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Assassination Drones are OK or morally questionable?

Are spy/assassinatin drones morally acceptable?

  • Total voters
    75
  • Poll closed .
AreteCourage said:
Special forces can get in there and handle themselves. It is what they do best. They have the ability to handle any threat and spare innocent people. Drones don't have that capability.
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the problem with this is that you are basing your opinion on Hollywood movies, where every mission goes like clockwork and nobody on the good side ever dies because the guys on the other side are all idiots.

Then there's the real world....
 
Wiggen said:
the problem with this is that you are basing your opinion on Hollywood movies, where every mission goes like clockwork and nobody on the good side ever dies because the guys on the other side are all idiots.

Then there's the real world....
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Except, in OBL's case, they were all idiots. I mean, c'mon! The Bad Guy Boss's lair and not a single soldier gets injured even a little? His two deputies, mowed down, totally ineffective. A couple chicks thought they'd get involved, bye. Osama himself was apparently busy with porn and could't mange to shoot anyone even one time. He also failed to push a 'detonate' button. Doesn't everyone think the Boss Lair should have a self-destruct button? Fail. They were all completely ineffectual, seems we got lucky that time.
 
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ecofarm said:
Except, in OBL's case, they were all idiots. I mean, c'mon! The Bad Guy Boss's lair and not a single soldier gets injured even a little? His two deputies, mowed down, totally ineffective. A couple chicks thought they'd get involved, bye. Osama himself was apparently busy with porn and could't mange to shoot anyone even one time. He also failed to push a 'detonate' button. Doesn't everyone think the Boss Lair should have a self-destruct button? Fail. They were all completely ineffectual, seems we got lucky that time.
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Yeah, they did get lucky. Plus they planned it for a long time. It still cost a helicopter that could just as easily have crashed and killed everybody on board.
 
Wiggen said:
Yeah, they did get lucky. Plus they planned it for a long time. It still cost a helicopter that could just as easily have crashed and killed everybody on board.
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I know they trained like mad, and it wasn't perfect. But, if it was the final boss on a game, kids would throw the disk against the wall after finishing. It's actually kinda hard to believe that Osama was such a *****, incompetent buffoon and coward. I know he was a terrorist and they are piece of crap cowards, but seriously... nobody got a scratch, that's not challenging. He just went down like a bitch.
 
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Wiggen said:
NO, what is mindless is the notion that we should stop all drone strikes becuase terrorists hide among civilians and are sheltered by supposedly 'friendly' governments. You want mindless - that's mindless.
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Killing civilians will not end the threat. It only grows it. But, the point is such killing is not moral, even if our enemy is immoral, or cowardly, or problematic.
 
Wiggen said:
the problem with this is that you are basing your opinion on Hollywood movies, where every mission goes like clockwork and nobody on the good side ever dies because the guys on the other side are all idiots.

Then there's the real world....
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No...I am basing this off the fact that more often than not...the Special Forces get the job done properly. They are the best trained military force in the world. They are smart, and calculated. They get in, get the job done, and get out with as little collateral damage as possible. Drones don't have that capability and kill anything within the area.
 
Ikari said:
It will be. Government expands power, it will be no different here.
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I imagine the only reason my town would have them would be for the zoning Nazi's to be able to spy more closely on that which they cannot see from the streets, but of course you are right, just not so sure about the assassination being part of that when used domestically.
 
AreteCourage said:
No...I am basing this off the fact that more often than not...the Special Forces get the job done properly. They are the best trained military force in the world. They are smart, and calculated. They get in, get the job done, and get out with as little collateral damage as possible. Drones don't have that capability and kill anything within the area.
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Which 'Special Forces'? What units? For what mission? In case you haven't noticed special forces are not supermen. We have lost scores of such men in helicopter crashes, shoot downs, and other terrible mishaps. Even our raid into Abottabad nearly lost an entire helicopter of our best. Navy SEALS can die, they can **** up, they can be overwhelmed. Are they amazing? Absolutely. But every single deployment entails potentially mortal risks, and that sky-rockets when you talk about cross-border raids. Drones are not only the superior alternative in terms of safeguarding lives, they are superior in terms of their utility to completing the mission and objective and limiting civilian casualties.
 
Ikari said:
It will be. Government expands power, it will be no different here.
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When was the last time you saw an F-16 engaged in police actions in the US? I'm not saying drones wont be re-purposed for civilian and police action in the US, they already have to some degree, but I'd be surprised if it went as far as some people seem to anticipate.
 
I think that as part of a war effort in foreign countries, I don't have a problem with using drones.

Domestically, I do have a problem with.
 
AreteCourage said:
No...I am basing this off the fact that more often than not...the Special Forces get the job done properly. They are the best trained military force in the world. They are smart, and calculated. They get in, get the job done, and get out with as little collateral damage as possible. Drones don't have that capability and kill anything within the area.
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Nonsense. Drones are capable of scanning vast areas to spot a target and then immediately take it out. The UBL raid took weeks of planning and risked more lives than it saved, the added risk was taken only to allow proof that UBL was eliminated (and where). For the average terrorist cockroach that is neither required nor desired, that option is reserved for making special political statements.
 
Fisher said:
I imagine the only reason my town would have them would be for the zoning Nazi's to be able to spy more closely on that which they cannot see from the streets, but of course you are right, just not so sure about the assassination being part of that when used domestically.
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Maybe, maybe not. I'd think things such as Ruby Ridge would be drones and I can zee the government using school shootings as an excuse as well.
 
grip said:
Aren't assassinations by drones a form of terrorism?
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That was what I meant by "poetic justice" and just like the jihadis snuck up on the WTC towers, the drone slips a bomb into the Jihadi's underwear. Ergo, in a battle against known terrorist terrority and unknown individual terrorists, it resolves the ambiguity of Rumsfeld's known unknowns. Outside of that environment, the slippery slope gets iced up a bit.
 
Ikari said:
It will be. Government expands power, it will be no different here.
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It is easier to move forward with such things than it is to move back.
 
Boo Radley said:
It is easier to move forward with such things than it is to move back.
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Of course, as new technologies become available, government assumes control of them and claims to be able to use it any ol' way they want. If you are not diligent in controlling the government, you will lose it.
 
Ikari said:
Of course, as new technologies become available, government assumes control of them and claims to be able to use it any ol' way they want. If you are not diligent in controlling the government, you will lose it.
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On that we agree.
 
Boo Radley said:
That speaks to accuracy. You can't just hit the bad guys. To be accurate enough in these situations (not nation against nation), that is the only way it would be morally acceptable.
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Quite the contrary - morally acceptable means that the gain is greater than the loss. For example, if terrorists hijack another set of planes and set them towards another set of towers, and we are looking at another potential 4,000 dead, then the proper response is to shoot those planes down and accept the loss of 400 lives over 4,000 lives. That's the morally acceptable thing to do. The morally unacceptable thing to do would be to turn to the families of those 4,000 and explain that their relatives died because life did not offer you the perfect solution you wanted.

The Real World differs from your ivory tower and make-believe situations where terrorists realize that its' wrong to wear civilian clothes and use human shields and so they stop doing so. That's why Obama campaigned against, and then kept and expanded the Bush anti-terror infrastructure.

As for accuracy, these systems are fully accurate, which is why you are avoiding that question by trying to turn it instead into a discussion on collateral damage. You made an ignorant comment, and now are backtracking. Which is fine - you can't be blamed for not knowing what you didn't know you didn't know.
 
AreteCourage said:
No...I am basing this off the fact that more often than not...the Special Forces get the job done properly. They are the best trained military force in the world. They are smart, and calculated. They get in, get the job done, and get out with as little collateral damage as possible. Drones don't have that capability and kill anything within the area.
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That is simply not an accurate depiction of the capabilities of the MQ-1 and MQ-9. On the contrary, a mitigated Hellfire missile has a very tight effects radius.

Let me put this in the context of a quick analogy:

You are complaining that a guy is spraying hundreds of bullets indiscriminately into a crowd at the cyclic rate. However, the guy is armed with a circa 18th-century Brown Bess Musket. That's approximately the difference between a bombing run with the ability to "kill everything within the area" and "a drone with a hellfire".
 
AreteCourage said:
Special forces can get in there and handle themselves. It is what they do best. They have the ability to handle any threat and spare innocent people. Drones don't have that capability.
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Both the bolded and the underlined are inaccurate. Ground troops will kill non-combatants as well, and have the additional problem that one is mounting an actual invasion of another nation. So two helicopters go down and now you have a platoon of SF guys surrounded in a TIC and you are calling in B-1 runs to protect them and actually laying waste to hundreds of people.

Give me a drone mission over a Black Hawk Down any day of the week.
 
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Boo Radley said:
Just because you can find something else that is immoral doesn't change the immorality of the action. There is also little evidence that these strikes make us any more safe. Benghazi happened with the drone strikes taking place. Something more surgical might be more effective.
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:doh a drone shooting a hellfire is about as surgical as you get, boo. There is literally nothing less damaging in the US arsenal with the capability to reach those distances. It is an itty-bitty little bomb - I've talked to guys in-country watching in frustrated disbelief as the missile strikes the front end of the vehicle and the dude get's out of the back and takes off running. The idea that our drones are laying waste to city blocks or somehow creating mass casualty events is one that I am surprised to find is apparently popular, but remains devoid of connection to what we are actually doing.

And yes, nothing absent laying nuclear waste to the entire planet will completely stop the enemy. That is neither an argument for doing nothing nor an argument for nuclear warfare.
 
Quick Question: especially among those who voted no, is anyone else in this thread a trained weaponeer who has actually tasked and deployed drones in combat, developed target packages, made collateral damage estimations, and worked extensively inside the joint targeting cycle? Does anyone complaining about drone strikes in this thread know without googling what the JPEL is, or what the current NCV for ISAF is? Does anyone complaining about drone strikes in this thread actually know what they are talking about v what-they-dimly-remember-from-the-news?























































yeah, somehow, I didn't think so.
 
DaveFagan said:
Drones are being used frequently for assassinations , attacks, spying, etc. I'm really seeking opinions on the drones used for assassinations.
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I think it's ok if there is strong evidence that the target is a terrorist, if there is a limited time in which the government can act to apprehend the person (e.g. because he lives in hiding and they only rarely get intelligence of where he will be at a certain time), and if they are located in a place that would make it impractical and unsafe to send in troops to capture the person.

Obviously, those circumstances are going to exist far more often in a place like the middle east than in, say, Kansas.

If the government has to fly into Pakistan or wherever each time they get this info, it's going to create a lot of problems and many more Americans will die. And the raids would probably be more often unsuccessful. Which means insiders would be less likely to come forward with information.
 
cpwill said:
Quick Question: especially among those who voted no, is anyone else in this thread a trained weaponeer who has actually tasked and deployed drones in combat, developed target packages, made collateral damage estimations, and worked extensively inside the joint targeting cycle? Does anyone complaining about drone strikes in this thread know without googling what the JPEL is, or what the current NCV for ISAF is? Does anyone complaining about drone strikes in this thread actually know what they are talking about v what-they-dimly-remember-from-the-news?























































yeah, somehow, I didn't think so.
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And that means we cannot comment? That means we cannot understand? We cannot infer? We cannot look at aggregated data? What's stupid is when people demand that personal experience be had in order to form coherent argument. It's usually just deflection away from a topic or argument. So let's stop with the stupid. I may not know the intricate and specific details of each and every drone plane, but I am more than capable of viewing the outcome and commenting on the use and morality of use. Regardless this is still my government and my military.
 
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