I want to encourage that you continue your great posts,
have a nice evening!

We urge everyone who cares about protecting human life and the future of this planet to seriously consider how many hours a day you are willing and able to dedicate to this campaign to GROUND the DRONES.

We can NOT ignore these exponentially growing weaponry terrorizing people around the world from their bright blue skies.

We MUST end this violence against all life, this violence perpetuated by our military in our name. We must NOT tolerate this another moment.

This from people who are complicity in ending human life in utero, invading what should be the safest place in the universe — your mother’s womb — and bringing bloody, violent death to innocents.

If they’re so opposed to bloodshed and violence, they need to end the bloodshed and violence they perpetrate inside their own bodies.

experiencedtraveller:
It is my understanding, dear zombie, that is was probably an Air Force sergeant flying the drone and not a ‘pilot’. While this is nit-picking, the reality has created very serious tensions and debates within the Air Force as to its future direction.Air force fighter pilots, officers all, have been our spear tip since WWII. That is changing.

Well, to be technically accurate, all missions over Pakistan by UAVs are conducted by the USAF. The Air Force insists on using commissioned officers which are rated as manned aviators to pilot their UAVs. The US Army and Marine Corps use enlisted personnel to operate their UAVs, but those UAVs are, for the most part, smaller, simpler, and more automated that the Air Force’s UAVs.

Starless: You are absolutely correct but I think you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone in the general public beyond military nerds to use the term “UAV” instead of “drone”.

I don’t blame the average Joe for using the term “drone” to describe a UAV. It’s a term that the media began using for such aircraft as a shorthand and it stuck. It’s just a pet peeve of mine.

Starless:You point out one of the perennial delusions which creeps into high command. A lot of generals seem to buy into it and I think Clinton bought into it and Bush 43 and Rumsfeld bought into it too. That is that with our awesome technology we can get away with fighting major conflicts on the cheap. Of course, this ignores the repeated lesson of history, which is that you can’t hold ground without people on the scene and getting people there is always expensive. UAVs are a great asset and can help to mitigate the expense somewhat, but they can’t ever mitigate it to the extent that high command hopes and imagines that it can.

I have one small disagreement with part of your argument. It is the DOD’s civilian leadership, including the President, not the military chain of command which have a tendency to be delusional about the use of UAVs. I will definitely agree that Rumsfeld bought into the whole “war on the cheap” idea (which UAVs were a part of) that he used in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in both situations it bit him in the ass. UAVs, however, are still being purchased en-mass by the military, despite the changeover from Rumsfeld to Gates and Bush to Obama. The reason for this is as I have stated before: they provide a cheap force multiplier for ground forces. UAVs do save lives but not in a direct way by keeping the operator out of harm’s way, but by providing timely intelligence to ground forces.

On the other hand, the air war in Pakistan is, in my opinion, a largely political endeavor with no real strategy to guide it’s use. If things are not changed, then the UAV missions over Pakistan will be useless unless ground forces are used to exploit the air cover.