George R. R. Martin Quotes

Drones are sort of the perfect weapon for a country that doesn't want to go to war. It only - there's no fingerprint. There's no direct involvement. There's human beings killed on the other end. You never see them. You don't have to worry about them. You don't have to meet their widows. It's sort of an antiseptic warfare.

And for the people who promote drones as the answer to everything, there is a danger from being distanced from the reality of the ugly mess of war.

The drones are really interesting - how have the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan? Because we've upped the drone strikes and most of the country doesn't even really know what that means or who we're killing or... it's such a new weapon that we don't know what the long term impacts of that kind of military action is going to be.

Generally speaking, it's a very hard thing to wrap your head around that a drone operator in Nevada can be releasing munitions in the Middle East.

Where land mines are indiscriminate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt.

The worst thing about being a drone pilot is that there is no intimate connection with what is happening in reality.

I don't see a great difference between someone sending a robot or a drone to bomb people and controlling it on a PlayStation from another country. It's thousands of miles away as opposed to someone in an airplane who is thousands of feet away releasing a bomb.

Few years ago I did a movie, Good Kill, about drone pilots and for four or five months I'm obsessed with the Air Force.

The front[line] of wars is increasingly non-human eyes peering down on our perceived enemies from space, guiding missiles toward unseen targets.

The United States is the first nation to regularly conduct strikes using remotely piloted aircraft in an armed conflict. Other nations also possess this technology. Many more nations are seeking it, and more will succeed in acquiring it.

Whatever one thinks of the justifiability of drone attacks, it's one of the least 'brave' or courageous modes of warfare ever invented. It's one thing to call it just, but to pretend it's 'brave' is Orwellian in the extreme.

Needless to say, there is no opportunity to interrogate or learn anything from a suspect who is vaporized by a missile launched by a keystroke executed thousands of miles away.

More and more, modern warfare will be about people sitting in bunkers in front of computer screens, whether remotely piloted aircraft or cyber weapons.

A drone isn't any different than a bomb; it's not any different than other weapons that are used, where there is always a capacity for people to be killed who you wished were not. It's just the weapons platform.

I've got no problem with drone strikes.

Warfare has changed so dramatically.

Napoleon might have understood Dwight D. Eisenhower, who fought not even a hundred and fifty years after Waterloo. But I don't think Eisenhower could even begin to wrap his mind around drone warfare, spy satellites, or any of the technology that now defines the security of our world.

When I read the script [of Good Kill], it read like a science fiction film. And Andrew [writer/director Andrew Niccol] is known for sci-fi. But when I spoke to him, he said this picture was 100% factual, which blew my mind. I realized then how little I knew about the drone program. And I felt that, if I knew so little about it, there must be others who should be educated about what's going on.

That's generally true of people who drop bombs from high altitudes. You don't know what's going on below. You don't see the human consequences of what you're doing.

What I do know is that drones are a modern weapon. When used effectively, when taking out ISIS or terrorist leaders, that's pretty impressive. When bombing wedding parties of innocent people and killing dozens of them, that is, needless to say, not effective and enormously counterproductive. So whatever the mechanism, whoever is in control of that policy, it has to be refined so that we are killing the people we want to kill and not innocent collateral damage.

We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.

With the indiscriminate nature of modern military technology (no such thing as a "smart bomb," it turns out) all wars are wars against civilians, and are therefore inherently immoral. This is true even when a war is considered "just," because it is fought against a tyrant, against an aggressor, to correct a stolen boundary.

The worst terrorist crimes going on right now are the drone campaigns.

I take my own experience and other assassinations through history and get a lot into the drone program, which doesn't work, as well.

The automation of warfare has, then, come a long way since the Persian Gulf War of 1991.