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What Happens In Vegas Happens In Afghanistan
theodp writes "After the morning commute from his Las Vegas apartment, Air Force captain Sam Nelson sits in a padded chair inside a low, tan building in Nevada, controlling a heavily armed drone aircraft soaring over Afghanistan, prepared to kill another human being 7,500 miles away if necessary. Welcome to the surreal world of drone pilots, who have a front-row seat on war from half a world away. 'On the drive out here, you get yourself ready to enter the compartment of your life that is flying combat,' explained retired Col. Chris Chambliss. 'And on the drive home, you get ready for that part of your life that's going to be the soccer game.' No wonder why the Air Force is interested in the Xbox LIVE crowd and the Army's opened a new arcade recruitment center!"
Remembers me of the movie Toys (1992), A military general inherits a toy making company and begins making war toys, and recruiting kids to "play" a war simulation game that was in fact a remote control of the real thing. It took less than ten years to make it happen.
My other signature is a car
Sure, they can try to kill the pilot in Vegas... but that's a mainland murder and that's a whole lot easier to solve and capture them here. Furthermore, they've got to be here to do that.
Does it really qualify as "murder"? Isn't that just war?
There was a report on NPR about it a while back, and you pretty much captured the issue.
Also, these people watch the missile they launch until impact, in many ways it is more up-close and personal than flying a bomber.
That with the complete disconnect from surroundings (Killing people than going to the soccer game), is creating a new situation, that the full mental impact is not fully understood yet. But the drone pilots are being watched, and the military is aware that it is new, and the ways to help are likely to be somewhat different.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The rules of war have changed... the enemy isn't a state, it's a force of people loyal to a cult that believes a corrupted religion.
Corrupted religion? Lets see here we have Muslims on one side and Christians on the other so which side are you talking about. They both seem pretty corrupted to me.
Pick a side. It's easy (black and white). You can be the victor, or loser/slave to your enemy.
Is there a third side? Neither of the two sides I see are just black or white. They both have had varying grays at different points.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
The irony of military robots is that we are using them to enforce a global economic system that is based on forcing humans to do labor in exchange for the right to consume the fruits of industry. Why not just build robots to do the work directly instead? Why not use global networks to freely share information about how to make the world a better place that works for everyone? The same is true for nuclear missiles intended to fight over oil and land instead of using the same technologies to build nuclear power plants (or solar ones and wind ones) or to create self-replicating space habitats or seasteads for endless new land. We need to start thinking in 21st century terms now that we have 21st century technology. Otherwise, we will likely accidentally kill ourselves with the tools of abundance.
As Albert Einstein said:
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
Or further:
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/nuclear1.htm
"""
"Concern for man himself must always constitute the chief objective of all technological effort -- concern for the big, unsolved problems of how to organize human work and the distribution of commodities in such a manner as to assure that the results of our scientific thinking may be a blessing to mankind, and not a curse."
"""
Or more on how Einstein was more than the disconnected absent minded professor he is made out to be:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/eins-s03.shtml
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
It is not the nukes and drones that may kill us all eventually, it is the unrecognized irony.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Before 9/11, we didn't feel we had the God-Bless-American-Right to kill foreign terrorists without a trial. After 9/11, we suspended all those nice legalities and started butchering the bastards.
I don't know which is worse. All I know is I like America 2.0 a whole lot less than I liked the previous version of America.
John
RC airplane flyers already have planes with real-time video feeds and some of them even have head-tracking goggles. Of course, they tend to be much smaller and short-range than a military drone.
You can search Youtube for 'fpv flight': http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fpv+flight&search_type=&aq=f
One guy already weaponized one for the 4th of July: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBn1h0x-37E
I didn't say i blamed them. Piracy is and always will be an economic problem. A somali Pirate works for say 1 year, attacks a half a dozen ships captures one and his cut out of the bounty of several million is ~$100,000 dollars. it is the kind of money many in the USA wish they were making. The best part is if you are attacked and can't get away you put down your weapons, they capture you feed you better than you have eaten in months, and set you free.
as I said piracy is an economic problem. If taking a freighter hostage earns you more money easier than fishing in water polluted and over fished by others then people will go for it. An intelligent solution would be to setup fish farms under Somali control and to buy the product from them at current market price, People will go for the legitimate option if given a fair chance. it must be fair though.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
A POW status would state how you may and may not treat them.
as does the protected civilian status, there are rules, and human rights
I agree that we (USA) should not treat non-POWs without basic human rights and without dignity.
Good, and those things are meant to be ensured by the fourth geneva convention, which the US blindly ignores by claiming to invent their own new status.
But what really pisses me off is how our new administration wishes to grant these terrorists with the same constitutional protections they (Al-Qaeda) wish we never had.
But if you were to not treat them fairly according to your laws, would that not speak volumes about the US as a country, violating your own principles is a lot worse than anything al-qaeda could do to you, you become the monster.
In my opinion the terrorists succeeded, but only because of the US government terrifying it's own people for it's own ends.
Hell they could have had osama back in 2001 if they had just stopped bombing the crap out of afghanistan.
"I ask America not to kill us," pleaded Hussain Khan, who said he had lost four children in the raid.
To which bush simply said, no negotiations, we're doing it anyway. If you can actually support that kind of crap, you are more callous than I.
The number of innocent civilians killed by bush's wars is insane, makes 911 look like a drop in the bucket. But nobody cares, because it isn't them.
Convention favors supreme military force. It was written before people started using asymmetric warfare to fight aggressors that were using their military advance against others.
Yes. Asymmetric warfare militants are illegal according to Geneva convention, but it is the only way they can effectively fight against aggressor. You cover your advanced military ass with convention and hope that others will play according to your rules that are designed to work against them.
Your post is crack. You're taking perhaps one resistance movement in the whole of the German occupied WWII area, a more rural and sparsely populated area at that, and extrapolating from it to all resistance movements across europe. Including more urban, populated areas of western Europe and Poland. Your conclusions therefore are quite unsafe.
The rest of your post, your casual calculating away of the deaths of wholly innocent people (1/4 of those deaths directly attributable to the occupying powers, another quarter potentially in engagements in which occupying powers were a party) is just staggering. I hope you are young, and speak this way because you havn't yet had the time to fully develop your views. Otherwise, if you're older, I am disturbed by your lack of empathy for other human beings.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Bizarrely, there is some evidence that the pirates may actually be helping the fish around Somalia. Due to the pirates, foreign trawler fleets are no longer willing to enter the fishing grounds. Hence fish stocks are beginning to replenish themselves. I originally read about this in the economist, which will be behind a paywall, this was the best article I could find with a quick google: http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/a-13-2009-01-26-voa51-68761347.html
Terrorism is also about what you do outside of the fight. When you make videos showing people being tortured and beheaded -- soldiers, journalists, your own countrymen, tourists, etc -- that becomes part of your identity even though it's not directly part of the war. That's a big component of being a terrorist instead of a hero.
Has the US done similar things in the past? There's an argument to be made about things like Hiroshima. But there's also one to be made that since then, maybe for the first time, technology has made war become more humane, not more brutal. That's not the act of a terrorist.