How do you feel about 'drones'? I am a bit worried by how the media and the american president are constantly suggesting that drones are a benign sort of weapon, that the use of drones is somehow a less serious matter than the use of more conventional military tools. Is warfare getting too cheap?

It's a natural progression - new war technologies tend towards producing more efficient weapons that kill with less of a risk to the deliverer. It's one step beyond fighter jets and long-range artillery. Someone in Colorado USA can bomb a car in Iraq like they're playing a video game.

New technologies make warfare less risky to the individuals involved (at least those doing the shooting, or pressing the buttons to make the machine do the shooting), but more riskier as a whole. When warfare required mass movements of people, and close combat using swords/arrows or horses/elephants, small flare-ups were unlikely to have a widespread effect. The new age of warfare (starting around 1914) makes it possible for individual flare-ups to have a much broader impact in terms of large-scale combat. Does this seem like an accurate view?

[quote=lyserge] Someone in Colorado USA can bomb a car in Iraq like they're playing a video game.

quote]

^^ This analogy, IMO, is spot-on.Using drones like this allows the 'depersonalization' of the foe to be alot easier to achieve but I wonder what psychological effects it will have on the 'pilot' some years down the line.

Not so long ago, Iran managed to bring down a US drone which had strayed/ventured into their airspace from the airspace of Afghanistan.AFAIK, they brought it down intact by using some computer technology to over-ride the 'pilots' control of it.It won't take the Iranians too long to suss out the technology the drone uses and to copy it for its own purposes.

I remember this iranian drone thing, and the USA was even asking them to give it back, LOL!

I obviously think this drone story is absurd and unjustified, but so is any of these current wars whether they use drones or not.

My main concern is: If an american president can start a war now, without having to worry about american soldiers coming home in bodybags, does that make it easier for a president to start a war or not? I fear it does.
And there seems to be a general concensus among media and politicians, that somehow, the use of drones is a less serious afair than the use of people...like:'OK, we used to have these two things: peace and warfare, and now with these new drones of ours, we've invented something that nicely fits in between peace and warfare'.....like it´s some new diet cola: 'warfare LIGHT'.
My experience is that way too many people, generally tend to believe these kind of fairy-tales.

"Good, it reduces casualties on BOTH sides in the form of reduced collateral damage. BUT, it must be used with caution since it removes the human element from war."

I personally think the use of drones of any kind is a bad thing, I mean, I don't like anything about the wars going on today so this is just the tip of the iceberg.


To agree with corpus callosum, there is more than likely some serious depersonalization that happens to whoever controls them, they probably don't even have any trouble sleeping at night or any signs of PTSD of any kind because all they do is sit in an air conditioned room with a remote control and a computer monitor.

a1pha: i'm not entirely sure who you're quoting (if anyone, why else is it in quotes?), but from what I've been reading, drones kill way more civilians than who they're actually trying to kill, and that they basically use some form of equation where they factor in an 'estimated collateral damage' into it along with a 'potential lives saved' by killing the desired 'militant', where as if the number of people the 'militant' is planning on (or thought to be wanting to) killing is higher than the number of people that is estimated to be killed in collateral damage while killing the 'militant', than they get the green light... kinda wordy of an explanation I know but it's how warfare works... they put human lives into equations to see if killing one is 'worth it' to them.... this is why I don't like warfare

Except in this equation they dont take in account that the sons and daughters and cousins and neighbours of the killed people will hate the USA/western/whoever army forever. This means generations of people who have their lives ruined forever and will swear revenge, thus furthering the cycle of threats and deaths and NEVER solving the problem.

Think drones overseas is bad? Then think about this...

There are currently about 10,000 drones being used inside the US by various government agencies as well as police departments...

drones are cheap in the short term, and expensive in the long term. despite whitewashing a LOT of collateral damage is done and that doesn't make the US seem very good in the eyes of people who lose loved ones\ due to these attacks.


regarding the videogame thing a lot of these folks (drone operators) have BIG mental health issues. No matter how patriotic you are I think it would be hard to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of killing people at your day job and then going to your kids little league game the next day.


Sad state of affairs.

Agreed

I can't vote on this, because the questions are poorly chosen. I will say that the drones are a bad thing. If a country wants to fight a war, it should do so, primarily on the ground. It should all be televised. Here in the U.S. we see none of it. There should be a draft, with no deferments, except for people with severe disabilities. This would make war less palatable for all of us bloodthirsty, vengeance seeking americans.


It's funny that the upsurge in drone usage coincides with the year that a film of Enders Game is in post production.

The other bad thing about drones relates to something Madeline Albright said (at least I think it was her), it was something like: What good is a weapons system if you never get to use it?.

Now, I know the chances are vanishingly thin, but just suppose that the u.s., at some point in the future, wasn't involved in several armed conflicts. The govt would have tons of those drones lying around with no one to use them on except us. Some police departments are already using them as Saidin pointed out.

We got rid of them red commies, we got Osama, the next bogeyman may be we the people.

what disgusts me is the use of American drones to conduct surveillence against American citizens. It is happening.
They use thermal immaging to look for weed gardens, they sample the air for drug labs. They are a fact of life.

Law Enforcement is using drones now that are as small as a humming bird and they can collect allot of information in one pass.

think of all the lives we are saving by imprisoning people growing pot!
if you are against these drones, clearly you have terrorist ulterior motives you are trying to hide from our beneficent government.
i mean come on.. they make these laws to protect us from fiendish pot smokers, who would ordinarily talk our ears off about the many uses of hemp, or some environmental garbage (BOOORING! if i wanted to learn i would go back to high school, amirite?)

my point is, drugs are bad. and if you don't think so you are a terrorist (possibly muslim).
just say NO to terrorism (unless you are the U.S. military in which case, keep on funding, training and weaponizing terrorism [got to sell the outdated weapons to somebody, and with a bloated military budget like ours, weapons become obsolete fast]).

Let me try and put my genius thoughts into words...somehow.

Phuck wars and countries, people that sustain it.

Does that answer the question?No?Well that's my answer. ^_^

[quote=Parshvik Chintan
my point is, drugs are bad. and if you don't think so you are a terrorist .

[/quote]

^^And probably a drug addict as well, a heroin junkie who is happy that their money goes straight into the coffers of the Taliban, giving them moral and financial assistance in their efforts to destroy the freedoms of the West, which they hate .Yep, more drones is what we need.

Naaaaaa, more Taliban is what we need.

I didnt fit anywhere in the poll. When it comes to war I would have to say using drones is an intelligent advantage. Saying war is too cheap because of it would be like saying using full automatics against people with single shot rifles or bow and arrows is cheap. The whole point of war is to overcome your enemy with technological advancement. So it makes sense.

Although I am against war in the sense that I think it is a primitive solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. "war is a racket"

Yeah. the point has been made that any weapontechnology tends to make war cheaper, to reduce risks on the battlefield, etc.
I would say, however, that for instance the atomic bomb has definately not made war cheaper. The atomic bomb is an invention that would make war so expensive, that it could be argued that military conflicts have actually been prevented because of it.

Inventing new military technology makes sense indeed.

But i remember the people of america to have re-elected george w bush. In america, for a very long time, the majority of the people where very much in favor of the war in iraq. Pictures coming from abu ghraib didn´t realy change any of that.

The only real reason why the american public eventually turned against the war in iraq, is because besides the innumerable deaths on the iraqi side, a relatively small number of american soldiers (somewhere around 5000 i believe, wich is nothing compared to iraqi casualties) also didn´t make it back. They thought that this war was heroic and fun, only until some iraqi´s actually started firing back. Then it wasn´t so funny anymore.

So...what if the americans would have had a fully automated military? There would not have been a pile of 5000 amrican corpses. I guess that under these circumstances, many americans would still believe that the war in iraq was fun. As long as nobody is shooting at thèm, the american public would probably laugh when hearing about the 100.000th civilian casualty in iraq...being able to reply only with something like: 'Yeah, GO USA', 'yeah, we rock' or sayings of a simmilar nature. Remember how convinced they where of the greatness of this war: I´ve heard americans say that they wanted to have france and germany nuked for not supporting the war (unwise, because france has 500 nukes itself, and some nuclear submarines with cruisemissiles to deliver these items).

It´s not nice to have your sons and daughters coming back in bodybags. But dead american soldiers may be the only thing that actually keeps americans from destroying the entire planet and gloating about it at the same time:'look at our power, we can do anything we want, we can rape all of your childeren and get away with it, we´re on top of the world, we rock..U.S.A, U.S.A, U.S.A.!!!!' The america the rest of the world has become so familiar with.