What's It Like To Pilot a Drone? a Bit Like Call of Duty 170
Velcroman1 writes "Teenagers raised on Call of Duty and Halo might relish flying a massive Predator drone — a surprisingly similar activity. Pilots of unmanned military aircraft use a joystick to swoop down into the battlefield, spot enemy troop movements, and snap photos of terror suspects, explained John Hamby, a former military commander who led surveillance missions during the Iraq War. 'You're always maneuvering the airplane to get a closer look,' Hamby said. 'You're constantly searching for the bad guys and targets of interest. When you do find something that is actionable, you're a hero.' Yet a new study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found real-life drone operators can become easily bored. Only one participant paid attention during an entire test session, while even top performers spent a third of the time checking a cellphone or catching up on the latest novel. The solution: making the actual drone mission even more like a video game."
Insert PC vs. console flamewar here (Score:3)
Solution to issues of boredom? Allow mouse+keyboard!
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Reason for innocent civilian deaths? Inaccuracies of using a controller instead of keyboard and mouse. I could target that Hellfire on a bathroom window, whereas those Xbox boys could only hit the broad side of a barn if there were women and children in it!
Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? (Score:4, Insightful)
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As opposed to the long bow or catapult, where you don't necessarily see the other guy ever. Only in the last decade has warfare become impersonal.
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At least you're out on a field where the other guy can shoot back, not in a cozy armchair, texting with one hand and bombing people-shaped-pixels with the other.
Re:Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
At least you're out on a field where the other guy can shoot back, not in a cozy armchair,
Close contact with the enemy does not make one dispassionate, and less likely to commit war crimes. It is exactly the opposite. A grunt on a patrol probably hasn't slept more than a few hours in the last week. He is hungry, and tired. His whole body aches with fatigue and itches with bug bites. His canteens are empty and his eyes sting with sweat turned to brine. Just yesterday he saw his best friend get his foot blown off by by a "toe popper". You think he is going to make more ethical life and death decisions than a well-rested, well-fed operator in an air conditioned van in Nevada who is having his every decision recorded? The depersonalization of war is a GOOD THING. Mistakes are still made, but we do not see any intentional atrocities like we did at My Lai, or No Gun Ri.
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Ah, so that's why Drone operators never fire on civilians, funerals, first responders (look up 'double tap') or people who look like they would look at them funny at some point if they were ever in the same place.
Further, I seem to recall bomb strikes in the Vietnam war (by well-rested, well-protected pilots in airconditioned cockpits) that would most likely be classified as war crimes had anyone but american soldiers perpetrated them.
No, the impersonalisation of war is not a good thing. The end of war woul
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"War is not nice."
Period. Dancing around the particulars doesn't change this fact.
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At least you're out on a field where the other guy can shoot back, not in a cozy armchair,
Close contact with the enemy does not make one dispassionate, and less likely to commit war crimes. It is exactly the opposite. A grunt on a patrol probably hasn't slept more than a few hours in the last week. He is hungry, and tired. His whole body aches with fatigue and itches with bug bites. His canteens are empty and his eyes sting with sweat turned to brine. Just yesterday he saw his best friend get his foot blown off by by a "toe popper". You think he is going to make more ethical life and death decisions than a well-rested, well-fed operator in an air conditioned van in Nevada who is having his every decision recorded? The depersonalization of war is a GOOD THING. Mistakes are still made, but we do not see any intentional atrocities like we did at My Lai, or No Gun Ri.
If your soldiers are committing atrocities against civilians, you need to train and monitor your soldiers better.
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I have a suspicion that you have never a) actually served in a military, b) never been shot at or c) never had to clean up your friend's blood after he has been while next to you.
It amazes me how many people who have not had these experiences are willing to put in their comments (paid for in the blood of those who have). Great idea - join up for 2 years with an Army and see what the world is like instead of sitting in your comfy chair posting to slashdot.
Guess what? I've never been the Commandant of a fucking Concentration Camp but I still know they were evil.
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On the other hand, if you fuck up because you got bored grinding out the full-bird-colonel level, you don't get to restore from the last save point, you can't even reroll a new character. Yes, rebuying some of your Steam games if you get caught cheating or griefing is rough, but it's nothing compared to a permaban in the form of a d
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There is a rather lengthy and complicated targeting process to get authorization to fire
Flip a coin?
...more like,
"DR705 to JTAC, recce complete. Request clearance to go hot on target?"
"Stand by DR705. (shake, shake, shake.) Ah, 'It is decidedly so.' DR705 you are cleared hot on target, cleared to release."
"Copy JTAC.Copy: cleared to go hot on target, cleared to release. Thank goodness. Last time it came back, 'Reply hazy, try again.'"
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It's not DR705's fault JTAC is a dickbag.
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It's not DR705's fault JTAC is a dickbag.
"Signs point to yes"
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I wouldn't want to be on the other end of your so called targetting "process":
http://www.cryptome.org/2012/01/0094.pdf [cryptome.org]
This was a MANNED AIRCRAFT flying a mission in support of troops under fire. This NOT an example of the targeting process for drones the GPP was referring to. If fact it is the opposite: an example of what happens when you DON'T use drones, and you don't have the review and dispassionate decision making that they enable.
Re:Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Death was ALWAYS acceptable, done up close and personal.
Have some Kampuchea, Rwanda, the Holocaust, etc.
Also, "cannons" called, citing prior art.
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What if the pilots were required to distinguish between obvious non-targets, such as children, and people with weapons or else face a stiff punishment, such as time in the jail? Oh, what, you're not interested in being a pilot now that a mistake leading to "collateral damage" is now actually more than you losing points in your game?
Oh, that's right, everyone the drone hits is a enemy combatant. So, I guess there is no motivation to worry about what one shoots at.
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Oh, that's right, everyone the drone hits is a enemy combatant. So, I guess there is no motivation to worry about what one shoots at.
Not since Wikileaks was shut down.
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There's nothing wrong with Islam itself. The problem is jackasses trying to push Shariah or Islamic Law on others.
You make laws with morality, not morality with laws.
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And when a known, verified, confirmed, visually-identified terrorist leader/bomb maker/etc. surrounds himself with his various wives and children with the express purpose of using them as human shields, what do you do then?
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This is why laser weapons would be so nice to have.
Point and zap. Minimal collateral.
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There is no guilt. The "enemy" is no longer people, but pixels rendered in false colour. No need to justify or otherwise rationalize murder. Neat. Welcome to the Ender's game.
I am not anti-drone when they are used responsibly. But I did find this quote from the article a bit provocative:
Cummings says the secret could be to make drone missions work more like a video game. That’s the opposite of the trend in the automotive industry, where distracted driving can lead to more frequent accidents and higher fatalities.
Emphasis mine. Are they worried more about the fatalities (bad guys dying) or the accidents (good guys dying)?
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Who is the good guy?
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Who is the good guy?
Good point. I think the word he needs is "skilled".
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Re:Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Elimination of your "enemy" as a tool for solving problems (internal, like keeping power, economic growth or resource acquisition, or external, such as threats from belligerent neighbours) was probably the most straightforward solution when level of technological and social development was comparatively low. The question that needs to be asked and answered is how appropriate is it today, and is there a better way.
It is a long topic, and Slashdot isn't the right place to pour one's soul out in a long treati
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It wasn't that many generations ago that our forefathers even believed that if you died home safe in bed and not in the heat of battle that you would never see the afterlife and your soul might simply vanish.
Were your forefathers Vikings? It's been a long while since anyone else believed this.
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There has never been any guilt where it counts. You forget that the people who start wars have traditionally not been the ones who do the dirty work. Yes, Kings used to actually fight in wars, but they used to consider it entertainment, or at the very least, upward career mobility.
Unless you're lamenting the fact that the grunts now don't have to sit in a trench, get maimed, or PTSD, drones are generally a good thing. I suppose that less of that makes it easier to keep prosecuting wars in the face of pub
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Which is not necessarily bad. As the "collateral murder" video has shown, people tend to be more aggressive when they fear for their own lives. A drone pilot is in perfect safety, so he has enough time to calmly make a decision.
Relying on a soldier to make moral decisions is naive. Soldiers are trained to do exactly what they are told. The decision to attack have always come from the officers and the politicians who don't participate in the fight anyway.
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There is no guilt.
[Citation Needed]
The available evidence suggests otherwise: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/drone-pilot-ptsd/ [wired.com]
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A war is not a war movie. It's point is not to make you experience strong feelings and emotions. It's point is to do the thing that's necessary to achieve your objectives (which, in a just war, is basically the security of your own nation) with minimal amount of force and bloodshed. Drones help minimize that on both sides - their operators are mostly safe, barring a terrorist attack on their control center, and the fact that they're removed from the battlefield and not subjected to stress of possibly being
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Drones aren't used in a war, they are used to police by murder people from a foreign jurisdiction without any kind of due process. Drone operations are very error-prone, cannot be appealed by the receiving end in any way, manner and form whatsoever. They seem expedient, but they set a bad precedent and create a lot of animosity among those, who are subject to the treatment.
Are they the best answer to the problem they are purportedly solving?
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Drones aren't used in a war
Are you claiming that Afghanistan isn't war? Or are you claiming that drones aren't used for strikes against combatants?
they are used to police by murder people from a foreign jurisdiction without any kind of due process.
Due process and war are largely mutually incompatible. If you want due process, don't wage war. If you wage war, due process goes out of the window. Once again, it doesn't matter if it's a Hellfire missile from the drone that hits a civilian hut, or a shell from a howitzer.
Drone operations are very error-prone,
You'll have to quote some numbers to back that up, seeing as how you're claiming that drones are somehow more error-pr
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Just because the motives behind it are not to your liking, does not make it not a war. It involved massive application of force on country scale, and several large battles. It is most certainly a war, just as Soviet operations in Afghanistan in 80s were a war. Not a "conventional" war, where both sides have roughly equal training and materiel, but that's also not a prerequisite.
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A war is not a war movie. It's point is not to make you experience strong feelings and emotions. It's point is to do the thing that's necessary to achieve your objectives
Its point is either to make money (every war started by a major power, ever) or to not have your country destroyed or co-opted (every defender in every war ever.)
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Re:Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Most drone observations are surveillance.
But not all of them.
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Re:Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
How quickly we forget the lessons learned on September 11th, 2001.
And what lesson is that?
Take repeated intelligence reports from your allies seriously?
Bother to read and take heed of reports entitled "Bin Ladin plans to attack within the US" that detail planned use of aircraft?
Ohh -- I'm sorry, I forgot.. we're all supposed to shove our heads up our ass and run around in fear while the US Government takes away more and more of our rights every time they say boo.
Re:Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? (Score:4, Insightful)
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"US Government takes away more and more of our rights"
Exactly what rights have been taken away?
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The fourth amendment has been violated time and time against by laws such as the Patriot Act and organizations such as the TSA.
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Can you provide any details to back up your assertion? Examples of US citizens being denied the 4th amendment protections? Any prosecution and conviction based on evidence gathered by breaking the fourth amendment? The judicial segment of the US government provides remedies to those who feel their constitutional rights have been violated. The Patriot Act and similar laws issued by the executive and legislative branches can be challenged in court. It's not a perfect system but there are plenty of examples of
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Examples of US citizens being denied the 4th amendment protections?
Warrantless wiretapping and people being molested at airports don't count? The latter happens in broad daylight, and if you think the government hasn't been using warrantless wiretapping despite the fact that they now think they have the power to, well, I don't know what to say.
The judicial segment of the US government provides remedies to those who feel their constitutional rights have been violated.
Except that the entire government is obsessed with safety over freedom; even the people don't seem to care.
It's not a perfect system but there are plenty of examples of legislative and executive branch laws being ruled illegal and overturned.
I wish they were overturned, but until they are, they'll stick around.
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Are people being convicted of crimes using information from warrant less wiretapping? Are there any examples of evidence collected by warrant less wiretapping being used at someones trial to convict them? Law enforcement agencies are all subject to having their evidence vetted by the courts as part of someones legal defense. Courts throw out illegally obtained or tainted evidence quite frequently. Courts have also nullified laws passed by the legislative and executive branches of government. Like I said bef
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Are people being convicted of crimes using information from warrant less wiretapping?
It doesn't matter to me whether they are or aren't; I feel that people's rights are being violated simply because the government is spying. But I somewhat doubt that the government would give itself these powers and then not even use them.
Like I said before the system is certainly not perfect
It is far from perfect.
As far as I know no provisions or protections in the constitution or bill of rights has been removed.
They do not need to remove them.
There are precedents of the government suspending or ignoring certain laws and rights.
And...? Something being old doesn't make it good.
It is the "people" who had conniption fits after 9/11 because the government did not prevent the attack. All the people complaining about airport security today would crucify the airlines and government if the scanning and searching procedures were halted or relaxed and an airplane gets blown up.
I know that already.
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Clearly what the article is saying is the lesson learned from 9/11 was that killing people with planes and terrorisizng populations of people makes you a hero. We learned that one pretty good, because we have been making a lot of heros.
And in no way was the lesson that sometimes people locally actually suffer the consequences of a small group of their neighbors insistance on using violence and clansdestine action as matters of normal policy in other people's local communities.
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Which branch of service do you hail from? There are a great many highly effective and honorable service members who have done their duty as ordered, and not only loathe the act of killing but also suffer from issues related to it for the rest of their lives. Ask their husbands, wives, or children about it.
There is a distinct difference between innate clinical psychopathy and behavior drilled into soldiers through military training. Perhaps you're a mental health professional; would you care to explain your
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You're right, they're not people. They stopped being people when they accepted the unholy religion of Islam. Any rational human knows that those meatbags are an abomination to anything humane and logical.
I seem to remember reading about a moustached Corporal in Germany in the 1930s saying something similar about another religious group.
Droning on and on (Score:2)
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like 'Predator'?
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Not according to Wordnet:
"drone
n 1: stingless male bee in a colony of social bees (especially
honeybees) whose sole function is to mate with the queen"
In the workers' society of the beehive, drones have all the fun.
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Why should it not be fun? Do you want your soldier "workforce" to be miserable, down, and inefficient?
Joystick? (Score:1)
Pretty sure I haven't used a joystick in Call of Duty or any other computer game in the last decade.
I'm bored - I'll start a bombing run now... (Score:1)
Tesla is not amused (Score:2)
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sadly, robots fighting robots does seem inevitable at this point, although humans are still likely to be participating.
"Sadly?" It's already in production:
James Cameron and Mark Burnett Team for Discovery's 'Robogeddon'
http://www.thewrap.com/tv/article/mark-burnett-alaska-series-others-announced-discovery-36832 [thewrap.com]
more important... (Score:2)
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What's it like to be bombed by a drone and its faceless pilot?
Same as being bombed by a piloted plane. Basically, there is a flash, and then you die, if lucky. If not, you live long enough to see your limbs flying.
What they need is more pilots (Score:2)
No wonder pilots get bored during 24 hour long missions. But these aren't real planes, you are not limited to 2 pilots per drone. Assign a team of 10 to each and make them work in shifts. I'm pretty sure that will help more than giving achievments for watching rocks.
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The thing is, from what I can tell from TFA (yes, I read it, gasp!) the participants in the study were *not* actual UAV pilots, but the usual psych study volunteers (probably unfortunate undergrads).
And they even mention that real UAV operators are "seasoned fighter pilots" - who by definition are college graduates with *years* of flight school and operational experience, often from the Air Force Academy. These people have already been highly selected to be the types who *can* in fact endure hours of bored
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That's exactly what I was thinking. If the pilots rotated out every hour or whatever then nobody would get bored. It's idiotic to force the same couple of people in to a 24 hour mission of sitting there doing nothing. What did they think would happen?!
What do you think will happen?
Predator cost per unit: $4.03 mil [wikipedia.org] (in 2010)
Operational costs - for operating one for border surveillance double that [securitydebrief.com]. For operating it non-stop (every hour of the year): multiply by 7 ($28.5 mil) - same 2010.
maybe it's time to replace the drone pilots, too (Score:2)
Just crank the AI up to max setting.
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Just crank the AI up to max setting.
Oh, please don't.
You know there will just be a big stack of drones hopping up and down, all trying to get out the closed hanger door.
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You can't - campaigns in this game have hardcoded difficulty settings. So if you're bored by the Afghanistan one, you have no choice but to switch to something else - say, China or Russia.
We saw it happen in "Toys" (Score:2, Interesting)
If I recall correctly, this concept is addressed in the 1992 movie "Toys" [1] as seen in
http://reelchange.net/2012/04/27/was-the-worst-robin-williams-movie-just-ahead-of-its-time/ [reelchange.net]
[1] and yes, I know it's a bad movie, but the idea of maneuvering real drones as videogames doesn't seem so out-of-time today.
The Sound matter (Score:2)
And (Score:4, Insightful)
Know what bothers me the most, is that there are democratic countries with "kill lists" , they even go public with it, and is fine, completely fine no one seems to bother !!
Re:And (Score:4, Informative)
there's a shitload of countries with no capital penalty and which literally as a nation want nobody dead.
who's on norways kill list? nobody. denmarks? nobody. swedish? nobody.
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Of course it would be. I don't see why you even ask the question.
A public kill list is an endorsement. It's a clear expression that killing people without due process is a normal, morally acceptable part of the nation's conduct. A private kill list is at best evidence of corruption.
In the latter case, there is a legal process which can put the murderers in jail. In the former, they only get medals.
Why should flying a drone be different? (Score:4, Insightful)
A common quote of combat pilots goes something like, "Combat flying is hours of boredom punctuated with a few seconds of complete terror." I've read something like this quote from several sources but most commonly from WWII pilots (and crew). Why should drone pilots expect it to be different?
At least the drone pilots get to go home even if the drone itself crashes, gets shot down, etc. I can imagine what a ball turret gunner from a B-17 or B-24 would say about the drone pilots being bored when they spent hours in a cramped, unpressurized, freezing cold turret scanning the airspace below the plane for approaching enemy interceptors; trying to stay alert and alive.
Cheers,
Dave
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I can imagine what a ball turret gunner from a B-17 or B-24 would say about the drone pilots being bored when they spent hours in a cramped, unpressurized, freezing cold turret scanning the airspace below the plane for approaching enemy interceptors; trying to stay alert and alive.
Something like this . . .
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner -- Randall Jarrell [blogspot.com]
get people like beavis and butthead to fly them (Score:2)
get people like beavis and butthead to fly them but give them some training first.
http://vimeo.com/44875392 [vimeo.com]
How can you shoot innocent women... (Score:2)
Pvt. Joker: How can you shoot innocent women and children like that?
Helicopter gunner: It's easy. You just don't lead them as much. You see, anyone that runs, is V.C. Anyone that stands still is well disciplined V.C. Ain't war hell?
Points (Score:2)
"a surprisingly similar activity" (Score:2)
Surprisingly to whom? I do not find it surprising at all that the gaming industry feeds into the military/industrial complex.
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After all, in video games, you get penalized when you shoot the random civilian instead of the guy with the gun
I learned the hard way you don't fuck with chickens in ocarina of time.
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You also get to shoot and blow things up a lot more in video games, not just when there's a confirmed Bad Guy on the screen once in a while.
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We need to get a Republican elected to president so we can start caring again.
I agreed with everything else that you said but that.
The last republican president started the current wars, and the last 2 republican candidates have given no indication they would have prosecuted war less aggressively.
You seem to be in denial.
Re:No Motivation to End the War (Score:4, Insightful)
His point was that people cared about the wars and pushed for them to end when there was a republican president. People don't seem to care as much now with a democrat as president.
You may or may not agree, but it is an interesting way of looking at things.
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Apparently ST:TOS reruns aren't quite as ubiquitous as they used to be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon [wikipedia.org]
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Thanks, I was going to bring up that old episode, but then I thought "certainly someone else has...let's read a bit further", and here you are.
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For the pilot of the drone, it's just a matter of pushing a red button on a dreary Monday morning. What we don't see is the brother, mother, husband, or son whose flesh was blown to bits by the drone.
You don't see that from a B-52 or an A-10, either. All you see is smoke and fire.
Bombing someone with a high tech manned aircraft is one thing, but the moment we abstract ourselves further and further from the hell that is war, we become the very monsters we're supposedly out to stop.
Do we? Or do we rather just turn war from an adrenaline fest to a cold, calculated application of force - resulting in fewer casualties, not more?
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Yes, let's gamify war. That's just what need in the military.
I was not talking about "gamefying" war. Drones are not that, unless you deliberately make them so.
It's a lot easier for a drone pilot to push a button that would likely kill people thousands of miles away.
Why would it be any easier? Be it a drone or a bomber, its pilot doesn't see human figures - it sees dots on a landscape.
You've overlooked the entire point of my response, which was to highlight the fact that drones are making it a lot easier for pilots and the military to brush aside civilian causalities
You'll have to explain how, precisely, drones make it easier than hundreds of other means of delivering death and destruction at great distances that are available to us today, from artillery to bombers to cruise missiles.
A tip goes out about a possible Al-Qaeda target somewhere in Pakistan, and a few days/weeks later, a village is reduced to rubble. The U.S. can wash its hands clean of the incident and no Americans were harmed during the operation, which is the *most* important part, right?
Meanwhile, some kid who has witnessed all this is just loving the democracy and freedom that the U.S. raining down on his village. I'm sure he'll grow up to love the United States and perhaps even become a productive member of society because of it.
Your hypothetical situation has nothing to do with drones, however. It