Air Force Drones Hit 1 Million Combat Hours 113
coondoggie writes "If you needed any more evidence as to how important unmanned aircraft have become to the US military operations, the US Air Force today said drones have amassed over one million combat hours flown. While that number is impressive, it took the planes known as Global Hawk, Predator and Reaper, almost 14 years to do it, but it could take only a little over another two years to cross the two million mark according to Air Force officials."
Glenn Greenwald Tweeted This One Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Glenn Greenwald Tweeted This One Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that each drone costs almost as much as a primary school building, I think we should all pause to reflect.
zombie eisenhower disappointed (Score:2)
zombie nixon, pleased
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I'd be happier if the fighters were replaced with drones, they cost a lot less. Skynet here we come!:D
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Given that each drone can remotely and without consequence for the wielders destroy an entire primary school, I think we should all pause to reflect.
Or were you just bitching about taxes?
Extreme dishonor. (Score:1)
Murdering goat herders from 50000 feet by remote control is the most extreme form of cowardice I have ever seen or heard of.
Re:Extreme dishonor. (Score:5, Insightful)
Murdering goat herders from 50000 feet by remote control is the most extreme form of cowardice I have ever seen or heard of.
Engaging the Taliban with robots is not a fair fight. It's not honorable. But the point of combat isn't a fair fight, it's not to gain honor, it's to win. And winning means making the fight as unfair as possible- fighting him on your terms, not his, using tactics and terrain where you can use your strengths and your equipment to your advantage. So instead of engaging the Taliban on foot, you engage him in such a way that he can't hit you back. That means engaging masses of Taliban with AK-47 assault rifles with A-10s tankbusters armed with 30 mm gatling guns designed to take out Soviet armor. Chasing down footsoldiers with Apache gunships. Obliterating Taliban headquarters with GPS guided artillery rockets which allow you to put 200 pounds of high explosive within a meter of where you're aiming, from 25 miles away. Or having some guy in Nevada shoot at a truck carrying Taliban leaders with a Reaper drone.
Fighting unfairly is nothing new. That's why armies try to take the high ground, and have better weapons and armor than their enemies, and to attack with superior numbers, and better discipline. Because it makes the fight unfair. Fighting unfairly is how the Battle of Agincourt was won. The English used a weapon- the longbow- that allowed them to take out the French knights before the French could get them. It was unfair, it was dishonorable, and it delivered the French a crushing defeat. And fighting unfairly and dishonorably is also how the Taliban fight. The Taliban have trouble beating the U.S. in a firefight so they have increasingly used improvised explosive devices that allow them to attack U.S. troops without exposing themselves. They pretend they're civilians so the U.S. doesn't know who to hit. They hide in the middle of civilians so that it's impossible to attack them without hitting civilians. They use suicide bombers. Is it fair? Is that honorable? Of course not. But their goal is to win, not to be honorable, or to fight fair.
There are limits to what's acceptable. Killing civilians deliberately, or with reckless disregard, is one of these, and sometimes the U.S. military has done this. And whether the U.S. really should be in Afghanistan at this point is debatable. But fighting unfairly is the whole point and it's naive to argue otherwise.
considering nobody knows what victory is (Score:2)
in these 'contingency operations', then its kind of hard to understand what 'winning' means. nobody can tell us. can you?
i read somewhere that you can't win a counter-insurgency by pissing off the entire population.
and i read another thing about this place called vietnam, where we killed hundreds of thousands of them, someting like 10-2o times more than they killed of us. and they still won.
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Engaging the Taliban with robots is not a fair fight. It's not honorable. But the point of combat isn't a fair fight, it's not to gain honor, it's to win.
It's not killing armed Taliban fighters that is the problem, genius, it's flattening entire villages because someone told you that the Taliban might be there, and, oh dear, looks like we were wrong, there's another nail in the coffin of winning hearts and minds.
We are not fighting against the whole of Afghanistan, we are fighting against the Taliban - that's the difference from WWII.
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The English used a weapon- the longbow- that allowed them to take out the French knights before the French could get them.
Technically the French tried to charge across a muddy bog in heavy armour, they were sitting ducks once the horses got stuck, so it had less to do with longbows and more to do with a really bad tactical decision.
I'll play along, I've been itching for a fight (Score:2)
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Main Entry: antidisestablishmentarianism
Definition: originally, opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England, now opposition to the belief that there should no longer be an official church in a country
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Damn it, wickedskaman! You've undermined my mojo!!!! I must cry now.
Try not showing off with long words you don't understand next time you post, or else buy a dictionary.
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War is not sportsmanship. It is never supposed to BE sportsmanship.
When war is resorted to, the enemy is either to submit, or die.
if its not 'hostile' then how is it war? (Score:2)
i believe our executive branch just told us that the UAVs in libya are not a 'hostile act',
so i am trying to figure out how you can be in a 'war' if its not 'hostile'.
or is it 'contingency operation' ? i get them confused.
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citation needed (Score:2)
i was actually the jackass bleating about Bush going into Iraq without an agreement from the UN.
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War is not sportsmanship. It is never supposed to BE sportsmanship.
When war is resorted to, the enemy is either to submit, or die.
We are not at war with Afghanistan, you utter clown.
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Murdering goat herders from 50000 feet by remote control is the most extreme form of cowardice I have ever seen or heard of.
This is Earth, not Kronos. Cowardice is irrelevant, winning is everything.
A good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
...that these things, by today's definitions, are neither hostile nor a part of war. It would be a much less peaceful world otherwise.
Stargate SG-1 (Score:1)
Sounds a like an episode of Stargate SG-1. Can't remember the exact episode though.
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Yes, it was indeed an episode of Stargate SG-1. That episode was The Other Side [wikia.com], featuring Rene Auberjonois as Space Hitler.
"Close the iris." *thud*
Obligatory Compared to a Human Post (Viet Nam era) (Score:1)
Another reason to question buying the F35 (Score:5, Insightful)
UAVs are smaller, more versatile, cheaper to buy and maintain, stealthier, don't get tired(in the traditional sense) and can loiter for greater periods. The Canadians estimate each F35 at $150M. I don't see an advantage for the F35 that UAVs won't meet or exceed in a few more years. The F35 is a plane looking for a mission, like the Comanche attack helicopter was.
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Well, UAVs are still pretty new militarily. Originally they were just surveillance devices until someone figured out how to strap some Hellfire missiles onto the thing.
The thing we've yet to see is UAV to UAV combat. Most UAVs have air-to-ground missiles. What happens when someone starts building air-to-air UAVs to target the Predators and the like?
Re:Another reason to question buying the F35 (Score:4, Interesting)
Derp, I forgot to add - I think we're seriously going to see what basically amount to Protoss Carriers in the next 10-20 years. A C-130 or AC-130 that can launch and retrieve fighter-style drones from its bays, and not have any latency or signal loss issues over long distances.
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There is nothing useful about that idea. One needs to refuel and reload and maintain combat systems, and a flying platform is a terrible place to do it.
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Carriers? That's just silly.
The latency for a radio link of 250 miles is in the order of a few milliseconds, and 250 miles is enough range to make finding a semi-mobile "home base" somewhere between tough and impossible.
As a pilot, I routinely hear radio calls 250 miles away when flying 10,000 feet; having a radio-relay essentially circling near the home base at 10,000 feet to support drone activity for a 500 mile circumference is a small price to pay. And the cost of having two such relays circling at 10,0
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I'm pretty sure someone thought it was silly to launch airplanes off of boats a hundred or so years ago.
You're missing a crucial bit here. The whole thing is about mobility. Let's say that we need to deploy a whole butt-ton of UAVs somewhere and fast. There really isn't a rapid deployment system for a fleet of UAVs as far as we know.
A carrier plane would allow more than a few possibilities. First, you can resupply and re-arm closer to the actual deployment zone. Broken UAVs can make it back to "base" before
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I could have sworn i have recently read about a UAV that could be dropped out of a cargo plane in flight.
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Speaking of signal loss why don't the enemy jam these things? I know they are not RC planes and won't just drop out of the sky if the radio link is cut, but they still need orders to attack and use GPS for navigation.
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Already been done experimentally back in the 50's. The B-36 could "dock" with fighters [wikipedia.org], but I guess the concept didn't turn out to be a very good idea...
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Not yet anyway.
Hang on there... (Score:2)
UAVs are smaller, more versatile, cheaper to buy and maintain, stealthier, don't get tired(in the traditional sense) and can loiter for greater periods. The Canadians estimate each F35 at $150M. I don't see an advantage for the F35 that UAVs won't meet or exceed in a few more years. The F35 is a plane looking for a mission, like the Comanche attack helicopter was.
You will be hard pressed to find a more strident critic of the F-35 than myself. I think it's an overpriced, under-performing, designed-by-committee farce. That said, it's still a fighter. UAV's, thus far, are not. I keep hearing people say "we should get rid of manned planes because UAV's do the job better and cheaper". Well, in many cases, yes. UAV's are pitch-perfect for things like long range maritime surveillance. But we're still going to need manned aircraft for many, many decades. We're nowhere near
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Drones can currently only operate in theaters where we have complete air superiority. In a theater where the opposing ground forces had effective surface-to-air or air-to-air defenses drones wouldn't be very practical.
There is a push for the development of UCAVs that would be able to carry air-to-air weapons as well as more directly engage surface-to-air targets but there's still limitations like communication lag or communications in general. A stealthy fighter can operate as long as it has fuel and it doe
jets will not help you (Score:2)
if you are bankrupt.
ask Adolf Hitler.
fuel, which you buy (Score:2)
with gold and/or swiss francs, which he was running out of.
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A UCAV with a proper sensor setup may have better situation awareness then a pilot. Nor do they get stressed or tired. Main problem would be IFF and target selection, and liability in case of a civilian or blue on blue incident.
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Or find a way to cram one hell of a multi-core computer into a small package and cram it in there.
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Wish there were more. (Score:3, Funny)
I like the program and hope to see it expanded. I think the US should have these continually flying sortees all over the world. So if a bad guy shows up in Europe, the US can easily take him out with a Tomahawk missile or two.
your number is... (Score:2)
a little low i think.
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No, I wish the countries using these things would buy from the US to keep the profits and have a leaner, more efficient, military. 300 million people don't need $900,000 million spent annually on defense. Imagine how much cheaper it would be to issue everyone a box of bullets and a gun to all upstanding citizens who could pass a standardized test on safety.
Why not just give everyone a sword? Oh, that's right, because the other side might have muskets.
Unless you somehow uninvent all weapons more powerful than a handheld gun with bullets, you're going to lose any future war very quickly.
Re:Wish there were more. (Score:5, Funny)
I like the program and hope to see it expanded. I think the US should have these continually flying sorties all over the world. So if a bad guy shows up in Europe, the US can easily take him out with a Tomahawk missile or two.
I'd prefer if they started by doing this in Manhattan.
I heard there are some non-patriots actually inside the Beltway in D.C.
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Well for example if Greece is going to default on its debt, it will have financial implications to the US as well. So the US could just let them know that they have a Hellfire missile within range of the Greek parliament.
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I guess Greece is not about to default for the lulz but because the economy is really fucked up there. Do you point your gun to a homeless person to oblige him to be a normal prosper citizen? Does it work?
I hope you're joking AC, but I have less faith in society than in your particular bit of nonsense.
As for the world police enthusiast, no, you can create havoc in underdeveloped countries but you can't just start to roam the world skies as "the finger of God" ready to kill anyone anywhere anytime.
You probab
Military robots like drones are ironic... (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net] ... because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
(I know, I'm like a broken record on this -- for those who remember broken scratched records...)
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I have to admit you have a point as to up-front costs, but if the robots can build and maintain other robots, which they can do to a limited extent already, the operating cost is less of an issue (although the robots can more easily get out of control like in James P. Hogan' s "Two Faces of Tomorrow").
Plus, in general, robots are becoming cheaper than human labor for more and more jobs anyway. See Marshall Brain's presentations, like this one:
"Marshall Brain - Automation & Unemployment"
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Remember, the USA helped create bin Laden by funding and training and arming him to fight against the USSR...
Yes, I agree on the need to switch to alternative energy and energy efficiency. The total US military budget is somewhere around US$1 trillion per year (or more with interest). That's a lot of solar panels and wind turbines and home insulation. Amory Lovins (IIRC) suggested decades ago that just the operating cost for two years of the US Persian Gulf deployment force would be enough to imporve US ene
because you cant throw 2 billion people into (Score:2)
the street without any way to feed themselves.
you want to have robots picking the crops and building things . fine.
who decides what the robots pick and what they build?
and how much of it they pick and how much they build?
its going to be the people who own the land and the people who own the raw materials that the robots work with.
everyone else is going to be sent to die.
Solutions to the issues raised by robotics... (Score:2)
And conveniently I just made a 12 minute YouTube video with some answers (or at least good questions) about that, talking about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY [youtube.com]
A PDF file of the presentation is here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf [pdfernhout.net]
More related stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income [wikipedia.org]
http://www.marshallbra [marshallbrain.com]
economics is the modern day alchemy (Score:2)
according to Yves Smith in EConned.
in most sciences, when mathematical models do not match reality, you change the model.
in economics, you hire more lobbyists.
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:-)
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its going to be the people who own the land and the people who own the raw materials that the robots work with.
Er, the idea is that everyone owns the land and the raw materials equally. It's called communism.
then the nomenklatura decide (Score:2)
and they are just about as bad as any other owner.
ask the ukranians.
Re:Military robots like drones are ironic... (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe you would prefer to read this, by John Taylor Gatto, about the socioeconomic system the US drones are defending?
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm [johntaylorgatto.com]
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprise -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
Why not just get the robot drones to do the work instead of using them against opponents of a rapacious short-term-empire-minded social system based around the USA? And maybe get more people to accept that the answer to "Why do they hate us?" is not so much "Because we are free" but rather more of "Because we support their oppressors"?
See also, for something written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC: ..."
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm [lexrex.com]
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
Hits 1 million (Score:2)
Is this good or bad for the future? (Score:3)
Robots dehumanize war, but if war shifts away from human casualties, isn't this a good thing?
Will drones ever be cheaper than training a grunt?
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At what point does the dehumanization of combat come full circle and become robots fighting robots, may the side with the last robot standing win?
I can't tell if this would be Heaven or Hell... because a war with no appreciable human cost becomes the war that never ends.
-- Robert E. Lee
Battle of Fredericksburg (13th December 1862)
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At what point does the dehumanization of combat come full circle and become robots fighting robots, may the side with the last robot standing win?
When African and the Middle East are finally pulled out of their poverty and can afford robots.
Until then it'll be child soldiers, suicide bombers, and improvised explosive devices.
I can't tell if this would be Heaven or Hell... because a war with no appreciable human cost becomes the war that never ends.
It just becomes a war of financial attrition instead of human attrition.
Once your country can no longer afford the warbots, the opposing force either kills your people, or you surrender.
most deaths in war are civilians (Score:2)
not armed combatants.
if you make the soldiers robotic, then you will have an ever increasing percentage of dead who are civilians.
Comment removed (Score:3)
How do friendly-fire rates compare? (Score:2)
The US is still using the proverbial 1% doctrine, where if there's a remote chance the bad guys are there...well fire away! The President even admitted the hit rate for the OBL raid was about 55%. What no one seems to give a shit about is if you adopt that 1% chest-thumping policy, you're wrong 99% and killing innocent civilians. In fact, wasn't it the current regional commander who admitted we're killing far more civilians than tur'rists?
I'll be more impressed with these drones if we see them performing
Imagine the progress if U.S.A. was on war! (Score:2)
There is so much technological progress now that U.S.A. is not on war with anybody, imagine if U.S.A. was on war!!!!
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Re:I wonder what that works out to in murders (Score:4, Interesting)
Why can't we figure out that we aren't wanted in that part of the world and just fuck off? They don't want us, they don't need us. Just fuck off before we pick up more bad karma and blowback.
If you know your neighbor beats his wife and threatens to kill her, and she doesn't say anything, do you stay silent? What if you heard the story from a coworker, or from your brother across the country?
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I think most people would agree that they have a moral obligation to interfere in someone's life in some situations. There's a line somewhere, but it's probably different for everybody. Now what happens when the oppressor runs an entire country, committing what you consider morally reprehensible acts that are not illegal in that country? Who should have the authority to do something? Nobody? Can we really leave it up to the people when opposing viewpoints are quashed violently?
Sam Harris gave this interesting TED talk [ted.com] that argues that science can answer moral questions like these, though he doesn't really address how we (as in the people of the world) should deal with it. I don't think there is an objective answer to these things...that's what makes international politics so difficult. To some people, removing Gaddafi (when he made clear he wouldn't listen to dissent) is worth it.
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To some people, removing Gaddafi (when he made clear he wouldn't listen to dissent) is worth it.
In which case, you say in advance "we are going to remove Gaddafi by military force" not "we will just bomb military installations to protect innocent civilian lives, oopsie we accidentally killed his family by bombing his uncle's house".
Also, you get fucking international agreement for your police/military intervention, including that of Libya's neighbours.
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Our mistake was to think we could make Afghanistan and Iraq into functioning democracies just by fighting the bad guys. Democracy has to come from the people, you can't just set one up and expect it to work. You also can't easily defeat a group like the Taliban, as we have discovered.
The Arab Spring is a good example of how it should work. The people rise up, and maybe we help a bit with technology or military assistance as in Libya, but it is very much their revolution and their victory.
We need a version o
Because they will come here (Score:3)
They want us dead. It's really quite that simple. It is much more effective to reach out to where they are and kill them before they get here.
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I do not see what post you are commenting on; or, if you statement is an independent statement. Because I can not see the context, I am left with a question about your statement.
When you sat "they" do you mean Americans, the people who attacked the WTC, or the people who just happen to live near the people who attacked the WTC?
Similarly, when you say "here" do you mean the US, or the nations that the US is occupying, or engaging in military activities in?
Your context (Score:2)
"They" is the people who attacked WTC twice, some embassies, and other places, and those allied with them.
"Us" is Americans, and in fact Western society in general.
"Here" is the US, or in general Western or non-Muslim countries.
I guess you haven't heard about the jihad going on that aims to make the entire world Muslim, all others must convert, be subservient or die.
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Skin color is uncalled for but in the WWII you didn't have "intelligent" weapons so civilian casualties were unavoidable. If the video of the Apache from wikileaks showed something to the world is that intelligent only applies to the form or the actual weapon, still the people behind the weapon fails, get confused or simply think everything is a video game.
Also I didn't knew that you had to be affiliated to any particular political party to criticize unlawful killing of civilians be it from USA, North Korea
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Why does skin color come into it? The US killed far, far more civilians during the Second World War than in Afghanistan. Get off your leftist high horse.
Touchy.