How exactly do the given R&D documents relate to the claims about mass civilian deaths from shootings and bombings conducted via US-supplied military drones? And what qualifies someone who was a graduate student researcher to be able to make any such claims?
Let us look at the answers to such poignant questions in the following paragraphs.
-
In 2008, I noticed within "battle damage assessment videos" that civilians within ordinary villages and settlements of Afghanistan, were being targeted by drones and drone related EWACS. The incident reports indicated that the drones had flown hundreds of miles away from pre-programmed flight paths, to hit seemingly arbitrary targets in random places with missile strikes. And consequently, the drones lost all fuel to be able to return to ground control stations, to then crash within those far off places, leading to a loss of tens of millions of dollars in each incident. Further investigations revealed that US military operators had manually overridden the automation, to deliberately and willingly conduct sorties for sport, where they hunted Afghan civilians in remote areas, using those drones.
-
Now, this is my eyewitness testimony, and I don't have the physical pieces of evidence anymore with me, which show that the drone operators were aware of shooting at civilians and that too, "for getting another notch on their belts for confirmed kills." The physical material demonstrating the conversations of drone operators, as recorded by US military standards and procedures for operating UAVs, isn't one of the files that I've managed to retain. However, numerous corroborating pieces of evidence have come to light over the years, which provide additional hard evidence about such murderous behaviors conducted by drone operators. Such problematic behaviors of commissioned, enlisted, drafted, conscripted, or contracted UAV operators were already known to US-led military commanders, as a distinct set of systemic issues, and not in the least bit as a one-off accidental incident.
-
In fact, during 2008, the only reason a systems engineer like myself was tasked with conducting a root-cause analysis of drone mishaps, was because the US military had recognized that somebody needed to do the research into the various causes for tens of millions of dollars being lost per month, in so-called mishaps. The millions of dollars being lost in various kinds of accidents and incidents, was obviously a primary concern to the military, compared to civilian casualties and murder victims in the Middle-East. A report published by the US Department of Transport (US-DOT) from the year 2004, "A Summary of Unmanned Aircraft Accidents and Incidents, by Williams, K.," provides pertinent examples about the number of, and types of drone mishaps, which were known to researchers around the year 2007-2009.
-
As for my qualifications in being able to make such observational remarks and testimonial statements:
Every engineer and researcher, even at the lowest echelons of the R&D supply chains of any industry,
is simply a human being with a moral obligation to take a stand, for what we have repeatedly witnessed,
throughout our lives and careers.
I am aware that providing these factual details along with my eyewitness testimony, in a publicly accessible domain, is an act of condemnation of particular types of activities and actions committed by certain US-led groups — activities and actions, that are now being more openly corroborated by other observers, and witnesses, via news agencies. This also implies that I am not taking a "neutral stance" on any of these issues, and I'm obviously not abstaining from voicing my personal opinions, and concerns, on the given subject matter.
Hence, the question naturally arises, "Who are the people that are supposed to be concerned about the honor and dignity, of friendly soldiers, killed or maimed by: faulty UAS and problematic UAS operators?" Aren't the US-DOS, US-DOJ, and the US-DOD supposed to be concerned about the welfare of their own soldiers and staff members being harmed by American, British, and Canadian defense systems providers?
You see, the US-DOS and the US-DOD might as well think of me as a harbinger for things to come, and not as an unfriendly antagonist, nor as an opponent to any of their legitimate causes and missions involving peacekeeping.
So what else is to come, what is being foreshadowed over here? Well, the previous sections of this documentation were about industrially orchestrated civilian massacres committed by US-led groups under the cover of recent wars. The previous sections also showcased how engineered aerial systems implicated in civilian massacres, are within themselves problematic, for they have been obtained, developed, used and even sold, via infringements of intellectual property and labor rights.
Now, the next section of this documentation is about serial rapes of civilians committed by US-led soldiers, and about how the movements of each and every US soldier were being tracked, at the meter level resolution of geographic location, via satellites, by various international entities. Were being tracked... are being... you get the picture, don't you?
Abbreviations:
EWACS - Early Warning And Combat Systems
R&D - Research and Development
UAS - Unmanned Aerial Systems
US - United States (of America)
US-DOD - US Department of Defense
US-DOJ - US Department of Justice
US-DOS - US Department of State
US-DOT - US Department of Transport