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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

> The Air Force also has contracted out more drone missions to private companies to meet what one general called “a virtually insatiable appetite” from military commanders for airborne surveillance.

It sounds like for now, contractors are only running surveillance missions.

What if contractors:

* Fly the drone and release ordnance that kills someone.

* Fly the drone but military personnel pushes the button that kills someone.

Does the contractor as a civilian bear liability differently than a member of the armed forces? Could a foreign country try to extradite and prosecute them? Could a foreign country arrest them if they left the USA?

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Officially civilians fly unarmed surveillance missions and uniformed personnel fly missions where ordnance is carried. They may further limit civilians, or maybe not.

That said contractors have been doing the intelligence analysis behind missions to kill people using drones. Even though the missiles are fired by uniformed soldiers, there's a big gray area right behind them.

What about blackwater being paid to kill people on a regular basis in Iraq? Is that a gray area?

Your questions make it appear as if we have any compunction about killing anybody or anything. We've become jaded to such things.

As long as the guys frame it in terms of protecting the homeland, national security or some other vague excuse, we don't seem to care.

It's when the guys that we don't like do it that we raise hell.

It's sickening, but that's what we've become.

Re-framing is incredibly powerful [1]. Operators don't kill people, they neutralize targets and complete operations.

This will always happen in a military context, and this is why it is so important to have real civilian oversight. Expedience plants the seeds of future wars.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reframing

> It's sickening, but that's what we've become.

What we've become? You think if armed drones were in the inventory during Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, or WWII they wouldn't have been used because of some lost sense of nobility?

But don't such things already happening on the ground (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi )?

Did civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan who engaged in direct fire and killed combatants bear any liability that the service members did not?

If they had happened to be captured by the forces of the opposing governments, they could rightfully have been treated as mercenaries or even as common criminals, rather than prisoners of war. This was a moot point though, since neither side made any pretense of observing international law in terms of treatment of PoWs.

They were immune from Iraqi prosecution until 2008.

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