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Thread: Miscellaneous

  1. #11


    Fireside: Escalating Drone War Unnoticed

    Uploaded on Nov 4, 2011

    A Wall Street Journal article titled, "US Tightens Drone Rules" says the CIA has made a series of secret concessions in its drone campaign, after military and diplomatic officials complained that large strikes were damaging the fragile US relationship with Pakistan. But one of the biggest problems is the CIA doesn't even publicly acknowledge its drone strikes. And for the most part, very few in the US notice because records of strikes are kept secret by the government. While the WSJ reports that during the summer it was decided that there should be new rules for drone strikes and that they should be launched more selectively. Where's the proof of any of those changes?

  2. #12
    Article "U.S. Tightens Drone Rules"

    by Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman and Julian E. Barnes
    November 4, 2011

  3. #13

  4. #14
    Article "Smart Drones"

    by Bill Keller
    March 16, 2013

  5. #15


    America's ex-drone pilot

    Published on Aug 6, 2015

    Brandon Bryant, a former drone pilot and sensor operator for the of the US Air Force, quit his job after 5 years of being in the Drone Program left him emotionally traumatized.

    In this episode of Transmissions, Motherboard speaks with Brandon about his feelings of responsibility for the remote killings of people with predator drones, its connection to Germany's drone program, and why ultimately drone warfare makes us lose our humanity.

  6. #16
    Article "Death by drone strike, dished out by algorithm"
    The US National Security Agency’s Skynet project uses metadata to help decide who is a target – but is it technologically sound enough to justify drone strikes?

    by John Naughton
    February 21, 2016

  7. #17


    Letting robots kill without human supervision could save lives

    Published on Nov 13, 2017

    Calls to ban killer robots ignore the fact that human soldiers can make lethal mistakes. If driverless cars will save lives, perhaps armed machines can as well.
    Article "Letting robots kill without human supervision could save lives"
    Calls to ban killer robots ignore the fact that human soldiers can make lethal mistakes. If driverless cars will save lives, perhaps armed machines can as well

    by David Hambling
    November 8, 2017

  8. #18


    No country would be safe from fully autonomous weapons

    Published on Apr 5, 2018

    The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and thousands of artificial intelligence experts call for a ban on fully autonomous weapons. Such weapons would be able to identify, select and attack without further human intervention. They are just around the corner. We must act now, before it's too late.

  9. #19
    "Drone Wars: The Next Generation"
    An overview of current operators of armed drones

    by Joanna Frew
    May 2018

  10. #20


    Does drone warfare reduce harm? Maybe not. | Abigail Blanco | Big Think

    Feb 3, 2020

    There has been a huge increase in drone usage since the war on terror. Proponents of drone warfare claim it reduces civilian casualties and collateral damage, that it's cheaper than conventional warfare tactics, and that it's safer for U.S. military personnel.

    The data suggests those claims may be false, says scholar Abigail Blanco. Drones are, at best, about equivalent to conventional technologies, but in some cases may actually be worse.

    Blanco explains how skewed US government definitions don't give honest data on civilian casualties. Drone operators also suffer worse psychological repercussions following a drone strike because of factors such as the intimacy of prolonged surveillance and heat-sensing technology which lets the operator observe the heat leaving a dying body to confirm a kill.
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ABIGAIL BLANCO

    Abigail R. Hall is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Tampa. She is the co-author of Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism (2018, Stanford University Press). She is also an Affiliated Scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, an Affiliated Scholar with the Foundation for Economic Education and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    TRANSCRIPT: People have often pointed to technology as a means to harm reduction. In particular, if we look at the expansion of unmanned aerial vehicles, colloquially known as drones, particularly in the war on terror. So we see a huge increase in the use of drones in foreign conflict. And typically we see that proponents of this type of technology make a variety of different claims as to the benefits of this technology. So things like: it reduces civilian casualties and collateral damage. It's cheaper in a monetary sense than conventional warfare tactics. But then also make claims like well, it's safer or preferable for U.S. military personnel. And while we don't have a robust amount of data on this topic what we do have suggests that on all of these margins, drones are at best about equivalent to conventional technologies, but in some cases may actually be worse.
    So UAVs have a higher failure rate than conventional aircraft, for example, as opposed to being surgically precise which is often the terminology that's used by leaders. This technology is only as good as the intelligence that drives it. And that intelligence is often very poor. And so the data surrounding things like civilian casualty rates are not robust. They're not reliable at all. The U.S. government, for instance, has made claims that only a handful of civilian casualties, for instance, have occurred as the result of drone strikes. However, you run into problems when you find out things like they define a militant as any military aged male within a strike zone. So that is roughly about like 15 to 65. So, of course, you're going to have casualty rates or civilian casualty rates that look relatively low if that's the case.

    What's most interesting, I think, is if people are really focused on the supposed benefits to U.S. military personnel, is the following data. Unmanned aerial vehicles actually take more personnel on the ground to operate than a conventional military aircraft. That is because they have to—or, at this point, they require a number of individuals within the range that they're operating. And so they also have to be guarded when they're not flying and so this places a variety of personnel within harm's way as opposed to conventional military aircraft which you can launch from an aircraft carrier. There's also some really interesting studies that are being conducted in psychology looking at the psychological effects of the use of UAVs on UAV pilots and actually finding a comparable or even higher rates of things like post-traumatic stress disorder and also a variety of other psychological problems because of the way that drone warfare is conducted as opposed to conventional warfare.

    If you are a UAV pilot, you are watching your target for a prolonged period of time. And so you observe that target, you can see when he's going to the grocery store or you observe him with his family. And then the strike is conducted. But then when the strike is conducted the drone doesn't leave. You're talking about technology that can take a clear photograph of a coffee cup or something really small—from 30,000 feet, it can take a clear picture like three feet off the ground. It's remarkable technology in that way. So they're watching these individuals for a prolonged period of time but then after the strike occurs they're interested in having additional information. And so they watch.

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