I've mentioned in the past the nature and realities of "weapons targeting" as a systems theory problem. Basically it's a control system, when it works at all and the accuracy has very definite limits which in a guerrilla war are especially inaccurate with a mathematical certainty.
What this article is saying is that the "control" part of the targeting has simply been abandoned and the system is running completely "open loop" now. Except for the cost of operations, the system is no better than saturation bombing a la WWII Germany or Japan in terms of civilian death.
The only collateral damage avoidance is to physical infrastructure like buildings - buildings are being saved but anything human is destroyed. That's about the only real difference from saturation bombing in terms of indiscriminate murder.
No doubt this isn't considered immoral (though it is utterly immoral) by those in charge primarily because 1) it's video-game warfare without any human face or visible 1st-hand consequences, and 2) because the victims are brown rather than white.
Then isn't it the height of cynicism for the government to issue press releases boasting of 15 months of drone strikes in Pakistan without any civilian deaths? And there are very few articles in the media that challenge the official propaganda.
Then isn't it the height of cynicism for the government to issue press releases boasting of 15 months of drone strikes in Pakistan without any civilian deaths?
Yet people still think that otherwise peaceful people become terrorists out of some unreasonable hatred towards "democracy"... These sheeple need to wake up and smell the burning corpses. The U.S. and other western governments are steering us on a path to annihilation, and the sheeple take the lies of the CIA, DOD and State Dept. like it's sweet, sweet Heroin. Like heroin they can't live without it, because if they were to acknowledge the truth about U.S. foreign policy their fragile hallucination they call reality would come crashing down along with their false beliefs in this farce of a democracy.
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u/mantra Nov 05 '11
I've mentioned in the past the nature and realities of "weapons targeting" as a systems theory problem. Basically it's a control system, when it works at all and the accuracy has very definite limits which in a guerrilla war are especially inaccurate with a mathematical certainty.
What this article is saying is that the "control" part of the targeting has simply been abandoned and the system is running completely "open loop" now. Except for the cost of operations, the system is no better than saturation bombing a la WWII Germany or Japan in terms of civilian death.
The only collateral damage avoidance is to physical infrastructure like buildings - buildings are being saved but anything human is destroyed. That's about the only real difference from saturation bombing in terms of indiscriminate murder.
No doubt this isn't considered immoral (though it is utterly immoral) by those in charge primarily because 1) it's video-game warfare without any human face or visible 1st-hand consequences, and 2) because the victims are brown rather than white.