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Behind the Scenes With America's Drone Pilots
An anonymous reader writes "As President Obama meets with advisors on an Afghanistan strategy today (who are now leaning more toward Joe Biden's more-drones policy), and even as Al Qaeda claims it's not all that scared of drones, the new issue of Esquire takes the first real in-depth look at the American military's UAV build-up. Defense geek Brian Mockenhaupt spends some time on the ground in Afghanistan, as well as back at the Pentagon, where the pilots ('more like snipers than fighter pilots') are playing a kind of role-playing game, getting to know terrorists' daily ins and outs. Looks like these Reaper drones are the real wave of the future, eh?"
What do you mean?
http://www.justnews.com/news/14708354/detail.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/business/worldbusiness/27iht-drone.4.11474996.html
http://gizmodo.com/5167853/the-draganflyer-x6-uav-police-edition
Except for FAA approval, there isn't much stopping our police state to use them.
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They're bad because one of the reasons people, soldiers included, don't like war is due to the risk of being killed. If you remove that you also remove the only motivation to stop a war or just not start it. The geek in me loves the tech involved in drones development (minus the weaponry) but my human half is scaried as hell because they represent one more step towards an endless war scenario.
Air power never wins wars, and that is what drones are. It is important to have boots on the ground, especially in a counterinsurgency campaign. For most insurgencies, the recruitment pool is the citizenry within the country who are unsatisfied and discontented. If a counterinsurgent force is relying primarily on impersonal methods such as drones or air power, the local populace will never see or interact with the foot soldiers of the counterinsurgency. The only way you can beat an insurgency is by interacting with the populace within the country, to galvanize support for the counterinsurgency campaign. If all you do is bomb people from the air you are going to get eh exact opposite effect. Without boots on the ground, you will not get proper intel. As such, there is a higher likelihood of collateral damage. When surprise attacks indiscriminately kill both combatants and civilians, you lose what little support you may have had. You have to go out there into the bush at the squad or platoon level and interact with local leaders, repair damage from both insurgent and counterinsurgent attacks, give little kids food/medical attention. You build up a rapport with people, and they will work with you. Otherwise, they are more likely to see you as the enemy instead of the insurgents. It may not be the newest, sexiest piece of technology, but it works. And you cant be afraid to have people out in harm's way. You have to have men getting in firefights, so the locals see you actually taking an interest in protecting their towns, their fields, their families. If this doesn't happen, you will lose.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
From page 4:
Indeed, they see many things meant to be secret, like men having sex with sheep and goats in the deep of night. I first heard this from infantry soldiers and took it as rumor, but at Bagram I met a civilian contractor who works in UAV operations. "All the time," he said. "They just don't think we can see them."
Better known as 318230.
The fear factor isn't from noise. It's from never seeing what platform delivered the munition. You sit a drone up at 25-30k feet, the target wont ever hear it or see it. The survivors of an attack only know that the hand of God came down upon them without any warning, no sound, and their buddies got vaporized. THIS is where you get the fear factor. The knowledge that it could come at any time, and there is no way to know when. In fact, you almost have to assume that there is a drone over you at all times, and that all it would take is the push of a button to wipe you out.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It's a flight sim "game" with real death for someone at the end of the day, not "pretend death and go post my frag score on slashdot". They receive flight hours towards their career gates because the training and experience to perform this mission is specialized and expensive to generate, so that providing a solid incentive path to bring and keep high quality personnel in the career field is important.
Bullshit. They're evil for killing civilians, not cowards. Attacking the enemy where he is strong isn't bravery, it's fucking stupidity. Sometimes killing civilians is justified either as collateral damage or intentionally. e.g. had German families started settling in France during WWII occupation you can bet your ass they would have been fair targets.
In the case of blowing up some random people in a bazaar for some obscure religious difference then it's evil - but it's not cowardly. Giving your life for something intentionally is the very opposite of cowardly. But if you think dramatic terms like "coward's way out" make it sound worse, go for it.