The problem isn't identifying targets. The problem is not killing civilians. Increasing the confidence of identifying targets may actually make things worse by allowing to justify drone strikes that would otherwise have to be called off.

The military likely won't be interested in identifying civilians. They have a list of people to kill and want to know whether one of them is in the target area. If they are and everybody else qualifies as a potential enemy combatant (i.e. they look somewhat male, adult and able-bodied) the drone goes kaboom.

Improving detection won't reduce casualties, it will increase confidence, which will result in more strikes and therefore more casualties. There's no incentive to improve the detection of civilians when everyone who is not obviously a civilian (e.g. children) can be considered a combatant.

This technology won't result in drone strikes being called off because there are civilians in the area. This will result in more drone strikes being made because they can ask a machine to greenlight them instead of having any personal accountability.

Our drones are already exceedingly good at hitting the targets they intend to. The problem is that most of the targets they are trying to hit are innocent.

That's questionable:

https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/operation-hayma...

At the very least, they are not yet good at hitting only the intended target.

Wouldn't better analysis provided by [AI-]assisted intelligence result in better identification of what things are the correct would-be-targets?

I don't mean getting better at hitting coordinate x,y,z on the mark better but rather identifying which coordinates are actually "real" war targets [munitions factory, command centers, training centers, etc.]

I mean, we literally target community leaders whose sole interaction with terrorists is making sure their village/families aren't in the crossfire. It's not that we don't know this, it's just that we're America, and we don't actually care.

Suffice to say, if Google was deciding who to shoot at, and it came up with a smaller number than they do now, the US would consider that bad design.

I would believe that one of our military's lesser goals (obvs winning and preventing our deaths are the major goals) is to avoid collateral damage.

We are not Hezbollah or Russia or Assad. None of them care much about collateral damage. Pretty sure a few of the above believe collateral damage sows fear and provides them advantage, if short-term.

Here's the thing, even if we magically only killed the people we want to kill, most of whom probably are innocent, and none of which were given a fair trial: We actually still create more violence.

Right now, to a kid growing up in many of these countries, the face of America is our President (...) and the sound of an American drone on the horizon. Now, one of these days, one of those drones pops his dad. In twenty years, that kid is a terrorist.

Our drone program is basically, the exact thing you'd do if you wanted to guarantee that there'd still be terrorists in the Middle East in two decades, because we're practically founding those terrorist groups right now.

What's the alternative? Let them play out their wars in their own style (aka more Assad-style conflicts but with Iran and Saudi as well as Turkey and Israel doing the business of war)?

While I think GWB and Obama both did us a great disservice in stirring up things in the ME. We also cannot just let them "duke it out". It'd be 10x-50x worse.

Pulling out now --would exacerbate the issue incredibly. Only people on the extreme right and extreme left believe that to be our best option.

We killed many, many Germans and many Japanese, in indiscriminate carpet bombing campaigns. Not many of those kids with "dead dads" became terrorists.

The USSR did some pretty nasty things in Afghanistan. You don't have Afghani terrorists going over to Russia and getting theirs.

You'd believe based on what? US doesn't do any on-the-ground post airstrike investigations most of the time, talking to the affected people. So it can't even know what is collateral damage and what is not.

Really, I'd like to see how would a feedback loop that would make US military minimize civcas work in the real world with the current way these things are evaluated by the military.

US had for a long time literaly two people dedicated to processing the hunderds of their civilian casualty incidents reports until recently. They have backlog of a year or so of reports. So after killing thousands of people in Raqqa and leveling the City, US military hasn't even started processing complaints. The operation is over for 5 months and official casualty numbers are like "perhaps we might have killed 2 civilians". "Sorry we have backlog." Meanwhile, hunderd corpses are still being extracted monthly from the leveled buildings in the city months later.

Still, it's mildly better than the idiotic european allies who still maintain that they killed no civilian after droping thousands of ~200kg bombs since 2014. It's really that demented.

It may be a stated goal to minimize collateral damage. But with this crap going on, I don't believe it has any meaning. US military probably employs 100x more people to clean the fucking toilets than to process the civcas reports. Lip service and all.

Wait, what makes you think the US is using drone strikes against "real" war targets? The targets of most drone strikes aren't a formal military, they're "militants".

The problem isn't finding locations to bomb. The problem is being able to tell whether the blob on the screen is the target you want to kill. If any civilians get killed in the process, they're probably terrorists too. If they're identifiably not, well too bad they decided to hang around in a "war zone".

And killing a lot more random unidentified bystanders in doing so.

That's not a standard you should feel proud of.