Posted on 09/20/2012 8:35:06 AM PDT by barryobi
I was minutes from ordering a drone strike on a Taliban insurgent – until I realised I was watching an Afghan child at play
I find myself caught between the need to follow the drone debate and the need to avoid unpleasant memories it stirs. I used drones – unmanned aerial vehicles – during the nadir of my military career that was an operational tour in Afghanistan. I remember cuing up a US Predator strike before deciding the computer screen wasn't depicting a Taliban insurgent burying an improvised explosive device in the road; rather, a child playing in the dirt.
After returning from Afghanistan at the end of 2009, I left the British army in 2010. I wanted to put as much distance as I could between myself and the UK, leaving to study in America (where I still reside). By doing so, I inadvertently placed myself in the country that is spearheading development in drone technology and use, highlighted by each report of a drone strike and the usual attendant civilian casualties.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
So? Human soldiers on the ground don’t occasionally shoot somebody by mistake? In war, it happens.
The muzzies are slow to learn that if you harbor terrorist, associate with them, or even just "tolerate" them, you become a legitimate target also.
Folks, it’s the Guardian.
Read the print on a t*rd...you’ll get more information.
“until I realised I was watching an Afghan child at play”
It sounds like the checks and balances used to verify targets is working.
Present and future islamsists should be past islamists. Their age, sex or conditon doesn’t matter to me as long as they’re dead.
Why don’t I care anymore?
A stray puppy followed me home once. It was cute and I wanted to keep it. My mother said no honey, you can’t have that puppy because it has a terrible habit - growing up to be a dog.
Not the fault of the puppy, of course. But she was right. A pit bull puppy is pretty darn cute, but they are deadly as a mature dog.
The fact that we do our best to avoid them, and mostly can, is a HUGE advance! I don't agree with those who would cast blame because our still imperfect processes and systems don't sort out combatant from civilian reliably.
War is hell, and it's an ongoing, merciless tragedy from start to finish. Though we've made great strides toward narrowing the destructive scope of our missions, there will always be unintended death. We and ours do our best, and that's all that can be done.
Just call the child’s death “Post-Natal Abortion” and the Libs should be fine with it.
I should add, you can’t fight nice and hope to win wars.
Well put.
There are still too many -- mostly Dem -- politicians who just don't get that.
That child is now approaching 15 years of age and is undergoing indoctrination and training to kill you and your comrades.
How to insure that childen are playing in the dirt at all IED implacements?
Publish an article like this.
The girls and women, being mere property of the Jihadists, should be spared whenever possible, and prayed for.
To win a war, you must destroy the enemy’s will to fight not just their means to fight. Demonstrating the willingness and ability to kill civilians is a good way to do that. Ala, Hiroshima and Nagasake.
200 years ago War Fighting hardly killed any civilians at least directly.....WW1 did not. WW2 got the civilian killing off the ground by the Brit and American bombing of German cities....it has not slowed that much since.
It would sure be nice if those Moslem boys would put on an easily identifiable uniform and agree to fight us on an open plain. They’d last about 30 seconds. They have no honor. They just want power without creating a society like ours that allows us to field such an overwhelming military. If I had one of those Star Trek transporters and a tricorder that showed me where every thug lived, I’d be beaming into their bedrooms at night to slit their throats. Drones come about as close to that as we can come right now.
It’s be cold day in hell before there will ever be a pro-western article in The Guardian. What would this clown have thought about WWII where we deliberately targeted civilian populations killing hundreds of thousands of them in Germany and Japan?
“I was minutes from ordering a drone strike on a Taliban insurgent – until I realised I was watching an Afghan child at play”
So? If you let the enemy use human shields successfully, then they will continue to use human shields. Do you think the scumbag would have hesitated to kill that child to kill you? How many other people did you condemn to death by letting this guy go?
If this is what our leadership is coming to, we’re doomed.
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