The German ministry of defence is in trouble because it botched its answers to a parliamentary caucus' questions in regard to the accidents of its aerial drones.
Well, the botching is bad, but such mistakes happen in bureaucracies.
What's more interesting is how the news media reports about this; a certain aversion against assassination drones among journalists (which I share because they are useless for actual defence) seems to have grown into an aversion against Bundeswehr drones in general.
Let's not forget:
One of the original arguments for such drones was that they would be cheaper than comparable planes because they don't need the same flight safety (no pilot's life at risk).
Drones crashing into the ground is normal, it was supposed to be tolerable. It looks as if many journos didn't get this memo in the 90's.
S O
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So the German troops in Afghanistan have no use for drones? That they are useless for defense depends on what you are defending. People sitting thousands of miles from their troops in combat can easily say they are useless because their butts aren't on the line.
ReplyDeleteThe German troops in Afghanistan do not defend Germany.
DeleteThe notion that Germany is being defended in the Hindu Kush was and is widely ridiculed in Germany and a robust and enduring majority of Germans want the troops withdrawn - and did so for years.
Look at how I linked to the basic low with the words "actual defence"; I meant defence against an aggressor who attacked us or allies at home or on the seas.
There is no such thing in Afghanistan.
Instead, ISAF is trying to uphold an unnatural balance of power in a distant civil war-torn country where once people ruled who provided hostitality to a guy who is long since dead and who motivated and paid the even longer dead people who attacked an ally of ours more than a decade ago.
The collective defence may have involved hostility against the Taliban, but this alliance motivation for fighting them no doubt ceased to exist when they lost power - more than a decade ago.
Or in short; drone usage in Afghanistan is 0% about defence.
The drone dispute is probably more complicated. Artillery observation systems such as Luna were not under attack, rather foreign imports. It smells like a smear campaign against the current minister.
ReplyDeleteIs it necessary that drones are armed and what armament should they carry? Should they fly with or without guidance and should that guidance be over wire, laser or radio?
Wire and laser guidance really only work within a few kilometres for aerial missiles and are not in use with drones as far as I know.
DeleteThe mission packages of drones depend on their niche; I suppose you can do without munitions onboard, but it's apparently very practical for assassinations.
The current minister is politically irrelevant, hardly anybody notices him (unlike his predecessor). Elections are in September, this may motivate some political aggressiveness, but this minister is a poor target for campaigning. He's too low-profile.
Really so you don't count saving the live of YOUR service men and woman as defending Germany? I will tell you that I consider every American fighting overseas as fighting for us. While you are right in some ways the fight over there is far away today it came to the shores of America in 2001. Can you tell me that it could not have come to Germany? Drones against a first rate power will have limited use at least at first. You act as if no German troops will ever deploy overseas. If your attitude is that German troops should only defend the German homeland then why are you in NATO?
ReplyDeleteTo pretend something you consider wrong only because troops are fighting somewhere is about the most stupid form of patriotism I can imagine. Why would I do that?
DeleteSome German troops in Afghanistan successfully convinced themselves that ISAF is at least helpful to Afghans, but rarely anybody thinks ISAF defends Germany.
To the contrary; it may put us in (marginal) danger because it provokes asshats to attack us in revenge.
My attitude is not that German troops shall only defend German territory; collective defence is fine. ISAF ain't "defence", though. It's a military adventure for politicians, and a most stupid one.
The idea of drone crashes being tolerable only works if the drones are cheap. If they cost much more than smart-bombs then people tend to get excited.
ReplyDeleteI agree that armed MALE drones are useless for defence against invasion, as are the unarmed variety - witness the short work Russia made of Georgian UAVs a couple of years ago. As a variation, though, persistent optics on something like a blimp or an aerostat can be very useful for routine border security or coast guard work, without the bandwidth costs.
If German troops are helpful or not their lives are still in danger. Do their lives only have value if they are doing a job that YOU think matters? I wonder what country would ever send any troops anywhere if you had to make sure that everyone in the country has to agree. And not wanting your fellow country men and woman to die is not patriotism. Do you not think that a country owes it to it's troops the support they need when they are deployed to defend their country? Maybe we should have our troops vote if they think that the mission they are sent on is worthy of them.
ReplyDeleteI don't settle on suboptimal proposals if I'm free to propose what I consider better:
DeleteI want the troops withdrawn ASAP, just as the majority of my people didn't want them there for years.
So who's reckless now? The guy who thinks some gadgets should be used by troops while they're at risk, or the guy who thinks the troops shouldn't be in a stupid and risky mission in the first place.
It's not patriotism to support a stupid military adventure with hardware.
I'm no useful idiot to the people in power who treated the ISAF mission as some kind of foreign political game. Troops are no poker chips, and gold-lining the poker chips is a useless endeavour.
So you hold the troops at greater risk because the people who sent them were wrong? How do you tell a parent that there child didn't have what they needed because the people thought that the mission he or she was sent on wasn't a good idea? I am not proposing anything it is happening right now YOUR troops are in danger now and deciding that they aren't going to get what they might need because you disagree with the choices that sent them there seems very unfair to them. Look I respect your right to disagree with your leaderships choices but to hold those sent to fight not having something they need to keep them safer i don't understand.
ReplyDeleteYou don't seem to understand. I don't want them to sit in Afghanistan without drones - I want them to be home.
DeleteOk but where are they? You have to be realistic about it they are there. The question is are they going to get what they need to fight? To me arguing if they should be there is all fine and everything but they are there and as long as they are you do the best you can for them.
DeleteThat's not being "realistic".
DeleteI'm not in a chain of command right now, so I don't need to accept the German participation in ISAF as unchangeable. I'm a citizen, a voter, who thinks about what should be done.
I'm not under the authorities' spell. I refuse to play their game and accept their actions as starting point for my thoughts.
It's probably worth noting that the armed Predator was actually a CIA innovation, and something that DOD expressed no interest in adopting. Also, the armed UAVs have no defensive value in Afgh - they're offensive weapons used to destroy specific targets. Putting a missile or bomb on them shifts them into the 'strike' column of the air tasking orders. The defensive value comes from the surveillance role (Gorgon Stare being the most evident example) - but that value is only available when there is no threat from enemy aircraft or AA.
ReplyDeleteBased on some developing designs I suggest that the best role for cheap UAVs in a defensive role is as expendable EW platforms (Mucke being probably the optimum size; Gray Eagle is probably too big, too expensive and too vulnerable to be practical in such a role against a peer threat).
Finally, I think there are a couple of tangential themes emerging from this thread. One is the tendency of deployed forces to place force protection at the top of the priority list. The other concerns opportunity costs - does it make sense to spend money on equipment used only for specific wars of choice at the expense of sacrificing acquiring equipment for potential wars of necessity (the US MRAP discussion of a few years ago falls into this category too)?
what is missed here to me the the media and family's. When you have the media saying well there are things that can make it much safer for your loved ones. And then you have a family member talking to the politicians you get billions spent on things that are not useful anywhere else. Drones can be used in other wars just not the first day.
ReplyDeleteThe moment a nation abdicates its military decision making to the families of soldiers/sailors/aircrews is the moment it gives up being a nation whose military is taken seriously. If you want your loved ones to be safe, not only should you never send them to war, but you should never let them join a workplace that experiences industrial accidents. As for the media, they figured out about 12 years ago that the campaign doesn't address any national interests, and the politicians stopped giving non-answers long ago, so the only stories left to sell are the human interest ones, turning war into a reality-tv-snuff-show. Again - not something to base military policy on.
ReplyDeleteThe war had a purpose and still does. Lest we forget that the planing for the attacks of 9-11 came out of one of them. Looking at the arab summer so many assume that it would have happened anyways. That the people of the region would have rose up without Iraq. How many there watched people in Iraq hold up their fingers with that ink stain and want that for them and their children. One more thing even with all the death after the invasion in Iraq how many of the people in the region still wanted a new chance. people say OMG look how many Iraq's have died. i would say look how many Syrians are dying today for freedom. How many that even today still say the Iraq invasion was a mistake want us to go into Syria. Freedom has cost and we forget that.
ReplyDeleteAlternative history arguments are worthless, for countless counterarguments based on another alternative history are possible.
DeleteThe ISAF mission is about installing, kickstarting and keeping alive of a proxy regime that keeps the former friend of a former (long since dead or quite irrelevant) enemy in check. There's no German interest in Afghanistan which justifies a military mission.
Plausibility check; if German troops had never been in Afghanistan and someone would now argue for our participation in ISAF talking about freedom and stuff, he would be considered insane.
People got used to the stupidity and the political inertia kept the mission going for purely foreign politics reasons. Our politicians deemed that sustaining the mission is less trouble for them than pulling out, especially our conservatives who have a built-in aversion against overcoming inertia.
BTW; Germany's "freedom" is entirely unrelated to Afghanistan.
When an ISAF soldier is killed, the chances are that s/he was killed by someone disgruntled that the west is in their particular part of Afgh, or by someone settling a score with the west for siding with a rival tribe. There is a lower possibility that s/he was killed by an active member of the Quetta Shura, Haqqani Group, or HiG – organizations that have local interests but neither the desire nor means to export violence. For that matter, they were reluctant hosts of AQ and actively sought means to disengage from AQ right up until 2002. The least likely possibility is that s/he was killed by AQ – a group which has evolved so far beyond its ‘90’s structure and outlook that it can’t be considered the same foe as in the aftermath of 9/11. So I fail to see a purpose for fighting.
Delete9/11 was an act of mass murder, not war. The proper response was through criminal investigation and prosecution, as was happening following other criminal acts such as the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and of the USS Cole. So I fail to see a purpose for fighting.
The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with inspiring aspirations across the Muslim world for democratic reform. For one, any such desires long predated 2003. Further, implementation of democratic reform has failed in that it has made the act of voting seem to be all that’s necessary for a responsible government. It’s not. Instead, what is necessary is the creation of institutions that transcend government, where leaders are accountable to the legal system and the armed forces defend a political ideal rather than a political leader. That concept is missing. Those Iraqis who survived the bloodshed may have held up ink stained fingers, but they continue to die today, so I fail to see a purpose for the fighting.
“Freedom has a cost” is among the most jingoist empty phrases uttered in the past century. What threats to western civilization were posed by a handful of fundamentalist terrorists? We tolerate greater risks from cars and tobacco and domestically-owned guns. But in response to a few terrorists the west has allowed intelligence collection agencies to erode personal liberties and we have given police forces unprecedented powers of detention. We have eroded our liberty in response to a negligible threat, spent trillions of dollars fighting irrelevant wars and in the process killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced at least as many again, and have fostered intense hatred of the west in the process. Was the purpose for fighting?
So freedom is something that we got from where? Most people in the world that get freedom pay a price for it in blood. Ask the family members of the dead from 9-11 what the risk were to their loved ones. A threat if you do not deal with it grows and grows. That is what 9-11 showed us we ignored for a long time the threat and they hit us over and over and we did the whole it's a crime thing. Well guess what it didn't work. You act like they didn't hate us before. Go back and watch the people who cheered 9-11 and tell me who hates who. I think the west better wake up before they loose everything they hold dear. Where are the hundreds of thousands of people we killed? I had someone say the west has killed millions of muslin's and I asked for a link to the news story as I am sure it would be a huge story. Guess what no response. Iraq was not a paradise before we went in, it is not a paradise now either. Will it ever be one that is up to it's own people they have a choice to make. People say look at how many died well guess what look at how many are dying in Syria. Will everyone shut up about it when the dead in Syria out number the ones that died in Iraq? Here's a idea go visit these peace loving people that every ones seems to think they are tell them you are against the wars and see what happens to you.
ReplyDeleteYou apply the inflated modern American English version of "freedom", which isn't only freedom, but something much wider - a buzzword for politicians and marketeers to mobilise gullible voters.
DeleteThe only threat to freedom posed by errorists stems from overreactions, from trading between security and freedom.
The West doesn't need to wake up - the Westerners who are still in crazy mode need to get back to reality and calm down after a decade of overreactions, prejudices and other methods of dumbing down the perception of this complex world.
You ask where 'Freedom' came from. For the English-speaking world it came from blood shed in 1215, and has since been preserved through apolitical legal systems and, on a few occasions, through further blood shed repelling credible threats of invasion.
DeleteAQ offers no such credible threat of invasion. They can in no way change western constitutions or way of life. They may raid, but they do so in no different manner than domestic terrorists (McVeigh, the Unabomber, the Jewish Defense League etc). The victims of 9/11 are similar to the victims of other acts of terror in the US: unlucky, but no cause for irrational war.
You are right that ‘they’ hated ‘us’ before 9/11. The creation of Israel in 1948 remains a source of resentment. The US and UK orchestrated a coup in Iran in 1953 which further soured opinions. The UK, France and Israel invaded Suez in ’56; the US supported Israel in ’67, ’73, 82 etc; we withdrew support of the Mujahedeen in ’89; ‘permitted’ Bosnian Muslim killings; killed thousands in Somalia in ’93; Saudi permitted US troops to ‘guard Mecca’ . . . there are a lot of reasons the Muslim world dislikes the west in general and the US and UK in particular. But none of that dislike, and in some cases outright hatred, is a risk of overwhelming our shores, overthrowing our governments and destroying our institutions.
You ask where the hundreds of thousands of dead are. Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties. The findings are not universally accepted, but even if they are off by several hundred percent they still represent hundreds of thousands of deaths. There is no single report consolidating civilian fatalities in Afghanistan, but Wikipedia lists numerous reports by year totalling tens of thousands of further fatalities. That blood has been shed chasing a handful of radicals who are simply as dangerous as high school shooters: horrible if one is in the wrong place at the wrong time, but no existential threat.
SO is right: we all over reacted. The US did so in a fit of blind rage. The UK followed out of a fear of irrelevance. The rest of the west did so in fear of US economic repercussions, and the rest of the ‘coalition of the willing’ did so with aspirations of US economic benefits. It’s long past time everyone took a deep breath and calmed down.