Thanks to nukes, we wont see any war that is more than trampling arround on third world countries. Those countries that cant manage to get nukes are no serious conventional threat. Anyway, nukes, just mentioning the word should shut down 99,9% of all military debates since they all operate under some odd asumptions that only make sense without nukes.

Hitler’s democratically elected regime, however odious, was the legitimate government of Germany

The NSDAP never had a majority in the elections. Hitler did become chancelor by presidential apointment. After that the NSDAP just used old fashioned force to gain absolute power and keep it that way.

Dahr Jamail interviews “Dr. Stjepan Mestrovic, a Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University who has written three books on US misconduct in Iraq: “The Trials of Abu Ghraib: An Expert Witness Account of Shame and Honor,” “Rules of Engagement?: Operation Iron Triangle, Iraq” and “The ‘Good Soldier’ on Trial: A Sociological Study of Misconduct by the US Military Pertaining to Operation Iron Triangle, Iraq.” He has three degrees from Harvard University, including a Master’s degree in clinical psychology, and has been an expert witness in psychology and sociology at several Article 32 hearings, courts-martial and clemency hearings involving US soldiers accused of committing crimes of war in Iraq, including the trials of prison guards involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal.”
On drones:
“Numerous news stories report that the government is currently using drones to kill pre-designated human targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan based upon “intelligence.” These news stories also routinely report that women, children, and civilians are often killed in the process. The mechanical drones are used exactly the same way as human soldiers are used: to carry out the same ROE that applied to Operation Iron Triangle. Incidentally, news stories suggest that the drone operators who execute these missions while sitting in remote control areas in the US are developing PTSD rates faster than the soldiers who actually engage in battle.
It seems to be the case that we are supposed to be mesmerized by the “postmodern” technology that leads to the use of “simulacra” soldiers and missions. The “target” becomes an image on a screen. But real human beings are carrying out the same ROE, whether in face-to-face confrontations or “simulacra” remote control engagements. And the human toll on both the soldiers and the civilian populations is not “simulacra,” but is very real.”

You can’t count the “government” of Afghanistan as anything but an extension of our invading army. There is no such thing as a legitimate election in an occupied country.

There are already signs of a high proportion of PTSD among the drone “pilots” in Nevada and Texas, since apparently these devices deliver pretty clear images of what and who they destroy, that is, innocent women and children almost every time. Then the “pilots” go home to dinner and face the innocent eyes of their own children.

“Unmanned” indeed! Why do you think the suicide rate of Iraq vets is so high? Because the entire war is a racist atrocity, and the only people who don’t know it are armchair posters like you! What do you think it means to BE a man? Kill children? Kid yourself really hard?

Well, that’s true. If you’re flying them from an office in Nevada rather than an airbase in Kandahar, then you’d be able to get home to see your family every night rather than once in six months, which would put a lot less strain on your marriage.
But I think you meant “martial”…

But drones don’t kill autonomously. Predators, etc, are really just large, sophisticated radio-controlled aircraft. No drone has ever released a weapon unless a human operator has told it to do so. Target identification is done by people looking at images. The implications of autonomous armed robots are very interesting (morally and technically), but entirely theoretical at this point.

92: As people have pointed out here before, all the laws of war and prisoner treatment have been drawn up by imperial bureaucrats in order to specifically disinclude such partisans from any definition as legitimate combatants.

This is not true (and also illiterate; “disinclude”? How about “exclude”?). It’s provably false with about ten seconds’ research, in fact, which makes me wonder why you decided to say it.

I found the software engineer thing a bit disingenuous. Having once had a minor part in a highly classified program, I know that they operate by compartmentalization of information. The programmer needs to know about technical capabilities, but not actual operational details. It will be illegal for him to enquire about these, as they are not necessary for his job function. So he is essentially a tool maker, pretty much like a gun smith. So the whole idea of who is supporting a military operation is a very fuzzy one. Do I have to work in an armaments factory? How about the guy who mines the metal used to construct the weapons? Or the farmer whose crops feed them? There are only degrees of separation, but never the sorts of certainty that our binary logic based legal systems are constructed to deal with.

Obviously, for reasons stated above, and others which I’ll assume we could all list off, the situation with the so-called “Taliban” and “al-Quaeda” soldiers is different and slightly more complex. (I use the scare quotes because I’m not aware of any definitive, independent proof that the people who are categorized thusly have any clear relationship with people who had previously used those names for their organizations.) Basically, at this point, the US, UK and their allies are fighting more-or-less disorganized groups of patriotic partisans. As people have pointed out here before, all the laws of war and prisoner treatment have been drawn up by imperial bureaucrats in order to specifically disinclude such partisans from any definition as legitimate combatants. So it’s hardly surprising that they’re being interned, tortured and killed, nor that the armies involved in suppressing them routinely target civilian populations in order to deny the fighters material and moral support. Governments always do that. Red Army vs. Makhno, Black and Tans in Ireland—it’s precisely equivalent. This is how the majority of armed conflicts work. The only veil that needs lifting here is the one covering the eyes of the bourgeois liberal dupes who persist in their exceptionalism and naivete.
“When they knock over there, friend, they’re knockin’ for you!”

I find it hard to reconcile any form of aerial bombardment with any of the concepts of “limited warfare” that are implicit in the Geneva conventions, etc. As other posters have at least alluded to, WWII saw the extension of “military target” to mean “the people who work in armament factories, their homes, and those of their neighbors.” “Total war” is not a moral position, in my thinking.
Consider the conventions on landmines and sea mines, for an earlier example, parallel to automated drones. And consider how rarely the word of those conventions was followed. Setting loose machines that kill autonomously is an act likely to have consequences.
Could a software engineer face war crimes charges for a shoot/don’t shoot algorithm? Or would the charges be closer to the point of release, or further back in the chain of requirements? Writing a requirement for an algorithm “kill nine of every ten without discrimination” would seem to be a moral crime right there – but instantiating it and letting the machine loose would also be clear crimes.
Contrariwise, writing an algorithm “target humans carrying objects longer than 60 cm and with length to width ratio of 4:1 or greater” is not a clear crime; pointing it at people coming out of a store known to sell brooms might well be.

There are undoubted moral risks associated with drone warfare. But they are outweighed by the marital rewards.

The article in The New Yorker came to my mind immediately, so I was happy to see you reference it. But I think you gloss over the “moral risks” of drone warfare. In the article, the notion of using drones as a tactic rather than a strategy comes up. The temptation is to lean more and more towards using it as a strategy, which would be horribly wrong from a moral standpoint.

My takeaway from the article was this. You know why the Greek gods were such giant a**holes? It’s because they held the power of life or death and yet were invulnerable themselves. 3,000 years ago the Greeks understood where this sort of thing leads.

Mere mortals worry about things like “just cause” in part because, in war, the stakes are very real and quite palpable. That’s the full context, as much as we’d like to think that high-mindedness is sufficient motivation for rectitude.

I’m sorry, but the United States is already criticized for its alleged imperiousness. Unless, ultimately, we keep some skin in the game, it’s certain that any high-mindedness we have will be fully eclipsed by high-handedness.

One should not make the mistake of thinking that there has been progress in anything except technology. The evidence suggests that the pronouncements of the United Nations, for example, bear the same relation to warmaking now as, shall we say, Kant’s ideas for perpetual peace in 1795 did to the history of the following 20 years. This is terrible, but it is also true.

And one might also say, looking to a future in which it is increasingly unlikely that perpetual peace will result from some friedmanite levelling, that it will remain, sadly, in the individual interests of everyone to live under the umbrella of a state equipped to deal death as efficiently as possible in as many ways as possible. Or to hope that wherever you are becomes such a backwater that nobody wants to attack you. But unless you are extraordinarily lucky, like the Swiss, and combine difficult geography with providing valuable services to more powerful states, you might find in that instance that instead you become Belgium, not merely ignored, but rather fought over as a convenient location to settle the scores of bigger powers, for a few hundred years or so.

We’ve Seen the Future, and It’s Unmanned

“The war begins each day on the long drive into the desert, just past the Super Buffet and the Home Depot and the Petco, and the swath of look-alike houses that cling to the city’s edge, along the forty miles of the strangest daily commute in America. Air Force Staff Sergeant Charles Anderson plucks his wristwatch from the cupholder and crosses into the war zone.”

Executive summary: It’s much much much cheaper to fly drones vs. fighter aircraft.