U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

Aside from delusional Trump loyalists that have now flip-flopped and are praising the Taliban, most Americans overwhelmingly supported withdrawing years ago.

ClumsyPilot• 5 years ago

Firstly, any goal you support could be achieved wrongly by terrible means. I support stimulatinf the economy, but not by bringing back child labour

Secondly, there has been a complete failure of leadership in rebuilding afganistan and in communicating to the public that you can't just pack up and leave.

I just listened to the podcast with an afgan vet, he was there for 10 years. On the first year they shipped a hydroelectric turbine to install in a damn. On 10 year when he was leaving, the turbine was still sitting on the construction site, noone even unwrapped it.

guiriduro• 5 years ago

Is it cynical to think about all the rest of the suppressed material out of the public domain previously to reduce objections to maintaining a military involvement?

pvaldes2• 5 years ago

Is very reasonable, in fact.

noisy_boy• 5 years ago

Entirely dismissing that possibility given the timing would be naive.

Borrible• 5 years ago

No, it isn't.

It is realpolitik.

Nasty game for nasty people.

And it could lead to outrage and spontaneous attacks on civilians and the troops protecting them.

Well done, whatever are the reasons for publishing it now, initiated by which player ever.

f6v• 5 years ago

Because spending trillions of $ on war instead of other things isn't enough.

Zenst4• 5 years ago

A cynic would probably think this was intentionally leaked to stir up problems that will spill out into the west, leading towards a sentiment of history repeating itself.

Though sometimes the timing of things are just coincidences as many a horoscope has surely taught us about connecting dots that are not connected.

belorn• 5 years ago

The military method to define any male (and sometimes women) above a certain age as an combatant was leaked 2010. This is simply a reminder that the same indiscriminating warfare are continuing.

If anything this article reminds me of domestic terrorists that define a certain demographic as being enemy combatants and then goes to indiscriminate killing spree. The major difference seems to be that the military personal who actually operated the drones know that what they are doing is wrong, otherwise the room would not have gone silent when the two civilians and their child got killed. Then when it comes to write the report the two civilians becomes combatants and the killing get internally justified.

loonster4• 5 years ago

In certain areas of operation, yes. Anyone found in that area is considered hostile. I have not seen anything that would imply that every male in the entire country is considered an enemy combatant.

scoopertrooper2• 5 years ago

You think the U.S. government leaked videos of themselves bombing afghan civilians in the middle of tense negotiations with the Taliban?

radu_floricica• 5 years ago

Scrolled through the comments to upvote this, or write it if it wasn't already. If it's just leaked it's pretty obvious. If it's older, I still suspect it was dug up again on purpose, but it's less glaring.

yardie• 5 years ago

The withdrawal doesn't need more support. The public has been calling for withdrawal for years now. It's already popular. The only ones who still support staying are politicians, military suppliers, and the media.

ceilingcorner• 5 years ago

I wonder if Facebook Twitter etc. banning violent and bloody content has prevented the public from protesting these things more widely. It is well known that TV broadcasts of Vietnam led to outrage growing against that war.

Nursie• 5 years ago

Did they broadcast violent and bloody content from there?

Genuine question. The downside to fb/Twitter etc allowing bloody/violent content would be that you’d get gore trolls and it would turn into /b

baybal2• 5 years ago

They did. Facebook, and Twiter both have plenty of it. The enforcement is obviously very selective.

The selective enforcement is much harder to prove than selective endorsement, and much sneakier at influencing the public opinion.

BeFlatXIII• 5 years ago

Downside for the Twitter/FB stockholders, for sure. Downside for everyone else? In the short term, also yes. In the long term, total upside as we all log out due to said gore trolls.

pvaldes2• 5 years ago

They could just close the comments for violent content that should be seen and let the still valuable testimony sink in a respectful silence.

cheschire• 5 years ago

Pretty sure the protests during Vietnam were just as large, if not more so.

Journalism finds a way, like internet, and genetically modified dinosaurs.

quietbritishjim• 5 years ago

Pretty sure the protests during Vietnam were just as large

That is the parent comment's point: there was more graphic coverage of the Vietnam available to a typical viewer, so the feeling against it was stronger.

pjc502• 5 years ago

The Iraq/Afghanistan war protests were large at the start, tapered off, and became a non-issue after a few years. Especially in the middle when we were "winning".

Few care about the cost to Afghans. The cost to Westerners has been fairly well hidden from discussion.

Laremere• 5 years ago

In a similar vein, I wonder if medical privacy laws are hurting us in this pandemic. If every time the hospitals filled up with patients, camera crews went through and documented all of the people suffering and dying, would those who aren't taking the pandemic seriously have their mind swayed? Obviously those medical privacy laws exist for a reason, but perhaps there should be more effort to ethically document suffering?

In both cases, as much as I like to think facts are what sway my opinion, an emotional connection is far likelier to motivate action.

EMM_386• 5 years ago

There are many documentary videos inside ERs during the pandemic. They blur the faces of everyone who has not consented to be on camera.

In one I recently saw, they interview some very sick patients. They have to use walkie-talkies to speak to them from outside the room. Some of them are having a lot of trouble breathing but still say they don't regret getting the vaccine as they don't trust it.

Videos like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu2J8zRftJE

This particular one is closer to the start of the pandemic but there are numerous others.

Bayart• 5 years ago

That form of sanitization came from traditional media and civil society.

cm2187• 5 years ago

The mandatory draft probably did more than the coverage.

kypro• 5 years ago

Some of the horrific things I've seen on sites like 4Chan are IMO one of the reasons I'm so empathic and concerned about stuff like this. A few months ago now I saw a really horrific murder there and it messed me up for weeks. I was visibly distant that night I watch it and my girlfriend asked me what was wrong. When I tried to explain I realised there were just no words I could use to invoke a similar emotional response or concern about what occurred.

The 9/11 attacks were awful, but I think part of the reason there was such a strong emotional response was simply because for the most part the media showed us exactly what happened. We saw people dead and others desperately trying to escape. We saw the sacrifices emergency responders had to make. We heard from the heartbroken parents who would never see their child again... So yeah, I think you're right, and I'd even go further to say I think it's probably a duty to watch content like this and does us a disservice when the media sanitises terror attacks (such as the ones which have happened in Europe more recently) when they report on them. As awful as it sounds you need to see parents looking at their now deceased and blooded child to even begin to understand the unbelievable suffering involved in these events. Whenever someone says to me something like "terror attacks aren't a big problems, it's just x number of deaths" you know they're saying that because they're getting sanitised information from the media because that isn't a possible any feeling human could have if they saw the suffering involved. I know a similar unemotional rationales are used in support of drone strikes, and I accept the arguments for against their use are complex, but at the very least there needs to be far more caution and accountability. If there is one thing videos of drone strikes have shown me is that there is currently a total disregard for the loss of innocent human lives by people who know there will be zero consequences for their actions.

kzrdude3• 5 years ago

The journalist seems reckless for publishing a photo of the journal. Transcribe that to protect your source.

h2odragon• 5 years ago

"protect your source?" We don't do that no more. Leakers are either heroes whose integrity must be honored and anonymity protected, or traitors who should be hounded beyond legal authority. Depending on who likes what they said.

cies2• 5 years ago

accidental killing of children

On purpose is a war crime now, so it has to be accidental.

Starting/continuing a war is not accidental though. It sure can be baseless (imho most if not all recent US wars were baseless).

nceqs32• 5 years ago

The war on ISIS? I heard Raqqa was lovely under their control.

avh02• 5 years ago

I'm not saying you're wrong, but this might (obvi, wild speculation) just be a premature version of: "I heard kabul was great under the taliban"

That said - yeah, I'm glad ISIS's great swoop was thwarted.

cies2• 5 years ago

The war on ISIS? I heard Raqqa was lovely under their control.

You heard something does not make it a good reason to go to war.

Some neighbourhoods of the US are "said to be lovely /s" but does that warrant an invasion?

ISIS took hold of places in Syria because Assad was facing an "attempt to replace" by the US.

ubavic• 5 years ago

I wonder will this hatred ever end; I wonder and worry my friend; I wonder; I wonder, wonder don't you? - S. Rodriguez

A4ET8a8uTh02• 5 years ago

Can someone explain the origins of the slang for 'charger'? That one would not occur to me.

torstenvl2• 5 years ago

We didn't use this term in Iraq, so I wouldn't call it "military jargon for child" like the article does.

It is common for units to come up with code words for various things, especially when the topic is emotionally charged or could be used for propaganda or intel. For example, almost nobody would use the term "FKIA" over the radio, even on a secure channel; they might say "flowers" instead.

2OEH8eoCRo06• 5 years ago

River City = reduced comms = something very bad happened, probably KIA

Toutouxc• 5 years ago

What's "FKIA"?

rendall• 5 years ago

Probably from "charge" in its sense of something to take care of

eurasiantiger3• 5 years ago

It means someone who starts running towards a group of soldiers. This may mean they are carrying explosives, but it may just be a play to get the soldiers to shoot an unarmed child in broad daylight.

hermannj314• 5 years ago

If that is the case, a charger is someone that poses a potential threat to a service member due to physical proximity. Turning around and using that term to refer to a kid on the back of a motorcycle you killed from thousand of miles away with an errant drone strike seems disingenuous.

Is the idea to pollute the record of history by using the term incorrectly?

perihelions2• 5 years ago

This reads like an AI-generated translation. It looks like the source that they're plagiarizing is this Daily Mail article:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9924567/US-drone-pi...

The points of difference have a strong smell of machine translation. E.g. "Killing for the sake of killing" turns into "I’ll kill you for the killing"; "Connecting Vets" becomes "Veterinary connection".

@dang This article should probably replace the submitted URL (edit: or alternatively, that article in the top reply comments)

related discussion thread: (identifying abuse of machine translation in published journal papers)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107614 ("Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science")

adjkant2• 5 years ago

From another comment chain (credit to @belter), this seems like the original source: https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-america-fa...

Comment chain (along with archive link for EU access): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299929

Y-bar• 5 years ago

This site isn't currently available in the EU

Do you happen to know another source or archived version?

Edit: thanks for the updated links!

perihelions2• 5 years ago

I've edited my comment above to clarify an ambiguity. The Daily Mail article isn't the original source of the news story, but it's the textual source that the submitted URL is plagiarizing off of.

earnubs• 5 years ago

This site isn't currently available in the EU

but i'm in the UK!!1ones

neom• 5 years ago

Given the video in the link that you sent - I wouldn't say that it's "accidental" - they said they killed anyone who met the "criteria" and the "criteria" was anyone who touched a walki talki because the Talian has taken the phones offline and they suspected ISIS was communicating via walki talki. This was described as basically killing for the sake of killing (agree) - but accidental makes it sound a lot less sinister.

belter4• 5 years ago

No it's not, see:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210825045512/https://www.audac...

ricardobeat2• 5 years ago

Note for other readers: “no it’s not” refers to the Daily Mail not being the original source.

The submitted link (eminetra.co.uk) does look like a ML-generated copy.

belter4• 5 years ago

@dang

Thinking better about it...per suggestion of perihelions maybe change to original source:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210825045512/https://www.audac...

or the Daily Mail link?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9924567/US-drone-pi...

Zenst4• 5 years ago

When we often look at drones and the advent of AI and the fear of automated killing drones but lets take another perspective. AI that assists in preventing innocents being killed. Still manually controlled but an AI to override hostile action when it deems it wrong. We all focus upon AI to identify and select targets, but an AI to help identify and prevent innocents being impacted - surely that approach would be a worthy goal? After all - no military want's collateral damage.

bserge• 5 years ago

Sadly, you'd be wrong about that last one.

Even in cases where they would want as few casualties as possible, I believe no military would want some "pos tech" telling them what to do (and especially what not to do).

Zenst4• 5 years ago

I believe no military would want some "pos tech" telling them what to do (and especially what not to do).

https://www.wired.com/story/pentagon-inches-toward-letting-a...

Also many an anti rocket/missile system that is automated and AI is (maybe already is in some aspects of tracking) being worked upon.

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/10/7/p...

So whilst the step towards automated weapons of destruction does seem inevitable, there is clearly more acceptance of weapons for preventing lives ending unfairly already.

pjmlp2• 5 years ago

I rather avoid an Oblivion like future.

Zenst4• 5 years ago

Yes, many do seem to worry about AI more than nuclear weapons - more so if they even cross streams so too speak.

But I do wonder how much of things are driven by worst case hoilloywood visualsations of things. Certainly the whole cold war and peoples mentalities, was very much media driven from the fear aspect. Will AI share the same and will we get to the stage that we see anti AI groups form and the term and history of Luddite gets revised!

Certainly many worry's, but also opportunities. Certainly don't want any AI working out a way to game Asimov's rules of robotics.

squarefoot2• 5 years ago

The worst part about the use of drones is not the collateral killing of civilians and their children; if done far away it has in the long run next to zero impact on the perception of the war among the attackers families. By using drones, the attackers are safe; their families won't mourn their beloved ones who won't return back from war zone, therefore they won't experience what war really is about, which has nothing to do with heroism and defending the homeland and other propagandistic idiocy commonly depicted in war movies. Every country should count their losses after a war, including winners. If we take away that, we eliminate the number one thing that can discourage the creation of an eternal state of war, so all is left is 100% business, which is something the weapons industry and their elected puppets in charge would absolutely love.

secondaryacct• 5 years ago

One would say: why isnt Afghanistan sending drones to Phoenix or San Diego? What led to this country / group of combattant to be so behind.

Im French and I live in China with a child born here. The two militaries I paid taxes to maintain are able to find ways to resist US aggression to a point where it would become really painful to treat us like they treated Afghanistan, and we are just as old as Afghanistan.

At some point, these people need to move their asses and at least ask for our help. We understand the US is a huge threat to most of us, we're ready to help, if only you make simple compromises.

But no, they ll spend their time in teenage wet dream, exploiting their population, provocking America before being ready to resist them. So they take the drone and we roll our eyes - how can people in 2021 be so blind to how to build a country...

scoopertrooper2• 5 years ago

An AI can't see more than the human eye looking at the same video feed. They need higher quality optics or lower flying drones.

It's not like this is a hard problem for a human to solve given an image of sufficient quality.

gus_massa3• 5 years ago

The problem is that you imagine that the AI will have the final word, but I imagine that the drone operator will have two button. One to launch the missile and another to override the AI block. And they will just get use to press the two buttons just in case.

On the other hand, AI can be used to identify possible targets, and the drone operator must just click to confirm the strike. The risk is that it's possible to combine an AI with a low threshold to report possible cases and internal rules that encourage drone operators just to confirm any AI report.

x86_64Ubuntu2• 5 years ago

It's not a worthy goal, because that's not how it's ever going to be fielded. The West has always used its tech to attack entities with far less resources and far less ability to strike back. So the end result is that we use tech to kill more people "because the computer said so". The kids in this article were killed over a radio, not something that is uncommon in Afghanistan and would probably culminate in whole villages being wiped out.

SandunGunn• 5 years ago

An old soldiers take: https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gallimore_why_it_matters_ho...

In summary drones make it to easy for the countries like the UK and the US to kill with no risk to their own service men. The missiles are not magic, there will be collateral damage. Solders on the ground could mitigate this

inglor_cz2• 5 years ago

"kill with no risk to their own service men"

Reducing the risk to your own troops is a fundamental concern of most armies out there and has been for millennia.

Robot warfare is a logical endpoint of such development. I cannot see anyone opting out of this race and remaining militarily relevant.

sangnoir3• 5 years ago

Robot warfare is a logical endpoint of such development

Robot vs. Robot is unlikely to settle wars - we may as well play chess rather than wage war and humans have too much bloodlust to solve differences that way. What is likely to happen is having country A's robots in country B's homeland killing humans, while battling country B's robots in A's homeland. What constitutes a "war front" will be really confusing when the next war between great powers comes.

lixtra• 5 years ago

The missiles are not magic, there will be collateral damage. Solders on the ground could mitigate this

I have no data about this but my gut tells me a drone could operate more safely than a ground team. The drone pilot is under much less stress while foot soldiers have to make live and death decisions in split seconds.

Also drone strikes are easier to audit than opaque small team operations in enemy territory.

ricardobeat2• 5 years ago

Having watched a few documentaries on the war, from multiple periods, my first thought was “who did they target with these drone strikes?” seeing as they usually had no idea who or where the enemy was.

The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes.

amelius• 5 years ago

Their defense will probably be something like: but it's one step less reckless than just throwing bombs.

wayoutthere5• 5 years ago

We need to seriously examine our own morality for allowing these ghouls to basically genocide brown people.

We are absolutely the baddies; between Iraq, Afghanistan and our air strikes on Syria, Libya, and Yemen during the same period killed 1 million civilians. We’re within an order of magnitude of the Holocaust, and we all just pretend everything is ok. I really don’t know why there aren’t more discussions of how this is basically the Islamic Holocaust.

salawat• 5 years ago

Until you can actually pierce the National Security curtain to have a frank discussion involving details on Ways and Means in the Intelligence Community, this is a "pointless act of hyperbolic futility". The answer will just be "Need to know, and you don't" or some other platitude. As what you're asking in the end is what are the inputs that drive these decision making processes. This will never be a public conversation.

Note, I think it's an absolutely sound and necessary thing to happen, I just never see it happening.

crazy_horse• 5 years ago

Genuine question - how do you get that 1 million figure?

arminiusreturns2• 5 years ago

It's not about morality per se, and rather about understanding the people, organizations, and mechanisms that allowed it to happen. Afghanistan wasn't my war (Iraq), but I've spent most of my lifes free time since I got my brain back (left the military) tackling this topic.

I think it was Ge. Wesley Clark or maybe Col. Wilkerson who said something to the effect of "There was a policy coup, some very hard nosed people took over and never informed the rest of us".

Its true, there was a policy coup, but I've traced it much further back. Besides the JFK episode, the biggest one was Woodrow Wilson and his handlers.

A good examination of these things though is uncomfortable and difficult even for those of us with a passion for truth, but the public doesn't want to hear about it. The elite don't want to discuss it (often because they make money off it). The media wont discuss it because it is controlled by the same people that pushed us into war.

I keep coming back to the media angle, and I also think thats one of the reasons for the increasing attacks on the freedom of the internet; essentially the oligarchs finally understood that as the last bastion of anarchistic freedom of thought, it was their primary threat.

blitzar• 5 years ago

“We killed two innocent men and a charger,” the U.S. official wrote in a personal journal that day, using the military jargon “charger,” which means child.

Got to wonder why the need to replace a 5 character 1 syllable word with a longer 7 character 2 syllable word, a little easier to stomach than saying, writing, or feeling like you just killed a child?

ulrikrasmussen• 5 years ago

Just a guess, but it could also be because "charger" is easier to decipher over a bad radio connection.

didntknowya2• 5 years ago

same reason casinos uses chips instead of cash. it reduces the emotional connection by introducing an apathetic layer.

dmos62• 5 years ago

Checkout Ben Anderson's 2 part ~30 minute report from Afghanistan for Vice from around 10 years ago [0][1]. He was embedded with British troops and ANA during a patrol with a lot of gun fights. The British strafed an empty field, almost bombed themselves twice and once an Apache launched a Hellfire missile into a compound with British and ANA troops in it and hit a building where a family with small children were hiding. Noone was hurt luckily. My point being, it's not always malice: sometimes it's just a chain of people making small mistakes and bad decisions that end up adding up.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yOI_WVGdY

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1JNuFPiTbs

CyanBird• 5 years ago

My point being, it's not always malice

Correct, yet the malice lies on said situations being allowed to continue time and time again, and fester

sandos• 5 years ago

Sounds very much like "Generation kill". Soldiers are happy when one day, finally, they kill more enemy combatants than civilians!

2OEH8eoCRo06• 5 years ago

It's never malice. Nobody goes, "hey, this compound is 100% only women and children, let's bomb it."

Reality: "A patrol nearby said they took fire from the compound at such and such grid coordinates" It gets bombed. Turns out the unit on the ground was mistaken.

War is hell. War criminals should be punished. But it's not a war crime to make a mistake. I love seeing these posts because it's clear that almost nobody here has experienced war. My ROEs were ridiculously strict on the ground in southern Afghanistan.

It's important to have some context as well:

According to the United Nations, the Taliban and its allies were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009, 75% in 2010 and 80% in 2011.

So sure. Both sides have killed civilians. But one side tries it's best to be accountable and limit human suffering while still carrying out missions. The alternative is to not be there at all.

sp3322• 5 years ago

But in this case it is malice. The Taliban destroyed cell phone towers so walkie-talkies were extremely common. Then the US declared every man with a walkie-talkie was a legitimate target.

sixothree• 5 years ago

If it's a choice between malice and incompetence then I say incompetence is malice.

didntknowya2• 5 years ago

it's not malice. it's more the recklessness and carefree attitude towards collateral damage just because of the war mindset. like "looks like a threat, let's bomb it in case. if any innocents get hurt everyone will understand it's just a casualty of war"

ghostwriter• 5 years ago

The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes.

nothing new, there's a well known quote from a former NSA/CIA director: "We kill people based on metadata" [1]

[1] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...

owlbite• 5 years ago

Before they were killing people with two-way radios they were killing sim cards the algorithm said should die :( (or so I hear).

syshum• 5 years ago

> seeing as they usually had no idea who or where the enemy was.

CIA considers any Adult Male over 16 and under 65 to be "the enemy" in most of these places...

thaumasiotes2• 5 years ago

These should be considered war crimes.

It's not a war crime unless you lose the war.

Splendor• 5 years ago

The US didn't exactly "win".

moksly• 5 years ago

America’s drones have made children afraid of blue skies in more than 7 countries over the course of the past two decades.

I’m not sure anyone really knows why or what has been achieved by it.

mleonhard• 5 years ago

Google is complicit. In 2017-2018, Google Cloud division developed software for the US military to watch drone footage and classify things like "man with a radio". Diane Greene, Urs Holzle, and Jeff Dean got up and lied about it to me and other Googlers in a meeting in April 2018. Specifically, they said it was only a $9M project, but it was already negotiated to $18M and on track for $270M of extensions. They also said a lot of words trying to rationalize their moral failure, greed, and callousness.

eurasiantiger3• 5 years ago

Do you know what keyhole can do?

actually_a_dog• 5 years ago

You know the worst thing about this, and everything else that's happened in Afghanistan in the past 20 years? The Taliban unconditionally surrendered in 2001: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/08/18/taliban-surren...

Talk about a waste: of lives, of money, of time, of effort that could have gone to far more productive purposes.

dayofthedaleks• 5 years ago

According to today's NYTimes, the proffered surrender wasnt quite unconditional - the Taliban requested amnesty in exchange for disarming.

Rumsfeld turned them down on the pretense of demanding unconditional surrender. My suspicion is America's persisting collective rage and the firehose of defense spending were beyond anyone's control at that point.

bzbarsky• 5 years ago

Per https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/07/news/rumsfeld-rejects-pla... which I think is describing the same incident it was not an "unconditional surrender", though it was somewhat close: the conditions were about immunity from prosecution or punishment for Mullah Mohammed Omar (Taliban's leader at the time).

coliveira• 5 years ago

The casualties of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars were mostly on civilians. It is not war, it is a genocide or muslim people because they don't want to let the West take their land/resources.

marcus_holmes• 5 years ago

A Hellfire missile apparently costs $150K [0].

Given that it's apparently OK to launch one of these at a single suspected enemy informant, couldn't we have saved a lot of time, money and lives by just bribing the entire population of Afghanistan to not do things that the West doesn't like?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire

merpnderp• 5 years ago

Infrastructure and industry were the solution to Afghanistan. A tribe which owns a large share in the local mining operation is a tribe which does its best to keep the peace.

The US could have built a lot of roads and propped up a lot of barely profitable enterprises with the money spent on all those military operations.

randomopining• 5 years ago

So like 30-50k per person for the total cost of the war. Or 1.6k-3k per year. I guess that's doable but it's probably not a lot of money. Plus the power structures still want to take advantage of any situation, it's not like 3k is going to pacify a warlord in the country.

So nope let's go with teh hellfire.

gccs• 5 years ago

No. The purpose of the war is to fund defense contractors and create jobs back at home. Giving the money directly to afganis would not do that.

dpatru• 5 years ago

The money for a missile could be given to the population, but then it would not go to the missile’s manufacturer. But the whole point of the war is to give money to arms makers. They are the only ones who benefit from the war and who lobby for it.

rscoots7• 5 years ago

just bribing the entire population of Afghanistan to not do things that the West doesn't like?

Lol we also did that.

MichaelMoser123• 5 years ago

No, most of the foreing aid got stolen by the corrupt Afghan government. see https://thediplomat.com/2021/08/taliban-take-kabul-via-path-... . They didn't even pay their servicemen, that's the reason for the quick surrender. Interesting why very few in the US are asking how they could spend more than a trillion of the taxpayers money without any oversight.

queuesorcs4• 5 years ago

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

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

whydid• 5 years ago

How much accountability do remote pilots have for incidents like this? I.e., is there an ammo budget? What happens if a pilot decides to "go GTA" and destroy things for fun?

queuesorcs4• 5 years ago

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

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

robertlagrant2• 5 years ago

"go GTA"

Is this an actual thing people think drone operators do? Surely the same that would happen to any military personnel who did the same with their weapons, except with a drone there's perfect camera footage to evidence it as well.

illgenr• 5 years ago

Would you still have signed up if you knew then what you know now?

queuesorcs4• 5 years ago

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

juanani• 5 years ago

What's the mood like? Are people excited to plug in and kill the baddies? Or is it just another day in the office yada yada Mondays are the worst? Do you prefer operators with previous gaming experience? Were there ever any operators that refused mission orders? how hard would it be for someone(higher ranking) to override an operators mission?

dilippkumar• 5 years ago

Given this is HN -

What did you see in your time in the military regarding drones and drone operations that don't have good equivalents in the civilian world (and that isn't classified and has real civilian world uses)?

Similarly, what does the civilian world do better?

Anything you wish someone would build to make life easier?

noxer• 5 years ago

Whole section about "Trump ended a rule requiring reports of all deaths from drone attacks" an not a single word about the fact that Obama made thous rules just before he left office.

This is not Journalism, if you fall for such political theater and intentionally placed stones for the next administration to look bad you are not a real journalist.

PS: I'm from Europe you can down vote anyway if you want ;)

iJohnDoe• 5 years ago

Think about this for a second.

Your family is walking into Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods and all get killed by a missile from the sky. Or you send your children off to school and the school gets accidentally hit by a missile. Killed in an instant and the family of those victims listed above have no idea why and have zero recourse.

If this started happening on US soil on a daily basis, I wonder if more people would care. The top comment here is talking about the article text and AI vs. the topic of the article.

FTA - 3,797 we’re killed by drones. They were killed by drones they had no chance to defend themselves against.

watwut3• 5 years ago

To be fair, civilians have no way to defend themselves against any even semi organized army.

nexuist2• 5 years ago

This did happen on US soil: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/move-1985-bo...

Police brutality is our domestic version of drone strikes. No chance to defend yourself and zero recourse.

Do we care an adequate amount about it? Maybe, although it seems to not be the culture's cup of tea right now as much as it was in 2020.

U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

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