even if our president doesn't
that's bullshit.
Former Air Force airmen...
Are we sure they're not just bitter at being done out of a job by robots?
I'd be fine with the drone program if they changed its name to "Roboforce."
Anyhow, tactical bombing is way better for killing inmocents than the US' previous go-to strategy of pointless, massive strategic bombing. Don't know that that's saying much, but drones are way better than the original purpose of the Air Force, which was to destroy cities/the world in a constant, worse replay of a bomb-civilians strategy that mostly didn't work in WWII.
On the plus side, Germany is much, much nicer.
To be clear, I don't think we can prove strategic bombing makes people nicer. But epistemology is hard.
Are we sure they're not just bitter at being done out of a job by robots?
They are still pilot by humans, just remotely. I think the long-term solution is to take humans out of the equation entirely, and have the drones piloted by AI.
That sounds like a spectacular idea, certainly.
Given that the drones are going after people who dress as civilians and hide among the civilian population, one (unintended) civilian death for every four to eight successful enemy kills is pretty good going. The opposition is running at about 10 (deliberate) civilian deaths for every one successful enemy kill. I think that means the equations are running in our favour - presumably, after all, the whole 'creating more terrorists' thing works the other way around as well; every time the Taliban kill some harmless lorry driver or schoolkid in the FATA, they'll presumably make implacable enemies of his entire family. (Odd they're still doing it, really.)
The four former drone operators who talked to the Guardian described the various ways in which they and their peers would try to cope during shifts of up to 12 hours. Airmen would show up to the control station drunk; others would sleep on the job, read comic books or play video games on their secure computers.
Ah, the USAF. "Proving the continuing need for US Navy aviators since 1948".
I think the long-term solution is to take humans out of the equation entirely, and have the drones piloted by AI.
You're not thinking big enough. Instead of drones controlled by humans, we should have humans controlled by drones!
"I think the long-term solution is to take humans out of the equation entirely, and have the drones piloted by AI."
Indeed. Just be careful about the programming constraints.
http://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf
I think the long-term solution is to take humans out of the equation entirely, and have the drones piloted by AI.
Why stop there?
I knew a guy in grad school who was in engineering who seemed to genuinely believe that wars could be fought between robot proxies with no humans dying, and believed he was helping work towards that future. The idea, I guess, was the losing side would accept the outcome before anyone died, and both sides would agree to target only robots. He seemed kind of naive about wars.
13: Wasn't that the basis for an episode of Star Trek (TOS).
Or maybe it was an episode of Doctor Who...
As long as the robots don't turn on us, everything will be fine.
15 Munroe was discussing this only yesterday.
9. ...one (unintended) civilian death for every four to eight successful enemy kills is pretty good going.
A claim that's slightly undercut by, well....
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Counting military age males hanging out with senior terrorists as combatants seems to me more logical than assuming that senior terrorists wander around with no bodyguards or other involved associates. Either you're going to over count or under count, but the error seems to me much more likely to be small if you assume these assholes have bodyguards and hang out with other terrorists.
Although 'hanging out with' is a bit different from 'standing near at one moment in time', if you see what I mean.
It's the most constitutional of all the fractions.
Or, if not near at least "in the general vicinity of". Bombing an area and then designating, what, around a quarter of the population as combatants independent of any reason to think they're involved is a pretty great way to inflate your numbers, especially if you're aren't especially rigorous when you're picking targets. And if you are rigorous when you're picking targets you're pretty much by definition not determining who counts as a combatant this way.
However you count the civilian casualty rate, it's substantially lower from drones than any other known method (bombing from the air, missiles, shelling) of sending explosives to kill people you're at war with who are hiding among civilian populations. Whether that is a good idea -- that is, whether it is a good idea for the United States to send explosives to kill leaders of the Taliban who are deliberately blending in with civilians -- is another question, and one that I've changed my mind on a bunch of times based on the little I know. But if you've decided that you need to do so, and also want to minimize civilian casualties, drones are the way to go.
However you count the civilian casualty rate, it's substantially lower from drones than any other known method (bombing from the air, missiles, shelling) of sending explosives to kill people you're at war with who are hiding among civilian populations. Whether that is a good idea -- that is, whether it is a good idea for the United States to send explosives to kill leaders of the Taliban who are deliberately blending in with civilians -- is another question, and one that I've changed my mind on a bunch of times based on the little I know. But if you've decided that you need to do so, and also want to minimize civilian casualties, drones are the way to go.
Our bombs bestow upon their targets the property of combatants, and if they weren't enemies before...
Carpet commenting is rarely effective.
I think that means the equations are running in our favour
How many divisions have they got?
Bombing an area and then designating, what, around a quarter of the population as combatants independent of any reason to think they're involved is a pretty great way to inflate your numbers, especially if you're aren't especially rigorous when you're picking targets.
"Bombing an area" is pretty much what they aren't doing. They are bombing a target with one bomb (or missile), not levelling a grid square Arc-Lite style.
And it is fairly easy to show that, even if all the MAMs killed en passant are actually civilians, the valid target:civilian ratio is still pretty good. The official figures say that the count is X valid kills and Y civilian kills where X=4Y. Now, you're arguing that X is actually made up of x valid kills and k kills of innocent military-age males, and Y is just all the women and children. The civilian population is less than 50% military-age males, so k must be less than Y. So x must be at least 0.8X and the ratio of valid kills to civilian deaths is still, what, 3.2 to 1.
The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.
"Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association," the source said. When "a drone strike kills more than one person, there is no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate. ... So it's a phenomenal gamble."
from: https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/
And that's without even discussing the fact that many drone strikes are "signature" strikes where the target is someone we don't even know the name of or have any solid intel on.
The exclusive focus on bombs for getting rid of people we don't like betrays a lack of creativity. Is no one up for a good poisoning anymore?
In a group that's 80% adult males, why would you assume that the non-combatant portion has a male/female ratio that matches the ratio in the general population?
Part of the point, and in fact the sentence right after what you quoted, is that if their bombing (and yes it still counts if it's just one or two) is killing at least one woman, child, or very elderly man for every four men (of potential combatant status) then it's not actually very well targeted at all. And it's extremely hard to take seriously the idea that the people who are ok with that level of discrimination are reliably picking out cases where they're sure that the people they're targeting are actually combatants at all. Once you've declared that every man between the age of, I dunno, sixteen and sixty is a combatant and you're setting up a program to target combatants I think you've lost credibility when it comes to claiming that you're doing your best to only target combatants and that any non-combatants you're hitting are unfortunate accidents.
if their bombing (and yes it still counts if it's just one or two) is killing at least one woman, child, or very elderly man for every four men (of potential combatant status) then it's not actually very well targeted at all.
OK, fair enough: based on your understanding of the operating environment, typical enemy tactics and procedures, and the social structure of the population in question, what sort of ratio would you expect an adequately well-targeted campaign to produce? One for ten? One for twenty? One for a hundred? Show your working. Because this is really the core of your argument: you're asserting that you know what the numbers should look like if the USAF was actually trying hard to avoid civilian casualties, and this isn't it. I'd like this unpacked a bit.
I would argue that the whole project of dropping bombs on people is flawed.
In a group that's 80% adult males, why would you assume that the non-combatant portion has a male/female ratio that matches the ratio in the general population?
It's the most parsimonious assumption, isn't it?
The UN (which uses its own numbers, not those of the US military) estimates that about 88 Afghan civilians between 2007 and mid-2015 were killed as the result of drone strikes. Coalition or Afghan-government caused civilian casualties by other means in this period are over 4,000. Taliban-caused civilian casualties in the same period are over 16,000. While I'm sure those numbers aren't perfect, they at a minimum give a sense of scale -- among ways of going to war and trying to kill enemies, drones have probably the best record of avoiding civilian casualties. That doesn't mean no deaths of innocent people from drones, and it doesn't answer the question of whether its worth bombing at all. But it does help explain why drones have been a tool of choice for people who think that the bombing is necessary.
34 is pretty much the easiest and most obvious response to 33. If you're launching a well-targeted campaign of attacks on specific enemy figures in civilian areas then you aren't launching a campaign involving dropping/firing high explosives from great altitudes, as cool and air forcey as that is. And if you are using bombs/rockets/whatever launched into civilian areas from far away then you aren't running one of those campaigns. You're doing something else entirely.
37 -- Other than poisoning or other spy-style assasinations, which have obvious other problems, ground attacks don't have lower civilian casualty ratios (when, as here, combatants are mixed in with civilians) than drone attacks. Quite the opposite. So, drones are about as targeted as you're going to get in war. That may or may not be targeted enough. It may or may not mean the use of drones is a good idea (today, I lean towards thinking it isn't, but my mind has changed a lot on this). But let's not pretend that there's some kind of nicer non-drone warfare that would kill the same number of Taliban combatants but result in fewer civilian deaths. There isn't.
I mean come on, the Bulgarians killed a guy with poisoned umbrella. We Americans need to up our game.
I'll add my support to 34 as well. I think that the people we are killing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and probably other places I am forgetting about aren't threats to us. Generally they won't ever be threats to us, but I'm willing to compromise. Keep identifying the people who you want to drone to death, and instead of blowing them up with everyone around them, we just deny them visas. How about that?
37: but you're just asserting what you want to prove there. I mean, if you start from an axiom that air strikes can never be well targeted, then you can easily prove that any particular air strike wasn't well targeted. But you've got to try a bit harder to make the argument actually convincing.
Drones also apparently have a huge impact on the communities they operate around - loud continual buzzing noise as they hover and wait for days on end. Imagine having to listen to something that could make you collateral damage 24 hours a day.
I'm willing to believe that air support in service of the ground troops of our allies can be tactically effective, but is there any evidence that sniping at targets of opportunity, especially signature strikes, has any real effect?
There's a strategic cost to daily sorties that attempt to disrupt and chip away at enemy operations, right? You let them know exactly what your capabilities are and how deeply your intelligence can penetrate, and you give them time and incentive to adapt and train countermeasures.
43, 46 -- I think that's the right question. The real question, to my mind, is does the US drone-focused strategy work or is it either pointless or counterproductive. If the latter, it's pretty evil, even if (relatively speaking) civilian casualties are low. I honestly don't know the answer. In answering that question we should keep in mind that people have been overrating the importance and strategic capability of bombing for 100 years now, which suggests a no-bombing default. On the other hand, the current state of control over the Taliban/Al-Quaeda in Aghanistan/Pakistan seems to be pretty good at the moment, and on the historical metric "how well has your war in Afghanistan gone?" the current US war seems to have done OK. Without actually knowing a lot more it's hard to say if things like signature strikes have made a real effective difference or not.
The official figures say
Because of course, we should always trust the official figures -- look how great that worked out for us in Vietnam, after all.
ground attacks don't have lower civilian casualty ratios
Maybe not, but de-escalation does. The alternative to drone strikes in Yemen isn't carpet bombing or ground attacks. Its staying the fuck out of Yemen.
41: Not really. Once the military grants that 1 out of the 5 people who die aren't combatants and their working definition of "combatant" is one of the most absurdly broad definitions possible,* then it's pretty clear what "well targeted" means in this situation. If you want to start with the assumption that air strikes can be well targeted then we're definitely not doing that. If you want to claim, and I think this is closer to what you said, that what we're doing is well targeted for air strikes then you're granting the claim that air strikes can't be well targeted in any serious way.
*"We're only hitting combatants by which we mean people who could physically use an assault rifle and we don't know for absolute certain aren't combatants!"
49 -- sure. The question is does that make strategic sense or not -- that is, have the attacks in Yemen actually (substantially) benefited world or domestic security, sufficiently to justify their (low, but not nonexistent) civilian casualties. Personally, I honestly don't know. This seems like an appropriately wobbly and inconclusive survey of the situation.
, and on the historical metric "how well has your war in Afghanistan gone?" the current US war seems to have done OK.
Surely this is the soft bigotry of low expectations. Wars in Afghanistan never go well.
50: "If you want to start with the assumption that air strikes can be well targeted then we're definitely not doing that."
Starting a discussion from the premise that the other side can't possibly be right and expecting them to accept that is an interesting strategy....
What kind of ratio would you accept as "well targeted"? I mean, for any tactic? If we weren't using drones but, say, night raids. (The most famous of these, of course, managed to kill four bystanders as well as the target, and injure two others, so that's a data point for you.)
Imagine having to listen to something that could make you collateral damage 24 hours a day.
Exactly the kind of thing that could make one want to take up arms against the foreign power buzzing you with drones.
Great. Wanting to take up arms against the United States is a good reason to be bombed by the United States. Everything works out in the end.
Starting a discussion by pretending that someone who pointed out one of two options was simply asserting one of them isn't much better might be a decent strategy if the actual quote wasn't literally two posts up from where you quoted it. As it stands though I don't think it's one you can get away with.
I'd say that, as per your example, killing five people and injuring two more is not an especially well targeted operation when they were trying to only kill one of those five people and the rest were bystanders they were trying to avoid killing. If that's doing ok then you're taking the second option I suggested above (you know, the one you didn't bother quoting), which is what I said I thought you were probably saying. If that's the best targeting available and that operation was counted as a targeting success, then you're lowering standards to the point where they're meaningless.
And, again you're ignoring the obvious point that the 'combatants' that are being targeted aren't even known combatants in the first place, just people we figure could be combatants.
+1 to 34. I love hearing people in rich, war-loving countries talking about acceptable civilian casualty ratios which they would never accept in a million years if they or their loved ones were the ones potentially in those ratios.
57 -- I mean, sure, I would most definitely not accept a civilian-murdering drone strike from another country, an invasion from another country, or even some other country coming onto the soil of this country to assassinate people. But that doesn't really seem like the right question. Killing people is always bad, killing people on foreign soil in their own country is also always bad.
The whole thing only makes sense if you think that those bad things are necessary to prevent worse things. That is, if you think that the Taliban/people we are killing are an actual for real honest-to-goodness threat to the US or world peace sufficient to justify doing bad things. If the threat is sufficient, then the strikes suck but may be a net good. I think the same reasoning would also hold true in the US (e.g., if we were, for real, in a civil war with an actual insurgency in the US which was enough of a threat to go to war with, and which itself was killing civilians, I would accept some US civilian casualties as a price for getting rid of that insurgency).
On the other hand, if the Taliban/terrorists/people we're killing are not a real threat against the US or the rest of the world -- or not one sufficient to incur loss of innocent life, even if with drones it seems that the loss of innocent life is (relatively) smaller than with other forms of warfare -- then the drone strikes are completely monstrous.
It seems like the reality of the threat and the efficacy of the response are the two key issues. And those are super hard issues to gauge. Personally, despite being a semi-informed reader of the news, I just don't know enough to know how real the threat from the people we're killing with drones is. Nor do I know how efficacious the drone warfare is at fighting against that threat. So I just don't feel ready to either blanket condemn or blanket approve, and I'm not very clear on how other people are ready to do so.
Completely sincere question - How does hesitation in this scenario not equal support?
It seems like core AQ is pretty seriously degraded, and AQAP has taken some very serious losses this year. There may be an infinite supply of angry people, but the supply of angry yet patient and capable enough to do harm beyond their immediate vicinity is a very different thing.
Of all the factions warring in Yemen, only AQAP is actually motivated enough to try strikes against western targets in the west. One would think that our quasi-alliance with AQAP would change the calculus generally, but apparently we're still droning their leadership, even while supporting our mutual allies.
RT- I don't understand why it is a question. These people don't have nukes, bomber wings, tank divisions, or fleets, where do you imagine this nebulous threat comes from?
Just on the general principle of the thing, we should be trying to kill AQ. It's way too soon to quit that.
61 Apparently, AQAP directed a couple of guys to go to a magazine in Paris and shoot people there. There's no mechanism for affecting an arrest of the people who planned and directed the action. Assuming (as ptb apparently do) that we're in a congressionally authorized state of war with AQAP, what do you do? Killing the control group who comes up with the strategy and authorizes particular operations isn't a crazy answer.
I don't like drones either, but maybe I dislike them less than any of the available alternatives.
I guess part of that is that I don't think there's a negotiated settlement with AQ.
61 -- a well-organized terrorist threat can kill hundreds or thousands of Americans, or more, in individual attacks, lead to worse political consequences here and abroad, and generally lead to horrible instability in lots of places around the world. A well-organized insurgency can lead to the installation of governments that are serious threats to world peace. So the potential for threat is quite real and quite worthy of a response. That doesn't mean any actual threat is in fact real or any actual response is or is not appropriate, but I don't think you can settle the issue just by saying that the Taliban couldn't conduct a full-scale military invasion of the United States.
I think a negotiated settlement with the Taliban might be possible. And might even be a good idea: let them fight it out with the local IS chapter.
I wonder if non-drone airmen have the same kind of personal reaction to bombing campaigns, or if it's the weirdness of being at war by engaging in what feels like a video game, in relative safety, that makes it particularly hard to compartmentalize.
Won't somebody think of the children? Because they're really good at video games.
I love hearing people in rich, war-loving countries talking about acceptable civilian casualty ratios which they would never accept in a million years if they or their loved ones were the ones potentially in those ratios.
Americans have conclusively demonstrated their willingness to be shot up for no good reason. So far, there is no ratio that we wont accept if it comes from a shooting.
How many Tea Party casualties would you accept in a targeted raid on a known Trump event?
Given recent news, I'm not sure I'm kidding.
Is the Tea Party still a thing? I thought it just took over the Republican Party and used that name.
65- When white christian men are encouraged to kill abortion providers and then do so, everyone here pretty much just shrug their shoulders and says its the price of freedom, nothing to be done. In the much more rare case of terrorism committed by swarthy Muslims maybe we should just suck it up and accept that there is a price for ruling the world.
"Rare" sort of elides a very big difference in the magnitude.
72: The difference, of course, is that anti-choice terrorists have a solid political base of 20-35% of the population, whereas Islamic terrorists have effectively zero local support.
IOW, if you want the US to stop bombing faraway places in response to terror fomented abroad, your solution is to increase political support for the terror.
There is 10 times as much terrorism now as there was in 2002. You guys seem to want to try for more. Would you be satisfied with 100 times as much terrorism or are you looking for 1,000. Maybe you want a million. I dunno but I can tell we are headed that way.
Roger, who the fuck are you talking to? Who is "everyone here" and "you guys".
74: We killed you. One of my few regrets about ending the death penalty is that case.
There was plenty of terrorism back before 2002, actually, both domestic and foreign. We just weren't labeling certain factions/armies/etc. in one specific region "terrorists" and anything at all that they did "terrorism". Also the US was supporting an awful lot of them so there wasn't much political benefit to be had from shrieking hysterically about it 24/7 on Fox News. The current freaking out about terrorism is more a matter of political convenience than something that reflects a massive change in the world.
Feel like this is getting deeply dumb. There's an obvious difference between, on the one hand, organized foreign political insurgencies that have as a goal of (a) killing mass numbers of US Civilians and (b) taking over entire countries by force to change the world order, and (b) abortion-provider killers (who, by the way, aren't "shrugged off" in this country -- they are criminally prosecuted for murder). Both I think are legitimately called "terrorist." But the difference in consequence to world peace and the level of threat are way different. As is whether the most appropriate level of response is (sometimes) military or exclusively through criminal law.
Goddamn numbering. But you can still figure that out.
Everyone here is the people of the US. You guys refers to the people taking the Neocon make the rubble bounce position on this blog. That seems to include RT and ajay. Possibly others who will know better if the shoe fits.
I still have stupid toe blisters keeping my shoes from fitting.
Ok, go fuck yourself, you moronic piece of shit. That's not a position I hold but I'd be happy for your virtual persona to be turned into virtual rubble, assshole.
Holy fuck you're some kind of libertarian? Should have fucking known. Eat shit and die, moron.
Among my people, we have an expression: "Led like a libertarian to the Tigre."
As long as we are talking about the effectiveness of flying killer robots, consider the effect of the drone campaign on the people of Pakistan, many of whom have little sympathy for the Taliban et al. However, how would you feel if Russia mounted a large-scale, imperfectly targeted assassination campaign against the tea party? What effect would that have on the American public?
(I consider myself banned and marked for drone strikes)
Yes, 89 is a totally real concern and could completely make the drone strikes counterproductive. Has that actually happened such that they are counterproductive (on net)? Again, I honestly don't know, one way or the other.
If these programs work why can't I think of a single country where we've stopped the program after it succeeding. Is the the plan to drop bombs on the Taliban forever, do you think this will increase or decrease the risk of terrorism in the United States?
89: Following your banworthy analogy to the conclusion, I should be investing in merchandise that says "Wolverines!!" on it in Urdu.
91: Thing is* that, so far, drones have never been used in a traditional, inter-state war (at least not one involving us). Who knows if they'd be decisive in one, but it's not really relevant IRL where we're targeting non-state actors to say that we keep using them in states without achieving victory.
If I were targeting rightwing assholes in Texas with drone strikes, or even poison-tipped umbrellas, there wouldn't be some clear instrument of surrender by which I would declare, "Texas has been cleared of rightwing assholes, and umbrella strikes will end, as the rights of women and POC and liberals are now safe." The only state actor** we've attacked since 2003 is Assad, and AFAIK drones aren't big part of the story there: we're just bombing the shit out of everything, old school.
*and, like RT, I'm pretty ambivalent on the whole thing. I understand that my hesitation to come to a definitive conclusion is pretty much the only reason Bam continues to use drones.
**maybe Gaddafi's an exception?
79- When I said there was 10 times as much terrorism, I meant it. http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/globe/index.html
More to 91:
If you could pin a non-neocon member of the shadow government down, and ask when we stop drone-bombing Afghanistan (or wherever), I suspect the answer would be something to the effect of, "once there's a stable, democratically-legitimate local government that can ensure that international terrorists can't gain a foothold within their territory." There's absolutely an underpants gnome aspect to this, but that's the endpoint. You can't drone a country clean of terrorists, even if it's not purely a hydra-like situation, because disorder foments radicalization, and drones--nor even their absence--can fix disorder.
I'm not sure any of this shit is fixable, drones or no. The only reason I've ended up on Team Drones-Aren't-The-Worst is that I'm not sure what the drone-free solution is. Non-drone force is probably just as bad. So if it's force-free, are we back to where we were when GWB's administration decided that Al Qaeda didn't matter because it wasn't a state actor? I mean, if Gore takes office after the election he won, I think that the US proceeds with a two-pronged strategy, one prong of which is, as Kerry said, police work, and the other prong of which is occasionally bombing targets. In 1998, that's OBL with cruise missiles, and in 200x, it's somebody else with drones.
I guess I'm not convinced that the problem is that we're using drones. I think the trouble is that Bush/Cheney kicked a fucking hornets nest, and we find ourselves without any options better than a flamethrower, and that's a shitty option. The old plan, which involved the occasional rolled up newspaper, can't work once the hive is riled up*.
*even though most of the hive is harmless drones or whatever. Let's not overanalyze this metaphor not analogy.
94: Not disputing the increase in terror, but man someone needs to redo that visualization. The ranking on the left is by number of attacks, so bizarrely the United States doesn't appear on the top ten in 2001, even though 9/11 has as many fatalities as the top four nations combined. And I can't even tell what the things on that globe represent. It's like some product of number of attacks and number of fatalities: again in 2001, there's a spike coming out of Northern Ireland that's bigger than that of New York. That would lead me to believe it's a function of number of attacks, but then New York and Washington have non-trivial spikes, so some measure of destruction per event must be taken into account.
They also have a graph by year with deaths which is what I was going by.
93, Gaddafi totally counts, and we still have active drone programs in both Syria and Libya. In both Syria and Libya we helped create zones of lawlessness, which we are now "managing" with intermittent assassination campaigns. Isn't our desire to maintain the ability of foreign government to drop dynamite on anyone they want exactly the kind of demand that is going to make it very difficult for any government capable of bringing an end to civil wars to emerge? If it's these zones of lawlessness largely created by the West, that have allowed groups targeting the United States to take power, isn't the West helping to maintain these zones part of the problem?
93, Gaddafi totally counts, and we still have active drone programs in both Syria and Libya. In both Syria and Libya we helped create zones of lawlessness, which we are now "managing" with intermittent assassination campaigns. Isn't our desire to maintain the ability of foreign government to drop dynamite on anyone they want exactly the kind of demand that is going to make it very difficult for any government capable of bringing an end to civil wars to emerge? If it's these zones of lawlessness largely created by the West, that have allowed groups targeting the United States to take power, isn't the West helping to maintain these zones part of the problem?
97: You're not kidding: in 2001, Spain gets a massive orange spike that's taller than any portion of the 9/11 attack*, plus a green spike that looks about as tall as DC, plus two shorter spikes, plus lots of smaller spikes. All that represents 79 attacks for 14 deaths.
Meanwhile, color me skeptical about the numbers underlying the bad infographic design. Iraq, from 2008 through 2012, has about 200 fatalities a year. Then it spikes to 7,000 and 13,000 the past 2 years. Am i wrong to interpret that as treating ISIS members in full military equipment attacking the Iraqi Army being called a bunch of terrorist incidents? That 13k number is far worse than the worst of the post-invasion insurgency.
*holy shit, these assholes either don't include Flight 93, or they leave it as a blue blip, which I assume means "thwarted plot" or similar, since they're all over the place
If the suggestion in 101.2 turns out to be right it's basically what I was suspicious about in 79. What we call terrorism has historically had very, very little relation to what exactly people were up to. Or at least it had a lot less relation to that than it did to the goals of whoever (usually powerful western countries) was labeling things.
Gaddafi totally counts
Did we use drones to attack Libyan Army units? Or did we (including France, which seems to have flown the most sorties) use traditional air forces to attack regular army units, until such units were no more, since which point drones have been used to attack non-state actors?
Isn't our desire to maintain the ability of foreign government to drop dynamite on anyone they want exactly the kind of demand that is going to make it very difficult for any government capable of bringing an end to civil wars to emerge?
Monopoly of force is the definition of functioning government, isn't it? Isn't that what Grant proved over Lee? He didn't have an air force, but by God Sherman would have bombed the fuck out of the South, no? And drone strikes against Forrest would have done no harm that I can see.
I mean, I totally take your point that we can't use freedom bombs to create peace in foreign lands. That was my point about underpants gnomes. I haven't read Black Earth, the new book about the Holocaust and the East, but it seems convincing on the point that statelessness is the ultimate font of evil in the modern world, from which it follows that "topple first, create unity later" is as doomed a strategy as there is. But here we are.
Serious question, because that's the distention that we're trying to work through.
95, I confess for me part of my ambivalence is that I'm not actually that worried about Islamic terrorists attacks in the United States*. I think that anti-terror is the public excuse for these campaigns, which mostly are about intervening in foreign civil-wars. The number of Muslim terrorists attacks in the United States since 9/11, by foreigners, is approximately zero, what we have had is a couple of spree killings, including the most recent one, by Americans** who were radicalized by our various murder-campaigns in the Muslim world. This is exactly what these campaigns are going to make more rather than less likely.
*The exception is like 9/11, attacks by Saudi's or funded by Saudi Arabia, which no one is ever going to do anything about.
** Hey look which country shows up again.
I'm certainly not interested in some sort of distinction of exactly how we bomb people, I'm using "drone campaign" as a stand in for "whatever it is we're up to, right now, in these countries".
And before someone points it out this doesn't mean I was against doing something about Al-Qaeda, but that campaign happened, and I don't think it's what were doing right now.
"roger t.c.b." is my new favorite commenter. There's a huge unfilled need for completely unhinged posters... and who is Asteele? It's like the Republican primary fight, only with aliases!
(Maybe they are both old-line unfoggetarians; roger seems vaguely familiar, from CT perhaps? Asteele just reminds me of an SF writer who is pretty hinged as far as I can tell.)
I'm using "drone campaign" as a stand in for "whatever it is we're up to, right now, in these countries".
I agree it's not a critical distinction in general: the difference between not-bombing a country and bombing (and/or missile-attacking) it is much vaster than that between air forcing it and droning it. BUT:
A. I think it's almost certainly true that, in terms of innocent lives lost, drone attacks are an order of magnitude more precise than older "hands-on" tech like special ops and tactical bombing, and 2 orders more precise than strategic bombing. So lumping them all together comes dangerously close to saying "Dresden is basically as bad as Abbottabad, because both killed innocent and guilty alike."
B. This particular sub discussion was sparked by 91. If you want to walk 91 back to, "whenever we start bombing people, we never seem to stop," that's fine, but it's nothing to do with drones as such. I basically agree with arguments of the form, "drones allow Americans to imagine a clinical, clean war that's fantastical, and the reality sows blowback," but that's a distinct argument from, "we should never impose force against non-state actors." One is a strategic decision, the other tactical (with subtle political implications). Don't bounce from one to the other for temporary advantage in a debate.
FWIW, aside from American love of violence, I can't help but think that 90% of our fucked-up thinking on this front is that we were a violent insurgency that succeeded because an international superpower intervened on our behalf, and it pretty much worked out for us (in some definition of "us"*). That totally fucks up our priors, and I don't know how to unfuck them.
*Native Americans aside**, there's an argument about emancipation, but, among other things, the ability of e.g. German rebels of '48 to come here and prosper has to be included in the weighting of American independence. It we'd followed the Canadian path, how many millions would have had no refuge? I honestly don't know (and admit I'm rhetorically thumbing the scales).
**it's probable that US leadership was worse for NAs than English would have been, but our evidence is highly contingent. I don't see a ton of evidence that the English had especially tender hearts towards aboriginal cultures.
108: have def. seen both before, and Asteele knows how to make a swimming joke, so....
Dear god. Arguing that drone strikes kill fewer people than bunker busters is not an argument in favor of drone strikes. Firebombing kills fewer people than nukes, but that doesn't mean we are morally justified in loading up the B52s with incendiaries and setting a course for the Northwest Territories.
Nor is the burden on the questioner to prove that drone strikes are the optimal way to deal with terrorists, or people who might have become terrorists had they lived to adulthood. Shrugging your metaphorical shoulders and claiming that nobody has *proved* this is an immoral course of action is disgusting.
On the merits, drone strikes appear a terrible way to deal with terrorists. I defy anyone who claims that Donald Trump is helping ISIS to explain why blowing a wedding party to bloody chunks isn't vastly more inflammatory than anything that jackass has said. And when the president wasn't a Democrat, I recall John Stewart joking about how we always seemed to be killing the number three person in AQ. It just didn't seem to stick, did it? Didn't we used to laugh at Bush for declaring war on "terror," an emotional state, a tactic...
We should focus our efforts on domestic security. Several billion dollars more on border security, additional police, and banal measures like better computers for the FBI would do far more to prevent terrorist attacks than comfortably abstract murder in a comfortably distant land ...
And I think we all know which candidate in the current primaries has a plan for spending billions of dollars on securing our borders too....
This from Brookings seems like pretty much the reasonable case for drones. This from the Army War College concludes that there's little to no evidence that civilian casualties from drone strikes recruit terrorists, but also little to no evidence that they are particularly effective as counter-insurgency measures (they may be more effective as counter-terrorism measures).
To 111, you seem awfully certain, but I am guessing you don't actually know much of anything.
These people don't have nukes, bomber wings, tank divisions, or fleets, where do you imagine this nebulous threat comes from?They don't have those things now, but aquiring them is the long term (multigenerational) plan. I think it's important to remember the hard core ideologues are thinking in centuries, and if they get their way we will eventually face a world war. If all these shitty slow burn wars prevent the world caliphate they're cheap at the price, civilian deaths included. Problem is determining whether what we're doing is working. Like Tigre, I don't pretend to know enough.
Taliban wasn't really a non-state actor, when the US got actively involved in the Afghan civil war, and everyone expects it to be a state actor soon enough again. We're not fighting them now to prevent Taliban attacks on the US, but to prevent/mitigate/punish Taliban attacks on (a) US forces still in Afghanistan and (b) the government we installed in Afghanistan, and have some investment in maintaining. This is a much more traditional arrangement for war. It seems to me that our drone campaign in Pakistan really is just an extension of the Afghan war, and that there are a whole lot of winks and nods from Pakistani officials, so long as we only drone people they don't like. (Which get withdrawn when our forces tangle with the Pakistani army, as happened back in 2012(?) and Pakistan closed the Khyber pass to supply traffic for like 6 months in retaliation.)
In Yemen, back when there was a government, we were droning people identified to us by the government as mutual enemies of the US and the Yemeni government. And for a time, the Temeni government would pretend that it, and not us, had been responsible for specific attacks. This is pretty different from the analogy-hypothetical given above. I suppose we're still acting like the Yemeni government in exile, that our friends in Saudia are trying to restore is in charge enough for us to drone mutual enemies there.
I'm pretty convinced that we've created chaos in Libya, and Anbar, because we're fucking idiots.
This more recent study from Rand concludes that drones have been on net pretty effective at reducing terrorism from Pakistan. This also suggests net benefits.
I'm extremely skeptical that the money from these strikes would be better spent on homeland security improvements. Almost everyone who has looked at what we do for homeland security and how effective that is at preventing terrorism has concluded that we spend way way way too much on homeland security measures already. I'm far more sympathetic to the argument that we shouldn't spend this money on either military or homeland security measures, but on something else -- like schools or public housing or relief for the poor or whatever -- but doing real cost/benefit on this issue seems extraordinarily hard and I'm inclined to think that most people who believe they have firm cost/benefit analyses are mostly bullshitting.
If we need to spend gobs of money, how about we send convoys through all the places we fucked up scooping unlimited refugees.
Most of the refugees this season are coming from some place that's really not mostly our fault.
I'm not saying we're to blame for Eritrea, but Syria would have gone completely differently if there weren't a bunch of dispossessed Iraqis, including former officers of the former Iraqi Army. hanging around. I don't think our direct involvement since 2012 -- stupid though it may be -- has been particularly material, but the indirect effects from our tossing Sunni officers out in 2003, and then our chosen people in Iraq tossing them out again in 2011, can't be ignored.
That's still a stretch given the overwhelming importance of optometry.
119 seems right to me.
This guy thinks that the drone strategy is misplaced, not because of anything particularly bad about drones, but because the whole policy of killing terrorists can be counterproductive, and we'd be better off devoting resources to things like fake photoshopping of stuff into terrorist propaganda. Maybe he's right, or maybe that's wishful thinking.
The first RAND article is body counts and baseless assertions. Vietnam all over again. The press blurb has no content.
Neither the second Rand article nor the Army War College paper support your position. The both appear to conclude that drone strikes don't work. They certainly don't support the notion that drone strikes in Pakistan prevent terrorist attacks in the US. So why are we killing innocents in support of a policy that doesn't work?
Again, the burden is on those who advocate killing to prove the killing works. It is your job to prove the benefits outweigh the costs.
And a hellfire missile costs 70k. For that money I'd rather have a cop on the beat than a crater in Pakistan.
What positive value are you attaching to "dead AQ guy"? Who is standing next to him is an important issue, but looking just at the money $70,000 for a dead AQ guy sounds like a tremendous value.
I'd bet the Air Force could have a very successful bake sale using that number.
The kids didn't need that playground anyway.
123 -- who are you, why are you so self-righteous, and why did you not learn how to read?
We should send him some English muffins.
The school where I vote has bake sales on election day. They say the funds are going to playground equipment.
OUR SUPER-ANGLICAN NOOKS AND CRANNIES WILL FINISH YOU ALL
I think there is something around a serious point for the left around how it needs to have some sort of positive foreign policy position that is largely agreed on even if arguments remain on the margins. Vox (I know, I know) has a crap billion word explainer piece up on ISIS. that is confused on its own terms on AQI, never mentions Turkey or Saudi Arabia, and boils down to: there is no chance this plan will work. This is in a piece trying to be supportive of the Obama administration. 1/n
The Thomas Corporation that makes English muffins is different from the one that makes school buses, right? Otherwise they would surely be capitalizing better on the obvious synergies.
Oh, come on, teo. Thomas school buses are nothing like authentic English school buses.
I suspect that the function that drone strikes best fulfill is allowing U.S. policymakers to say they're doing something about scary and bad stuff in Pakistan, Yemen, etc., without putting American lives at risk in the actual doing of the something. Evaluations of the effectiveness of drone strikes is even less important from the policymakers' point of view than estimations of accuracy and collateral damage. The strikes work every time.
139: For what audience? How many votes can actually moved by meaningless yet violent gestures in Pakistan and Yemen? 3, 4 voters nationwide? An Odd Future endorsement would move more votes.
118: Didn't the Syrian refugee crisis begin in earnest with the rise of ISIS, rather than the beginning of the civil war in Syria? Or... Is it just that I only started paying attention when the media did?
(Genuinely unsure of the answer to the above, but: If the former, I'd say a lot of the blame could be fairly apportioned to the Second Gulf War, or in other words, "our fault" for US and UK commenters.)
Hmm. Probably should have refreshed the browser tab that I'd had open since this morning before posting that, just to check whether or not there'd been a further 22 posts in the meantime.
Thing is* that, so far, drones have never been used in a traditional, inter-state war (at least not one involving us)
This isn't close to true. The event that first made everyone stand up and say "Huh. Drones! Why didn't I think of that?" was the Israeli counter-air operation over Syria in 1982, where they made very extensive use of them for reconnaissance and electronic warfare. Yes, that didn't involve the US, but the US used them in a similar way in 1991, 1999, and 2003. I presume they probably did in Bosnia in 1995 but I've not heard about it. Georgia used some Israeli-built ones against Russia in 2008 and that went about as well as you might expect. Both the Russians and Ukrainians operated them in 2014.
(Of course you could count a V-1 flying bomb as a drone, but I'd count it as a cruise missile. It wasn't coming back.)
What nobody has done in that context is used them to track down individuals, but that's because using them like JSOC does is predicated on absolutely no air defence (i.e. the local air force doesn't exist, as in Somalia, or is cooperating, as in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen).
The link in 122 is well argued. Foust is usually interesting and Registan. net is well worth reading.
141. I think what happened was that the success of Da'esh/ISIS meant that people who were already displaced within Syria had nowhere left to go. But if you look at the arguments by actual Syrians about Syria, they overwhelmingly want their allies to go after Assad first, because he is actually killing a lot more people than the cult nutters. Assad has a modern army supplied and supported by Russia, he has the morals and political traditions of Saddam Hussein, and he is throwing old fashioned bombs around like a drunken quarterback; Da'esh has, at this point in time, a lot of cannon fodder and some captured weapons it may or may not know how to use.
This could change. The upper echelons of Da'esh have, as Charley points out upthread, an experienced officer cadre who could, given time, train an army. They also have a sophisticated and ambitious political program. But there are still not many of them, and if the rest of the population of Syria could stop dodging Assad's ordnance for a moment, they could probably deal with them in Syria (Iraq is another question).
Didn't the Syrian refugee crisis begin in earnest with the rise of ISIS, rather than the beginning of the civil war in Syria?
Well, depends on your definition of "in earnest", but, no, it started pretty much as soon as the war started. There were over 200,000 by mid-2012, when ISIS was barely a factor - most of them were fleeing Assad. (Assad continues to be way ahead of ISIS in body-count terms by the way. That's what happens if you've got aviation with dumb bombs, and artillery, and lots of tanks.) It's complicated by the fact that most of the refugees from the civil war aren't coming to Europe and a lot of the refugees coming to Europe aren't from Syria, but from elsewhere in MENA or further afield (Horn of Africa, Nigeria, Sahel etc). And also by the fact that ISIS arose as the war was getting generally worse and more widespread in 2013 or so, so that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone was fleeing ISIS rather than fleeing the already-existing generalised awfulness.
The upper echelons of Da'esh have, as Charley points out upthread, an experienced officer cadre who could, given time, train an army.
Yes, but, if everything goes absolutely according to plan for them, you still only end up with an Arab army trained and led by Saddam-era Iraqi and Syrian officers. They're not exactly going to be an unstoppable juggernaut of conquest.
Also, Assad seems to be at times working with ISIS, or at least deliberately avoiding fighting ISIS to let them fight the other opposition for him/help him maintain power by making him the lesser of the local evils.
So, I was looking through Wikipedia at the various ethnic and religious groups in the region trying to find one we should prop up. While reading on the Druze, I learned that they drink mate (I guess it doesn't have any diacritcal mark, but it would be easier if it did) which somebody brought back from Argentina. I would not have guessed mate spread to other places and, if I had, that would be about the last place I would have guessed.
147: yeah, it's a real Arrow's-theorem war out there.
146. Far from an unstoppable juggernaut of conquest. But harder to stop than a rabble of confused kids who serve no military purpose at all and the political purpose of dying gloriously. To the extent that you might actually need an army of sorts to stop them, rather than an ad hoc militia.
150: actually, maybe not. Because the one thing we've learned since 1990 is that it's really really easy to defeat things that are like the Iraqi Army, because we've done it twice with minimal losses and ISIS has done it at least once despite being massively outnumbered.
What if we tried it with Shiite officers and Sunni enlisted men?
This seems like a long shot, but has anybody tried Circassians lately?
Circassians are basically Georgians, aren't they?
I sort of doubt they see it that way. Anyway, there's a large, Tzar-related diaspora that means there are large numbers in the region.
Oh, OK, bit further north.
I think you want Bosnians and that sort of thing, actually. The Janissaries were mostly from the Balkans.
I had planned on minimizing the kidnapping of children.
Circassians are Chechen, right? If so, yes, they have been tried, by IS, apparently to good effect.
154. I thought so, but apparently not. They originally lived rather to the north of Georgia, and while the affinities of their language are just as obscure as Georgian, they're not related. In Ottoman times they were famed for the beauty of their women.
Compare that face to Bashar, who looks like somebody was trying to make a parody of Charles de Gaulle.
But Saladin was Kurdish, and everyone is super pro-Kurd already, so no changes necessary.
148: I would not have guessed mate spread to other places
Mate-based soft drinks are actually big in Germany, and huge in Berlin.
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BTW, ajay's Nixoniad is just as good as anticipated.
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Mate is the best. I would drink it all the time, but in my homeland it's marketed as a health product and therefore ripoff expensive.
and everyone is super pro-Kurd already
Except the Armenians, because the Turks tended to use Kurds as hit men during the Genocide. It's never simple. The Turkish government doesn't like the Kurds either, because a lot of them live in the Turkish state and want to live in a not Turkish state. But I've no idea what the man on the Kadikoy omnibus feels about it.
162 I saw a lot of Club Mate for sale in Berlin.
And yeah, Circassians aren't Georgians.
I just walked down the red carpet at the gala opening night for the film festival. Catherine Deneuve is here.
Ask her what she things about Kurds. We have a theory.
There goes Richard Dreyfuss. And some entitled twats. Ugh.
Ask him what he thinks about boat size. I have a theory.
By 'everyone' I meant us armchair strategists in the west. And the Armenians at least are not yet involved in Syria. (Right?)
Oh yeah, I think Unfogged leans pro-Kurd.
There goes Richard Dreyfuss. And some other entitled twats. Ugh.
FTFY
This is fun so far but Chani hates the hoopla.
Barry, if the entitled twats get you down, the red carpet possibly isn't the place for you.
Thinking of going around introducing myself as Tom Cruz. Then telling them I'm Ted's older brother. You know the one who is not an ashole.
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Buzzed because there are consensus amendments to the big-money CA marijuana legalization initiative, and their press-release summary, at least, makes it look like the backers read my lengthy comments and incorporated more than I would have guessed.
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So tax breaks rising with the strength of strains produced?
179: Glad they moved in the right direction!
Of course drone strikes in Af/Pak aren't preventing terrorist attacks in the US. They're supposed to be preventing/lessening attacks on American soldiers in Afghanistan. In which we are participants in a civil war. One might say that our continuing participation in that civil war is a bad idea, but using terrorist attacks against the US as the measuring stick misses a whole host of considerations. You certainly can't say that there's not a genuine constituency for preventing/punishing attacks on Americans in uniform.
Droning doesn't seem inconsistent with 122.2 style psyops, seems to me.
144 and 145:
Thanks chris y and ajay. I can definitely get on board with Heebie's (?) "make a statement on unfogged and wait for somebody more knowledgeable to correct it" as an effective tactic for finding things out.
162: However, drinking Vodka Mate in Berlin is something that I am knowledgeable about!
I think its popularity can be ascribed to the fact that it has the same "alcohol plus lots of caffeine" effects as something like Vodka Redbull or Buckfast, but tastes pleasantly like iced tea. And in addition, there's the enjoyable ritual aspect of drinking off a generous swig from the bottle of Club Mate, and having the barperson fill it back up again with vodka.
