What if the data refuted the claim that significant innocents were being killed by drones, and proved them safer for bystanders than boots on the ground type operations? Is the info then more relevant or because it goes against what felt like the correct stance it would thusly be simply wrong anyway?
I'm not at all one who wants collateral damage in conflict. I don't want conflict in the first place. But collateral damage in military ops is definitely not new and to say any military member who has ever caused an innocent death is a war criminal is--a bit of a bold claim. I understand the sentiment but for various reasons military action has carried with it a wake of collateral damage, and so I feel the benchmark is to do as much as reasonable to minimize the collateral but maintain a buffer before going to war criminal status.
What if the data refuted the claim that significant innocents were being killed by drones, and proved them safer for bystanders than boots on the ground type operations? Is the info then more relevant or because it goes against what felt like the correct stance it would thusly be simply wrong anyway?
I'm not at all one who wants collateral damage in conflict. I don't want conflict in the first place. But collateral damage in military ops is definitely not new and to say any military member who has ever caused an innocent death is a war criminal is--a bit of a bold claim. I understand the sentiment but for various reasons military action has carried with it a wake of collateral damage, and so I feel the benchmark is to do as much as reasonable to minimize the collateral but maintain a buffer before going to war criminal status.
How is someone responsible for the death of even one innocent life using implements of war not a war criminal?
Imagine being a pilot of an attack plane and you take out an AA missile site bring run by rebel forces. Let's say thr same type of BUK system responsible for the downing of the Malaysian passenger jet. Legit target I would say.
Turns out one of the operator had a local girl there flirting with him for a little diversion from his days of boredom watching the equipment. And she was killed when your missile made a direct hit on this military equipment out in the forest away from all semblence of civilization.
Is that a crime? Is it her fault for hanging out near the hardware or personnel? Is it the AA operator's fault for inviting a friend to talk to him? Or are you, the pilot who launched the strike, at fault for trying to open up airspace so that you don't get a repeat of the Malaysian shoot down incident? Or is it the commander who decided to order the destruction of all AA systems in the area
That kind of morality doesn't fucking work in the real world occupied by real people.
The nature of modern, industrialized, globalized war is that every war action, and every war crime, is built on a chain of hundreds or thousands of people whose actions enable the war machine. Modern military forces, official or guerrilla, do not consist of distinct groups who visit discreet, personal violence on others directly with guns and blades. That is never how it worked, but it works even less like that now.
That AA operator does nothing more than twist some knobs and watch a blip on his screen vanish to protect his friends against violence. He is not a warrior in the traditional sense. He is a death technician whose machine kills people when he inputs the right numbers. From his perspective, he is absolutely right to put in those numbers; if he does not shoot down that plane, his comrades will die.
We don't have a beef with him. He's just a guy doing a job. However, lets say the army he works for kills a hundred people a day, and causes nontrivial economic disruption which will kill five hundred people a day. He does not personally do this, he sits in his truck bitching about the heat and watching his screens.
If you do not want 600 people to die tomorrow, you have to destroy his machine, so your planes can go and kill enough of his friends that they stop killing people. There is no way to destroy his machine without killing him. There may be a way to destroy his machine without killing bystanders in some circumstances, but it is not reliable and increases the risk that your own death technicians. As the operator knows this, and knows we can destroy his machine easily, he may park it near civilians so that our side hesitates to fire. If too many of your technicians die, you will not be able to stop his friends and it will all have been for nothing.
All war is a tragic. All war is terrible. But absolute pacifism is not a practical ideology, and war does not require the consent of all parties to commence. It sucks when bystanders die. It sucks when pilots die. It sucks when AA operators die. It sucks when soldiers die, even the soldiers of violent ideologies. It sucks when the civilians they kill die. When you try to draw a line in that mess, you find you have a really wide goddamn marker.
The leaders of our countries have looked at circumstances in the world and have decided that it is better that these people die than these people, or it is better that a certain group die than nontrivial economic activity in this area become disrupted. If you want to pretend to be an informed and politically active person, you have to be willing and able to talk about those circumstances and engage with the basic premise. "There shouldn't be war" is as useful a thing to say about violent conflict as "There shouldn't be scarcity" about economics.
There shouldn't be war, but there is, so we have to deal with it. Just as we have Economics which is devoted to managing scarcity. Do I want civilian casualties? Only as a funny play in Cards Against Humanity. Do I accept they will happen when we're trying to win a war? Yes. We've slowly reduced the number of innocent people we kill with each war and each new development in technology. We used to raze whole cities with bombing campaigns to destroy one to a few factories in that city. Now we're down to destroying a street market to take out a target. I call that progress really.
Comments
I'm not at all one who wants collateral damage in conflict. I don't want conflict in the first place. But collateral damage in military ops is definitely not new and to say any military member who has ever caused an innocent death is a war criminal is--a bit of a bold claim. I understand the sentiment but for various reasons military action has carried with it a wake of collateral damage, and so I feel the benchmark is to do as much as reasonable to minimize the collateral but maintain a buffer before going to war criminal status.
You selectively remember things you were right about, and selectively forget the times your assumptions were wrong.
Want to prove me wrong? Turns out you'd need A BUNCH OF DATA TO PROVE IT.
Black and white morality is a trap. Push it all the way to the end, and there are always complex gray areas.
Turns out one of the operator had a local girl there flirting with him for a little diversion from his days of boredom watching the equipment. And she was killed when your missile made a direct hit on this military equipment out in the forest away from all semblence of civilization.
Is that a crime? Is it her fault for hanging out near the hardware or personnel? Is it the AA operator's fault for inviting a friend to talk to him? Or are you, the pilot who launched the strike, at fault for trying to open up airspace so that you don't get a repeat of the Malaysian shoot down incident? Or is it the commander who decided to order the destruction of all AA systems in the area
The nature of modern, industrialized, globalized war is that every war action, and every war crime, is built on a chain of hundreds or thousands of people whose actions enable the war machine. Modern military forces, official or guerrilla, do not consist of distinct groups who visit discreet, personal violence on others directly with guns and blades. That is never how it worked, but it works even less like that now.
That AA operator does nothing more than twist some knobs and watch a blip on his screen vanish to protect his friends against violence. He is not a warrior in the traditional sense. He is a death technician whose machine kills people when he inputs the right numbers. From his perspective, he is absolutely right to put in those numbers; if he does not shoot down that plane, his comrades will die.
We don't have a beef with him. He's just a guy doing a job. However, lets say the army he works for kills a hundred people a day, and causes nontrivial economic disruption which will kill five hundred people a day. He does not personally do this, he sits in his truck bitching about the heat and watching his screens.
If you do not want 600 people to die tomorrow, you have to destroy his machine, so your planes can go and kill enough of his friends that they stop killing people. There is no way to destroy his machine without killing him. There may be a way to destroy his machine without killing bystanders in some circumstances, but it is not reliable and increases the risk that your own death technicians. As the operator knows this, and knows we can destroy his machine easily, he may park it near civilians so that our side hesitates to fire. If too many of your technicians die, you will not be able to stop his friends and it will all have been for nothing.
All war is a tragic. All war is terrible. But absolute pacifism is not a practical ideology, and war does not require the consent of all parties to commence. It sucks when bystanders die. It sucks when pilots die. It sucks when AA operators die. It sucks when soldiers die, even the soldiers of violent ideologies. It sucks when the civilians they kill die. When you try to draw a line in that mess, you find you have a really wide goddamn marker.
The leaders of our countries have looked at circumstances in the world and have decided that it is better that these people die than these people, or it is better that a certain group die than nontrivial economic activity in this area become disrupted. If you want to pretend to be an informed and politically active person, you have to be willing and able to talk about those circumstances and engage with the basic premise. "There shouldn't be war" is as useful a thing to say about violent conflict as "There shouldn't be scarcity" about economics.