Lewis

"Against this sort of background, it seems more than a little puzzling to hear one of the nation's finest legal minds suggesting that unmanned aircraft are somehow "so cruel as to be beyond human tolerance", whereas manned bombers are presumably OK. Particularly as the unmanned aircraft's use of weapons is completely under the control of human operators anyway."

Oh do come along now Lewis. Let the senile old bastard make his comment then trundle off to the library to smoke his fine cigars, quaff his port, and piss himself to sleep.

Did he mean with or without human control ?

In the quoted extract, Lord Bingham doesn't say whether he means totally computer controlled drones, or ones which are under the command of another human.

The decision to end another persons life is not one that can, or should, be taken solely be a machine which has just run an algorithm. It should only be taken by another person. (I've never had to make that call, and I hope that I never have to.)

Should machines that make this live or die decision on their own without human input be classed as cruel ? Maybe not cruel, but they shouldn't be allowed. The ultimate authority must be another human.

Where has the judge been?

I'm not sure what this article has to do with technology, or how the opinions of a retired judge on military issues matter.

One might think if there is a weapon which should be banned, it should be man-carried or vehicle carried portable bomb, either planted and left behind, or carried as part of a suicide bombing.

As I doubt this judge is completely ignorant or looney, I can only assume his comments on roboplanes were carefully considered and weighted against terrorist bombing. As he does not explain why a roboplane is worse, than say, a tube bombing, a bus bombing, a railway bombing, an embassy bombing, the bus stop bombing, the school bombing and so many others, I can only assume he sees no issues with terrorist bombings.

Some other weapons the judge may want to consider for banning include the dull knife used to slowly decapitate people, and acid thrown in the face of girls going to school in Afghanistan. I'm sure someone as wise as a judge deeply contemplated the above alongside roboplanes before he determined roboplanes were far worse.

It's simpler than that

Lord Bingham was about ten years old when the V1 buzz-bombs were falling on England. I think there's some history involved.

Hmm

It may be - it may be, I’m not expressing a view - that that man is an idiot.

As Alastair Hardwick (and possibly others) have already pointed out, these machines are not autonomous killing machines, just big radio controlled planes with weapons. They're probably not even robots, depending on your definition.

Even if they *were* autonomous, you can't call a machine cruel - who's to say human beings are objects of moral concern for a machine anyway? They aren't, for us.

Unmanned vehicle

Nice to know that some people still remember doodlebugs.

hmm

@cirby: Then he was about elevn years old when the RAF and USAAF were burning out Dresden, and the USAAF burning much of urban Japan down to ground level, all with manned bombers.

Paul Fussell quotes Liddell-Hart on weapons to the effect that "mankind tolerates abuses but abhors innoviations."

Killing at a distance

The whole of the history or industrialised warfare has been a direction towards killing at a distance. Muskets, rifles, artillery, bombs dropped from far above, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles. In the sense that they remove the operators from direct danger, then the remote controlled drone is nothing new. It's unlikely that they are any less indiscriminate than shelling a target. What I suppose they are trying to supplant is that messy house-to-house fighting, but in doing so they will, inevitably, be less discriminating, but no more so than many other weapons.

I suspect the real issue here is going to be seen as one of imbalance of risk between one side and another. Conceivably that could be counter-productive.

One wonders what might happen should robotic armies, ever become technically viable, even if they are essentially remote controlled machines. If they could be more discriminating than drones, would they still have the same objections? I rather suspect they would as the scenario would look much like any number of science-fiction invasion-by-alien plots.

He actually says he's NOT expressing a view

This is a transcript from a verbal interview, not a considered opinion piece. He was being asked to comment on the "international problem of countering terrorism... corruption and ... how to conduct armed conflict". He even gets topics like pollution int here. He used the flying bomb example, in discussing wider issues of military accounability. In fact, the Fieseler 103 (the V1 bomb). was exactly that: an unmanned drone designed to fall upon a house and kill its occupants. Somehow, I find it more likely that a retired judge would cite an example from World War Two, when looking for an example of an inescriminate weapon, rather than offering an opinion on a specific military practice.

Video games

The thing that worries me most about these remote controlled things is that they are too similar to video games - the "pilot" sits in from of a screen (somewhere outside Las Vegas IIRC) and "plays" it in a rather similar way to a game, with the same zero risk to themselves.

The danger is that this leads to a moral disconnect from what is actually going on: the "pilot" will probably never have been to Pakistan and can go home in the evening to his happy family life. "What did you do at work today dear?" "Oh, I killed 70 people" - no. This disconnect is already bad enough with conventional air-to-ground warfare but this is one step worse.

Of course, none of this is as bad as the people who design ICBMs and things like that.

to anonymous coward

Re: The danger is that this leads to a moral disconnect from what is actually going on: the "pilot" will probably never have been to Pakistan and can go home in the evening to his happy family life. "What did you do at work today dear?"

You are SO VERY VERY TERRIBLY misinformed my friend I almost fell off my chair.

I actually have knowledge of certain people who fly these things and they are some of the most experienced flight personnel in the RAF today! A certain person has flown in both Gulf Wars and holds the title Wing Commander. Now crawl back under your misinformed stone......

@Inachu

So you believe the tools who murdered unarmed and unsuspecting civilians in the various numerical conspiracies (9/11, 11/7) are cowards.

Why do the terrorists not stand up like men and confront us with REAL weapons such as tanks and aircraft? Is it our concern that they come unprepared to do battle?

I'm with hizzonner on this one...

I'm with the Judge on this one. But neither he nor the Reg seem to understand why the use of these weapons should be seriously restricted if not banned.

It's nothing to do with additional cruelty. The track record of the so called laser guided weapons delivered by manned aircraft is far worse than anything so far managed by the Hellfires.

The real issue is "reduced cost/risk" to the attacker and the problem which arises from that is that it makes it much easier for them to make a lethal decision. And that makes it far more likely that the weapons will be used in increasingly trivial or dubious circumstances.

The protection offered by manned flight is that, if we run the risk of losing a pilot, we'll take a lot more care in assessing whether the target really does need to be destroyed.

It's really in the same vein as I've hinted elsewhere. I'd like to get back to our "Leaders" taking the lead position into any future military conflicts. It's likely to make them much less likely to start their wars in the first place...

@ian 22

"So you believe the tools who murdered unarmed and unsuspecting civilians in the various numerical conspiracies (9/11, 11/7) are cowards."

Well if they truly believed that they would become martyrs and go straight to heaven then they could well be cowards. They were faced with a certain and instant and painless death to be replaced by an expected eternal life of pleasure. So I would say that they were deluded, but not heroes. A hero would face up to the consequences of what they did, justify it in person, justify themselves to their relatives and generally deal with issues in this life. Committing suicide as a way out of an impossible personal situation is one thing. Taking with you a huge number of uninvolved people believing that you will live in glory for ever without living with the consequences is the act of a moral coward.

I remember...

some religious dignitaries being interviewed on TV, noting that the war in Iraq was violating traditional Christian Just War theology, because the U.S. forces were too well equipped, so the body count was too one sided.

So, naturally, these drones don't give terrorists anyone to kill with their Improvised Explosive Devices, and so that must be bad.

I'm just glad they're not in charge of deciding what equipment the Metropolitan Police should have.

@Psymon

Pysmon dit:

"Despite the constant improvement in military technology, non-combatant casualties have been increasing, and it is this fact that needs some serious scrutiny."

this is a "fact" from when? .. last week ? .. the week before last ?

fact is .. casualties numbers from major conficts worldwide, both military and non-combatant have been going down, year by year in general since the 700,000+ that died in 1951 .. and in the last 9 years have reached historical lows

there are less "major conficts" too .. there were many more dying during the Clinton years on average, than during GW's term .. I guess when it's a Euro war like Bosnia, Europeans just want to convienently forget over 60,000 combatant deaths and the over 40,000 civilians killed in 3 years ..

@Inachu

Dude the only way and i mean the only way you could save any face after making such a comment is if you are a front line veteran....

I have this strange feeling that you are not....

Confused?

So jabbing someone to death with a fire sharpened spear or slashing bits off them with a blunt sword is ' humane' is it? IIRC the first weapon to be banned were dum-dum bullets about a century ago on the grounds that they inflicted shocking wounds. Far better to be instantly disassembled by HE, delivered by whatever means.

Apers mines (not all land mines) and small (not all) bomblets were banned because they create a 'dirty battlespace' that causes civilian casualties later. Not because they are inherently inhumane (whatever that means).

As for the learned gent's view, it confuses 'targetting' and 'delivery'. Some one somewhere has to decide what to attack with some degree of precision (which might be very broad). Then a weapon is aimed into this space, either at a point on the earth's surface, or at an identifiable target or into an area where it will detect and home onto a target.

@ Harry Stottle

You are absolutely right, and doubly so in the current combat environment. No personal risk means it's too easy to just drob the bomb and accept the collateral damage, or drop it even if we are not sure of the target.

We cannot justify making our soldiers and pilots more important than 'enemy' civilians, because we make enemies of the civiian population and build the support and recruitment capability of the enemy.

Set up the planes with sniper rifles, take out just the baddies even if they are in a crowd, and we will be heroes instead of pariahs.

Sentimentally wrongheaded

The man is suffering from a failure of concrete perception. It's increasingly common nowadays, as people make judgments based on comforting abstractions while shielded from the pitiless impact of reality.

What's cruel is being hurt; death itself isn't bad at all, just as long as it's very quick and more or less painless. Being hit on the head by a one-ton bomb isn't very cruel at all, as you're unlikely to know anything about it. One moment you're going about your business, the next there is no you to be doing anything.

The worse the injury, the less susceptible to effective treatment, and the longer before it can heal or be alleviated, the more cruelty. Being stabbed seriously is quite cruel, especially if you can't get to a nice sterile well-equipped hospital with modern anaesthetics. Being shot in the guts is cruel; so is being hit by blast and/or fragments from that one-ton bomb if you are unfortunate enough not to be killed outright.

Worse, IMHO, are being burned by a flamethrower, covered with napalm or white phosphorus, killed by slow-acting poison gas, or being caught by radiation from a nuclear weapon. Not to mention surviving (injured or otherwise) while your parents, children, siblings, etc. are killed or maimed.

A small, low-flying robot drone is perhaps more likely to score a direct hit on its target, thereby killing him/them with a minimum of extra suffering. As the article points out, a manned bomber usually stays good and high to avoid the slightest risk to its precious crew, and - as manned bombers have for the past century - probably misses its targets by anywhere between 50 yards and a few miles.

If we want to reduce cruelty, we should consider giving up the habit of killing people we disapprove of (or trying to kill them and killing others instead). Our glorious leaders should ask themselves, as seriously as they can manage, "whom would Jesus bomb"?

Cluster bombs and land mines

One hopefully will keep the ability to produce them, as they are incredibly useful in "making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country", as the Great Pacifist put it...

http://toppun.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=42619