Friday, December 14, 2012

Joystick Warfare Hell

Remember people, you all left this and accountability on the table and quickly walked away from same. Allowing those that started it all to walk off into their comfortable lives with the booty from, and started laying blame on those coming in to clean up the devastating policies rendered!!

The Suffering of an American Drone Operator
12/14/2012 - Much has been made of the devastating impact American drones have on civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. One soldier's story shows that it can also adversely affect the lives of those who operate the remote-controlled weapons. Former servicemember Brandon Bryant is still haunted by images of the injured and dying.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls.

Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.

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"Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.

"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

Invisible Warfare read more>>>


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