Dirty Wars
In this book the author of "Blackwater," takes us inside America's new covert wars. As he reveals, the foot soldiers in these battles operate daily across the globe and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture, or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies of America. Funded through "black budgets", Special Operations Forces conduct missions in denied areas, engage in targeted killings, snatch and grab individuals and direct drone, AC-130 cruise missile strikes. While the Bush administration deployed these ghost militias, President Obama has expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy. This book follows the consequences of the declaraion that "the world is a battlefield", as the author uncovers this important foreign policy story. From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond the author reports from the frontlines in this high-stakes investigation and explores the depths of America's global killing machine. He goes beneath the surface of these covert wars, conducted in the shadows, outside the range of the press, without effective congressional oversight or public debate. He unmasks the shadow warriors who execute these secret wars and puts a human face on the casualties of violence that is now official policy as he tells the story of an American citizen marked for assassination by his own government. -- From book jacket.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
10mentions
8people
2013–2019years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Another point to consider:
For better or worse, each US drone strike requires an in-the-loop officer to authorize each weapon release. So whether it's a targeted assassination of HUMINT-confirmed high-value terrorist or the indiscriminate slaughtering of a funeral procession of innocent villagers based on HUMINT-free AI speculation, the US military's policies stipulate that, theoretically, there should always be someone to hold accountable for these successes and these crimes.
See also: Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars (2013)
- This is almost entirely because of the Iraq war. America had quite a sufficient military, even when Afghanistan started getting bad. But it was Iraq that over-stretched every aspect of the American military apparatus. Which became very obvious by their totally dependency on PMFs like Blackwater and Halliburton to provide security.
The blow-back from Iraq also pushed America to depend on covert wars because Iraq made overt warfare totally unpopular with the public. Now everything is done via special forces during classified operations, as the book "Dirty Wars" covered so well, as not to put politicians in a place where every military operation is potentially political suicide.
I doubt we'll see many large-scale wars in the future. It will almost entirely be drone bombings + intelligence-driven covert special forces raids.
Which is good / bad. Bad because the public will never be fully informed on the number or breadth of intervention the US is engaged in. But good because less soldiers will die via conventional warfare.
- The recognized leaders of these countries are the ones who are allowing this. Read Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill for more.
- Before you get too angry, consider that this experience is common of soldiers in war, not many of whom would after combat use terms like warrior. I doubt he chose the headline himself or was even asked about it, and it is contradicted by the tone of the article. There are far more important questions here than which labels are used to describe the people who carry out the killings.
This one guy (part of the largest group ever inducted as drone pilots) killed 1,626 people, and that figure won't include the civilians near the targets, who were often at home or travelling with their families. The real figure is probably 2-3 times that.
“We’re gonna shoot and collapse the building. They’ve gotten intel that the guy is inside.”...Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot. “And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ ”Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog.
What I find most troubling about this is that:
This program has been expanded to Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan already, and the same legal justification given for killing in Pakistan with no trial or even proper investigation could be given for a drone killing in Idaho. There is no limit to this war in time or space.
Even if you are on a battlefield, killing of non-uniformed and unarmed combatants is illegal under the Geneva conventions - you're supposed to avoid civilian casualties - clearly targeting houses and markets etc doesn't do that.
People who have not been positively identified as combattants and are away from any battlefield are killed without trial, without counsel, without charges and without official remorse if there was a mistake or they were innocent.
The distance created by the drone and the lack of risk to US personnel gives a very real risk that substantial abuse of this method of killing will occur. What if the US withdraws from Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iraq, but continues to kill from a distance? What if they expand the war to other countries and don't tell anyone (JSOC is in 100 countries)? All this has been done without even declaring war.
This drone pilot deserves to be recognised for at least having the courage to speak up about what he was asked to do, about the mistakes made.
The book Dirty Wars is definitely worth reading if you are interested in finding out more about US drone programs.
- Sorry but targeted drone strikes are the exact opposite of terrorism. If the US wanted to terrorize we could carpet bomb cities much quicker and cheaper than with drone strikes.
I 100% agree that accidental killing of unintended targets is terrorizing the native population of countries where this happens, and also leads to creating more terrorists/enemies of the US than it possibly eliminates.
Jeremy Scahill wrote a ~700 page book about this very subject that came out a few months ago. Dirty Wars. It is worth reading.
- There is a great and current book describing our current posture. Check out "Dirty Wars" for a wonderful intro to our secret wars all over the world. JSOC is operating in many, many countries where we do not have active wars going.
And, dear reader, JSOC is not the CIA.
