Ted Rall for March 06, 2009

Alas, collateral damage! Carpal tunnel syndrome - the bane of the American remote-control warrior!

grrrr!

We’ve come a long way from “The Best Years of Our Lives.”

You go, Ted.

will this wounded warrior get a purple heart?

Ted seems to be conflating two issues. Gunfire from weddings makes pilots hopped up on amphetamines (b/c of shortage of pilots) think they’re being fired on, so they return fire. This isn’t the issue with drones. I can’t find a news report in which a drone bombed a wedding. All I find is stuff like this http://www.thenews.com.pk/topstorydetail.asp?Id=18190 and this http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1838778,00.html where troops and pilots are involved. Am I just not looking hard enough? By bringing up weddings, Ted is therefore inadvertently arguing FOR the use of drones. He would be more convincing to argue a distinction between drone’s targeting only the highest-level al Qaeda/Taliban vs. targeting their troops more broadly. Before U.S. Air Force drones hit targets in Afghanistan as part of pre-planned operations, lawyers and intelligence officers in the Combined Air and Space Operations Center match it with cell-phone intercepts, informants’ tips, and “pattern of life” analyses on the intended targets. Other airmen estimate the likelihood of civilian casualties, with “Raindrop,” a classified simulation tool that models local traffic patterns, structural compositions, and bomb blast patterns. It’s a process so rigorous that even Human Rights Watch says that the chances of civilian casualties are near nil, when it’s followed. (The problems – and the slaying of innocents – come during last-minute, so-called “troops-in-contact” scenarios.) The CIA should adopt this standard, if it hasn’t already. More here: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/02/kilcullen-says.html As for the courage angle, the point isn’t to demonstrate courage. The point is to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a staging ground for terrorism again. There is an argument against (unrestrained) use of drones, but Ted isn’t making it.

The drone “pilots” are actually at Nellis. The simple fact that in the field a $68,000 Hellfire fired from a helicopter is followed by machine gun fire that could have done the same job for a couple of bucks isn’t very high “intelligence”. If targets were really identified this clearly, bin Laden would have been picked up five years ago.

That’s what is makiong this war so hard to sell; we have the latest technology and screw up while they have simple guns and rockets from decades ago and are still managing to get us…

The average joe can’t help buit being puzzled.

The “average Joe” has no concept of asymmetrical warfare or the complexities of building a consensus among factions that have vastly different goals.

I have to agree with Crassus here.

Who care if it’s drones or human pilots firing rockets at wedding parties and demonstrations? As long as it’s in Afghanistan, the average Joe won’t mind.

Anyway, I saw on Discovery once how an AH-64 fired at two unidentified persons. Of course, they could have been carrying a portable SAM but I still think it was overkill.

First, the chopper fired its machinegun. That only got one because the Apache’s 30 mm chaingun is rather slow (single barrel, not a gatling type).

One soldier (it was only a silhouette but let’s assume he was a combatant) took cover behind a sand dune. The gunner zoomed in with his TADS, then let loose with a barrage of FFAR rockets! After half a dozen or so, something behind the sand dune started burning. I guess he got him after all.

War… I mean, WOW.

Also in the same program, an A-10 pilot was speaking into his radio, while flying over a burning vehicle: “I hope they were enemies because they are all KIA.”

And then there was this brilliant F-15 pilot who shot down two helicopters over the Iraqi No-Fly Zone. After the kills, he made a low pass because the AWACs was worried they might have been friendlies.

You could hear the pilot breathing heavily as he passed over. “Targets destroyed. No survivors.”

The remote-control «heros» in the United States don’t seem to be doing an adequate job killing people in Afghanistan - why else would Mr Obama send another 30 000 pair of «boots on the ground» ? Given the financial crisis caused by a cavalier attitude towards regulation (and a worship of Mammon reminscent of the 1920s) and a Pentagon budget which serves an enormous boondoggle for the war industry and its captive politicians, it might just prove to be the case that expansion in Afghanistan might lead yet another empire to its (well-deserved) graveyard….

Henri

The problem with empires collapsing is that the elite will not be troubled much by this. For them, it merely means putting up bigger fences and doubling security around their estates.

How did the elite of the British empire end up? They still live in Buckingham Palace to this day and the British Queen is the richest woman on the planet.