But how different is telling a drone "kill the person with this face" to telling a missile "fly here and blow up". The video seems to show ez-assassination technology (tm) being used by "the wrong" humans, not AI going rogue and deciding who lives and who dies on its own.

To me, the video is scary not because of AI, but because of how easy and inconsequential it portrays murder. It makes you wonder if that isn't sort of the end goal of advanced warfare technology - the more surgical it becomes the further it deviates from our idea of what war is - this is drone warfare and it's nebulous legality taken to the very extreme.

What I perhaps find unsettling in myself is that I find this somehow worse than open warfare - as if its not the loss of life that bothers me, but the sinister efficiency of it. Is that really a valid criticism? Why is it "more ok" to fly a plane to drop a bomb on some foreigner than for a drone to do it - is it because it simply costs/risks us more, that technology like this cheapens human life?

The AI takin over is scary too. I just hope they work out in time that the only winning move is not to play.

Never understood why he wouldn't drop the bomb on the wooden duck decoys.

are you implying that I'm a stupidhead?

I think education could definitely have a role. I don't think you'd need too much to connect the dots between the country who dropped the bomb out of the sky and the huge wound it created in your heart. Having enough heart or brain power to believe these foreign invaders have your best interests would be harder and may be beside the point if it pushed you over the edge.

I highly recommend reading Jocko Willink's book to get an understanding of these conflicts.

This guy makes it sound like the war is a mess akin to the fast pace of Battlefield 3 multiplayer and it couldn't be further from the truth. The US armed forces go to some pretty extraordinary lengths before dropping a bomb - for starters they give prior notification to the residents before any area is considered combat zone.
Imagine fighting a war, where you are constantly being open about where you are going to strike, it seems insane. But they do this to minimize civilian casualties as a priority over destroying targets.

To show up the greatest country in the world? Revenge? To destabilise Clinton's campaign?

You can drop a bomb, but if it's not at the right time, or place, the damage can be ignored. Timing of delivery is everything.

Or, alternately, it's a bluff to cause panic in which case something might slip out.

Jeebus, have you guys ever played poker? \= )

For sure, I believe that by trying to be all things, it has made compromises in other areas. But perhaps the flexibility is a more important than a few advantages here and there. All of the current US planes are also multi role as well, with the exception of dedicated bombers. So any jack of all trades worries also apply to the majority of the planes that have been in service for the last 30 years. It seems like versatility has been the driving factor for upgrades. So it makes sense a new plane would be designed with versatility in mind.

For things like Close Air Support, I would much rather be in the invisible fast plane, than the bullet proof slow plane like the A-10. You've dropped your bombs before the enemy even know you're there, and before the bombs hit the ground, you're 40KMs away, at an altitude where most ground based missile systems can't hit you(even if they can detect you).

Close air support of that nature of course only happens when you have reached full air superiority, which the F-35 is the best plane for.

It might seem overkill now to have such an advanced plane to drop bombs on people with AK-47's, but you never know how politics can change. Assad might decide to start buying some advanced Russian SAM systems, and that's when a stealth plane will come in handy.

As I said in that thread, I don't see an incentive for the US to intervene. This isn't the Cold War battle over spheres of influence, neither does oil have the same geopolitical relevance. Despite the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Libya, none has led to a spike in oil prices? Instead it's fallen precipitously. Why, because the US being the swing shale oil producer has capped world prices.

Meanwhile I listed the reasons for Russia to intervene, none of which you have challenged or refuted. TOWs have by all accounts been supplied by the Saudis. I don't think Russia is attempting to destabilize Syria, but they do wish to prop up Assad. Bombing has conveniently been primarily of non-ISIS rebels since they challenge the regime more directly than ISIS which is being bombed already.

Syria includes a litany of rebel groups some as radical as ISIS. From what I have read it is suspected that both the Syrian army and al-Nusra/ISIS used various chemical weapons. The Syrian army has undoubtedly dropped barrel bombs, weapons designed to create indiscriminate collateral damage to civilians just like chemical weapons, it is entirely consistent that they would have also tried using chemical weapons which is practical terms are no less likely to be deadly to civilians or likely to incite terror. There are by all accounts >5,000 different rebel groups in Syria. That you would ascribe them all as wanting chaos would suggest you've been fed a narrative.

A Cold War MAD mindset makes little sense today. Russian bombing of western Europe in some kind of hypothetical retaliation against the US makes no sense in this day and age. In any case it was scrapped because of Putin's paranoia.

Was Japan really that close to surrendering when America dropped the bomb? I get the impression he's exaggerating that.

"It's been one culture that's been blowing shit up over and over again"

Americans?

This is really fucking reprehensible on Mahers part. He's an American and an atheist. See how quickly he takes responsibility for drone strikes, wire-tapping, dropping atomic bombs on civilians. How about the Stalinist purges?

Know what he'd say? I don't support that (except maybe the drone strikes, because fuck brown people, amirite?). I'm not part of that.

SO WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU PUTTING 9/11 ON A FUCKING KID WHO PROBABLY WASN'T EVEN BORN?

Hey, ya know what? Maybe we should be careful. Maybe we should treat the kind of people who commit mass killings in the US with a degree of caution. So let's start with locking up the white males, 'cos those motherfuckers seem to go on shooting sprees with depressing regularity.

Ugh, seriously, fuck Maher. That was fucking disgusting to watch.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Ordinance, flight testing, no sound, test pilots' to 'ordnance, flight testing, no sound, test pilots, drop tanks, bombs, missiles' - edited by calvados

Potty-Mouthed Princesses Drop F-Bombs for Feminism by FCKH8. has been added as a related post - related requested by Trancecoach on that post.

Potty-Mouthed Princesses Drop F-Bombs for Feminism PARODY has been added as a related post - related requested by Trancecoach.

Even in the nuclear world. we're human, and we fuck up. I get that. So to be quite honest, the idea that a armed nuclear bomb was almost accidentally dropped on US soil really doesn't bother me too much.

What bothers me, is that...you bet your sweet ass that if that bomb had detonated.....we would have covered it up.....There is no way in hell the military back then would have admitted we dropped a bomb on ourselves. we would have blamed the Russians, and we would have gone to war.

An accident, I can forgive, but turning an accident, no matter how big, into WW3....

Granted, I know I am speculating. I just cant see the US military saying, "oops, our bad. sorry about that whole "wiping you out of existence" thing, North Carolina"

I won't defend the costs of military operations nor can I stand the senseless death that war brings. However, separate from my moral and ethical repulsion, I can see the strategic value of carpet bombing, even in modern warfare

If you want to destroy one building, or take out one person, then precision missiles are perfect. However, if you want to take out a sprawling arms manufacturing complex, they would be cost-ineffective. However, accurately dropped "dumb" bombs are cheap and effective.

Russia used carpet bombing to destroy the port of Poti during the 2008 South Ossetia war.

This is really crap.

This imperialist fuck's argument amounts to this:

1) The US will need to defeat Japan through military means
2) The US wants to avoid "another Okinawa" (with a quote from Truman)
3) The US needed to drop the atomic bomb

So, lets look first at that Okinawa analogy. Okinawa, as with other pacific islands, were particularly brutal because of both their strategic importance to the Pacific front as well as their terrain. Both because of they needed to be seized in order to cutoff mainland Japan (and isolate it) and their small, heavily dense terrain caused warfare to be at times hand-to-hand, the battles here were desperate and ugly.

This leads us to the next point: the whole presupposition with the imperialist fuck's argument is that there was no other way but occupation, in the form of Okinawa, to end Japan's empire.

This is false. The US had other options to end the war. Occupation of Japan wasn't a strategic necessity in the way occupation of the pacific islands was. The US could have maintained a bombing campaign while getting the rest of the world to pursue political/diplomatic talks with Japan.

The reason the US dropped the bombs wasn't to end the war (which was already war, de jure shit aside). It was to a) ensure supremacy over Japan (which isn't the same thing as ending a war) and b) to ensure global imperialist hegemony.

Amerikkka doesnt give a shit about saving lives. What about all the people firebombed in Dresden? What about all the imperialist adventures before and after WWII? Don't give me some ethical crap about a country, at least 1/4 of which was still under apartheid conditions, that wants to save lives because it respects human life so it drops atomic bombs on an already defeated people.