Why is the article focusing on the goon pulling the trigger, as opposed to these actual killed-dead casualties?
In fact, the whole point of the article is that there's a population of people who got lied to and manipulated in order to kill people whose culpability was questionable at best. This is a completely valid journalistic subject, separate from the people who were killed.
In other words, the painted picture is much broader and deeper than the man itself seemingly put into the focus. In reality, he's just used as an anchor point to tie the big picture, and might be also used as a so-called decoy (or bait) in a narrowly starting, but deeply expanding story. This doesn't make his tragedy lighter, however.
To be honest, I feel sad and disturbed for everyone involved in this.
Who isn't manipulated in situations like this?
Remember Iraqi soldiers killing babies? And Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? The first to get manipulated are always the general public.
After that it just matters who does the killing... if it's "our guys", then every bombed wedding and reuters reporter is foreing militant or a terrorist, and if it's "them", then it's a poor civilian. If you bomb a hospital, a civilian train, bus, building, bridge or whatever... again, if it's "our guys" it was "bad intel" or "a mistake", but if it's "them", it's "war crimes for intentionall killing civilians".
Indiscriminately bombarding cities feels somehow worse than this targeted killing, and somehow better, because it’s nothing personal.
I'm pretty sure that's basically standard operating procedure in the military though?
Harder to get soldiers to kill people if they think of them as people and not as the enemy.
Hannah Arendt
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Himmler speaks of the challenge of remaining a decent person despite witnessing and committing atrocities (the section around “Dies durchgehalten zu haben, und dabei – abgesehen von menschlichen Ausnahmeschwächen – anständig geblieben zu sein”), showing the kind of reversal at work that Arendt describes.
Himmler was horrified and mentally affected after mass shooting he seen. So, he started to figure out how to kill Jews differently, out of worry for mental health of German soldiers.
So, the above is at best him figuring out how to kill more effectively. Definitely not some kind of guilt or regret.
If a drone strike kills five men, who knows whether they were enemy combatants? Your example is murky and vague, through no fault of the dead men. If it kills three kids under the age of 10 and two mothers, it's more obvious the casualties weren't combatants. If you're a journalist and you're looking for examples of clearly horrific drone strikes, you point to the one that killed people who were most obviously non-combatants.
I think you know this and you're asking a rhetorical question about the value of human life, but it's a question with a real answer. "Innocent adults" is a phrase less self-evident than "innocent women and children" because of the way militaries and insurgent groups recruit.
> … All that's being pointed out here is that it can't both be the case that there are no relevant differences between men and women and also that a phrase like "women and children" is useful. You have to pick one.
I can’t imagine the thought process that says “humans have had a visceral reaction to the killing of women and children specifically in war, across millennia and across cultures, but surely such thinking is obsolete in our generation.”
Why is the article focusing on [an uncomfortable but lesser-known side aspect of war], as opposed to [the more obvious bad aspects of war we already know about]?
Because war is what you call "complicated". It is this complexity that the article was attempting to address.
A similar spin was with the Abu Ghraib: torturers were humanized and their victims dehumanized.
Conversely, what is described in this article is the worst of both worlds. After spending days looking at their lives you are most definitely killing a human/father/grandfather.
It's "hilarious" when anyone in the US says about anyone else they are war criminals, since they don't recognise ICC. (Also, hello India and China)
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
Even if they volunteered totally aware of what they would be doing and what would happen, it's one thing to Know and another thing to Have Experienced.
Referring to working a job as "volunteering" is incredibly naive.
"" An immanent problem with enabling technologies, is that they enable all connected parties and carry their values. Stare into the abyss, and the abyss stares back at you. When picking up a technological tool you had better know what it is for. What is connected to the other side of it? And you should do so with the intent of mastering it, and using it kindly. As Andre Loesekrug-Pietri, a founder of European JEDI ('The European DARPA') project put it, unless the people of Liberal democracies take control of technology "other people or other political systems will impose their values on us". ""
The rationale for remote weapons is risk reduction. Despite the apparent diffusion of responsibility and decoupling of action and consequences, the operator remains connected to the target. Blurry pixels turning red on a screen are still lives being extinguished. Unless you have a generally low IQ and very poor emotional intelligence that fact is still inescapably bound to your actions and will haunt you as if you had seen the whites of their eyes and body parts. Indeed the trauma may be worse, because you now have to fill in the gaps with your imagination, somewhere between dispassionate official EKIA reports and gruesome media accounts. You'll never know, and so you'll never get closure. Each technological action has an equal and opposite reaction.
“It’s a holistic team approach: mind, body and spirit,” said Capt. James Taylor, a chaplain at Creech. “I try to address the soul fatigue, the existential questions many people have to wrestle with in this work.”
Just amazing to read this, I mean after hearing all about the innocent lives taken, and then to be presented with their attempts to optimize the teams involved with it.
If only that were true, they wouldn't wage all of the senseless wars that the US has fought since WW2.
Take your low effort trope and shove it somewhere unpleasant.
Of course the war machine is gonna war. That's what they do. You don't see Newport making their cigs kill their customers faster unless there's something in it for them. The air force is the same way. They might be in the death business but they're not gonna go around wasting bombs on people who are no threat to anyone unless they think that's how they're gonna accomplish their goal, which you can pretty much guarantee they don't after 'nam.
Are you really so blinded by ideology that you can't see that no military wants to spend resources in a manner that does not help them achieve their goal? Spending the fewest resources to get the most done while forcing your enemy to waste his is one of the most basic concepts in military strategy.
Also, thinking that a remote pilot has different level of empathy vs a pilot that's inside the aircraft is a little deranged from the reality of military operations. A weapon is a weapon, it is meant to eliminate/kill targets.
This informational advantage can and does influence decision making, go / no go scenarios.
However, when supplanted by electronic warfare and decent intel, we've seen how Azerbaijan's TB2s destroyed a lot of Armenian SAM sites, without blinking. Even they took out a S300 site by marking it with a TB2 and destroying it with missiles.
So, it's not as clear cut as it seems.
I just meant to say that something like "we fly this drone, alone, here, make a quick kill and come back" only works against very under-armed military groups. Ukraine, as an example, is well above that level of defense.
Also, I am eagerly awaiting reliable information on how did it happen that TB2s were such a force against Russian tanks. I suspect extreme levels of Russian bardak while covering their own forces with air defense layers.
Should we cancel ourselves, as we have done to Russia?
I think most American's won't really care about what our government is doing to others thousands of miles away so long as we can buy our iPhones, watch our movies, and browse our TikTok.
I think the only practical thing that can be done is to encourage competition from America's equally-sized rivals (pretty much just China at the moment). That being said, these other countries are often not saints themselves (looking at you China), but competition is really the only thing that can check the abuse from any single party. While there are smaller "better" countries they are still within America's sphere of influence and even if you move there and avoid contributing to US taxes, you still end up contributing to that ecosystem that essentially powers the American system (most US allies participated in the war in the middle east).
Depends on who you are, isn't it?
Ask the Chinese. I am sure they love their government (I believe surveys have shown that there is high level of approval)
Ask the Afghans. The Chinese aren't bombing weddings and schools.
Ask the Yemenis. The Chinese aren't funding the Saudis which are causing a man-made famine in their nation.
Ask the Americans. Ooooh. China is terrible. I mean, there's a bias, no? They're the ones at risk of losing their spot at the head of the table. Makes sense they wouldn't like them.
That is a bleak outlook. It would mean that any kind of revolution, or internal change, is effectively impossible, and that the only way to limit the powers of nation-states and corporations is through adversarial confrontation with similarly sized competitors, which can come at huge cost (wars, sanctions, etc).
Internal changes are still possible, but we need to fight for it. While that may come at a huge cost, I believe that it would end up less costly than endless confrontation with similar powers.
All nice and dandy. And the world looks the other way.
Anyone can be made to commit atrocities in an environment shaped the right way. If I grew up like these people, I'm sure I would pull the trigger in exactly the same situations.
But it still would take my cooperation. I can only pull the trigger if I'm somehow made to want it, at some level. Or at least if I'm made to think I have no choice.
By emphasising our individual ethical responsibilities -- the simple fact that it takes some amount of cooperation for a person to do anything at all, we are creating a small obstacle in the way of creating a dangerous environment that can turn me into an assassin.
I can easily imagine that we achieve world peace within 50 years through two very simple economic reforms but I can't imagine that it will actually happen.
That’s not a world that I, as a Westerner, would want to live in.
The 'detached black and white' view of the world us how we got here in the first place.
Clinging to moral absolutes and trying to frame real life in that rigid framework is a lazy/irresponsible way to be efficient. If you don't have to worry about the details (truth), decisions seem easier.
I'd rather clean toilets my whole life than build a career on the death of innocents.
It's more than half.
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/uw-grads-story-rev...
Looks like it was more the drug policy of the U.S. Air Force that lead this man to fall apart more than the droning of people far away.
