Air Force Drones Hit 1 Million Combat Hours 113
coondoggie writes "If you needed any more evidence as to how important unmanned aircraft have become to the US military operations, the US Air Force today said drones have amassed over one million combat hours flown. While that number is impressive, it took the planes known as Global Hawk, Predator and Reaper, almost 14 years to do it, but it could take only a little over another two years to cross the two million mark according to Air Force officials."
Glenn Greenwald Tweeted This One Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wonder what that works out to in murders (Score:4, Interesting)
Why can't we figure out that we aren't wanted in that part of the world and just fuck off? They don't want us, they don't need us. Just fuck off before we pick up more bad karma and blowback.
If you know your neighbor beats his wife and threatens to kill her, and she doesn't say anything, do you stay silent? What if you heard the story from a coworker, or from your brother across the country?
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I think most people would agree that they have a moral obligation to interfere in someone's life in some situations. There's a line somewhere, but it's probably different for everybody. Now what happens when the oppressor runs an entire country, committing what you consider morally reprehensible acts that are not illegal in that country? Who should have the authority to do something? Nobody? Can we really leave it up to the people when opposing viewpoints are quashed violently?
Sam Harris gave this interesting TED talk [ted.com] that argues that science can answer moral questions like these, though he doesn't really address how we (as in the people of the world) should deal with it. I don't think there is an objective answer to these things...that's what makes international politics so difficult. To some people, removing Gaddafi (when he made clear he wouldn't listen to dissent) is worth it.
Re:Another reason to question buying the F35 (Score:4, Interesting)
Derp, I forgot to add - I think we're seriously going to see what basically amount to Protoss Carriers in the next 10-20 years. A C-130 or AC-130 that can launch and retrieve fighter-style drones from its bays, and not have any latency or signal loss issues over long distances.
Re:Military robots like drones are ironic... (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe you would prefer to read this, by John Taylor Gatto, about the socioeconomic system the US drones are defending?
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm [johntaylorgatto.com]
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprise -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
Why not just get the robot drones to do the work instead of using them against opponents of a rapacious short-term-empire-minded social system based around the USA? And maybe get more people to accept that the answer to "Why do they hate us?" is not so much "Because we are free" but rather more of "Because we support their oppressors"?
See also, for something written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC: ..."
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm [lexrex.com]
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.