[TeMPOraL]

It is an iterated trolley problem.

Imagine the "default" track splitting into a hundred million tracks, which all cross and merge into and separate from each other. It's such a maze that nobody can really tell what path the trolley will take once it enters a particular track. There's a couple thousand people in blue shirts tied down to a single-digit number of those tracks. A hundred-million-way split is essentially a bump in the main track, which means the trolley will randomly pick one of the hundred million of directions.

The service track (which splits off the main track before the hundred-million split) has a couple redshirts tied to it, plus 50 yellow-shirts per each redshirt. If you flip the switch, the trolley is sure to travel down the service track.

Additionally, the rules of iterating the problem are: if you don't flip a switch, there's a small chance the game ends. If you do flip a switch, the game will always continue, and there's a small chance that next round, more blueshirts will be tied to some of the hundred million tracks, and a small chance that the trolley will go down the main track regardless of your choice.

What do you choose? The US government answer is essentially to jam the switch in the "to service track position", because "fuck it, we don't care about non-blue shirts, and besides, the trolley company pays us to make sure the trolleys keep going".

[s1artibartfast]

Overall, I think I agree with your analogy, which illustrates the complexity of the problem. If I follow, you are claiming that:

1. Lives saved by military intervention are unpredictable 2. The people killed by military intervention are categorically different than those saved 3. The number of lives saved changes over time. 4. Military intervention on average kills more than it saves (Today) 5. There are ulterior motives at play

OF these, I think 1-3 are pretty agreeable, 4 is unknown, and 5 is true, but generally overstated.

>What do you choose?

Given the enormous complexity of the problem, I would hire an organization of professionals to make lever choices, and support the scrutiny of this organization by competent 3rd parties.

I would be highly skeptical of anyone who claims that it is "evil" to ever pull the lever.

The real challenges are twofold:

First is the asymmetrical information between the professional lever pullers and the 3rd party critics. 3rd party critics have no visibility to the tracks and the lever pullers dont tell them if the blue shirts are one or a hundred track slips away from the trolly.

Second, The lever pullers are hired by the blueshirts, and individual blueshirts have radically different views on how many red/yellow shirt lives are worth one blueshirt life.

[TeMPOraL]

My claims are similar to which you identified, but stronger in some points, so let me put them explicitly.

1. Drone strikes aren't saving lives in an immediately obvious fashion ("these targets were about to launch an attack on us"), but only indirectly, if at all ("these targets may or may not have been planning some sort of attack in the future, which they may or may not have been able to execute; but we're sure they won't be planning or executing anything when they're dead"). The hundred million tracks are meant to show the degree of uncertainty about possible future attack and its casualties. Any given drone strike is unlikely to have saved anyone at all.

2. The people killed by drone strikes are of different nation than the one that does the killing. This is illustrated by the blue/other color split, and red/yellow illustrates enemy combatant/enemy civilian split. That they latter are tied together describes collateral damage.

3. The risk grows over time if the drone strikes continue. This is illustrated by the iteration rules. In the example, as long as the trolley keeps killing redshirts and yellowshirts, the number of blueshirts on the tracks tends to grow over time - and if it goes on long enough, the trolley will eventually follow the main track despite the switch being flipped, and will run over some blueshirts. This illustrates how each drone strike generates more hatred on the other side, creating more potential attackers and increasing motivation for performing an attack. Done long enough, an attack is guaranteed to happen. Conversely, stopping the strikes deescalates the issue, reduces the hatred - as illustrated by the game having a chance to end early if you don't flip the switch.

3a. The exact point I'm trying to make here: US drone strikes are creating and perpetuating the problem they are claimed to mitigate. Stopping them is the actual way to mitigate the problem.

4. As per point 1, the amount of lives saved by these attacks in the long run is unknown, but unless military intelligence is not an oxymoron it's claimed to be, it's most likely negative.

4a. From this follows my belief, reflected by using 1e8 tracks in the example, that the chance of actual attack happening and killing people is much smaller than the chance the enemy will lose their interest in the fight if they're no longer being terrorized. Not pulling the lever and waiting for the game to finish is a loss-of-life-minimizing strategy in my example.

5. There are ulterior motives, and there are many of them. That's somewhat of a side topic, though. But I do claim that these motives are enough to blind the decision-making apparatus to the point 3a - drone strikes are causing the risk, not reducing it.

> Given the enormous complexity of the problem, I would hire an organization of professionals to make lever choices, and support the scrutiny of this organization by competent 3rd parties.

That's the right view in the abstract, but in reality, the professionals running the show are professional PR people ordering professional lever pullers to pull the lever. That's not to say the politicians and the military are bad at their jobs - they're OK, but they're also not focusing on minimizing loss of life long-term.

> I would be highly skeptical of anyone who claims that it is "evil" to ever pull the lever.

It isn't always evil to pull the lever here - it just almost always is. Exceptions are few and far between.

> 3rd party critics have no visibility to the tracks and the lever pullers dont tell them if the blue shirts are one or a hundred track slips away from the trolly.

This is a line of reasoning that's commonly used to defend intelligence agencies - "they won't announce out loud when they save everyone from doom, because that would be defeating their ability to stave off another disaster". However, as far as I know/read, to the degree various journalists and investigators were able to dig out information, there aren't any secret success stories they're hiding. So I'm biased strongly against trusting this line of reasoning alone.

> Second, The lever pullers are hired by the blueshirts, and individual blueshirts have radically different views on how many red/yellow shirt lives are worth one blueshirt life.

That's true, but the lever pullers are also good at playing up the need for pulling the level, and then there's also the trolley company - which is meant to depict, in a generalized way, how the military–industrial complex makes money on perpetuating the killing.

[s1artibartfast]

Thanks for engaging. You raise a number of interesting points worth exploring, but the end of of the day, I think it all boils down to two of them.

3a. Do drone strikes exacerbate or mitigate the problem violent actors and actions in the long run.

5. if decision makers are capable of assessing 3a and acting in accordance with public interest.

Regarding 3a, I can see the obvious logic of how drone strikes(or any bombing/killing) could militarize more people and think it is plausible. It is worth considering that there are other factors which can militarize people as well, such systemic injustice, domestic violence, poverty, and cults of personality. These can continue independent of strikes and still increase the number of militarized people in it's absence. It is also worth noting that the capacity for harm for those already militarized increases with organization, which strikes purportedly disrupt.

It would absolutely be worth the cost to collect solid data on the drivers of militarization. I would love to see it and admit that I have not looked deeply into the subject. Most discussions on the subject I have seen take 3a or its opposite as a foundational assumption.

Regarding 5, I wholeheartedly agree that in reality there are additional motivations at play. However, I am generally skeptical of traditional military-industrial complex profiteering motive and think it is over complex. I do not think that defense companies lobbying for war and has a significant impact on it, although companies provide the means and certainly profit off of it. Similarly, I dont think military decision makers seek war for personal gain. There are a sufficient number of other motivations political decision makers to engage in warfare without such elaborate and clandestine explanations. I suspect personal political benefit, national economic benefit, and propagating social ideals at the global level are at the top of this list. You are right in that minimizing the long term loss at the global scale is not the main objective.