Of bombs & drones

[mahnmut]

First of all, let this sink in...

The US under Trump drops an average of 121 bombs every day in a number of undeclared wars worldwide:

This means 1 US bomb explodes somewhere every 12 minutes.

You know what they say, one person's death is a tragedy; a million deaths is just statistics. Except, if you try counting to one million, say, one number per second, that'd take almost two weeks. So it's doable. Hoorah!

The problems start after that. If we want to reach a billion (that's with B), we'd need 32 years. A trillion makes... uhm, that's even beyond my imagination.

But don't be scared by the limits of our imagination, folks! Because there's no limit to the destructive prowess of America the Great. A US economist recently dug into the military reports and found out that the Pentagon had mysteriously made 21 trillion dollars disappear between 1998 and 2016. Without reporting to anybody about it. The money just vanished into thin air, like those gargantuan pictures of our imagination that we try to paint when we try to visualize what "21 trillion" might look like. And because even the imagination of government accountants has its limits (no surprise!), the investigation as to the whereabouts of that staggering amount of money was discontinued. Yeah, just like that! Poof!

Still, there's another kind of stats that our imagination might be able to handle. Like the one showing that the efficiency of the US drone strikes is a mere 2% on average. That's the share of the people killed who had been real targets, the rest is collateral.

You see how even small figures could suddenly be of interest, and look significant. A sober assessment on these stats would make us realize that 98% of all casualties to drone strikes are just folks who happened to be near the explosion. Namely, women, children, elderly people, or random passers-by. Most of them were torn to hundreds of pieces. That's what the military jargon calls "surgical precision". Imagine a visit to your doctor, where in 98% of all cases, instead of squeezing the acne on your forehead, they'd chop your head off with a chainsaw instead. Or throwing the baby with the bathwater - literally. Pretty, eh?

Statistically speaking, the US is tearing innocent people to hundreds of pieces once in 12 minutes. The US military drops 121 bombs a day around the world, without having even declared a single war.

And this is just Trump. Remember Bush Jr and the "mere" 70,000 bombs that he dropped over five countries? And Obama, with his charming smile, Hollywood charisma and 30,000 bombs on top of Bush's 70,000 (adding two more countries)? Nobel must be squirming in his grave right now, seeing how the Peace Prize named after him was granted to mass murderers like Kissinger - and nice guys who dropped tens of thousands of bombs on innocent people.

Trump, of course, is the current on-average record holder among the most recent three emperors of the un-announced American Empire (if we assume he's really in control of the Pentagon, which is doubtful). The first year of his term "excelled" with 44K+ explosions, i.e. the above mentioned 121 bombs a day. This has caused the Pentagon to run out of "bomb stuff", and their drone pilots (read: gamers sitting before a computer screen, joystick in hand) are now lacking enough ammo for their deadly games.

Imagine being a superpower and running out of bombs at a time of peace! Whoah! A world without bombs!? Only kids would believe that... provided that they're not torn to pieces in the meantime, that is. Nah. It's hard to imagine such a world at this point, even if the bombs tend to fall in other countries, populated by brown people who talk funny, and all of this is happening as safely far away from us as possible, which we only occasionally hear about on the TV. Or a dystopian movie. I'm not sure at this point which one we're living in.

By the way, the last major bombing of innocent people in a "white" country wasn't so long ago. OK, let's skip the Serbian example - those people were obviously evil, all of them. Let's denote Poland as the last "good" country to be majorly bombed. That was about 2 billion seconds ago, which is not that much, if you employ a sufficient amount of your imagination. I could even provide footage for proof if you don't believe me.

Btw, at what point could we call the constant and systematic killing of innocent people around the world, a genocide? Or it depends on who's doing it?

Comments

[garote]

Not sure where the bomb-every-12-minutes stat is coming from... The only reference on that from "newsclick.in" seems to be a broken link? ( https://www.cfr.org/zenko/2017/01/05/bombs-dropped-in-2016/ )

[mahnmut]

Here are some alternative links.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/america-dropped-26171-bombs-2016-obama-legacy
https://www.cfr.org/blog/how-many-bombs-did-united-states-drop-2016

[garote]

Okay, those eventually lead to something that at least aggregates from a believable reference, even if it is a blog post:
https://www.cfr.org/blog/how-many-bombs-did-united-states-drop-2016
Looks like just about all of those bombs were dropped in either Iraq or Syria.

Shall this be a debate about whether the US should even have a presence there in the first place?
I'd mostly come down on the side of no, the US should not, regarding both countries.

Should this be a debate about whether the US should employ means more or less surgical than bombing?
Bombing could be characterized as "cowardly" on the one hand, and more likely to be authorized as a result, but if there is some goal in mind - kill these particular people over here but not their neighbors - it's a heck of a lot better than sending in ground troops and triggering mass displacement and guerrilla tactics. Do you want to see fewer bombs, more precisely targeted? Don't we all.

We could talk about sending in specialists. Investigators, advisors, spies, strike teams. The US does that as well. It also does it a lot more often than you would ever see documented in the news, for the sake of letting the specialists quietly do their jobs. Should we go all specialists and no bombs, in Iraq and in Syria? Maybe that would work better. Maybe that would not do much, and that craptastic multi-headed civil war would just grind on until everyone got gassed to death.

This is all a boondoggle as far as I'm concerned. Though there is one scenario that keeps me up at night, and makes me think more about US involvement in these regions. The very real possibility of small revolutionary groups capturing thermonuclear devices from the Pakistani military, perhaps smuggling them onto planes or ships. Several thousand dead over the course of 15~ years of drone strikes is atrocious, but what really gets my goat is the idea of five hundred thousand people evaporating in a burst of light, followed by millions dying from radiation sickness...

[asthfghl]

Why should you be sending anyone anywhere? What business do you have policing the world? What are you there for, to defend good people from bad people, or rather to protect your geostrategic interests? Those are the issues we should rather be discussing, instead of focusing on the number of bombs, or their level of precision, or the veracity of the sources reporting on them.

[mahnmut]

Spoken like a true hawk. Now if you may excuse me, I'm going to the bathroom to puke.

[garote]

About that "2% high value" drone statistic...

The same article also mentions an analysis by the New America Foundation:

"The number of civilians plus those individuals whose precise status could not be determined from media reports -- labeled 'unknowns' by NAF -- reported killed by drones in Pakistan during Obama's tenure in office were 11% of fatalities," said Bergen. "So far in 2012 it is close to 2%. Under President Bush it was 33%."

So, where is the truth? Is it that the drone strikes in 2012 were 2% accurate, ... or 98% accurate?

[mahnmut]

No, the huge majority of casualties of the drone strikes are not the intended targets:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/civilian-deaths-drone-strikes_us_561fafe2e4b028dd7ea6c4ff

[fridi]

I think you're missing the point here. Shooting at people from a distance after having chosen some vague targets arbitrarily seems rather trigger-happy, cowardly, inefficient, immoral, and doesn't help win hearts and minds. It's counter-productive. That's the point.

Or we could quibble about per cents.

[garote]

It’s actually pretty important, that percentage.

How many people would be upset, displaced, traumatized, accidentally shot, etc, if the US was attempting to kill these targets via ground invasion?

[fridi]

The same number, or similar. Let's not fool ourselves, you're not choosing the shooting of people with robots over shooting them face to face because you care about the people this is affecting on the ground - you're doing it because it saves you the lives of your own troops, hence the political cost back home is lower. You're also doing it to appease the business interests of the producers of the relevant technology. That still doesn't make your methods any more efficient, and it certainly won't earn you the hearts and minds of the people you're killing - they're still going to hate you, if not more.

[halialkers]

It's not cowardice. The PR of bombings has always been a coverup for the reality that the air generals who devised the method designed it deliberately to wage an endemic war of perpetual massacre until the shattered shellshocked survivors in their rubble fields lynched the autocrats who brought them to that point. All bomber wars are immoral, which is why I'm very curious if the people in the countries who say this have actually sent messages to their MPS/EuroMPs/Congresscritters/what have you to not have bombers or indeed an independent air force?

What value are moral scruples never acted upon?

[airiefairie]

Now imagine if the money for those drones and missiles was used for something productive in those countries...

[garote]

As the sticker I saw on my friend's car in the 80's read:

It will be a great day when the schools get all the money they need and the military has to hold a bake sale every time it needs a new bomber.

[johnny9fingers]

Those poor military wives get yet more heaped on them. Or maybe the folk in charge will have to mandate the teaching of baking alongside navigation etc. :)

[halialkers]

Let me begin with a simple prelude:

All air war involving bombs from the air since the era of Douhet is simple murder on a gargantuan scale in the biggest military fraud that's seen the most money poured down the rathole made by a screw without end in human history. All of it is immoral, even when regular boring mundane bombs have killed more than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, even in WWII Japan. Nobody shrieked about outlawing the B-29 and the regular boring bombs that did that and conducted the firebombings, not until Germans decided to shift the focus away from their gleeful murder of Jews by whining that air war was so much less fun when what they did to others turned back and struck them.

That said, I have two simple questions for those who object to the method used:

1) Do your countries have bombers with smart or dumb bombs? Have you done what I've done and written to your MP/Congresscritter/equivalent asking to erase bombers and actually an independent air force as one of the biggest cons and frauds in world history? You say something is this kind of moral evil. If you see it and do nothing about it your words are hollow wasted pretense shouted into the uncaring void.

2) Remind me how NATO conducted its involvement in Libya without US involvement and the French waged their wars in Mali and Syria (for that matter France sure is eager to bomb and blow up its former colonies but not so much with the former colonies of others (Iraq)). Why is that acceptable when bombs dropped by European air forces, Russians, and French people are just as lethal as anything the USA uses? Or do you have the little kid mindset that bombs don't kill when they're not dropped with Major Kong riding them to a giant "Yee haw?"

[johnny9fingers]

I seem to recall that the mediæval church had a long interdiction on crossbows using pretty much the same basic argument. :)

[halialkers]

Italians came up with the theory. Europe used it for generic terrorization in colonial wars. Yet somehow bombers in the Swedish or Swiss or South African air forces are morally pure. I do believe air war is the most evil kind of them all and that an Air Force is a con artists’ scheme. I have agitated against the existence of the one in my country. Have you? Do you think your weapons don’t kill people if used for that purpose?

[mahnmut]

Oh I've got the kid mindset, don't I. I'm such a silly innocent little kid.

[halialkers]

If you think that the only power in the entire world using bombs to kill people from the air is the United States and nobody else ever has, does, and will and objections to them are not morally necessary then at least it’s a very narrow black and white morality selectively applied.

[fridi]

Aaand, let the US-whiteknighting begin.

We may need a few Trump Badges of Honor.

[asthfghl]

It's a tu quoque all over again.

[halialkers]

How do you get “we got away with boring non nuclear murder and deceive ourselves into believing bombing raids are otherwise than murder” as white knighting? Or should European colonialism and use of the very methods decried with none of the protests and all of the body count be omitted? Murder is always wrong.

All bombing campaigns are murder most foul. The USA is not the only power doing this and last I checked the physics of using bombs and drones are not ideological.

[halialkers]

Mind you Europeans really hate being reminded you didn’t end your empires, you just outsourced the filth and barbarism to us so we kill the people your leaders and regimes want dead and your people act like centuries of looting the world stopped applying to you when it hadn’t and certainly not in the memories of those affected, still more when our allies never fail to find the backbone to murder more people of their earlier victims.

Why else the alternate French and British views of Iraq and Syria? What other common factors?

Europeans hide behind the US military, whine that it dies what your leaders want it to do, and act like your hands are cleaner than ours. Insofar as the person who hires the assassin does not do the murder themselves yes.