rc3.org Rafe Colburn on software development (and other topics)

Didn’t read the linked study, but I am dubious that you can prove any kind of causal relationship between assassination and organizational longevity. There are so many other potential causes for the correlation that I don’t think that sort of study can be anything other than suggestive.

I don’t view these operations as any different in kind to any other military response to terrorism. I don’t think military responses are very useful in general, but I don’t see what’s different about trying to kill one dude with missiles rather than trying to kill some other dude by invading and occupying the country he was operating out of – except that the former is rather cheaper, will kill vastly fewer people, and is at least as likely to succeed.

I don’t buy that there is something civilized or superior about massive conventional military operations against the forces of the government of a country, and something uncivilized or improper about firing missiles from drones with the permission of the government of a country. The latter is not clean or pretty and will result in a lot of dead civilians. The former is even less clean and pretty, will result in orders of magnitude more dead civilians, nurture resentments at a national scale, and not incidentally, cost thousands of times as much and get thousands of American soldiers killed.

If we’d stuck to airstrikes after 9/11 we would have been a lot better off. My point being, the choice is not airstrikes or nothing. It’s airstrikes or even more invasive violence.

Posted by Jacob Davies on 20 April 2010 @ 7pm