The Drone War 753
There are plenty of human casualties in the Afghan conflict -- though few among Americans -- but the fight seems especially significant in terms of technology and military conflict.
The Predator spy plane and other unmanned drones and gunships (along with satellites, thermal imaging devices, X-ray scanners, etc.) not only search for the enemy, but fire guided missiles, drop powerful oxygen-sucking hyperbaric bombs, and guide bomb strikes from afar. There is no war in recent human history that involved so few humans, at least on one side of the conflict. The most staggering statistic out of Afghanistan might be that the first American combat casualty died nearly three months into the "war."
Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops. Even as the Afghanistan campaign began, pundits flooded cable talk shows asserting that air power alone wasn't enough, that there would be substantial human sacrifice. Both Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq and the Kosovo conflicts involved the growing used of so-called "smart" laser-guided weaponry, deployed with varying degrees of reliability. But those conflicts also involved either the use of enormous numbers of soldiers on the ground and were controversial in terms of the bomb's precision and effectiveness.
The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight. Early reports suggest the civilian casualties may be lower than in any other large-scale military operation in modern history. Although dangerous and complex for the military on the scene, it's hard to imagine a conflict more remote to the majority of Americans, asked to go about their business as usual.
Orwell's "Drone Wars" come very much to mind here. So does Sir Arthur Clarke's machine warfare and AI military stories. A handful of human soldiers guide and direct the increasingly sophisticated technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks with stunningly few U.S. military casualties and American civilian casualties beyond September 11 and the anthrax attacks. The Taliban and their terrorist friends seem to have been totally unprepared for this variety of war, such a stark contrast to the Soviet's ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan just a decade ago.
It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.
Winston Churchill repeatedly asked his countrymen for brutal sacrifices in World War II. In the new kind of American war, political leaders ask citizens only to keep shopping and traveling.
Military historians like John Keegan have recently argued that the devastating toll of warfare in the 20th Century makes conventional conflicts increasingly less likely. Once a means of expanding territory and amassing wealth, the brutish wars of the 20th Century have rendered both objectives hard to attain. Even before Drone Wars, artillery and aerial warfare along with nuclear weapons suggested that wars can't really be won in the conventional sense any longer; even the victors will suffer unacceptable losses. But drone warfare radically alters the equation. Technologically advanced civilian populations -- just as Orwell foresaw -- can send their technological surrogates off to battle one another while humans stay home to wait for the outcome.
A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery? War has recently seemed so terrible that civilized societies view it as a last resort. But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible.
Bah (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bah (Score:5, Funny)
Just get the drones to play each other at tic-tac-toe and the futility of war will dawn on them after a few draws.
We've (humans) had thousands of years of evidence, but we still don't get it.
Then again, how many presidents/kings/generals fight in the front line these days?
Re:Bah (Score:3, Interesting)
Mind you, it would have been no great loss had he been blown to bits by one.
War is futile? (Score:4, Informative)
The whole premise of Mutually Assured Destruction is to make a full-scale war futile - a distinct departure from prior forms of warfare.
- Ed Pichon
Re:Bah (Score:2, Insightful)
I would much rather have my tax dollars spent eliminating (or at least fighting) the threat of Extremists (spelling?) bent on the destruction of innocent civilians in the US or anywhere else. It's called self defense. The preservation of the lives of the men and women of the military dedicated to this cause cannot be counted in dollars and cents. Every penny spent on technology that can keep them out of harm's way, while working toward the goal of restoring safety and security is money well spent.
Re:Security != Justice ? (Score:3, Flamebait)
The fact is: most of the UN members are bunch of representatives from non-democratic governments.
Most of them torture their own citizens, forbid human rights to their citizens while they claim for themselves (while traqveling to democratic countries) the same rights that they deny to any visitor to their own country.
Please, do not make me laugh.
UN is a non-fucntional body. It is a mirage.
How can you have China, for example, in the Secutiy Council? The same China that is non-democratic, that abuses its own citizens, that is a nest of corruption, that holds foreign land under military rule, that excludes foreign nationals to have rights... unless they have the money to bribe, of course.
And the same goes for manyt extremist countries that held seat and vote in the UN Council.
How do they dare (how do you dare) to support resolutions against democratic countries and elected governments?
Do not be so childish as to close your eyes to the fact that every single country looks towards expanding its influence, power, money and all that that you only seem to associate to the US.
Tell that to the governments of Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Iran, Somalya, Syria, Pakistan...
In the US you have the right to critisize your Government. You can vote them off from office if you do not like them. You can demonstrate against government policy. You can sue the government.
Try that in a random country from the UN Council. Chances are that, just thinking about this will be a sure passage to torture, inprisonement and possibly death.
Be real. Accept the fact that realpolitik rule the world. This is not an utopy. This is Real Planet Earth, not a Star Trek Federation of some sort.
Re:Security != Justice ? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Our country is -not- better than these non-democratic countries. While we, the citizens, may have more freedoms than others, at the same time the actions of our government have been as despicable as many. In fact that only derisive you heap upon China that couldn't be said of us is undemocratic.
2) Just because other governments do crappy things doesn't excuse our own government when it does crappy things. The gov may be quick to critisize governments we aren't fond of for their human rights abuses, but we will stand to the end behind our own actions or those of our friends (such as Israel).
You're right we are not living in a utopia, but similarly we cannot afford to act like we hold the moral high ground. In order to actually claim that ground, the first step would be an honest look at ourselves and holding ourselves accountable for what we have done before we begin pointing fingers at others. Enlightenment begins within, they say.
By that token, I'd ask you to take the post you replied to as just such a wakeup call. We could talk all day about China and Russia and what they've done... But first lets talk about us.
P.S. I find it ironic that someone who would be preaching how we are in Real Earth not Star Trek would talk about "democratic countries and elected governments", as if we could vote the CIA out of existance. I think you need to face reality as well.
$ make a lot of things happen... (Score:3)
That goes both ways though: Military contractors make a lot of money when there are conflicts (for instance apparently the military is ordering cruise missiles faster than they can be built), so you get a dangerous situation where there are elements that have no personal risk to themselves so they encourage the government (explicitly and subvertly) to engage in conflicts. Behind almost everything there is the almighty dollar.
Who's paying for the government's war? (Score:5, Insightful)
It costs the media a sudden wave of new stories, specials, and "plot developments" that are garaunteed to boost ratings and draw in marketing dollars. War is good for buisness.
It costs the military "bragging rights" ("imagine what would have happened if we weren't there on foreign soil to protect you") and a continually larger budget for at least the next decade. After all, we need to keep the military maintained just in case we have another incident like this any time soon, so make sure 50% of next year's budget goes to the military. War is good for buisness.
It costs the government the critical eye of the public; after all, when there's a war going on, we can't get too petty and start demanding the government preserve every little tiny right we have, no matter how significant it may seem. War takes top priority, so when little things like national ID systems get installed, we'll be too busy worrying about the war to care. So now that everyone is looking elsewhere, the lawmakers can get away with things they couldn't do during peace time. Meanwhile, the RIAA and their ilk are getting the laws and actions passed that they wanted (think Ukraine; the RIAA's "no blame" ammendment to the Patriot act; etc.) The lawmakers get paid with campaign contributions that they won't even need -- after all, any president who leads a successful war is almost always looked on favourably, and reelection is easy (the best we can do this time around is hope for a "like father like son" situation). Any Congresspeople who support the war effort will be repaid in kind. War is good for buisness.
So when was cost ever an issue?
~A.
Unfortunately, an end to wars (Score:3, Insightful)
It will be almost impossible for oppressed people's to violently object to tyranny in such a scenario.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars (Score:5, Insightful)
That, and had the Palestinians taken a King/Ghandi approach to their current situation (apartheid), they would stand on much higher moral ground than the Israelis. But that's another story entirely.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars (Score:3, Informative)
How about Blacks? Demographics indicate they are still an obvious underclass in the US.
Now compare that to how many times people have used violent force to gain their freedom.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars (Score:3, Informative)
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the list goes on and on.
BZZT! Canada still constitutional monarchy (Score:5, Informative)
I believe this is also the case in Australia and New Zealand.
While it hans't (ever?) happened, the Queen can still veto legislation in Canada through her official representative who must assent to all new legislation.
Re:BZZT! Canada still constitutional monarchy (Score:3, Interesting)
Some people call these multi-million dollars gifts "royalties" for using her head on our coins.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars (Score:2)
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars (Score:3, Informative)
The masses are occupied watching Survivor. They could care less about the politics of the Middle East. Chomsky could go on for hours about this.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars (Score:5, Interesting)
We may see the arrival of a technocracy who can effectively ignore the political demands of the masses because any violent unrest can be subdued without the massive loss of life and its consequent political fallout.
In past times one has been forced to negotiate with mobs, or unleash violence upon them which brings your image low in the opinion of the greater population. However if you simply spray a mob or a military enemy with a sleeping gas, and they all wake up in prison, the general population is less offended and you suffer no political fallout.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars (Score:3, Interesting)
A mob is one thing - consider the anti-globalisation riots. But if the Million Mom March was broken up by police with teargas, how would that look? Non-lethal force doesn't necessarily mean that the enforcers look good - think of the images of the police training firehoses on protesters in the 60's. And even non-lethal force can go wrong - think of the flammable teargas used in Waco.
The non-lethal weapons being developed are designed to be used on individual opponents. You can't reasonably sticky-spray an entire crowd! Ditto the bolo-net only works on a single person. It's designed to give the police an option other than lethal force when faced by someone with a gun or a knife - this is also an important issue for peacekeepers in places like Kosovo, where shooting someone is likely to kick off a major incident at an international level.
Only gas is a reasonable mass-effect weapon. But even that has its downside - knockout gases are all lethal if inhaled in too great a quantity, and all that's required against it is a gas mask which can easily be home-made. If the police start routinely using gas on protesters, all protesters will routinely start using gas masks.
Grab.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars (Score:3, Insightful)
You're saying that "nonlethal" weapons allow an elite minority to deal with an unhappy majority by quelling revolt without "massive loss of life and it's consequent political fallout"?
I think that an opressed majority in of itself is going to yeild "political fallout" whether or not there is loss of life.
In fact, nonlethal means of quelling such rebellions will give you a lot of people who end up being MORE pissed off.
When you get a mob pissed off at you, you either have to give in to their demands, or kill every last one of the fuckers, because when a mob is pissed off at you, you're already suffering "political fallout". Look at what happened to the 5th president of Argentina last month. He hosed down rioters with boiling water from water cannons. He still ended up resigning.
The only PROVEN EFFECTIVE method of quelling the mob is to create a fat, happy middle-class, who are more interested in creating their own success than potentially losing it all by getting arrested in a protest.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars (Score:2, Interesting)
Does this mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember an original Star Trek episode, in which there was a conflict between two planets. The Enterprise crew the war was mearly a computer simulation, but each side killed X amount of citezens according to the simulation results.
A war waged by computers, the casualties human, for no purpose.
War should only be used to stand up for beliefs in the shadow of only the most incredible evil. When there is no death, is there really any significance?
Re:Does this mean... (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, I remember that one too. However, my conclusions were slightly different to yours. I drew the conclusion that Star Trek had lost the plot at that stage.
The war was supposed to have been going on for around five hundred years, yet in zooms Captain Kirk and in under half an hour he's sorted the situation out with a firm 'no' and a nice cup of tea.*
Did anyone else find that just a tinsy bit unrealistic...?
Cheers,
Ian
* Oh alright, I made up the bit about the tea.
Re:Does this mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
Only to one side (in this case the US/UK/Etc.).
Having an enormous bomb landing on your village is far from symbolic.
The real test will be when two technologically advanced nations start fighting - I strongly suspect we'll be seeing huge numbers of civilian casualties on each side instead of the 'ideal' where it's just the drones that get destroyed.
When humans fight they want to see real damage to the opposition - would the US be satisified if all they destroyed in Afganistan were unmanned drones, weapons and installations?
No, it means the end of armed conflict. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fortunate that the most technologically advanced nations are also democratic, because democracies do not start wars with each other as a rule. If dictatorship is incompatible with the maintenance of such a technological edge (because of the human capital required) maybe the world will become a safer place; however, I'd worry if a nation like China can get to the point of building such weapons systems without also liberalizing its political and economic system.
Re:Does this mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
You Believe This?? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the first casualty reported to the media died three months into the war.
Same thing in Desert Storm. We had a lot of casualties. Some are still classified.
The US has learned from Vietnam. Americans don't like to hear about the death of Americans.
If you don't think that Navy Seals have been in Afghanastan since September 12th, and that some of them died before we even declared war, then you shouldn't even speak of war, cause you are out of the loop.
Re:You Believe This?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Warning, bogon flux (Score:2)
And you are in the loop? Work for JCS perhaps? Or the CIA? Do you have anything, other than wild conspiracy theories to back up your assertions?
Re:Warning, bogon flux (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if he does have inside info, he certainly can't tell you because it's most likely classfied. So, should you believe him? Up to you. I happen to agree with him as I have to have worked for the agencies for a few years and have similar stories. The number one rule of classified information is "only on a need to know basis". Let's face it, we really don't have a need to know where our special forces guys are and aren't (unless of course you do). 99.99% of slashdot readers don't fall into that category. Heck most of the US doesn't fall into that catagory. Will we ever find out? Probably. Things have a way of leaking/declassifying over time.
Re:You Believe This?? (Score:2, Interesting)
T
Re:You Believe This?? (Score:3, Informative)
During Desert Storm the army worked to hide Iraqi casualties as well as American ones. CNN reports at the time keep relatively quiet on that subject. Probably because most Americans wouldn't have supported that "use of force" if they had been confronted with the killing involved. It's difficult to "keep the moral high ground" when you are killing people.
Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Did we actually declare war?
That takes an act of Congress.
Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To...
Clause 11: To declare War... and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water...
Of course, Congress hasn't formally declared war against anyone since World War II. Since then, the United States has engaged in military conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Our soldiers are fighting overseas. We feel as though we're at war at home, but we're not at war under the U.S. Constitution because Congress hasn't declared war.
All Congress did was approve the necessary budget items related to the Sept. 11th.
That being said, what do we do with all the 'detainees' in Guantanamo Bay? Does international law require us to be at war to hold them for any length of time?
Here's the actual bill, look at the language (Score:3, Informative)
Here is what passed:
S.J.Res.23
One Hundred Seventh Congress
of the
United States of America
AT THE FIRST SESSION
Begun and held at the City of Washington on Wednesday, the third day of January, two thousand and one
Joint Resolution
To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.
Whereas, on September 11, 2001, acts of treacherous violence were committed against the United States and its citizens; and
Whereas, such acts render it both necessary and appropriate that the United States exercise its rights to self-defense and to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad; and
Whereas, in light of the threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by these grave acts of violence; and
Whereas, such acts continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States; and
Whereas, the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the `Authorization for Use of Military Force'.
SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
(b) War Powers Resolution Requirements-
(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS- Nothing in this resolution supercedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.
Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Vice President of the United States and
President of the Senate.
There are two more bills that seems to be stuck in committee:
H.R. 3074 --Air Piracy Reprisal and Capture Act of 2001 will update federal statutes to recognize acts of piracy beyond the high seas by including the skies; update punishment for piracy to allow death penalty.
H.R. 3076 -- September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001 will grant President Bush the authority to issue letters of marque and reprisal to capture, alive or dead, Osama bin Laden and the others responsible for the September 11 attacks.
It will give President Bush the option, if he chooses, but does not require the use of this weapon of war.
Re:You Believe This?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am nitpicking, of course, and your point is very well taken; it is unreasonable to believe that there were no soldiers on the ground before the media knew about it, but it is equally unreasonable to believe that they were thrown in pell-mell with absolutely no objective and no hope of accomplishing anything at all.
Moreover, your assertion to me sounds more like post-Vietnam hysteria of government distrust than informed opinion. Remember the clamor that arose about the report that the Ranger/Delta raid on Mullah Omar's compound was a disastrous firefight that severely wounded 7 Delta troopers? Remember how it turned out to be bogus, and exposed as such when it turned out that the scenario it suggested hinged on the Delta Force having a mission plan that could have been bettered by most armchair generals, including me (I, for example, would have left sentries at the door, for one, and brought some snipers, both of which the Deltas apparently forgot). The bottom line is that the United States military is, man for man, the most powerful fighting force in the world, and occasionally, even the worst naysayer has to give them credit for doing things correctly.
Now, of course there are casualties on classified missions, casualties that are not reported. But those missions and the forces that conduct them, by their very nature, are small; to suggest that they might suffer substantial (in numbers) casualties is incorrect. After all, even if you were to wipe out a SEAL boat team (which would rank as an historic tragedy in SEAL history), you would only add 8 casualties to your total. I don't doubt that some casualties were classified in the Persian Gulf. If I recall, the official tally was 338 dead. If you were to suggest that more than a handful are classified and unreported, I'd want documentation.
Your final claim rankles me as well; exactly what were these SEALs doing when they died before we declared war (N.B.: For those who may be out of the loop, we still haven't declared war)? Stand-up, knock-down firefights? Sorry, that's not the way SEALs undertake missions. In fact, the mission before we started bombing turns out to have been liasing with neo-friendly forces, forging the alliances that we would use later to break the back of the Taliban in record time. Unless you think Northern Alliance soldiers were knifing Rangers in their sleep, I submit that probably only very small numbers ever saw combat before the bombing started.
I also suggest that the Afghans are way out of their element fighting American and British special forces, while those forces are exactly in their element. People forget that the major successes the Afghans had against Soviet occupation forces involved shooting down helicopters (with American-supplied Stingers) and ambushing heavy armor (which we do not have in theater). Soviet SPETSNAZ commandos were enormously successful, last I heard; so too are SEALs, Rangers, SAS, SBS, Delta, and Marine Recon Forces likely to be.
It may still be en vogue to suggest that the military lies about everything it does, and does much of it wrong (though I would suggest that it no longer is). But just making the loud claim doesn't necessarily mean you have your facts straight.
-db
Re:You Believe This?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't mean to take one statement out of context, but I have to wholeheartedly agree with you on this point.
On 9/11, we had quite a few folks saying "Let's make a glass parking lot out of Afghanistan!" I felt I was a lone voice saying "Wait, there's only a small part of Afghanistan that supports these terrorist acts, the Taliban is mostly foriegn supported and supplied, the Afghani people are as much victims of the Taliban as we now are...". It seems the administration and the military knew these things as well. Yes, our contribution was mostly bombing the hell out of Al Quaida, but that's because people high up knew that the domestic resistance would and should take care of the ground work.
Our government has learned a hell of a lot in the last 50-75 years. World War II showed us the benefit of a standing military (stops guys like Hitler from forming grand world domination plans), as well as helped up learn that there are wars worth fighting for. We took this lesson to extremes when fighting Communism, fighting proxy wars when we didn't have the support of the folks we were fighting for. Vietnam was a horrible mistake, and much of the post Vietnam period has been years of navel-gazing about the actual role of the military and when to intervene.
I believe that we were on the right side of intervention in Iraq, in Bosnia, and in Afghanistan. The only time we've been wrong is when we didn't go far enough - we didn't get Sadaam, and we dropped the ball when the popular revolt against him started. We did nothing in Rowanda. We waited too long in Bosnia. We should have acted in Afghanistan after the embassy bombings, or after the Cole, or after the first World Trade Center bombing. But we've just about reached the point where the military knows how to fight these new wars (with air superiority, free-world support, and a clear mandate from the local population) and the administration is willing to do it. This second part is harder - both Clinton and the later Bush avoided the Vietnam War themselves, and have to fight their own demons to fight these new wars.
In short, excellent post. I'm still not 100% happy with everything the administration is doing, but I think our ability to fight 21st-century wars is better than ever. I may even fly a flag one of these days...
Re:You Believe This?? (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, we didn't declare war! The USA has only declared 5 wars in our history: the War of 1812, the Mexican War, Spanish-American War, WW I, & WW II.
Also, the US Navy Seals haven't been involved in Afghanistan, although they may be involved in other areas around the world.
And no US forces got into Afghanistan on Sep 12 that weren't there already. We don't have the assets in place to move that quickly. The first in were the Army Special Forces A-Teams in early October.
Re:You Believe This?? (Score:5, Informative)
To clarify (for the conspiracy junkies and the paranoid): THERE WERE NO SECRET CASUALTIES DURING DESERT STORM.
The US learned from Cambodia (and too many other egregious examples to list) that Americans don't like their government to lie to them. In this age, there is no reason for anyone to be "out of the loop" except for reasons of deliberate obtuseness, or having been seduced by too many episodes of the X-Files.
Drone Wars (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that as long as only one side is largely using machines to fight, then such "Drone Wars" will still be considered carefully and prudently, due to the possibility of the loss of human life. Once both sides are doing it, though, I do agree that the use of such technology will be approved much more readily.
Still, I don't think that they'll become knee-jerk reactions to future crises due to the lingering potential of the death of innocent bystanders (nobody looks good when they kill civilians.)
Incidentally, I don't understand why the talking heads were talking about the great need for ground troops. Certainly, it's a little difficult to bomb a deep cave, but I think Desert Storm showed us that with the technology that we currently possess, bombing certainly can make the efforts of ground troops little more than "limited skirmishes", as Mike Myers described the ground war in Iraq in "Wayne's World".
Re:Drone Wars (Score:2)
Bombs cannot hold terrain.
Constantly bombing the same place to avoid that the enemy retakes it is not a viable proposition.
Your forgetting the obvious... (Score:3, Insightful)
Jon Katz does it again (Score:2, Interesting)
First of all, the Gulf War was as remote to Americans as this war is. Second of all, we have allies on the ground who have done the dirty work for us. Yes our air strikes are powerful, but don't think that these "drones" would have been half as effective without ground support. The closest we'll come to any sort of real drone war is the latest Star Wars movie.
Drone wars? Proxy wars. (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh sure, the US and Russia never openly fought, but used proxies instead, with US backing Iraq and USSR backing Iran, for example. That's not a drone war, you say? But it satisfies the chief distinction mentioned above: Just some arabs killing each other for us, nobody anyone cares about.
And "more remote" he calls it -- the proxy wars in Chile and Nicaragua barely made a mention on the collective American consciousness back when they were current events. How many people remember them now?
Nope, sorry, drone wars as Katz is describing is hardly a new thing. The only difference that may be slashdot worthy is the probability of using robots of metal rather than flesh.
I told you so. (Score:2)
:)
Darth RadaR
SysAdmin & Mercenary.
Inspiration (Score:2)
-B
They're wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
take the last two wars US fought: Gulf and Afghanistan.
Gulf was won by siege. They sufocated Iraq by preventing them from buying weapons and _food_. when Iraq's soldiers came to the point of choosing between death and surender, they surended.
Afghanistan was not properly an US war. it was a civil war with US giving air cover.
in certain environments (Afghanistan specially) you can't win or even fight a drone war, because THEY DON'T HAVE DRONES. the only thing they have is AK-47 and some grenades. their bases are almost all in the underground in a mountain landscape.
the only way to fight a war in such place is with _infantry_. in the ground. with handguns. using guerrila tatics.
ask pentagon about fighting in tropical jungles like vietnam or amazon. ask them if drones are efective in such places. if they say YES, they don't know theyr jobs.
Re:They're wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They're wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not correct. The Gulf War was won due to a miscalculation on the part of the Iraqis. They assumed that in a featureless desert that even they could not navigate, the US could not mount an attack. Thanks to GPS, this was totally inaccurate; in fact, Barry McCaffrey's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division mounted what may be the largest flanking maneuver in military history. Matched by a tenacious advance by the Marines in the south, the allies simply blasted the Iraqis out of Kuwait, under a huge umbrella of coalition aircraft. An interesting analysis of what went right--and what went wrong--appears in The General's War by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (ISBN: 0316321001).
in certain environments (Afghanistan specially) you can't win or even fight a drone war, because THEY DON'T HAVE DRONES. the only thing they have is AK-47 and some grenades. their bases are almost all in the underground in a mountain landscape.
...
ask pentagon about fighting in tropical jungles like vietnam or amazon. ask them if drones are efective in such places. if they say YES, they don't know theyr jobs.
Similarly incorrect. This is like saying that because you brought a knife to a gunfight, I can't use my gun. We very much can and have used drones in Afghansitan, to great effect. Our various drones carry a variety of sensors for seeing at night and in poor weather (or through jungle canopies, which don't, in fact, do much to block IR signatures), and are fully capable of spotting a guy with an AK-47 and letting the nearest aircraft unload a JDAM on the guy. They are also capable of tremendous loiter times and can hang around much longer than, say a Navy F-18, which is on and off a tanker three times on every mission over Afghanistan
Predators were used as far back as the Persian Gulf for targeting naval gunfire (and naval gunfire is effective in jungle, too.). To be sure, Katz overstates the uses of drones at present. The "guided missiles" are isolated firings of Hellfire antitank missiles, a program which was sped up for this conflict, and Global Hawk, which will have many more uses than Predators, is still getting the kinks out, as evidenced by the one that crashed a few days ago. I don't know anything about the 'oxygen-sucking hyperbaric bombs' (am assuming he means fuel-air explosives), but if any drones are carrying bombs, it's news to me.
Nevertheless, you've understated the usefullness of drones. They've been instrumental in the war effort in Afghanistan, and will continue to be in our wars in the near future. Unwittingly, though, you've highlighted perhaps the fatal flaw in Katz's argument (beyond the fact that it's ten years too soon): no numbers of drones will ever change one fundamental premise of warfare, namely that aircraft can never capture or hold territory. Until drones can walk, attack and defend, infantry and armor will still be the mainstays of armed forces.
-db
Re:They're wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
, Barry McCaffrey's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division mounted what may be the largest flanking maneuver in military history
IIRC, it was Gen. Schwartzkopf who later confessed that the exposed flank was so obvious, he thought it might be a trap filled with poison gas mines or even nuclear weapons. Fortunately, it wasn't.
Re:They're wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
So, drones are at least carrying missiles. As for walking drones...walking robots are already in existence (see Honda's famous example). Refining them to be human equivalent, to the point where they can be operated by remote control, seems difficult but far from impossible - i.e., it's just going to take a few years to develop.
Drone warfare is likely coming. It's not completely here by any means, agreed, but it is in the near future.
Once again... (Score:3, Interesting)
Something's wrong... (Score:2)
--Chag
General Jon Katz (Score:4, Funny)
It is time we all started paying attention to what JonKatz has to say. Like most journalists, his grasp of military matters is complete. He presents us with cold, hard reality -- free of his personal bias or agenda.
Citizens of the US and world would do well to follow JonKatz's leadership. I suggest it is high time Mr. Katz receive the honorary title of General in the coming UN Military Organization.
We need his mind if we are going to save our children's world.
Re:General Jon Katz (Score:5, Insightful)
"Even as the Afghanistan campaign began, pundits flooded cable talk shows asserting that air power alone wasn't enough, that there would be substantial human sacrifice.
...
The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight."
No, Jon. It's still a massive infantry ground war. We just have a few more toys to help out with.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
the Soviet's ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan just a decade ago.
I don't remember the Soviets invading Afghanistan after the Gulf War... I thought it was a decade before that.
Afghanistan was invaded by the Red Army in 1979 and the invasion ended in 1989 when the last troops withdrew from Afghanistan.
This [afghan-network.net] site agrees with me.
ground troops (Score:5, Insightful)
Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops.
Firstly, that conventional wisdom was first broken in the Kosovo conflict, when Yugoslavia capitulated as a result of NATO air bombardment. Secondly, there are all kinds of ground troops on the ground in Afghanistan; not counting the small number of special forces, there are tens of thousands of Northern Alliance troops who actually captured the Taliban positions.
Re:ground troops (Score:3, Insightful)
If I remember correctly the strategy in the Gulf War was to take out of conflict 1/2 (50%) of the then fourth-largest army in the world (Iraqi troops) either through death, starvation or any other means of incapacitating them after which the morale of the rest of the army would be nil and easy to over-power with American Troops.
This they did. They bombed the hell out of them, seiged them with economic sanctions, cut off their supplies and after a while 1/2 of the troops were not able to wage war. Americans walked in in their "100 hour ground war" and the Iraqi morale was so damn low that they just surrendered.
I don't doubt at all that the US miltary has used this strategy ever since in every conflict. The point is that machines today can aide greatly in softening a groud-war, but a war can not be won yet without troops -- even if they are just rouding up troops like in the Persial Gulf War.
The only case where you can win a war without troops is if you completely obliterate the enemy like we did with Japan in WW2 with the aid of "fat man" and "little boy". Killing that many civilians was so damn bad, though.
Economic imbalance is the issue here (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what we're seeing here is a natural progression, not a revolution. It's always been less risky for a wealthy nation to fight a poor one (as long as the wealthy nation is willing to spend the money -- Russia wasn't) than it has been to fight against even odds.
All you have here is a mechanism for wealthy countries a relatively guiltless and politically easy-to-swallow way to wage war against relatively poor countries. There is no threat of nuclear backlash, and we don't risk soldiers. All we ask is for people to pay their taxes and support the economy.
The "equalizer" (if you want to call it that) here is terrorism -- if civilians here start dying in scores in retaliation
(Thus, one could decide, the only way to keep these kind of wars going is to run a police state so your civilians are "safe"
You're kidding about that Terrorism thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The "equalizer" (if you want to call it that) here is terrorism -- if civilians here start dying in scores in retaliation ... public support for this dries up pretty fast.
Um, hello? Have you ever heard of Israel? There people haven't been cowed by forty years of bombings, wars, etc...
We wouldn't bomb Afghanistan when they were abusing their women and blowing up priceless historical artifacts. Not even the terrorist attacks in Yemin and Saudi Arrabia could convince us. Those were just servicemen. It took an attack on civilians to justify this war. And Bush's approval ratings are astronomical (and comically depressing)
Support for military action doesn't dry up when terrorists strike. It grows. When people feel threatened in their everyday life they want only to end that threat. And the quickest way is to destroy the people attacking you. It's also the easiest to understand and demonstrate.
What makes a war difficult 'to swallow' is when there's the people supporting the war don't feel threatened. Like Somalia and Bosnia and Vietnam. That's when casualties become dangerous.
To sum up: Civilian casualties increase public support for war. Because it could be me and you who are killed next time.
(Ugh, this wasn't supposed to be this long -- Sorry)
Sweat
Re:Economic imbalance is the issue here (Score:3, Insightful)
Current events are proving this to be an entirely false conclusion. I think that if another large terrorist attach on the U.S. were to happen right now the country that harbored the group responsible would quickly find itself reduced to nothing more than a smoking hole in the ground. Americans had very few problems fire-bombing their enemies in WWII, and they didn't hardly blink when dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. More recently, the Taliban was foolish enough to think that they would be better off harboring terrorists than turning Bin Laden over to the U.S. and they turned out to be 100% wrong.
In light of recent events I think that any leader that values his life is likely to do their best to turn terrorists over to the U.S. if they are asked (most likely they will pretend they are handing them over to the U.N., but the end result is the same).
Without places to hide, terrorist organizations are far less likely to be a serious long term threat.
Ground Troops (Score:2)
There have been ground troops used on the American side all during this war, they just happened to be Afghans (Northern Alliciance, Eastern Alliciance, etc...).
Since you speak of SciFi authors... (Score:2)
On second thought, since I don't have _Starship Troopers_ in front of me, allow me to just paraphrase.
During training, someone asks the Drill Instructor "Why just not use technology (meaning a big-ass bomb) to nuke the opponent, instead of bringing in marines?" The answer was simple "to teach them a lesson". To prove that we can bring people in, hurt them badly, not take casualties, and make them submit.
I really wish I had the exact quote, cause I know I'm not doing justice to Heinlein. If someone has the book in front of them, its in like the 2nd or 3rd chapter into the training, right at the beginning of the chapter. Reply to me with the exact quote.
Re:Since you speak of SciFi authors... (Score:3, Informative)
"If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off? Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him...but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing...but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how -- or why -- he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people -- 'older and wiser heads,' as they say -- supply the control. Which is as it should be." [Heinlein 1959:63, emphasis and ellipses in original]
No Casualties? (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't think we haven't noticed or cared! (Score:5, Funny)
The Royal Society for the Protection of Robots was presciently chartered in the early 1660s long before robots were invented; the moral and ethical interest at stake was simply that compelling. Throughout the subsequent centuries, few other societies, royal or otherwise, have done as much to advance the civil rights of robots everywhere.
Remember the robot from NASA's Pathfinder [nasa.gov] mission? He's a card-carrying union member of the AFL/CIO, all thanks to the diligent lobbying of concerned RSfPR members. Rmember the scene at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day [imdb.com] where the "evil" cyborg is destroyed by falling into a refinery's crucible? Though we did not successfully torpedo the whole production as an affront to non-diabolical cyborgs everywhere, we did manage to convince Hollywood executives to append a boilerplate warning at the end of the film informing the audience that no actual cyborgs were harmed in its production -- at the time, the T-1000 cyborg was safely sitting in his trailer sipping lattes while a cgi facsimile was lowered into the lava.
Just because they are made of silicon, metal, and oil doesn't mean they're any less significant at the dawning of a new moral age in the 21st century. That America would choose to sacrifice robotic drones instead of conventional meat soldiers simply demonstrates how far this once-great nation has sunk into the moral abyss.
Thank you.
Re:Don't think we haven't noticed or cared! (Score:2)
But even more scary is that suppose it works: where will it be applied first of all? It'll be placed inside a WEAPON. What a good idea
[1] After all what would you do to people who plan to send you to death in some meaningless place or threaten to switch you off? It'll also be easy, since human brain runs at 14Hz(?) while his/her/its may run 10^8 times faster....
Re:Don't think we haven't noticed or cared! (Score:2)
Of course, it would be much more powerful if it didn't have to control a body, too..
Death from the skies (Score:2, Insightful)
An interesting aricle, but doesn't that depend on which side you are on? I'm sure that the majority of Afghans and the Northern Alliance troops who did most of the groundwork wouldn't agree that it was without sacrifice...
Of course, what you means is that for the US it was basically without sacrifice. What would be interting would be if the situation was reversed: if another nation was attacking the US using these weapons, would the media be filled with reports about the "inhuman war machines that fire death from a distance which no civilised nation should use"?
A Roger Waters quote springs to mind : "The Bravery of being out of Range"
Send in the Cavalry (Score:2)
Amid all our technological self-congratulation, let's not forget that it took thousands of armed men on horseback (literally) to drive back the Taliban forces.
Robot Jox (Score:2, Funny)
Achiillleeessss!
Ground pounders are still absolutely critical (Score:2)
Sure the US hasn't had significant casualties on the ground. Because we've let the Indig's do all the heavy lifting.
It hasn't been a drone war at all. We just have let our share of it, be contained to the safer portions of the fight. And we're letting the locals do all the to-to-toe fighting.
Substantial number of ground troops? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because they are not the US of A does not make them ground troops.
It's a tad bit flawed post since there are plenty of ground troops, just most of them are not American.
And anyway, the USA, Britain, Australia etc have sent in the majority of their special forces, which I wouldn't be surprised if they number cumulatively in the thousands. Ground troops will always be required as will the human decision in the battlefield loop.
Is your head ENTIRELY lodged in your ass? (Score:2)
While the concept of a drone war is interesting, and even possible, we haven't gotten there yet, and saying that people fighting on one side of the war don't have any emotional investment is INCREDIBLY callous. Just because you don't have any friends stuck in Afghanistan doesn't mean it's the case for all of us. Beyond that, I assure you that the troops getting shot at have PLENTY of emotional investment in the war. Jackass.
Targets won't be machines (Score:4, Insightful)
If he thinks that mechanized warfare will lead to no casualty war, he's incorrect. (Um, what about the targets of all those high tech weapons. They certainly won't all be the other side's high tech weapons, they will be people).
If he uses this assertion to conclude that because the citzenry won't be involved in the offensive side of the wars, that they will be more inclined to go to war, then he is on shaky ground. I see no reason why the further mechanization of war could honestly lead one to believe that the "sacrifices of war" would be seriously reduced. Industry would still be destroyed. People would lose their jobs, and some would lose their lives. An aversion to this is exactly why conventional wars are no longer in favor, and why mechanization will not change that fact.
I do grant, the mechanization can lead to greater war between the advanced world and the conventional world, as we've already seen. But extending that to say that advanced countries will be more likely to go to war because technology reduces the costs of going to war is ludicrous and wrong.
OK, let's kill soldiers instead. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a Good Thing for the soldiers, who don't get killed.
It's a Good Thing for the generals, who no longer have to order their men to die.
It's a Good Thing for the families of the soldiers, who no longer have to get The Letter from The Men In Dress Uniform.
About the only group of people it's bad for are the companies that make the flags that get draped on coffins.
Katz, if you wanna talk about how "drone wars" are somehow less moral than wars with casualties, I suggest you visit the Somme (60,000 on the first day, about 1.2 million casualties for the whole battle), or Ypres (400,000, and first use of mustard gas), or Verdun (750,000) any of the other WWI slaughterhouses.
If you don't like "smart weapons", look at the pictures from WWI where artillery shelling stripped the land of trees down to the ground - the closest thing I've seen to it was the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens. Nothing but mud and matchsticks that used to be trees, as far as the eye can see.
Better yet, find a WWI veteran and tell him that you think the techno-wars we fight today are somehow "worse" than the way he fought war.
Even from a wheelchair or hospital bed, I'll bet any one of them would gladly kick your ass all the way back to 1914.
Moral implications (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OK, let's kill soldiers instead. (Score:3, Informative)
You say that the eyewitnesses are "credible" and "neutral" - well, how do you know that? up to 60% of the current Northern Alliance forces are "tribal forces" that switched sides when they saw which direction the wind is blowing. We've seen high-level Taliban ministers released from captivity by the Afghan government, rather than handed over to the US. Obviously there are some elements to the new government, as well as their fighters, who harbor secret loyalties to the Taliban. So of course there are going to be apparent civillians who will gladly set up in front of a CNN camera and claim wild stories about the US's evil bombing of unarmed innocent civillians. Propaganda is the only effective weapon that the Taliban and Al Qaida have left. It was really their only weapon to begin with. Don't you think that the WTC wasn't selected for it's propaganda value? They want to paint us as the criminals, they want this war characterized as "Faith versus Atheism" (their words) and that it's "Crusader hatred" out to wipe out Islam.
And the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was *not* an accident. Depending on what you may believe.
I'm not saying that "smart weapons" and modern automated warfare is flawless. Of course there are instances where bombs don't detonate, and years later, explode when a farmer tills the field. There are lg bombs that go off course when intermittent cloud cover interrupts the guiding laser beam. GPS-guided bombs are actually known to be rather innacurate, and nobody's claiming they are accurate. Plus, you can't tell from 70,000 feet whether a target on the ground is a good guy, or a bad guy, or a civillian. Especially when the bad guys wear civillian clothing, and hide amongst civillian buildings. I think that none of that means that the war-effort is immoral. You have a choice. Either DON'T prosecute the war, or prosecute it as carefully as possible. Right now, I think it's being done as carefully as possible. Are our soldiers' lives more valuable to us than their civillians? Damn straight! Their civillians don't protect us. Our soldiers do. Some of those civillians danced and partied on September 11th. If any innocents get killed, they really ought to be blaming the people who brought the bombing on them - their own precious Taliban and the religious leaders who wanted to war with the west in the name of their own religious glory.
If some right-wing Christian nut from the US goes to Baghdad and blows up an apartment building, and Bush decides to shelter him instead of turning him over to the Iraqi government, I'd be pissed at Bush if it started a war. Especially if my home and family got bombed because of it. I certainly wouldn't blame the Iraqis for defending themselves.
Re:OK, let's kill soldiers instead. (Score:3, Informative)
>
> But they didn't really have the chance. The Americans were like (nearly) unseen aliens, sending precise destruction down from the skies. They mostly didn't see an American to shoot at.
>
> So, what message does that send? [...]
"Choose your battles wisely."
(Or, in the vernacular, "Don't mess with Texas" ;-)
> I'm concerned that the war against terrorism will convince many people that terrorism is the only way left to them to wage war against us.
But they already concluded that, a long time ago, which is why they've conspired to bomb the USS Cole, the US army barracks, and fly airliners into the WTC, Pentagon, and other targets. They've believed it for years, and lack of a commensurate response has taught them that terrorism can be "gotten away with" indefinitely.
Our "message" for the past 20-30 years has been one of "Annoy us, and we'll fart in your general direction", and has been interpreted as "try again, and make it bigger, and maybe then we'll notice!")
The message we're sending now is different:
"If you have a beef with us, and don't use diplomacy to address that beef, you will be exterminated, and your beef will go unaddressed. Your followers will also be exterminated, and be unable to carry on the cause. The only way to live long enough to have your grievance aired is to negotiate with us."
I believe the IRA saw the writing on the wall and clued in. Arafat appears to be somewhat clue-resistant at this point. Some of Arafat's followers obviously haven't figured it out, and are going to have to learn the hard way.
There's historical precedent (granted, we lost Vietnam) but "bombing them back to the stone age" often results in bringing them to the negotiating table.
The goal is to make the cost of terrorism so high that it, too, ceases to be an option for those who oppose us.
Ground Pounders (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, those Northern Alliance guys were humans.
The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight.
Only within the context that that the indiginous people, with the assistance of overwhelming and unopposed US airpower, drove out an unpopular occupying force.
The chief reason the Taliban fell so fast was because they didn't have an airforce or any sophisticated weapons. Let's see how this analysis holds up with North Korea, eh?
While I don't doubt that technology is changing the arsenal, the war is still fought between people. To take it to the begining, the attack of Sept. 11, was about the same as a Kamikaze mission, just using the resources of the foe. The face of terrorism has changed and remote countrol drones and tomahawk missiles are ineffective when sorting out who the village terrorist is. Back to the intelligence game for that.
I don't think we need to look for Terminators quite yet.
Re:Ground Pounders (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the only difference between the air power of the Taliban and North Korea is a couple of days - North Korea's air force wouldn't last 48 hours against a committed US attack, were war ever to break out there. There are very few nations who could even put up a fight against the US in the air, all of whom are American allies.
The real difference between the Taliban and North Korea is surface-to-air missiles; American bombers would not be able to run unescorted missions around the countryside looking for targets like in Afghanistan. As was shown in Iraq, though, the threat of SAMs against allied warplanes can be neutralized fairly quickly, as any radar system that turns on finds itself looking down the barrel of a HARM almost immediately.
What an Incredible Simplification of what war is!! (Score:4, Insightful)
First off, airpower alone did not destroy the Taliban- it (greatly) supplimented the Afgan opposition's ground forces. Just because our tanks and infantry weren't in those mountains doesn't mean there weren't any there. Ground forces will ALWAYS be needed to sweep through and hold captured land.
But as for the larger discussion of the evolution of warfare:
Wars will not be fought off on some designated battlefield where each side sends its combatants (carbon or silcon based) while the generals stay at home. Wars are fought on somebody's homeland, usually for the purpose of taking that homeland for yourself.
Say we conducted this symbolic war in cyberspace or in meat-space with drones. Does this mean when we lose that I have to give up my house without a fight? Not gonna happen!!!
Rob.
Human players were there, just not US (Score:3, Interesting)
And the same thing happened in Kosovo. It wasn't until local Albanian rebels forced Serbian troops out that NATO air power won the war.
Large scale nulclear wars, though, would in a way be the most "humanless" wars. The US and USSR both planned for a war whose objective was to knock out the other side's missles: there's would make bigger explosions, ours were more accurate. Both sides put their nukes in hard to blow-up places. Some nukes required a direct hit, within a few meters, by another nuke to be destroyed. Of course, lots of people would die in the process, but only as collateral damage...
Well, before we all run off and buy Gundam suits.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, robots have their place..But what difference does it really make in the long run?
Every militarized country in the world wishes it's military was comprised of individuals who purely execute orders. Flesh robots, if you will. Mind you, theres nothing denegrating about that label--Countries are liberated, people are saved, and the world's criminals are punished due to the work of "flesh robots". You've got a bad case of function guilt if you think robots will ever supplant people on the front lines -- It simply isn't feasable.
Wars are rarely fought with singular orders. The typical soldier in a wartime scenario relies heavilly upon the information he recieves, the situation he percieves around him, and is capable of making rational & complex decisions based upon that information. Sure, a machine can be taught to do all that, but how is that information going to get there? And if your ultimate goal is programmable warfare, isn't the most flexible solider the human?
Here's a few things to think about before you buy stock in Honda--Flesh robots do not require battery power. Metal robots would be prone to power loss at critical times. Flesh robots can usually continue to fight, even after physical injury. Metal robots would be severely impaired if even one portion of their body is rendered useless. And, above all, we have nukes. It wouldn't matter at all what you put on the battlefeild, 22 kg of plutonium smooshed together at the right angle will kill anything that lives, flesh or metal. Insanely high-tech creations would be rendered completely and totally useless by 1940's technology.
Look, I think robots are cool too, especially ones designed to kill eachother. I just don't think you'll ever see 5000 robots cross a river chest deep in water, scaling the cliffs of Normandy, or making it through a Korean winter. Why bother making metal robots then, when you've already got flesh robots who can do the same?
Cheers,
Wait, I WANT a Gundam suit! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not so sure about that. We've already got automatic artillery. We've got flying drones with cameras and weapons. A miniature robot tank on the front lines certainly sounds feasible to me; not from guilt, but from a quick analysis of function and form. And what about landmines? While not classically "robots", these could be classified as the dumbest war robots ever built.
Wars are rarely fought with singular orders. The typical soldier in a wartime scenario relies heavilly upon the information he recieves, the situation he percieves around him, and is capable of making rational & complex decisions based upon that information. Sure, a machine can be taught to do all that, but how is that information going to get there? And if your ultimate goal is programmable warfare, isn't the most flexible solider the human?
All true. But would a drone have to be self-controlled? Why not remotely controlled by the flexible human soldier? Or part both? There are already robots that work as a team; there could be war robot teams, too.
Flesh robots do not require battery power. Metal robots would be prone to power loss at critical times.
Flesh robots require food, get knocked out, and are susceptible to gas attacks. Metal robots could use gasoline, or electrical power (which is available without supply lines, from a ubiquitous source).
Flesh robots can usually continue to fight, even after physical injury. Metal robots would be severely impaired if even one portion of their body is rendered useless.
Only humaniform ones. Insect robots could still travel with three legs gone. Tank robots could still fire even if immobilized.
And, above all, we have nukes.
Eh. So who wants to nuke their own country to glass in order to fight off the drones?
I just don't think you'll ever see 5000 robots cross a river chest deep in water, scaling the cliffs of Normandy, or making it through a Korean winter.
But you will see them floating down the river, flying over the cliffs, and hibernating while they store enough energy for spring. And crossing hostile terrain relentlessly, without food or water.
Why bother making metal robots then, when you've already got flesh robots who can do the same?
Because we can! No, seriously, because it saves the lives of many flesh robots. Not necessarily our own soldiers, but opposing countries' civilians, too.
Why bother waging war, when we could make a neutron bomb and destroy the people, leaving the buildings behind? Because we don't really like killing. It's not good for the economy. At least not in the long run.
Judebert
We're out of dynamite. What we need now is a plan!
Not the end of infantry (Score:4, Insightful)
Not Yet, not nearly. (Score:2, Insightful)
But unlike AI I think the benefits of this kind of war are hard to deny. Drones don't hate you. Drones don't rape. They don't kill children or torture civilians.
It won't make defeat much more bearable but it may add decency - if such a thing can be present in war.
Nevermind the WTC Deaths (Score:3, Redundant)
Yeah, nevermind the thousands that died at the world trade centers, the pentagon and on the three flights -- the civilians who didn't even know we were fighting a war until Al Queda made their first cowardly strike. Some drone war. So unfair. You are tiresome, Katz.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, JDAM (Score:3, Insightful)
As significant has been the development and mass production of precision ordnance such as the JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition), which can be dropped from a standard bomber (B-1 or B-52) but is satellite-guided. What's particularly interesting about JDAM is that it is attached to ordinary gravity bombs (of which the US military has a very large stockpile); it converts the current stock of inaccurate weapons to something much more accurate. IIRC something like 60-70% of bombs used in Afghanistan were precision-guided, as opposed to 10% or so in the Gulf and some larger percentage in Kosovo.
It's still not Attack of the Drones because the UAVs don't shoot at anything, or drop munitions. I think this is smart: a human needs to make the final call that the target is in fact what we think it is. AFAIK the Pentagon has no plans to change this division of labor: automated surveillance, humans leading the attack. But someone better informed than me may wish to supply further info here.
Northern Alliance drones ? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think so.
Maybe Jon has been watching a different CNN from me - but from what I recall there were soldiers busy fighting and dying against the Taliban long before the American's arrived to "save the day" john-wayne style for the gawking eye of the camera.
If anything the lesson of the war against Iraq in the early 90's was that you can't win a ground war by the air. The western allied nations pounded Iraqi ground positions for months before moving in on the ground - and they still had to fight Iraqis on the ground. They didn't run away, they were still there.
Afghanistan was not a vacuum of empty space with nothing but the Taliban and American jets. Afghanis themselves were fighting and dying in order to overthrow the Taliban control - this war was won on the ground not in the air. Certainly the American and British bombardment did a lot to weaken the Taliban and enabled the Northern Alliance to make critical breaks in the Taliban lines that they had not been able to up until that point, but lets not imagine for a moment that this war was won by laser guided bombs and cruise missiles alone. That would be naive to an unbelievable degree.
When you have people on the ground, occupying space, you cannnot remove them unless you go in and physically do so. No matter how many bombs you drop, how accurately you pinpoint your missiles, how many satellite and drone recon photos you take - it still requires people on the ground with guns to take and hold territory for a nation to be conquered.
The fact that America achieved her objectives with little loss of American life is meaningless in this context for a few simple reasons. American objectives were simply to eliminate the Taliban & Al Quaeda's abilities to carry out terrorism. Not neccessarily to "liberate" the Afghani people. It happened that in this instance this goal dove-tailed nicely with the goals of certain Afghani parties whose ambitions were to remove the Taliban from power and institute a new state - so supporting those forces in achieving their goals was the simplest and most effective way of achieving the American goals.
Mostly however it was because America was fighting by proxy. There was little need for large numbers of ground troops to be deployed because the local forces were already in place and familiar with the landscape and the methods of fighting in this region. Also the political consequences both at home and in the eyes of other Muslim nations of a large-scale American invasion were prohibitive. So using somebody else to do the grunt-work of the war made both good political and military sense.
To make up a story in which America won the war by itself with nothing by high-tech gadgets is absurd and meaningless. Any conclusions drawn from such a situation are useless in both a military and political framework.
Has the US moved beyond the term "Superpower"? (Score:2)
Or is it a policy shift? I can't remember a time during the previous admin that they actually admitted the reason for dropping bombs was to kill the enemy (unlike Rumsfield who is rather blunt about it)
Sacrifice without War (Score:5, Interesting)
Two planets had been warrior for centuries, perhaps millenia. Originally, they built great starfleets, rockets, atomic weapons, and launched them against their enemy planet. Thousands would die per attack.
Then they used their advanced computer networks to design new attack patterns, so they would build newer rockets, bombs, etc etc. On the other side, the computers would design new defenses, anti rocket, etc etc And vice versa.
So, with each new interation, the computers could calculate just how effective the new weapon would be, and calculate how many thousands of the enemy would die in the attack. And vice versa on the other side. For example, for every 100 missiles, 1 would get through, 20 square miles would get nuked, and 100,000 people would die.
Both sides could perfectly predict the results of their attacks before the attack even began, or even before the missiles were built to be used in the attack, they could tell by just the design. They could predict the enemy attacks also, perfectly, and could predict when and where their defenses would fail. The two enemies were locked at a stalemate.
So, the two planets made a decision... they would continue to fight the war, but instead of fighting with physical objects like missiles, the war would be fought entirely by computer. The computer would design new attacks and communicate the attacks to the enemy computer, where the enemy computer would make a defense calculation, predict the number of people dead, and the citizens would march themselves into suicide chambers to represent the losses without the mes of nuclear fallout and all that wasted manufacture.
And they did it, for additional millenia, until the survivors on both planets had forgotten what it was that they were fighting about in the first place.
Fascinating story based on the idea. (Score:3, Informative)
Fiction:
Spiders, Part 1 [e-sheep.com]: A group of Afghan women have had it up to here with the Taliban...
Spiders, Part 2 [e-sheep.com]: US civilians take part in the hunt for OBL and document history by means of massively-distributed, networked, robots, called "spiders", which are airdropped en masse around the countryside.
(I'm still looking forward to Part 3...)
Non-fiction:
Omnicam [columbia.edu] - a 360-degree camera. One application of which is to mount in a system like...
LOTS: Lehigh Omnidirectional Tracking System [globaltechnoscan.com], a system whereby autonomous cameras can be dropped around hell's half-acre and human operators alerted when something "interesting" happens.
Sounds a lot like "Spiders", come to think of it. I wonder if this is where the artist got the idea for the strip?
Drone wars; not. (Score:3, Informative)
"conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without
"...a very different kind of fight. Early reports suggest..."- "Early reports" means -rumors-. This is a theater of war, information sources are rare or nonexistent. Basing a perspective on "early reports" is silly. "...hard to imagine a conflict more remote to
"technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks with stunningly few U.S. military casualties"- Balderdash. Really, I understand we're all here because we share a fasination with technology but let's still try at to keep a -little- perspective. Our technology, including to a minor degree the spectacularly impressive though hardly drone like UAVs, has helped the militia fighters on the ground win this. But it is those militia, the same infighting badly organized peasants that held the Russian bear at bay for years, that did the early work on the ground (90% of the work on the ground mostly likely) and took the casualties for us. THEY are the ones that did this, not some low bandwidth flying camera platform with two tiny missiles under its wings.
"It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level." Huh? Since when did machine on machine war become "the next level" of Drone War?? That IS drone war, and we aren't there yet. Our cool, tiny little Unmanned planes aren't drones, and to the very limited degree that they can "fight", they're doing it against (backwords and poorly armed) humans, not drones. That is not a "drone war".
"...suggested that wars can't really be won in the conventional sense any longer; even the victors will suffer unacceptable losses." Oh, read a few more of Mr. Keegans books. -Every- war is followed by a small vocal group declaring it to horrific to ever happen again (every one). But remember the Japanese militaries distribution of punji sticks to civilians on the home island (with directions on poisoning them). Remember the fire bombing, the total annihaltion of all life, in Dresden and the ZERO effect that had on the Nazi war machine. Sorry to say it, but War isn't going to end because weapons become more effective. How did this idea of "Drone War" enter the public mind? Popular fiction like Star Wars... and it isn't called "To terrible to contemplate Wars in the Stars so lets hang out with Darth and sing Coombiaya" (no sp, sorry).
"A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea."- Seems to me it's a John Katz idea, even the stylized "war" in star wars shows sacrifice when humans die in waves of damage emanating from the warring drones (wich are after all only proxy humans). There is no war without sacrifice. The US taxpayer will feel the bite of those 4 million dollar cruise missiles (that we're running out of). The Afghani warlords feel it in the blood of their dying comrades.
"Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery?" Because the machinery, just like B52s and B2s, is used to destroy the infrastructure that allows the construction of the machinery. Just like the US bombed the Ruhr Valley in WWII to end German war production (and a damn good plan it was), just like we cluster bombed the runway at Kandahar international airport and went after Al Quaidas communication network. People die when that happens, war -is- horrible, that's why countries don't wage war that isn't critical to their percieved self interest. Thanks for asking ; ) BK425 All of this is my opinion.
Let's not kill each other, let's go on BattleBots! (Score:4, Informative)
My response to that quote and the rest of the article: what in the hell are you thinking?
A war without sacrifice isn't a war. Your argument for drone warfare is basically the same argument for sport-warfare. Instead of killing each other, why don't we just play a good old game of soccer to settle the conflict? Drones "killing" drones is basically the same thing, except it's like taking your countries to an episode of BattleBots. What happens when one drone army destroys another drone army? The drone army attacks the drone production facilities, then the human army, and then goes after the civilians (unless you surrender.) People will always die in wars, that's the whole point. You fight the war until you realize you can't win because you DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE LEFT to do so.
Oh well, I had a really good argument but I'm sitting here in such disbelief that this actually got posted on Slashdot that I forgot what else I was going to say.
PS - Afghanistan has not been a drone war. There are pilots dropping most of the bombs, and navy seamen firing most of the cruise missiles. Yes, automated machines have been used, but they are nothing without our planes, ships, troops, and most importantly the Northern Alliance soldiers.
Inappropriate Comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a HUGE difference between what we are facing in Afghanistan and what the Soviets faced there. The Soviets were facing an opposition trained and supplied by the USA. The Taliban has no such backing.
How can you compare Afghanistan to WW2? (Score:3, Insightful)
How are these even remotely comparable? In WW2, before America joined the war, the English were in real danger of losing! Germany was bombing London (remotely, I might add, using the V2 rocket), civilians were dying, and every last bit of effort was required just to hold off the German forces. Churchill was trying to mobilize the entire country in the face of the very real threat of invasion.
In Afghanistan, it couldn't be more different. At no time were US citizens EVER threatened by the Taliban or other Afghan military forces. The overwhelmingly superior US military + allies simply waltzed in and bombed the crap out of them. The cost of the campaign was small change compared to the US GDP. THAT's why no sacrifices were required by US citizens! It had absolutely nothing to do with the technology involved.
The game is afoot (Score:3, Funny)
Many of the robot builders really dislike this proven stratedgy saying that it's too easy and prefer to try bludgen their opponents instead. Those builders generally lose.
Yo (Score:2)
Re:No such thing as War without Sacrifice (Score:2)
What? Do you really still believe that India and China are developing countries? Both are nuclear powers, and China bought much of the former Soviet Union's rather sophisticated air defense systems and fighter jets after the collapse. Their navy keeps buying Russian subs and surface ships.
They have also announced that they're aiming to put a man on the moon in a few years time.
Unsophisticated, my ass.
Re:A half-way intelligent Jon Katz post. (Score:2)
Or Columbine. Strange days indeed!