launch until impact, in many ways it is more up-close and personal than flying a bomber.
That with the complete disconnect from surroundings (Killing people than going to the soccer game), is creating a new situation, that the full mental impact is not fully understood yet. But the drone pilots are being watched, and the military is aware that it is new, and the ways to help are likely to be somewhat different.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Corrupted religion? Lets see here we have Muslims on one side and Christians on the other so which side are you talking about. They both seem pretty corrupted to me.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:3, Interesting)
Pick a side. It's easy (black and white). You can be the victor, or loser/slave to your enemy.
Is there a third side? Neither of the two sides I see are just black or white. They both have had varying grays at different points.
The irony of military robots is... (Score:5, Interesting)
The irony of military robots is that we are using them to enforce a global economic system that is based on forcing humans to do labor in exchange for the right to consume the fruits of industry. Why not just build robots to do the work directly instead? Why not use global networks to freely share information about how to make the world a better place that works for everyone? The same is true for nuclear missiles intended to fight over oil and land instead of using the same technologies to build nuclear power plants (or solar ones and wind ones) or to create self-replicating space habitats or seasteads for endless new land. We need to start thinking in 21st century terms now that we have 21st century technology. Otherwise, we will likely accidentally kill ourselves with the tools of abundance.
As Albert Einstein said:
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html [stanford.edu]
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
Or further:
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/nuclear1.htm [aip.org]
"""
"Concern for man himself must always constitute the chief objective of all technological effort -- concern for the big, unsolved problems of how to organize human work and the distribution of commodities in such a manner as to assure that the results of our scientific thinking may be a blessing to mankind, and not a curse."
"""
Or more on how Einstein was more than the disconnected absent minded professor he is made out to be:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/eins-s03.shtml [wsws.org]
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm [sacred-texts.com]
It is not the nukes and drones that may kill us all eventually, it is the unrecognized irony.
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:3, Interesting)
Before 9/11, we didn't feel we had the God-Bless-American-Right to kill foreign terrorists without a trial. After 9/11, we suspended all those nice legalities and started butchering the bastards.
I don't know which is worse. All I know is I like America 2.0 a whole lot less than I liked the previous version of America.
Hobbyists already have small UAVs (Score:5, Interesting)
RC airplane flyers already have planes with real-time video feeds and some of them even have head-tracking goggles. Of course, they tend to be much smaller and short-range than a military drone.
You can search Youtube for 'fpv flight': http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fpv+flight&search_type=&aq=f [youtube.com]
One guy already weaponized one for the 4th of July: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBn1h0x-37E [youtube.com]
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't say i blamed them. Piracy is and always will be an economic problem. A somali Pirate works for say 1 year, attacks a half a dozen ships captures one and his cut out of the bounty of several million is ~$100,000 dollars. it is the kind of money many in the USA wish they were making. The best part is if you are attacked and can't get away you put down your weapons, they capture you feed you better than you have eaten in months, and set you free.
as I said piracy is an economic problem. If taking a freighter hostage earns you more money easier than fishing in water polluted and over fished by others then people will go for it. An intelligent solution would be to setup fish farms under Somali control and to buy the product from them at current market price, People will go for the legitimate option if given a fair chance. it must be fair though.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:1, Interesting)
No really, I was hoping for a +1 Insightful : P
People usually write because they want to impart something to the reader. Whether that is a department of MIT-educated army psychologists who want to create some form of identification and framing around army decisions, or whether that's the homeschooled child of a rural flower-power couple expressing her feelings.
Now, because we have some desire for "truth" and take offense at people trying to manipulate us etc, we don't like it when people try to influence us. And it could be argued that when manipulation itself is the goal, you start out with a big negative karma effect for whatever you're trying to do.
The problem in this case is that - if you are looking at articles that describe the horrors of war and atrocities committed by the US/Europeans - I do NOT see them as the recovered and translated personal diaries of poor farmers writing on sheepskin. The people who want to portray the war in a negative light are every bit as fanatical as the ones wanting to portray it in a positive light. There's millions of Afghans so you _always_ choose which view you want to represent in an interview. Hence saying "This is psy-ops, there should be a negative angle instead, describing pain and suffering!" is simply the same but opposite.
Hence, rather than read articles, I prefer to read as superficially as possible to pick up basic facts, and use logic and reason to _imagine_ the rest. Saves a lot of time and trouble. : p
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:3, Interesting)
A POW status would state how you may and may not treat them.
as does the protected civilian status, there are rules, and human rights
I agree that we (USA) should not treat non-POWs without basic human rights and without dignity.
Good, and those things are meant to be ensured by the fourth geneva convention, which the US blindly ignores by claiming to invent their own new status.
But what really pisses me off is how our new administration wishes to grant these terrorists with the same constitutional protections they (Al-Qaeda) wish we never had.
But if you were to not treat them fairly according to your laws, would that not speak volumes about the US as a country, violating your own principles is a lot worse than anything al-qaeda could do to you, you become the monster.
In my opinion the terrorists succeeded, but only because of the US government terrifying it's own people for it's own ends.
Hell they could have had [independent.co.uk] osama back in 2001 if they had just stopped bombing the crap out of afghanistan.
"I ask America not to kill us," pleaded Hussain Khan, who said he had lost four children in the raid.
To which bush simply said, no negotiations, we're doing it anyway. If you can actually support that kind of crap, you are more callous than I.
The number of innocent civilians killed by bush's wars is insane, makes 911 look like a drop in the bucket. But nobody cares, because it isn't them.
A Combat Vets Thoughts... (Score:1, Interesting)
I am a USMC combat vet of multiple OIF and other operational deployments. This is a big issue, but from what I've read everyone seems to be focusing on the wrong parts of the issue and its results. By using remote technology, what we do is remove the horror you feel from seeing the end result of what you have done. Shooting someone from afar (or bombing with a drone) is one thing, but shooting multiple people, including accidental civilians, and then after-wards having to walk around in the carnage you have produced and is very different. But this is not the real problem, it is that the military and governmental officials use tactics like this to keep the amount of morale high, the main result being a lack of questioning of the most important question in war. Why? This is why I could no longer serve the military. I grew up as your traditional war guy. I was a southern baptist from Texas, I had a long family military history, as my dad is a Marine, both my grandfathers were in the military, my great uncle was wounded on Guadalcanal and died on the 2nd push on Iwo Jima. I believed in god and my country with a great bit of idealism, and joined not long after the initial Afghan invasion. The more war I experienced, the more I questioned things, and eventually started looking into them. The deeper I looked, the more and more I felt betrayed by my country. The very moral fabric of my life was ripped out from under me, I now no longer believe in god, in my country, and especially I hate patriotism and nationalism for their use as tools to blind young men. These wars are about two things, money and power, make no mistake. But I digress, (I could go on for ages about the subject, I am currently doing a rough outline for a book, but it is more for me than anything else) The point is you remove the horror of war, and you remove the main reason that people should realize why it is so horrible and should be avoided if at all possible, creating a culture that views war with a distant afterthought, bound with the strings of selective justification. To this day though, I have not come up with an answer of how to prevent this. It seems to happen regardless. We have a war, we have tons of vets with PTSD, and we forget our lessons, and 20 years later we are in another war that creates the same problems. The first step I can think of, is to at least try to educate our young population about war. I see things like Army propoganda trailers in the movie theatres that make war look like an exciting episode of Call of Duty. We should start showing films of you buddy dying from an IED blast, from another being trapped in the Humvee as it is on fire, films of insurgents blown to bits, about how some of us can barely leave our apartment or keep a job because we are so on edge or paranoid, how the VA treats you like a pile of shit. We must do anything and everything to stop the politicians and the powers that be from inflicting this on a new generation later. Fuck the politicians and all the things that keep them there and all their benefits.
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:2, Interesting)
Convention favors supreme military force. It was written before people started using asymmetric warfare to fight aggressors that were using their military advance against others.
Yes. Asymmetric warfare militants are illegal according to Geneva convention, but it is the only way they can effectively fight against aggressor. You cover your advanced military ass with convention and hope that others will play according to your rules that are designed to work against them.
Re:Fly-by-wireless-link for the win! (Score:3, Interesting)
Your post is crack. You're taking perhaps one resistance movement in the whole of the German occupied WWII area, a more rural and sparsely populated area at that, and extrapolating from it to all resistance movements across europe. Including more urban, populated areas of western Europe and Poland. Your conclusions therefore are quite unsafe.
The rest of your post, your casual calculating away of the deaths of wholly innocent people (1/4 of those deaths directly attributable to the occupying powers, another quarter potentially in engagements in which occupying powers were a party) is just staggering. I hope you are young, and speak this way because you havn't yet had the time to fully develop your views. Otherwise, if you're older, I am disturbed by your lack of empathy for other human beings.
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Additional risk to us: (Score:3, Interesting)
Terrorism is also about what you do outside of the fight. When you make videos showing people being tortured and beheaded -- soldiers, journalists, your own countrymen, tourists, etc -- that becomes part of your identity even though it's not directly part of the war. That's a big component of being a terrorist instead of a hero.
Has the US done similar things in the past? There's an argument to be made about things like Hiroshima. But there's also one to be made that since then, maybe for the first time, technology has made war become more humane, not more brutal. That's not the act of a terrorist.