queuesorcs's comments

I want to preface this with the fact that a few specific incidents left me disillusioned with the military and that I don’t think people really understand just how horrible war is. That being said I wouldn’t change the decisions I made. I truly believe the work that I did was a net positive and that my work contributed to saving the lives of both military members and civilians. Unfortunately not everything goes perfectly and I still struggle with those things mentally to this day. The things that do still haunt me aren’t the extremely hard to avoid tragedies, they were the events caused by poor leadership and people being placed in positions they didn’t deserve to be in. I think one thing most people don’t consider is that at the end of the day the military and government overall work and function very similarly to the businesses they work or have worked at. The big difference is that the incompetent manager doesn’t mess up part of a presentation, order, or whatever else you may be working on. It leads to innocent lives being lost to an avoidable situation and ends up being referred to as a tragedy.

One of the other major things that made me want to offer any information I can is the lack of knowledge on the topic I’ve seen posted on here and places like Reddit. I just would never attempt to have an actual discussion on Reddit though. When you have a topic so shrouded in secrecy and the only articles that people see about them are articles like these, it’s not too surprising though. There’s just so many variables to account for from the administration in office during the strike, to the human managers that happened to be on the clock at the time.

To be clear and so I’m not misleading, I was neither a pilot or a sensor operator so I cannot guarantee you that there isn’t more to it than what I know. As far as I understood the drone pilot works in conjunction with a sensor operator. Because the drone pilot is an officer he is the one to fire the missile but the sensor operator controls the laser to direct the missile. I would strongly believe that there are other emergency stops available due to my experiences but at the bare minimum, the sensor operator could always direct the missile away and the sensor operator themselves can’t do anything without the pilot actually launching the missile.

Editing to add in that hellfire missiles cannot be redirected once launched.

As much as I love to check hackernews, I’m not normally able to chime in with relevant information on most topics. I feel like this may be one where I can actually do that though as I’m former military and my job directly related to drones on a daily basis. Depending on what’s asked, I may not be able to answer but I’d love to help by sharing any knowledge or information on the subject that I can as I’ve gained so much from others sharing on different topics on here. Ask away and I’ll check back in 15-20 minutes.

Editing to add on that I’ll continue to check back on this for at least the rest of the day in case there’s anything else I can potentially shed more of a light on.