Or do you somehow believe that getting exploded by a 155mm Howitzer, or skewered on a pike, or swiss cheesed by a 50cal, or drowning with 150 of your friends in a sinking ship, or dying in agony from disease in a cramped room with hundreds of others that smells of death and rot, or being eaten by sharks in the pacific, or evaporating in a ball of plasma and radiation, or roasted alive in a pill box by sticky gasoline from a flamethrower, or being trampled by a horse, or suffocating under a mixture of mud and your best friend's blood, or or or or.... is more dignified or less horrifying than a flying land mine?
See Brandon F show an example of the raw brutality of linear warfare, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hP3SeJIVFk
There is nothing "cruel or unusual" about drones. Nothing at all. This is what war has always been.
Do you think people were being hyperbolic when they explained "war is hell"? Do you think soldiers with PTSD were just sissies and overreacting?
Did you think war was Glorious? Or Just? Or Noble? Or virtuous in literally any way?
No one is gonna give up the option, given their effectiveness.
I believe most of these people are not being killed when they beg like this. Nonetheless, the rules of war should try to preserve dignity in death. It needs to be codified at least, even if it’s violated, and perhaps some future generation will litigate the sin.
The brutality of this war probably hasn’t all gotten out.
The AFU suggested that they see maybe a 40-60% kill rate -- "kill" as in hit and damage; casualty rate -- from drones.
so you're only seeing the 40% that actually do anything, and of those, the ones that can be released, both for OPSEC, as well as simple logistics like having enough bandwidth to upload or time to edit.
You can't surrender to a UAV that doesn't have the battery to follow you back to the opposition's lines.
The same logistical challenge exists if you’re captured by an injured person.
Or if one guy has 93 prisoners to manage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9o_Major
This is precisely my point.
We are not gonna get a new Geneva Convention banning drones.
War is cruel and unusual.
Geneva convention-type rules, like bans against cluster munitions, are usually less about what soliders do to each other, but more about protecting civilians. But targeted drones on the front lines pose virtually no danger to civilians at all.
Indiscriminate bombing is a major sin. We have no way of litigating the current war criminals, but ICC has warrants out on some. There’s a sadistic element to cutting off food and water.
Not intentionally. It takes time for the drone operator to target. There's no torture. And drone attacks are the complete opposite of indiscriminate bombing.
> There should be a clear rules of surrender here.
That would be wonderful if it were possible. But how on earth could you implement it in practice? These attacks take place on Russian front lines, often kilometers away from Ukranian front lines. The drone has enough battery to quickly fly out with a heavy explosive and attack. It doesn't have enough battery to slowly escort a soldier walking back across the no-man's-land. And even if it did, Russian forces would surely be ordered to shoot deserters. Putin doesn't care about losing lives, as evidenced by the entire war.
You can't individually surrender when you're on your own front lines. You have to make it to your enemy's controlled territory first. (An entire unit can surrender, of course, but that's effectively giving your unit's territory to the enemy first. An individual soldier doesn't have territory to give.)
You've read about "foraging" to supply an army with food, which was done for millennia. Nice polite word. Do you know what it meant? It meant sending out soldiers to find farmers and force them to hand over their food, and next year's seed counts as food in this context. Pity the farmer's wife or daughter who hadn't hid well enough. Pity the farmer too.
War really is despicable.