All: we eventually ban accounts that propagate flamewars like these. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for how HN is intended to be used, and then please use it that way.
The good things about HN are all fragile. The default forces of the internet all tend to destroy them. Everyone posting here is responsible to take care of the container—just like you wouldn't litter in a city park, or set one on fire.
You probably don't realize that there are war veterans, and active service members (e.g. National Guard, Reserves) working for tech companies like Google. But then again, such realization would be a real downer to your agenda.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...
Whatever you think of civilian deaths, don’t forget that we assasinated 6 US citizens without a trial. Freedoms my ass. What about the freedom of people attending a wedding or receiving medical treatment not to be killed? If this was another country doing the same to the US, would your non-argument hold water?
Large scale aerial bombardment of cities in WWII was enabled by advances in technology in the period shortly before that period, so it's really not a good thing to bring up to support a blanket “technology helps reduce them” claim about casualties.
Get it?
Without WW2 and Enigma, who knows when, or even if, computers might have developed? 20 years later, 40?
Technology of the airplane went from the first 200kts monoplanes, through to the hard limits of propeller aviation, and the birth of jets and rocketry by the end of the war.
Without the development of tacho bomb sights (eg Norden and Mk XIV), mass bombing would not have been worthwhile, as it was too inaccurate. They would lead to inertial guidance systems, enabling the ICBM.
Technology was the enabler of most of those deaths.
How is that any different than murder?
Due process and judicial process in a courtroom are not the same thing. Your citizenship isn't a bubble you carry around with you that gives you enhanced protection from your government under all circumstances; if you choose to put yourself in a kinetic theater of operations then it doesn't act as a bullet proof vest.
In the case of Al-Awlaki, his due process was people in the executive branch (specifically the National Security Council) looking at the fact that he was running around on battlefields with people the US was fighting with, and deciding that he'd chosen to become an enemy combatant. You can certainly critique the general conduct of war by states, and whether the US should be engaged in asymmetric wars in general or in that theater in particular, but I am no more or less exercised about al-Awlaki's death than I am about any of his Yemeni/Al Qaeda associates that were blown up at the same time.
Put another way, if you were OK with them being killed, then you should be OK with him being killed because he chose to affiliate with them. If you're not OK with it, then I'd say the problem is the War on Terror as a whole, since it effectively functions as a blank check to target any group that can be designated as a military threat.
Not off the top of my head, but the Supreme Court decision in Ex Parte Quirin, From WWII, makes entirely clear that enemy combatants who are US citizens are not entitled to special treatment as compared to enemy combatants who are not citizens.
> There is supposed to be a strict separation of never using the military against the citizens of the united states
There is no legal or historical basis for this claim; in fact, the Constitution explicitly envisions the use of military force to suppress insurrection, which is ordinarily carried out by civilians; it is clearly intended that the government not act extrajudicially against persons (not just civilians) within the jurisdiction of the US when access to the civilians justice system is available, but enemy combatants, regardless of citizenship, at least when outside the practical reach of the US civilian justice system, don't seem to have any protection from the application of military power at any time in history.
Most of the people targeted, individually or generally, by the US military in the Civil War were US citizens, for instance.
Next given the scale of wwii I’m sure there were us citizens fighting for the axis powers. The main difference is we lacked the ability to track, research, and target individuals like we do today.
alleged criminals are killed on the streets almost every day. From legal standpoint, what is difference between them and terrorists in your opinion?
The long amorphous war(s) in Indochina alone seems to likely be on that order of magnitude.
That’s tens of millions, and I’m being generous in ignoring how you’ve moved the goalposts. Your thesis is simply unsupportable, sorry.
Besides, we don’t know what the future holds, but in terms of raw possibilities we can now end all human life on Earth thanks to technology. That’s also new in the last 70 years. Hopefully we’ll never do it, but we could. Thst also flies in the face of the “technology reduces casualties” business. Of course, so does all of human history for thousands of years, but hey, let’s keep it simple.
It says "This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths ", which is not "tens". Now imagine death toll if US would directly fight war with USSR over Europe.
And yes, it includes Vietnam and Korean wars, where high precision weapons weren't used yet.
The total casualties in the wars between the superpower-led coalitions substantially exceed the casualties caused by the US military in those wars. (And, in any case, yes, in the normal way terms of scale are used, a number ≥ 10^7 and < 10^8 is usually described as “tens of millions”.)