That was an Onion article. Bush’s actual favorite movie is “Field of Dreams”. Although I don’t remember that movie ending with the son being a bigger disgrace than the father.
You mean liking dropping bombs from 30,000 feet? Firing artillery rounds from half a mile away? Launching a cruise missile from 300 km away?
Killing people long-distance is nothing new. I’d worry less about the soldiers remote-controlling killer robots and more about the politicians who ordered those soldiers into battle with their remote-controlled killer robots.
Also: remote-controlled killer robots - how fuckin’ awesome is that?
There are always pluses and minuses. A turret operator who isn’t sitting exposed to fire also has the potential to be a bit less trigger happy in a twitch situation. Which can have tragic results in a dense urban operating environment.
I guess I don’t really see the parallel. If we’re discussing disconnection from the act of actually killing, Ender’s game makes more sense. Last Starfighter, he was in a ship, sure, but he was still as “there” as possible, given the context.
However, I will concede that I’m focusing on a conceptual aspect of the discussion and referencing it with a literal movie.
lol… I read that so long ago.
But honestly…
You could believe that to be true though.
NERDS!
Dude gets recruited to fly a starship, and was awesome at it, because he was the top player of a video game where he did the same thing.
I was keying in to this part of the article:
“The guys operating these systems grew up playing video games. They developed skills in … (video games) very similar to the CROWS controls. … experienced video gamers are skilled at whipping that screen view around, and picking up any signs of danger.”
Ender’s Game is about Ender being a genius. Full stop.
Yeah but the sub-discussion was about being removed from the combat. That’s what I was referring to.
I can’t find it now, but there was an amusing article I stumbled upon the other day about how snipers were “most moral” combatants possible. Always hit their target, no collateral damage, takes out the minimum number necessary for the goal, etc. Yet ironically it’s considered just short of cheating.
The interesting part about the public perception of snipers is how it emphasizes the glamorous aspect, the shooting, rather than the important part, which is observation. Teaching someone how to be a great shot is a piece of cake in comparison with learning how to patiently process different elements of their environment in order to provide effective information and, in many cases, raw intelligence.
Of course, that’s within the framework of some kind of organized force, whether conventional or unconventional, that has means for making use of info/intel. A lot of times it’s a misnomer applied to marksmen or just particularly good shots.
In any case, morality is in the context describe here an irrelevant issue, one that is emphasized by people that are uncomfortable with the fact that killing and murder are mostly different as a result of where you are standing when it happens. It’s an interesting theoretical avenue, at times, but it doesn’t change a thing about what happens on the battlefield.
I can’t really see a down side to replacing turret gunners with machines. That job sucks, and even the best at it could use some standoff now that the optics have evolved to such a high level. The big question would lie in terms of cost effectiveness and the overall liability that a Stryker vehicle represents.
How many millenia ago was it that raining arrows down from a long-ass ways away was considered a tactic? Spare me the emotional detachment bullshit. The next step down that line of logic is to start calling FPS games “murder simulators,” acting like an idiot, and getting disbarred.
But why does he get picked above all the rest of the students? Partly because of how he plays Giant’s Drink.
For me, the term sniper evokes someone who denies civilians access to an area in an urban conflict by shooting anything that moves. Doesn’t seem particularly moral.
I don’t think the turret operators are distanced at all. They are very much exposed to being roadside bombed or shot with a rocket. They are still in the thick of the fighting. Probably makes them whip the camera around like crazy. I know I would.
When everything becomes reliant on electronics on the battle field, the dude with the EMP, can opener and ak47/satchel charge wins.
That’s not the job of a sniper in the military, at least the US military.
We sure as hell didn’t have air conditioning and sound systems when I was in the Shit ('70-'71). These Strykers (named after Rear Admiral Jeff Stryker, by the way — Google him) sound more like the dorm rooms in which you draft-dodging pukes smoked pot and called me a baby killer while I dodged shoeshine bombs and tried to keep my pungee wounds clean.
CHARLIE, UP IN THE TREES!
“Chaka, when the walls fell.”
Actually, there is a Star Trek episode that is kinda-sorta relevant to this discussion: Season 1’s “A Taste of Armageddon.” Sorta.
Anyway, the moral conundrum here is pretty clear: If you’re in war, you ideally want to kill exactly the people you want to kill while reducing your own costs and collateral damage (human and otherwise) as much as possible; however, if you are at the point where you can pretty much kill anyone you want to with very little expense, what’s to prevent you from doing so? Why would you not use that power if you had it?
You have to better define “very little expense”. For example, while it would have been relatively cheap in raw dollars to preemptively n00k the USSR way back in the day, the costs go far beyond the dollars to build the weapons. In the same way, looking at modern combat operations in Iraq of Afghanistan, costs are not just the $27 trillion per minute or whatever, they include the costs of lives, economic loss, etc.; aka the “opportunity costs” of the operation.
Putting all that together, it’s extremely difficult to even imagine what possible enemy-defeating solution there is that has “very little expense”.