I haven't read his answer yet, but mine is: People aren't good at thinking in the abstract. A problem seems different when you know the story of one individual. That's why Steven Spielberg had the little girl in the red coat, and why Joseph Stalin said: "When one person dies, it's a tragedy, but when a million people die, it's a statistic."
Now, I'm reading Feldman. He observes that there has been a "fantasy of precision has been at the heart of the political and tactical appeal for U.S. President Barack Obama." But:
The real military advantage of the armed-drone strike over a conventional airstrike... isn't the precision of the hit. It’s the fact that a pilot isn’t being put in jeopardy. Yet somehow the idea that drone strikes are more precisely targeted has lingered, giving the technique greater public appeal....Feldman doesn't directly address why hearing about 2 specific innocent victims causes people to rethink anything. Is it too obvious?
When it comes to drones, the fantasy of precision is just that, a fantasy. Killing innocent civilians, whether they’re Americans or Pakistanis or Yemenis, is an inevitable reality of war....
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79 comments:
Obama is personalizing his million failures to something that doesn't matter.
He's killed jobs and foreign relations for his entire presidency.
They'll improve only when he's gone.
There's something to take responsibility for.
America's military strength and technological edge has given us the luxury of thinking we can fight wars without killing innocent people.
That's about to change.
We need to get over our it. Or submit.
Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion attributes the phenomenon to cultural progress. He's okay with using the word "zeitgeist."
The purposeless extinction of the passenger pigeon and the dodo.
Slavery.
"Collateral damage."
And again, I ask: Where are all the libtards who wanted Cheney frog-marched for the same "war crimes" Obama has committed?
Robert Cook, Garage, et al? You still in bed? Haven't gotten your Soros-approved Talking Points yet?
Drones were oversold as a method to kill the guilty and spare the innocent. Explosions are just not that neat.
The problem is emphatically not that innocent people may be accidentally killed during an attack. It happens.
The real problem is that even though there are only a relatively handful of hostages held by terrorists, the CIA, NSA, and Defense Intelligence Agency apparently do not know precisely where they're being held. This is manifestly a failure of intelligence.
Or if they do know, no one up the chain of command is paying attention. If this alternative is true, then there is a failure of a different sort of intelligence.
Yet somehow the idea that drone strikes are more precisely targeted has lingered, giving the technique greater public appeal....
When it comes to drones, the fantasy of precision is just that, a fantasy.
He's right, it's a fantasy, buy why would anyone have believed that ever? It's been said all along that drones kill innocent people too. That is not an argument for or against. It seems obvious though.
I guess they were unable to redefine the hostages as combatants as the administration has done for other instances of collateral damage. Pity.
I remember cleaning up after some of those. Total mess.
Good thing Obama is prez now. We aren't murderers when a Dem is prez.
Althouse wrote, "Feldman doesn't directly address why hearing about 2 specific innocent victims causes people to rethink anything. Is it too obvious?"
Smart people tend to assume that other people are smart enough to know what is obvious.
This is a bad assumption. It's assumed everywhere. I think people should know that global temperatures have not risen for 17 years. I think people should know that vaccines are safe.
People are stupid, mostly. Smart politicians know that.
Writers often assume that their writing makes their meaning obvious. That's a big problem, especially if you're not a great writer. I'm not one. Is my meaning obvious here?
You gotta hit people over the head to get the idea acrost.
Part of this is built on the simplistic notion that Bush was the bumbling, incurious president who don't read newspapers while Obama was the the thoughtful, intellectual professor president. His foreign policy, even when blatantly doubling down on Bush precedence, was constantly sold in these terms. Drones was the smart, targeted method. Bill Maher was smugly assuring us that Libya was the model for the right kind of intervention, and Obama never got the credit he deserved for that unmitigated disaster. The problem is stupid, pointless, reckless military adventurism. It doesn't really matter much if you have a "D" or an "R" at the helm.
Shit happens in war, and we are at war.
I still say that the United States should post a list of people it will not hesitate to kill by drone strikes with an explanation of just why each one of these people are targets.
Drone strikes are here and will not go away. However, you can buy drones at Toys-R-Us and weaponize them yourself. If the U.S. maintains it can strike whomever it chooses at will on the basis of the U.S. being a sovereign entity, so can everybdy else - China, San Marino, or the Baghdad Caliphate.
"He's right, it's a fantasy, buy why would anyone have believed that ever?"
Here's a phrase to commit to memory and recall as the likely answer to almost any question: People believe what they want to believe.
It's a fine point that the real military advantage of drones is that the pilot isn't in jeopardy. To some that may seem unsporting, but as GEN McCaffrey once said, We're not looking for a fair fight.
I don't think it's a fantasy that drones are more precisely targeted than old-school airstrikes. But there will still be mistakes, and even for non-mistakes there will sometimes be innocents around the target. Prof. Althouse's point, that killing innocents is an inevitable reality of war, is sound.
(The ICBM sometimes kills the wrong people? That's some precise writing there.)
I also believe I have read that it has already happened that U.S. drone strikes have been carried out against targets requested by non-U.S. actors as favors in return for intelligence or in hope of winning their cooperation in the war against "global terrorism" - i.e. warlords having the U.S. military eliminating their competition in the poppy trade, or whatever.
This is unacceptable, but will only get worse, if the secrecy is maintained.
One of Bill Mauldin's WW II Willie and Joe cartoons has his characters in a foxhole under fire say (quote from memory here)
"I don't worry about the bullet with my name on it. It's the one marked 'To Whom It May Concern' that scares me!"
In the Pacific Theatre in WWII, the US sank Japanese hell ships carrying Allied POWs. Often we knew they were on board but interdiction of war materials was held to be of more importance than Allied lives. War is hell. The sooner we wake up to that fact the better.
People believe what they want to believe.
That's the cognitive scientist effect.
They discovered it.
It's not self-aware exactly, but still it's a contribution.
And we only hope that such requests that have been complied with so far have been in the service of the "Global War on Terror."
In fact, we do not know but that some already may have been purchased with personal bribes.
". . . created such a storm of drone 'rethinking'?" . . . I haven't read his answer yet, but mine is: People aren't good at thinking in the abstract."
There isn't anything to rethink. No one who paid attention assumed drones would be more precise, produce less collateral damage, or operate on better intelligence.
The supposed "rethinking" has little to do with general habits of thought. It is a political exercise with a political purpose. Progs have been bitching about drones all along (see West, Cornel).
This is just an opportunity to bitch more effectively. Sure, exploiting concreteness bias is part of it. So is the sentimentalism of the female LIV.
But drones are more accurate than previous forms of bombing. We now kill everyone with ten meters of the blast radius than everyone in Dresden or Hiroshima. How can that not be an improvement. Drones probably cause less collateral damage than IED's and suicide bombers......Anyway this distracts attention from the true moral issue of warfare in our era--water boarding. Obama has not water boarded any prisoners so the inescapable fact is that his war has been an unqualified moral triumph.
We do not know of any prisoners being "waterboarded" under this administration.
Ann Althouse said...
"He's right, it's a fantasy, buy why would anyone have believed that ever?"
"Here's a phrase to commit to memory and recall as the likely answer to almost any question: People believe what they want to believe."
Exactly.
I almost forgive you for voting for Obama in 2008.
One of the longstanding concerns with drone warfere is that it's too easy, too sanitary, and therefore too tempting to commit to an ill-coceived strike. Drone warfare deserves a little special scrutiny because of this.
The President was just showing off one of his powers.
And after Hillary gets those powers she can sell drone hits on your enemies or withholding them from your friends for the highest charitable contributions made to the Foundation as she gets ready for 2020 re-election cycle.
And remember, there wont be a shred of evidence ever found. All shredding of evidence is professionally done.
Greg Hlatky said...
"In the Pacific Theatre in WWII, the US sank Japanese hell ships carrying Allied POWs. Often we knew they were on board but interdiction of war materials was held to be of more importance than Allied lives. War is hell. The sooner we wake up to that fact the better."
The left knows this. It occasionally makes a comment or two about Obama's killing comments. Robert Cooke is even consistent about calling him a murderer.
The issue isn't that they care about innocent people being killed. The issue is we are generally fighting statist oppression and barbarians, and they prefer oppressive regimes to Republicans/Libertarians. They are just angry they aren't the oppressors. Socialism has failed every time it is tried and usually results in lots of state sponsored murders. To them it isn't the policy that was wrong; it is that the wrong people were in charge.
Ann Althouse said...
"He's right, it's a fantasy, buy why would anyone have believed that ever?"
Here's a phrase to commit to memory and recall as the likely answer to almost any question: People believe what they want to believe.
Touche' Madam.
With the present drone strike policy it is not necessary to be "in charge."
Remember Bradley - now "Chelsea" - Manning? Edward Snowden?
All you need is access to the information network and the ability to imitate a "legitimate" order. This could be done from a mountaintop in Afghanistan or in the bowels of Langley.
Some day we will find that someone entirely from the outside found an unguarded portal and ordered an automated strike on a U.S. installation.
Coupe said...
To this end, the USA is satisfied with the theory of "plinking." Plinking the enemy is an attempt to wear down the enemy.
Dem Presidents like to roll out maps on the Oval Office floor and send messages with Octal. (Moldable TNT/HMX)
LBJ and BHO come to mind. Unfortunately their opponents don't understand the message format and believe in a simpler definition of victory...
"If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly."
- David Hackworth
""If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly."
- David Hackworth"
And Hack knew what he was talking about. "Steel my Soldier's Hearts" is one of the better books about Vietnam.
<\rant on> What I find so troubling about this whole thing is not that sadly we killed two innocent hostages who we didn’t know were there, but that in the process, we killed an al-Qaeda bad guy (Ahmed Farouq) who we ALSO didn’t know was there!
Think of the massive expenditures made by our intelligence community and think of the number of times they screw up. Is there no accountability?
There are literally thousands of highly paid people in the intelligence community who are not getting it right … with no obvious consequences.
With each passing day, my faith in our government’s ability to provide basic services to the citizens of this nation fades. The problems in the DoD are rampant — and getting worse — and the intelligence community, operating in the shadows, continues to fail in carrying out its mission.
If I were president, I’d have the accountable people in my office TODAY (give them no time for creating a weave of alibis and excuses), and I’d kick some ass, demote some people, and cut some budgets. You screw up in the private sector, you lose your damn job!
That is all.
The President is "the accountable people."
I'm confused as to when an ICBM has killed the wrong people. Or even that anyone would claim its not designed to kill everyone.
Michael K said...
And Hack knew what he was talking about.
Another guy who knew war up front and personal, "where metal meets meat" was Colonel Charlie Beckwith.
Today is the 35th anniversary of Operation Eagle Claw, one of the battles in the long list during our war with Iran.
created such a storm of drone 'rethinking'?
Less thinking about the precision of the drone. More thinking about your perception of the precision of the man in charge what's wielding them.
well there are a couple of problems, they didn't state who they targeted,
roggio's site, mentioned the strike sans Gadahn, not long after, they didn't inform the families of Weinstein or LoPorto, till months later,
The real military advantage of the armed-drone strike over a conventional airstrike... isn't the precision of the hit. It’s the fact that a pilot isn’t being put in jeopardy.
Maybe "strike precision" is the myth that the Obama administration is using to sell "droning" to their core supporters, who know so little about the military that some of them will buy the myth.
The real reason lies with the logical corollary of the bold-faced line above about the pilot: there are no Americans coming back in body backs. When Americans come back in body bags, there's always some news outfit or lefty group (am I being redundant here?) who makes sure that every funeral cortege at the airport makes news. Just ask President W.
Well, with this drone strike, there's an innocent American captive who's not even getting to come back in a body bag, and a not so-innocent American who was the target, also not coming back for burial. This isn't exactly how the administration has sold the program.
Re: Eagle Claw - We should have bombed the embassy and killed everybody. Say we didn't know the hostages were still there.
The embassy people were worthless anyway, after their incompetence at shredding documents.
Coupe said...
Re: Eagle Claw - We should have bombed the embassy and killed everybody. Say we didn't know the hostages were still there.
LOL, 500 KT :)
nice glassy bowl where Tehran stood...
>> I'm confused as to when an ICBM has killed the wrong people.
People have died maintaining them...
"fantasy of precision"
Still preferable to what 1,000-plane raids did to Bremen, Hamburg, Tokyo and Kobe in WWII.
The precision strike hit the target that was intended. It was the Taliban, violating the laws of war that positioned POWs in a circumstance that made them targets...
$hit happens in war. We need to fight our wars that minimize our losses first and attempt to minimize collateral losses, but not let that constrain us.
dRONE strikes ARE More targeted. You can't control the blast radius though.
Big Hack fan here.
I would recommend "About Face" as required pre commissioning reading for every Army ROTC, OCS or West Point Cadet.
Steel My Soldiers' Hearts is a great memoir of battalion command, but I preferred "About Face," maybe because his wife at that time was a better ghostwriter. I think she did a better job at preserving a soldiers' voice.
Great lessons in command in both.
I've also known people who served with both him and Hank "The Gunfighter" Emerson. All had great things to say about his leadership.
RIP Hack.
The best way to neutralize US air power and drone strikes is to take hostages and keep them with you at your C3 nodes. 2nd best is to use other noncombatant human shields.
It's foolish to expect our enemies to do anything else.
If you ONLY use drone strikes and not boots on the ground you get these one off operations where they mop up the mess and, ooops, dead americans.
You'd get that anyway,but with boots on the ground the peope on the ground might be able to have some intel about who might be in the building so as to not, blow the building up just yet.
Which means nation building of sorts. Or ground troops at least. Obama is simply fighting battles on the cheap. Not even battles but skirmishes.
If it was determined that there were two americans in the building that would have been a great time to send in a rescue team. If the rescue team failed, flatten the whole place.
If we actually capture people instead of just drone striking they might produce information like "There are two American hostages somewhere and are being used as human shields!"
Here's a hypothetical.
Suppose we captured someone (yes, I realize its a stretch) and he revealed that there were two americans being held hostage and they were scheduled for execution tomorrow.
How far should we go to extract the info about where they're being held so we might consider a rescue?
Or do we just let the execution go through?
I am glad that something as realistic as this article was written by a prof at Harvard Law. The sum of comments here pretty well supplement the article: "war is hell"; it's better than carpet bombing; "what about Hiroshima?".
The drone strikes have allowed the left to feel that there was no real "war" going on. We wipe out a couple of guys on the far side of the world; they must have deserved it and, of course, as good guys we hurt no one else that matters (your abstraction argument). Add a couple of unaccounted white guys into the mix and suddenly it's war and the Left has to acknowledge it. It is not that different from the previous administration's activities except in scale.
Of course it also exposes Obama as not quite as omniscient, nor as peace loving, as the left would like to believe.
I read that allied resistance fighters begged for Gestapo Hq to be targeted for bombing, not in spite of, but because resistance fighters were being held there. They knew it would be a quicker, more merciful death.
People have died maintaining them...
I would maintain that's just the price of having them as a weapon, not the same as using them as a weapon.
Yet somehow the idea that drone strikes are more precisely targeted has lingered, giving the technique greater public appeal....
When it comes to drones, the fantasy of precision is just that, a fantasy.
Actually, it isn't a fantasy. In addition to the advantage of not putting a human pilot at risk, a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle, they aren't "drones") can loiter over an area for hours observing what is going on. Manned tactical aircraft can't do that. When the UAV operators engage a target with a Hellfire missile (or a bomb if they're flying a Reaper), they can hit within a few meters of the aiming point almost every time. They're very precise, but the idea of a "surgical strike" that kills only the bad guys is a fantasy.
As a side note, Hellfire missiles were designed as anti-armor weapons. They're less effective at killing people than of blowing up vehicles, unless they're fitted with a special fragmentation sleeve. The company that I work for makes those sleeves. No, I don't work on that project but I don't lose sleep over it, either. Those fragments aren't precise.
Uneeda bomb that only hurts bad guys and leaves good guys untouched.
But that would be dangerous in the hands of a Democrat.
Fen: Nice chickenhawk dodge. Cheney was instrumental in launching an unnecessary war that killed >100K people and destabilized the region spawning ISIL after cooking the intelligence books.
Obozo's crime was following up with more of the same which has thrown good money and priceless lives and body parts after bad.
The reason it is being personalized now is that Sheik Barak Hussein Osama wants to create opposition to his own policy that he wants to scuttle.
Anybody who talks about "precision" with a fragmentation warhead is bullshitting you, and anyone who supports their position is selling the bullshit for them.
Granted, it might be more precise than an old school Arc Light, in the sense of annihilating a single vehicle in a market, or a single building on a block, but it's still rough on the neighbors. Pakistani wedding party, anyone?
The only precision weapon is a well-sighted rifle and a man with the training and judgment to use it.
At the risk of seeming cynical, I might put forth the argument that the deaths of American hostages at American hands might prove a disincentive to taking American hostages in the future, since they are no longer reliable shields.
"Cheney was instrumental in launching an unnecessary war that killed >100K people and destabilized the region spawning ISIL after cooking the intelligence books. "
Delusions are seen on both sides but the left's seem to be more fanciful.
I'm reading Emma Sky's book "The Unraveling" and it is very interesting and educational. You should read it.
Michael K: Sky's book sounds like a worthwhile read, thanks.
"War is hell" said Sherman back in his day! It appears he had a point!
On the other hand, submission is hell too, especially if you submit to ISIS or other such Islamic terror entity.
The issue for me at least is whether we know enough about the targets we're going after and what the effect of hitting that target might be.
Precision munitions and laser-guided bombs do not prevent innocent people from being killed; it simply reduces the NUMBER of innocents killed. Instead of razing a city, we can destroy a factory. Instead of killing most of the people within 1000 yards of the target, we can kill most of the people within 10 yards of the target. But when we kill a terrorist with a Hellfire missile, there's a good chance that we're going to kill his wife (or wives and concubines) and his kids.
What the USAF needs to do is to WIDELY publish statements something like this: "The United States Air Force intends to kill the terrorist Abu Bin Badguy. Do not remain in his vicinity, or you may be injured as well. Run away from him FAST."
richard mcenroe said: "At the risk of seeming cynical, I might put forth the argument that the deaths of American hostages at American hands might prove a disincentive to taking American hostages in the future, since they are no longer reliable shields."
Just so. If the terrorists know that the crazy7 Americans intend to kill every living thing within 100 yards of any American hostage even at the risk of killing the hostages, they might decline to remain near them, perhaps allowing the hostages to escape. Further, it ought to be widely believed that the village where any hostage dies will be incinerated.
They ought to be in considerable fear of their OWN lives for as long as this war lasts.
Howard: Nice chickenhawk dodge.
Chickenhawk? I actually served in Iraq. Marine infantry.
And if you are trying to claim that those who didn't serve cannot support the war, then by your own logic the reverse is also true - those who didn't serve cannot condemn the war.
Did you serve at all Howard?
Otherwise, by your own standard, sit down and shut up.
Not only fewer dead pilots, but fewer pilots being burned alive in a cage on TV.
I was just reading Robert Graves book about his experiences in WWI, Goodbye to All That. Graves writes that POWs were frequently murdered outright. Sometimes the soldiers felt resentful that they had to stay in the trenches and the POWs getting out of it. Other times, if the fighting had been hard, they killed the POWs to get even for fallen comrades. Sometimes, they killed them because it was a long trek back to the rear and just too much bother........There's an advantage to killing from a distance and from a safe perch. The killer doesn't become a dog of war.
As our President said: "But our intelligence was good."
Howard said...
"Fen: Nice chickenhawk dodge. Cheney was instrumental in launching an unnecessary war that killed >100K people and destabilized the region spawning ISIL after cooking the intelligence books."
In addition to Fen's defenestration of your stupidity I want to add that the invasion and our involvement had zero to do with the rise of ISIL. Death rates were also lower during the entire time we were there than they were before and after we left. Not only were they lower the right people were generally being killed due to our best efforts. After we left women and minorities were targeted by ISIL. That's on you and Obama champ.
@Achilles:
"That's on you and Obama champ."
Typical revisionist attitude. Do everything humanly possible to argue why the Iraq War was not the unmitigated disaster it was but actually a really great thing.
ISIL was able to operate in western Iraq precisely because of the security vacuum that was left there in the wake of the invasion. There rise to prominence in that area was due mainly to the destabilization in Syria and the collapse of the Anbar Awakening after they were shafted by the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. The government our soldiers were dying trying to prop up. The government that's recently been pushing a bill through its legislature to lower the marriage age to 7 and essentially legitimize marital rape. So is that bill on Bush and the war supporters, champ?
ISIL was able to operate in western Iraq precisely because of the security vacuum that was left there in the wake of the invasion.
No. ISIL was able to operate in Western Iraq precisely because of the security vacuum that was left there when Obama withdrew.
Fen: When and where were you in Iraq? I was Army infantry, Ramadi, OIF I (2003-2004).
Farmer...
That word "legislature." It's a biggie.
They didn't have one at all under Saddam.
Nobody I know gives a shit. However, I did just pinch a loaf.
Tits.
@Jason:
"No. ISIL was able to operate in Western Iraq precisely because of the security vacuum that was left there when Obama withdrew."
The security situation begins after the destruction of the Hussein regime. The decrease in violence in 2007-2008 was due primarily to the completion of ethnic cleaning in Baghdad and the Anbar Awakening in the west. The Anbar Awakening breaks down after failure at integration with the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. That, coupled with the collapse of order in Syria, are the primary antecedents. The Maliki government would have faced sever opposition from his own coalition, let alone opposition parties, if he were to agree to allowing US combat troops to remain. Plus, why are you so convinced that the US military can accomplish against ISIS what it has been unable to accomplish against the Taliban? The administration played the surge strategy (more troops, Petraeus, COIN) in Afghanistan, and it was a complete failure.
this is trolling, right? I mean you've had the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan explained to you before, so why would you keep missing it?
@Unknown:
So the military does know how to defeat a guerilla insurgency in Iraq but it doesn't know how to defeat one in Afghanistan?
There is no rethinking occurring, just using a high-publicity event to restate opposition to killing the enemy.
Never let a crisis go to waste. Especially if your only tool is a hammer, and all you see is nails.
That's a little loose phrasing but let's say arguendo that's close enough. It is practicable and worthwhile to gain and hold ground in Iraq, it is not practicable and worthwhile to gain and hold ground in AfPak.
Certainly not worthwhile. Terrain is impossible, end of the earth for SLOC, people and land are worthless. Only practical way would be to genocide everyone in the areas you care about. Smallpox is probably best. You game? I didn't think so.
Iraq is a whoooooole nother story.
So you want boots on the ground in Western Iraq? And how long do they have to stay there, dying in low numbers, policing a sectarian civil war until.....
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