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The casualties at the other end of the remote-controlled kill

102 points| igonvalue | 3 years ago |nytimes.com

135 comments

order

thematrixturtle|3 years ago

> There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy.

Why is the article focusing on the goon pulling the trigger, as opposed to these actual killed-dead casualties?

mattzito|3 years ago

Did you read the whole article? It actually covers a scenario where the wrong person was killed-dead due to some bad intel.

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.

VictorPath|3 years ago

Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler--who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself--was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

Hannah Arendt

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

kieroda|3 years ago

These stories are not mutually exclusive, The New York Times covers a lot of the victims' stories too (and there was at least one daily podcast on the subject within the past few months).

elvis10ten|3 years ago

A bit off tangent: Why do we still use the phrase “women & children” in 2022 in times of war? That language seems to exclude men that aren’t involved. Why not innocent adults & children?

akhmatova|3 years ago

The thing is they're not "goons". They're good, solid people. Who thought they were actually going to be saving lives, first by going after, you know, the Bad Guys. And then by using (what they were told was) "precision weaponry" to do so.

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.

d0mine|3 years ago

Because it is how propaganda works: dehumanize the enemy, and the opposite for your side: make your hangman as human as possible. It is aimed at people who don't believe there were no war crimes and therefore the spin is necessary to get sympathy for the killers.

A similar spin was with the Abu Ghraib: torturers were humanized and their victims dehumanized.

gatvol|3 years ago

Sounds a lot like war crimes to me.

taylorius|3 years ago

Or indeed, the "customer" who is ordering that these dubious strikes go ahead.

Ygg2|3 years ago

Good question. My guess, the plight of a remote assassin just hit closer to home (no pun).

elzbardico|3 years ago

When America kills women and children, they are not humanized. Institutional racism goes beyond borders.

Aeolun|3 years ago

I think the point of the article is that the current strategy causes needless casualties on both sides?

paganel|3 years ago

Really now? I know Western newspapers like the NYTimes have become very, very enamoured with the military-industrial complex, and I get that, de facto, the US is at war, but why should anyone feel sorry for the people mentioned in the article, people whose mission is to kill some poor peasants herding their goats in the mountains of Yemen or who are attending a wedding somewhere in Afghanistan?

goldenkey|3 years ago

The same reason that the workers at slaughterhouses deserve pity. Even vegans understand they undergo PTSD and injuries to keep a machine going. No person is suited for these jobs.

homonculus1|3 years ago

If those who repent of evil can't be forgiven then none of us have hope.

nonrandomstring|3 years ago

The obvious quote apropos here is Max Frisch "Technology is a way of organising the world so that we don't have to experience it.", which I probably cite a bit too often. But I'll offer a quote from Digital Vegan which I think is not out of place here, and I hope conveys a deeper message;

"" 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.

elliotloglog|3 years ago

> Starting in 2015, the Air Force began embedding what it called human performance teams in some squadrons, staffed with chaplains, psychologists and operational physiologists offering a sympathetic ear, coping strategies and healthy practices to optimize performance.

“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.

throwaway0a5e|3 years ago

The air force really isn't interested in wasting multi thousand (or more) dollar bombs on people that don't deserve them and in a manner that just makes more people hate them and makes their job harder. They also aren't interested in burning out their teams of expensive professionals. Just because you're hearing about them address the latter doesn't mean they stopped caring about the former.

H8crilA|3 years ago

In addition to the morality of such ops, keep in mind that those drones (such as the Reaper) are nearly useless against an opponent that has a proper air defense setup (SAMs). Having high price tags and carrying lethal weapons would make them a priority. Their only practical application is to "bully" an unsophisticated enemy. For example, had Russia tried this kind of a weapon against Kiev or Lviv then the s300 and Buks would have taken them out in a matter of minutes.

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.

_3u10|3 years ago

If you’ve flown in a plane and flown a flight sim of the same plane you’ll understand the difference in visual acuity. A pilot in the seat has huge informational advantage over a remote pilot.

This informational advantage can and does influence decision making, go / no go scenarios.

bayindirh|3 years ago

> For example, had Russia tried this kind of a weapon against Kiev or Lviv then the s300 and Buks would have taken them out in a matter of minutes.

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.

drno123|3 years ago

If we boycott Russian products, and do not hire Russian people, should we start doing the same with US products and american engineers?

b3nji|3 years ago

It seems this is a logical path that has now been set, doesn't it? I've been deeply ashamed of my own countries invasions, and wars along side the U.S. People didn't care about that though.

Should we cancel ourselves, as we have done to Russia?

pastacacioepepe|3 years ago

Seeing as the US are war criminals that refuse to be judged and committed unspeakable and uncountable atrocities over the past few decades...YES

Ekaros|3 years ago

We absolutely should, until they clear their house from top to bottom. Have trials run against anyone participating in these atrocities with jury being peers of the victims(that is those murdered). Treat anyone who has anyway participated or given money to the political parties or anyone who supported these actions as concentration camp guards from National Socialist Germany.

watwut|3 years ago

I suggest sending more American guns to Ukraine as a compromise.

FpUser|3 years ago

>"And sometimes what the customer wanted did not seem right. There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy"

All nice and dandy. And the world looks the other way.

dr_dshiv|3 years ago

If my kids play a lot of realistic drone strike games, does it increase the likelihood of their being recruited as child soldiers for the Great Drone War? Asking as a concerned parent.

Trouble_007|3 years ago

More likely their online 'Killz n Skillz' are being sucked up to train AI.

Fargoan|3 years ago

I have no sympathy for the cowards who murder with drones. They know that what they're doing is wrong and nobody is forcing them to murder.

revscat|3 years ago

I do not know how to put it into words, but the simplistic morality expressed here makes me uncomfortable. While I also find remote controlled war to be abhorrent, nevertheless this attitude seems… overly simplistic?

bobsmooth|3 years ago

What about artillery operators? Why are drones special?

spoonjim|3 years ago

Remember that half the population has an IQ under 100 and half of those live in places where the American Soldier is still venerated as a paragon of virtue and sacrifice. They’re not victims like the Yemeni kids they’re killing, but they are being manipulated into the situations they choose for themselves.

Ekaros|3 years ago

And I also have no sympathy for those who vote for or fund the people who allow or make these actions continue. They have as much blood on their hand and deserve the worst. Pure evil like that should not be allowed to exist free in this world.