I identify fairly strongly as a liberal (although this was not always the case), so perhaps it’s not a huge surprise that one of the most frustrating phenomena I experience as a politics junkie is watching liberal leading lights latch on to stupid ideas. Today, for instance, whoever was running the Mother Jones Twitter account sent out this:
The Obama administration explains when it’s allowed to kill you. mojo.ly/w6N3F0
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) March 6, 2012
The link points, as you can see, to Adam’s Serwer’s latest piece, When the US Government Can Kill You, Explained. His lede:
On Monday, the Obama administration explained when it’s allowed to kill you.
The piece, which discusses Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech Monday on the legal reasoning behind the administration’s national security policy, is accompanied by a stock photo of U.S. Air Force “Reaper” drone armed with guided HELLFIRE missiles — the sort used to kill the American-born al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki.
I’ve admired Serwer’s work for a couple years now, and am a Mother Jones subscriber. This post – and posts like it – are a severe disappointment to me, because it demonstrates the fact that (at least some) liberal publications are not above the kind of base fear-mongering that we so often excoriate the right for.
One of my first posts for this blog was on Anwar al-Awlaki in light of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act. In it, I cited Serwer’s analysis of the bill as recommended reading, because I thought (and still think) that he did an excellent job of correcting misperceptions about the bill. From his piece, dated Dec. 16, 2011:
So it’s simply not true, as the Guardian wrote yesterday, that the the bill “allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.” When the New York Times editorial page writes that the bill would “strip the F.B.I., federal prosecutors and federal courts of all or most of their power to arrest and prosecute terrorists and hand it off to the military,” or that the “legislation could also give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial,” they’re simply wrong.
This is a different NDAA provision than the one that reauthorized the president to use lethal force against certain “named persons” in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (or “AUMF”) passed by congress shortly after the terror attacks of September 2001. However, those provisions, like the ones covering detention, remain largely unchanged by the latest NDAA. I had thought Serwer knew this. But here he is today:
Who decides when an American citizen has had enough due process and the Hellfire missile fairy pays them a visit? Presumably the group of top national security officials—that, according to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, decides who is targetable and forwards its findings to the president, who gives final approval.
Okay. We can definitely have a discussion about whether or not the U.S. government can legally target American citizens in military actions against identified enemies.
But what does that have to do with drones? It seems they always come up whenever this subject is discussed. Indeed, the Washington Post ran an editorial yesterday in response to Holder’s speech which, while being generally positive about the attorney general’s content, was titled “It’s time to release the drone memos.” Drone memos? The Post’s editors mean the legal reasoning behind the killing of al-Awlaki — but why call those the “drone memos”? Are the means used to kill an American citizen on foreign soil more important than the legal reasoning the administration used to justify the ends? Serwer’s post, as noted above, is accompanied by a photo of a drone aircraft. Here he is again, later in today’s piece:
If the standards for when the government can send a deadly flying robot to vaporize you sound a bit subjective, that’s because they are.
But by this point in his article, Serwer had already acknowledged the fact that his headline promised more than he could actually deliver. “There won’t be any drone strikes in Denver anytime soon,” he points out, almost as an aside, earlier in the piece.
This is true — between the AUMF, NDAA, and existing law, the military is triply prohibited from using any kind of force against citizens on American soil. What’s also true is that the military has never been barred from exercising lethal force against enemies identified in authorizations for the use of military force, even if those enemies happen to include American members.
Holder made this point in his Monday speech at Northwestern University in Illinois. Here’s what he said, as quoted by the The People’s View:
Furthermore, it is entirely lawful – under both United States law and applicable law of war principles – to target specific senior operational leaders of al Qaeda and associated forces. This is not a novel concept. In fact, during World War II, the United States tracked the plane flying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto – the commander of Japanese forces in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway – and shot it down specifically because he was on board. As I explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee following the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the same rules apply today.
Some have called such operations “assassinations.” They are not, and the use of that loaded term is misplaced. Assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self defense against a leader of al Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack would not be unlawful — and therefore would not violate the Executive Order banning assassination or criminal statutes.
This has nothing to do with where that leader or supporter was born, or what their citizenship status is. If that mattered, American soldiers would have to ask everyone they ever shot, shelled, or bombed whether they had U.S. passports. Just so that there’s no misunderstanding, here it is again: citizenship has no bearing on whether you can be engaged by the U.S. military, and it never, ever has.
Now, on to drones. Drones are remotely-controlled aerial vehicles that can be used either for mid- to long-range surveillance and intelligence-gathering or for “delivering ordnance on” (also known as “bombing”) targets identified by that intelligence. Drones like the Predator and Reaper are useful because they can be outfitted with a wide variety of weapons and sensor equipment, they can be fielded relatively cheaply, and, most importantly, reduce the risk soldiers face from hostile action. In this, they are like every other technological advance on the battlefield — we make more effective bullets, longer-range rifles, better-armored and faster tanks, night-vision goggles and rifle scopes, and tougher body armor. These are tools commanders use to help accomplish their objectives more efficiently and with less loss of friendly life — priorities that every commander has had since before Agamemnon knew where Boeotia was.
So drones are simply the battlefield expression of emerging technology. There may be a discussion to have about their value and the effects they have on war psychology, but that is a completely different discussion than the provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act and national security policy Holder was discussing today require. Bringing them up is intellectually dishonest, disingenuous, and prejudicial to the discussion. I’m disappointed to see so many liberal thinkers who I’ve praised in the past use this line of nonsense.
But it serves as a helpful reminder that liberals are sometimes willing to engage in the very same kind of dishonesty and fearmongering they enjoy pointing out on the right.
When I hear liberals talking about there being no difference between the parties, and giving knee-jerk criticism of President Obama, it often strikes me as spoiled whining. I’m not comfortably middle class, myself. I’ve been a caregiver for the last 13 years and I KNOW that people’s lives depend on a very real difference between the parties at all levels of government.
Furthermore, I think our President and the head of our State Department are the wisest leaders this country has had to deal with foreign relations in a very long time.
I’m afraid I’ve given up on most liberal news blogs. They depress me.
I agree there are concrete differences in the two parties’ domestic social policies, but it’s not like the people who die in the U.S.’s various wars are “comfortably middle class” either. And not all of them are evil terrorists.
If President Obama had busied himself starting wars instead of ending them, that would be a point here. I don’t think it was necessary to start the War on Terror, but after eight years of the Bush administration we have surely made a lot of enemies. Unfortunately, those enemies are often radicals that are also hostile to a lot of their neighbors, as well. There is a reason that so many terrorists trained it Afghanistan— it’s not just cheap real estate. They were run out of the countries they were born in.
Granted, the use of drones is irrelevant except that they are starting to be used by more government agencies inside the U.S., and this development is scary. The thing that worries me about this is that Obama and Holder are establishing the principle that unnamed officials in the executive department, following unknown rules, can decide for unknown reasons, that individuals can be killed. You are basically saying you trust them to only do that to people outside the U.S. I don’t trust them, and I particularly don’t trust a President Palin, or a President Newt Gingrich, or even a President Willard Romney, to continue to follow those restrictions. He didn’t touch on it in this speech, but Holder apparently believes they didn’t need the authority in the NDAA because the President already has the authority to arrest anyone anywhere and confine them anywhere, to included sending them from the U.S. to Bagram AFB in Afghanistan.
I don’t know about more and more agencies in the US using drones. The article I posted below says the Montgomery police in Texas was the first to have one. Unfortunately they had a little mishap when testing theirs :>)
The article does say, though, that Congress is considering putting them in US air space. I know, what could go wrong, huh?
So drone is what’s hot in the streets?
Not the war on women, the GOP trying to bring Jim Crow back into style by piecing out the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and teh gheys being icky to them, but……DRONESSSSSS………JUST LIKE BUSH…RWOAAARRRR!!!!!!!
These people make me sick
And its comical that the only time Greenwald ever popped his head was when AG Holder made his speech, not about Sandra Fluke, not about the new march on the Pettis Street Bridge for voting rights, not gay right, but fucking drones.
And dont mention his secret love, Ron Paul, is helping Mitt Romney in the primaries, its god damn comical
I really don’t get the drone thing. Honestly. It’s a relatively (but not very) new weapons and surveillance platform that’s significantly less sinister than other methods of havoc-wreaking the military has at its disposal. Drones, and drone strikes, mean less risk to U.S. personnel, better intelligence, more-accurate strikes and less collateral damage. What’s not to like?
“Oh, well, I saw Terminator, so obviously they’re evil.”
“What’s not to like?”
Spoken like someone who knows nothing about the actual consequences of air strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Spoken like someone who knows nothing about the order-of-magnitude differences between drone-fired and bomber-dropped airstrikes.
For real. Whether or not the targets who suffer a strike are actually the intended targets is an issue of intelligence more than anything else, and a drone pilot with surveillance can possibly make a better assessment than a fighter or bomber pilot who gets orders to strike targets that are given to him/her from other agencies. Manned aircraft also go into and out of the target area very quickly. Those aircraft are phenomenally expensive and pilots are highly trained— it makes sense to minimize risk.
Though the thought of remote killing does bother me, I’m a veteran of the U.S.A.F. and have been under a mock attack by A-10s. Since I knew they were ours, I knew there was no danger; yet I could not help but think of how terrifying it would be if it were hostile. I remember this when we go to war, and I hate our wars; but missiles, bombs, strafing— drones got nothing on the fighters/bombers.
They’re testing a new type of drone, one that has an AI, can conduct its own mission without human interference, that’ll make them piss their pants
Oh, and by the way, Greenwald was all for Bush blowing up Iraq and killing between 100K-1M brown people, you know, those he claims to care about now. And not the brown people in Brazil, especially the kids who get murdered every day in the favellas, no, not them, just terrorist via drone
See, now putting AI on a lethal platform – I can see having a problem with that in principle.
But a remote-controlled plane? Why is that supposed to be uniquely problematic? Because there’s no American pilot who might get killed?
Yes, that seems to be the main complaint. “It dehumanizes war!”
Because what war has going for it now is its inherent humanism?
Wouldn’t it be pretty to think that the presence of “the human element” in the conduct of war served to make it more humane?
War is not an abstraction, to be discussed carefully at a distance. It’s a nasty, hellish business, in which people kill and injure others and destroy cities and farms, often for the sake of some treasured abstraction or other, and sometimes because some nation or group has done something that cannot go unaddressed.
Sad as that truth is, sometimes it’s necessary to engage in that nasty business.
When we do, it’s always a good idea to remember things such as this quote from Lao Tzu:
“Weapons are instruments of fear, they are not a wise man’s tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart,
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing.”
I’m an American, and I care that fewer American kids get killed more than I do about other nations’ kids. Call it what you will, it’s human nature to care about who and what is closer. And I want all our kids over there (wherever “there” is) to come home safe. If drones further that, so be it.
Anything that keeps American kids safer when we do have to kill people and wreck things, for whatever reason, I’m likely to favor.
You want to deal in abstractions, I think a certain Mr. Greenwald speaks your language.
Why do you assume that just because Greenwald doesn’t talk about something, he must not think it’s important? I mean, presumably he’s interested in gay rights. Has it not occurred to you that different people are good at writing about different things?
Also: are you implying that issues surrounding the “war on terror” (drones, civil liberties, etc) somehow aren’t important?
Serious question: Why are drones so much scarier than other conventional forms of warfare, such as the AH-64 Apache (which also can be outfitted with HELLFIRE missiles and sports a swiveling machine gun under its nose that fires 30mm exploding rounds wherever the pilot is looking)? Or the Abrams tank? Or long range artillery systems or MLRS?
They’re not scarier in any significant way that I can think of. I can’t speak for anyone else, but the reason people are fixated on “drones” is because they’re the primary method of aerial bombardment these days. The objection is to the war in general and aerial bombardment in particular. People like Greenwald object think the current U.S. war in Central Asia (and elsewhere, maybe someday including right here in the U.S.?) is immoral.
If that’s the case, fine. Just say so. It’s silly to pretend that drones are in any way more sinister than any other method of bombardment. In point of fact, they’re much less sinister, since they’re capable of much higher accuracy than more traditional methods — which usually involved using larger munitions to make up for lack of precision.
the reason people are fixated on “drones” is because they’re the primary method of aerial bombardment these days.
That is not even close to true. Look at Libya. Look at Afghanistan. There are far more strike sorties being flown by pilots than strikes by armed UAVs.
Because its been two weeks of attacks on women, more so attacks on voting rights, nothing about the GOP being made into Limbaugh’s bitches, and we’re back to Greenwald obsession with Eric Holder and teh drones
You tell me
Then why hasnt he explained how he supported Bush bombing Iraq with bunker busters, support Ron Paul who signed the AUMF, and was for corporate run mercenaries going into countries and snuffing out those same brown people he now purports to care for?
He didn’t support Bush’s war in Iraq. He was just as critical of Bush as he was of Obama. He applies his standards consistently. Unlike some people.
I never voted for George W. Bush—or for any of his political opponents. I believed that voting was not particularly important. Our country, it seemed to me, was essentially on the right track. Whether Democrats or Republicans held the White House or the majorities in Congress made only the most marginal difference. I held views on some matters that could be defined as conservative, views on others that seemed liberal. But I firmly believed that our democratic system of government was sufficiently insulated from any real abuse, by our Constitution and by the checks and balances afforded by having three separate but equal branches of government. My primary political belief was that both parties were plagued by extremists who were equally dangerous and destructive, but that as long as neither extreme acquired real political power, our system would function smoothly and more or less tolerably. For that reason, although I always paid attention to political debates, I was never sufficiently moved to become engaged in the electoral process. I had great faith in the stability and resilience of the constitutional republic that the founders created. All that has changed. Completely.
Glenn Greenwald
http://sadredearth.com/christopher-hitchens-glenn-greenwald-and-the-war-of-ideas/
I’m not sure what that’s supposed to prove. Greenwald has always been honest about the fact that he began as basically apolitical, and has grown quite a bit over the years (part of his journey was going from a conventional supporter of the Democrats to a critic of both parties’ authoritarian/militarist tendencies). None of what you quote here negates what I said.
I’m sorry it bothers you so much, but it remains true: Greenwald was just as critical of Bush/Cheney as he was of Obama. Read anything he wrote during the Bush administration. Pick something randomly from his archives.
He supported the Iraq War, and backed away when it became unpopular, and never sites how he was a supporter.
If he has an opinion, thats one thing, we can debate that, but intellectual dishonesty and wording the story to fit his agenda, thats what we dont like
So, um, still sticking by your assertion that Greenwald didn’t support Bush now that Arrogant Demon has posted writing from GREENWALD’S OWN DAMN BOOK showing that he did exactly that? I mean — who you gonna believe — Glenn Greenwald or himself?
“Pick something randomly from his archives.” Not exactly picked at random, I’ll grant you, but illustrative of Greenwald’s xenophobia. http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/11/gop-fights-itself-on-illegal.html
When confronted with this, his excuse was “Oh, I was young, I didn’t know anyone was actually reading that, and you’re all a buncha CULTISTS!” (His favorite epithet.)
And I think it’s perfectly legitimate to ask why Greenwald remains silent on widespread human rights abuses that are taking place in the favelas in the country where he actually spends most of his time.
Greenwald cuts no one else any slack in his puritopian dictatorship. I see no reason why he should be let off the hook himself.
Follow the link in where he was for it until it became unpopular and switched around
http://sadredearth.com/christopher-hitchens-glenn-greenwald-and-the-war-of-ideas/
During the lead-up to the invasion, I was concerned that the hell-bent focus on invading Iraq was being driven by agendas and strategic objectives that had nothing to do with terrorism or the 9/11 attacks. The overt rationale for the invasion was exceedingly weak, particularly given that it would lead to an open-ended, incalculably costly, and intensely risky preemptive war. Around the same time, it was revealed that an invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein had been high on the agenda of various senior administration officials long before September 11. Despite these doubts, concerns, and grounds for ambivalence, I had not abandoned my trust in the Bush administration. Between the president’s performance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the swift removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the fact that I wanted the president to succeed, because my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country, I still gave the administration the benefit of the doubt. I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country.
The fact that Greenwald assumes it about everyone else makes it an entirely fair assumption about himself.
Great piece, Ian. I can’t believe the idiocy I’ve seen over this issue. Last week Sean Paul Kelley was saying on Twitter that Obama & the Republicans are the same on all the big issues, and I brought up some minor niggling details like, oh, voting rights and equal opportunity and reproductive rights and such, and he actually said to me “none of those matter if you’re dead”. As if President Obama were planning to kill every single person in America.
On the drone thing, there’s a simple reason why it’s all drones, all the time: a) Greenwald has been framing the conversation on these particular issues (and shame on certain liberals for letting him get away with that), and b) drones are the only metric on which he can plausibly claim the President is actually “worse” than Bush. Hence his focus on civilian casualties from drone strikes, and only drone strikes: if you compare civilian casualties under the President with those under Bush, there’s no comparison at all, but if you focus on drone strikes and only drone strikes you can pretend that the President’s policies really are a “continuation and expansion of Bush’s policies”.
One of the problems that you gloss over is in the first sentence you quote from Holder: “Furthermore, it is entirely lawful – under both United States law and applicable law of war principles – to target specific senior operational leaders of al Qaeda and associated forces.” Obviously, this is non-controversial — the military can target e.g. generals and other senior leaders even though they don’t pick up a gun.
What is controversial — and what I don’t see discussed in this post — is whether Awlaki was an operational leader. The public record doesn’t seem to support this contention. He was a propagandist who fluently spoke English, and, I might add, one of our go-to “good clerics” before he was radicalized and became a bad cleric. But that doesn’t make him an operational leader, and the government refused to produce any evidence suggesting he was. Instead, a handful of people in the executive branch decided he was and ordered him killed. I don’t understand how supporters of this decision square that with the 5th Amendment – no U.S. citizen can be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, with due process of law.” A handful of executive officials acted as judge jury & executioner – are you really comfortable with saying that’s due process? To me it suggests that, if anything, Obama refused to go to court with whatever intel he had because it probably wasn’t enough to convince a judge. So he just killed the guy. Some Americans were upset with warrantless wiretapping and indefinite detention — well isn’t this worse?
Furthermore the U.S. government maintains that the War on Terror ™ is a worldwide conflict. Why are supporters of this reasoning so sure that it wouldn’t equally support similar hits on U.S. citizens in-country, with or without drones? After all, now there’s precedent! Hurray!
But “operational leader” isn’t a requirement. Here’s Section 2 of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force:
Is it a bit mushy? Sure. But the point is that legally speaking, the AUMF does give the president broad authority to use any appropriate military force against nations, organizations, or persons who were involved in the attacks — not just in a planning or operational capacity, mind you. And again, this has zero to do with citizenship.
Back in my first post on this, I worried that the assumption that American citizens were due some “extra level” of human rights over citizens of other nations betrayed an “invidious sense of nationalist privilege,” and I stand by that. As I pointed out here, citizenship simply doesn’t enter the equation.
Fine, we can talk about the AUMF too. You’ll note that it doesn’t say “any brown person the President finds distasteful.” Tell me how a propagandist — even a vile one calling for violence — is one of the “nations, organizations, or persons” who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001?” He just wasn’t. He was a U.S. citizen exercising a core First Amendment right, and if we say that his speech counts as “aiding,” well, I find that pretty troubling. You can call for violence under the First Amendment, like it or not.
The executive branch says that the AUMF grants blanket powers, and the courts have conceded nearly as much, but it’s just a bridge too far to say it authorizes this hit — look at the text and then tell me how it applies to a U.S. citizen living in Yemen who posts hateful speeches to YouTube and who plainly had nothing to do with Sept. 11. And if you lean on the language saying “he determines” and conclude that the leader determined it, then that’s the exact same problem — the executive branch pulling names out of hats and killing who they please without any oversight.
And again: al Awlaki was not just a “propagandist”; he had an active role in al-Qaeda operations.
Yeah, sorry – to say that al-Awlaki was simply “exercising his First Amendment rights” is dangerously naive, and simply untrue.
Tell me how a propagandist — even a vile one calling for violence — is one of the “nations, organizations, or persons” who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001?”
He joined al Qaeda, the organization that planned, authorized, committed, and aided the terrorist acts that occurred on September 11, 2001.
He just wasn’t. Well, he said he was.
Once you declare yourself an enemy of the United States and align yourself with a group that is an enemy of the United States, you’ve essentially expatriated yourself. Why should a person who is dedicated to doing harm to any random American while living and working with a group dedicated to acts of terror in a foreign country be treated like anything other than an enemy?
A lot of innocent people have been killed, injured, orphaned, displaced, etc. by Bush’s wars. What makes the fact of being an American citizen so important when that citizen is voluntarily living with sworn enemies, and knows it? Why would the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense and the President consider an American living and working with terrorists in a country where we are militarily engaged to be a sacred cow? So we have to risk a lot of troops in a ground action to sort this guy out to bring him to the States for a trial? So terrorists would have a lot of incentive to heavily recruit Americans as a shield?
Everything isn’t a slippery slope.
Not true (pdf; search for “Awlaki” to get a sense of how involved he was in the operations).
Mike D,
I teach writing, and what jumped out at me about your comment was the way your argument meandered in the second paragraph. You start out by claiming that there is little reason to believe that Awlaki was an operational commander, as opposed to a propagandists, but then your argument for this proposition sort of morphs into a point about 5th amendment procedure. Now, we can talk about the procedure and how the 5th amendment applies, but that really has nothing to do with there being plausible doubt about Awlaki’s involvement as an operational commander. There’s the testimony of the Underpants Bomber, for instance.
I responded to this at the people’s view yesterday – you may not agree with Obama’s war policies as a matter of principle. But to say that he’s somehow a clone of Bush the Lesser because he uses Predator drones to attack terrorists shows that nuance and analysis aren’t words fully understood by the Emo-Progs.
The Emo Prog Left would regards the threats from the Right on the rights of women, gays, minorities and unions – i.e. rolling back social and economic gains that have been achieved since the end of WWII – as red herrings. The real issue is the intellectual masturbation about “civil liberties” – i.e. the government intruding in the rights and ideals of middle to upper middle class (mostly white male) intellectuals.
I see numerous online liberals who demonstrate the same hyper-focus on unmanned aerial vehicles in their discussion of foreign policy.
Me theory is that drones are so inherently, distractingly cool that any discussion in which they play even a tangential role soon becomes a discussion of drones.
Even this one! Ian set out to write a post critical of the arguments some liberals are making about Holder’s speech, and of all the potential directions a post like that could go in, which one does his zoom in on?
That’s right. Say it with me: drones.
Well, okay. My point was to highlight the fact that liberals are now willing to engage in dishonest fearmongering, not to discuss the legal underpinnings of the administration’s foreign policy or to fisk Holder’s speech.
But drones are pretty cool.
Hey Ian, just an a total geek – if I were going to images of flying, murderous robots, I wouldn’t go with the Terminator. I’d use this guy.
Hey man, if we’re going to ass-kicking robots, we need to go hardcore.
I like that – although I haven’t seen any of the new Transformers movies. I briefly considered using Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, but he’s too sympathetic a character. Tee hee. Also he can’t fly.
Soon my friend, very soon
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/26/business/la-fi-auto-drone-20120126
Although humans would program an autonomous drone’s flight plan and could override its decisions, the prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.
Programming the flight plans and being able to override its decisions is direct human control. The drones are probably not doing a lot of thinking, and certainly haven’t developed a will of their own. Any mistakes to be made are the same mistakes that a mission with fighter/bomber or drone pilots might make— those craft and ground control are heavily computerized; except that pilots and ground control are more likely to be tired and/or drunk or drugged than a well made program can ever be. Of course programmers can be in various altered states and fatigue, too, and those programmers would likely hold their breath whenever something goes wrong with a drone mission.
I can’t imagine a Command and Control crew reading magazines and surfing for internet porn while a drone does all the work— they still have to take responsibility for whatever happens on their watch.
I am disturbed by the idea of making warfare more abstract; but having served in nuclear forces, I can assure you that as abstract and video game-like our ability to deal profound, if not, final destruction may be, it is not the child of abstraction; abstraction is the child of destructive human impulses.
Intent is everything.
Tee..hee..
The police department of a little county in the boonies down the road from me decided they needed one of them there dronez. Now they already had one of them Bearcat armored vehicular type whatchamacallits.
Well… they decided to photo-op the testing of their newest toy and calamity ensued.
Police drone crashes into SWAT team
Good grief. Those drones were designed to be controlled by well-trained personnel in well-trained TEAMS that coordinate with other well-trained teams. Selling drones to generic police departments and even SWAT teams as if they were just another tool is just whack. Air space and the people who use it are tightly regulated for a lot of good reasons.
@wiley
I know but this is Texas. Nothing more needs to be said IMO.
Fortunately the SWAT guys were ok inside their Bearcat.
The scary part about this comical situation is the article I posted says Congress wants to put these things in US air space. What could go wrong? Indeed!
I grew up in Texas and don’t miss it at all.
Yeah, the days of Ann Richards and Molly Ivens are long gone here for sure to say nothing of the miserable summer heat.
But things are looking up for large parts of Texas. In Houston we just re-elected our progressive lesbian mayor for a second term. And Harris county which encompasses Houston went purple in the 2008 presidential election. Hopefully that trend will continue in November and it’s looking more and more as if it will.