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The Drone War
There are plenty of human casualties in the Afghan conflict -- though few among Americans -- but the fight seems especially significant in terms of technology and military conflict.
The Predator spy plane and other unmanned drones and gunships (along with satellites, thermal imaging devices, X-ray scanners, etc.) not only search for the enemy, but fire guided missiles, drop powerful oxygen-sucking hyperbaric bombs, and guide bomb strikes from afar. There is no war in recent human history that involved so few humans, at least on one side of the conflict. The most staggering statistic out of Afghanistan might be that the first American combat casualty died nearly three months into the "war."
Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops. Even as the Afghanistan campaign began, pundits flooded cable talk shows asserting that air power alone wasn't enough, that there would be substantial human sacrifice. Both Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq and the Kosovo conflicts involved the growing used of so-called "smart" laser-guided weaponry, deployed with varying degrees of reliability. But those conflicts also involved either the use of enormous numbers of soldiers on the ground and were controversial in terms of the bomb's precision and effectiveness.
The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight. Early reports suggest the civilian casualties may be lower than in any other large-scale military operation in modern history. Although dangerous and complex for the military on the scene, it's hard to imagine a conflict more remote to the majority of Americans, asked to go about their business as usual.
Orwell's "Drone Wars" come very much to mind here. So does Sir Arthur Clarke's machine warfare and AI military stories. A handful of human soldiers guide and direct the increasingly sophisticated technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks with stunningly few U.S. military casualties and American civilian casualties beyond September 11 and the anthrax attacks. The Taliban and their terrorist friends seem to have been totally unprepared for this variety of war, such a stark contrast to the Soviet's ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan just a decade ago.
It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.
Winston Churchill repeatedly asked his countrymen for brutal sacrifices in World War II. In the new kind of American war, political leaders ask citizens only to keep shopping and traveling.
Military historians like John Keegan have recently argued that the devastating toll of warfare in the 20th Century makes conventional conflicts increasingly less likely. Once a means of expanding territory and amassing wealth, the brutish wars of the 20th Century have rendered both objectives hard to attain. Even before Drone Wars, artillery and aerial warfare along with nuclear weapons suggested that wars can't really be won in the conventional sense any longer; even the victors will suffer unacceptable losses. But drone warfare radically alters the equation. Technologically advanced civilian populations -- just as Orwell foresaw -- can send their technological surrogates off to battle one another while humans stay home to wait for the outcome.
A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery? War has recently seemed so terrible that civilized societies view it as a last resort. But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible.
Cost... Sounds like a good enough reason not to fight for me.
It will be almost impossible for oppressed people's to violently object to tyranny in such a scenario.
War is mearly becoming symbolic.
I remember an original Star Trek episode, in which there was a conflict between two planets. The Enterprise crew the war was mearly a computer simulation, but each side killed X amount of citezens according to the simulation results.
A war waged by computers, the casualties human, for no purpose.
War should only be used to stand up for beliefs in the shadow of only the most incredible evil. When there is no death, is there really any significance?
So where is the outrage, statement of retraction, or appology from all the STOOPID pundits who didnt know what the hell they were talking about? Can people just say anything? And keep their reputations...
Rememeber that episode (TNG i think), where two planets ran wars on computers then based on the results, sent appropriate numbers of their own people to death?
I wonder if we'll see anything like that in the future...... (doubtful)
It was a good premise for a show anyway....
The most staggering statistic out of Afghanistan might be that the first American combat casualty died nearly three months into the "war."
No, the first casualty reported to the media died three months into the war.
Same thing in Desert Storm. We had a lot of casualties. Some are still classified.
The US has learned from Vietnam. Americans don't like to hear about the death of Americans.
If you don't think that Navy Seals have been in Afghanastan since September 12th, and that some of them died before we even declared war, then you shouldn't even speak of war, cause you are out of the loop.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I think that as long as only one side is largely using machines to fight, then such "Drone Wars" will still be considered carefully and prudently, due to the possibility of the loss of human life. Once both sides are doing it, though, I do agree that the use of such technology will be approved much more readily.
Still, I don't think that they'll become knee-jerk reactions to future crises due to the lingering potential of the death of innocent bystanders (nobody looks good when they kill civilians.)
Incidentally, I don't understand why the talking heads were talking about the great need for ground troops. Certainly, it's a little difficult to bomb a deep cave, but I think Desert Storm showed us that with the technology that we currently possess, bombing certainly can make the efforts of ground troops little more than "limited skirmishes", as Mike Myers described the ground war in Iraq in "Wayne's World".
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
In fact, to some countries, sacrificing millions upon millions of dollars worth machines, against like forces would be a gigantic sacrifice. Not to mention fighting against a country like China or India, that has billions of 'expendable' people, but little in the way of technological or military sophistication. /have/ to give it to me?" Could you imagine such a war, realistically? Who would win? It would have to come to human casualities eventually...no matter the tech level of the agressor or the defendant.
The other part of this 'drone war' to consider...territory wars will be even LESS likely - "My countries bots killed your countries bots, so we get to annex this 100sq miles of your country. No? But my bots WON! You
The role of ground troops was played nicely by the Northern Alliance fighters. It's not that there were no ground troops fighting the Taliban, it's just that they weren't Americans.
...there are significant ground forces, they are just not Americans.
There have been a vast number of casualties on "our" side. YOU don't know about them because they happen to be afghans (and you apparently can't be arsed with such things as basic research).
While it is true that automated warfare seems to be the americans goal the actual performance of many of these machines seems to show that we won't see anything close for some time yet.
Interesting point. This reminds me of a Star Trek episode.
Everything else aside, I welcome a world where wars are solved with Robots.
But only, of course, if the future is like the one in that stellar B-Movie Robot Jocks!
------
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This is a good opinion/observatin piece from Katz, but it falls apart in a couple of places. For instance, I think Katz doesn't realize that one consequence of developing a new weapon or methodology for warfare will inevitably lead to a counter-weapon or methodology. As an example, what's to stop some other country from developing superior "drones" on the sly? What if someone circumvents the whole issue of fighting against drones by taking people hostage, attaking the drone controllers indirectly, or simply dispersing into neutral geographic areas?
-Maher-
... with another pointless article.
First of all, the Gulf War was as remote to Americans as this war is. Second of all, we have allies on the ground who have done the dirty work for us. Yes our air strikes are powerful, but don't think that these "drones" would have been half as effective without ground support. The closest we'll come to any sort of real drone war is the latest Star Wars movie.
I suspect that havving a proxy army (na) to fight for you helps as does having the formar USSR providing tanks and kit to your proxy's
"Entirely different" ? Not even. The chief distinction I'm seeing drawn here is that nobody we care about dies in a drone war -- which has been true of a dozen proxy actions over the past half century.
Oh sure, the US and Russia never openly fought, but used proxies instead, with US backing Iraq and USSR backing Iran, for example. That's not a drone war, you say? But it satisfies the chief distinction mentioned above: Just some arabs killing each other for us, nobody anyone cares about.
And "more remote" he calls it -- the proxy wars in Chile and Nicaragua barely made a mention on the collective American consciousness back when they were current events. How many people remember them now?
Nope, sorry, drone wars as Katz is describing is hardly a new thing. The only difference that may be slashdot worthy is the probability of using robots of metal rather than flesh.
And my SO thought that all that time spent on Quake was wasted.
:)
Darth RadaR
SysAdmin & Mercenary.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I think somebody watched Robot Jox on TNT last weekend.
-B
All these sci-fi writers are wrong. deeply wrong.
take the last two wars US fought: Gulf and Afghanistan.
Gulf was won by siege. They sufocated Iraq by preventing them from buying weapons and _food_. when Iraq's soldiers came to the point of choosing between death and surender, they surended.
Afghanistan was not properly an US war. it was a civil war with US giving air cover.
in certain environments (Afghanistan specially) you can't win or even fight a drone war, because THEY DON'T HAVE DRONES. the only thing they have is AK-47 and some grenades. their bases are almost all in the underground in a mountain landscape.
the only way to fight a war in such place is with _infantry_. in the ground. with handguns. using guerrila tatics.
ask pentagon about fighting in tropical jungles like vietnam or amazon. ask them if drones are efective in such places. if they say YES, they don't know theyr jobs.
What ? Me, worry ?
...Jon Katz shows he's not qualified to comment on something. Notice his assumption about drones doing battle only with each other. We'll never see a war like that, as it wouldn't decide anything. At some point you have to physically move in a take control of fixed physical assets, which means people are involved. (Yes, it's possible that many, many years from now we'd have robots so advanced they could take over even this job, but that's deep in the SF realm for now.)
--Chag
--Chag
So... what you're saying is, in the future, wars will be decided with a game of Rock em Sock em Robots?
The hell's wrong with that?
And I'm caught w/o a drone pun
No sig for you!!
Once again, we have an insightful, thoroughly-researched article from Mr. Katz. As usual, it is free of broad generalizations, stereotyping, and adherence to the peculiar sort of "conventional wisdom" that pervades Slashdot.
It is time we all started paying attention to what JonKatz has to say. Like most journalists, his grasp of military matters is complete. He presents us with cold, hard reality -- free of his personal bias or agenda.
Citizens of the US and world would do well to follow JonKatz's leadership. I suggest it is high time Mr. Katz receive the honorary title of General in the coming UN Military Organization.
We need his mind if we are going to save our children's world.
the Soviet's ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan just a decade ago.
I don't remember the Soviets invading Afghanistan after the Gulf War... I thought it was a decade before that.
Afghanistan was invaded by the Red Army in 1979 and the invasion ended in 1989 when the last troops withdrew from Afghanistan.
This site agrees with me.
Not to play the alarmist (or that smug, irritating guy at every party who insists on talking ominously about political issues he doesn't understand), but isn't that almost exactly what Hitler told the German populace in World War 2? He was afraid that if people had to make sacrifices for his war, it would lose popular support.
In that case it the rationale was propaganda for a questionable cause, rather than super-sophisticated war-drones.
Hrmf.
Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops.
Firstly, that conventional wisdom was first broken in the Kosovo conflict, when Yugoslavia capitulated as a result of NATO air bombardment. Secondly, there are all kinds of ground troops on the ground in Afghanistan; not counting the small number of special forces, there are tens of thousands of Northern Alliance troops who actually captured the Taliban positions.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I don't think this builds to a future where robots fight each other and we sit at home and wait for the outcome.
... public support for this dries up pretty fast.
... or at least feel safe.)
I think what we're seeing here is a natural progression, not a revolution. It's always been less risky for a wealthy nation to fight a poor one (as long as the wealthy nation is willing to spend the money -- Russia wasn't) than it has been to fight against even odds.
All you have here is a mechanism for wealthy countries a relatively guiltless and politically easy-to-swallow way to wage war against relatively poor countries. There is no threat of nuclear backlash, and we don't risk soldiers. All we ask is for people to pay their taxes and support the economy.
The "equalizer" (if you want to call it that) here is terrorism -- if civilians here start dying in scores in retaliation
(Thus, one could decide, the only way to keep these kind of wars going is to run a police state so your civilians are "safe"
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Humpf !
No war without sacrifice.
It's not because for this one the US in on the right side of the trigger that on the next one they won't be on the bomb side.
+ Casualties, civil oe military, and from any camp, IS sacrifice.
On this one, your sacrifice is keeping feeding your economy so as to leverage taxes to sustain the army. Maybe not a very big one, but still a sacrifice.
+ On an other point of view, keep training on SU27
and Quake, for the next fighter will most certainly have to have those skills (a drone is not fully automated yet, and if you have a flying Fighter Drone, how long before the first Fighter Robot ? and guess how you will control it ? Sharpen your keyboard, get better mouses, E-War is announced (sic)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
There have been ground troops used on the American side all during this war, they just happened to be Afghans (Northern Alliciance, Eastern Alliciance, etc...).
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Aren't we just at the begining of it?
...lets quote Heinlein.
On second thought, since I don't have _Starship Troopers_ in front of me, allow me to just paraphrase.
During training, someone asks the Drill Instructor "Why just not use technology (meaning a big-ass bomb) to nuke the opponent, instead of bringing in marines?" The answer was simple "to teach them a lesson". To prove that we can bring people in, hurt them badly, not take casualties, and make them submit.
I really wish I had the exact quote, cause I know I'm not doing justice to Heinlein. If someone has the book in front of them, its in like the 2nd or 3rd chapter into the training, right at the beginning of the chapter. Reply to me with the exact quote.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What this article fails to take into account, is this is an entirely NEW kind of war - this is not nation versus nation, nor is this a war over control of resources - this is a war fought simply to kill the other guy, and to stop thier actions.
It makes no sense to flood Afghanistan with troops - like I said, we are fighting neither for territory or for resources, but only for justice and peace of mind.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
I think the best SF book about a technological proxy war, and of interest in evaluating the implications of drone warfare, is Lem's Fiasco. Though the real thrust of the book is the Fermi Paradox (and Lem has some very interesting ideas on that score, too), the planet "contacted" (if you read the book you'll see why those scare quotes are important) is in the final stages of a technological proxy war/drone war that has extended well out into the planetary system.
Having a drone drop a satellite guided bomb is a bit different from machines that can think and fight for themselves in real time. I think you are reaching here.
p.s. 1500th post. Love me!
sulli
RTFJ.
As a charter member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Robots, I feel the pain of these drones.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Robots was presciently chartered in the early 1660s long before robots were invented; the moral and ethical interest at stake was simply that compelling. Throughout the subsequent centuries, few other societies, royal or otherwise, have done as much to advance the civil rights of robots everywhere.
Remember the robot from NASA's Pathfinder mission? He's a card-carrying union member of the AFL/CIO, all thanks to the diligent lobbying of concerned RSfPR members. Rmember the scene at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day where the "evil" cyborg is destroyed by falling into a refinery's crucible? Though we did not successfully torpedo the whole production as an affront to non-diabolical cyborgs everywhere, we did manage to convince Hollywood executives to append a boilerplate warning at the end of the film informing the audience that no actual cyborgs were harmed in its production -- at the time, the T-1000 cyborg was safely sitting in his trailer sipping lattes while a cgi facsimile was lowered into the lava.
Just because they are made of silicon, metal, and oil doesn't mean they're any less significant at the dawning of a new moral age in the 21st century. That America would choose to sacrifice robotic drones instead of conventional meat soldiers simply demonstrates how far this once-great nation has sunk into the moral abyss.
Thank you.
I'm not sure what Katz is on about. Okay, so there are a handful of unmanned planes that can fire a missile or two. Yeah, interesting. For about 5 minutes.
But what is making the difference is the overwhelming air superiority. Sure, they are flying Nintedo Game Cubes, but they have people inside of them, directing the fight. Not a lot of difference that most wars of the 20th century.
And where the hell are the grunts in Katz' discussion? Sure, american soldiers were not a large part of the war (in numbers), but there was a full scale bloody ground war going on. It takes people to grab ground and people to hold ground. Missile armed spy planes are not going to change that. Not even a lot of R2-D2 units with M-16s strapped to their sides. We are a long, long, long way off from some kind of Drone War.
Geez.
I oughta be in pixels.
"A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea"
An interesting aricle, but doesn't that depend on which side you are on? I'm sure that the majority of Afghans and the Northern Alliance troops who did most of the groundwork wouldn't agree that it was without sacrifice...
Of course, what you means is that for the US it was basically without sacrifice. What would be interting would be if the situation was reversed: if another nation was attacking the US using these weapons, would the media be filled with reports about the "inhuman war machines that fire death from a distance which no civilised nation should use"?
A Roger Waters quote springs to mind : "The Bravery of being out of Range"
Excuse me Jon... this is the 21st century!
The Soviet invasion was NO MORE in 1992... in
fact, there was no Soviet Union!
Yes, time flies...
Just because technology can limit the cost of war (lives and dollars) doesn't make it more convenient.
What are we going to do? Is every country going to send their robots to the moon and see who wins?
What then is the point?
slashdot song. Read his userinfo if you don't know what I am talking about.
Isn't war something that always has been around in the history of mankind?
Only difference is the way the wars are fought: with clubs and knives or with planes, tanks and guns. The result is always the same: a lot of innocent people die.
Technology will gain further importance in the future of warfare: let's not forget that a lot of current technology exists because of the fact that people made war upon each other.
We're not quite there yet, for better or worse. There were lots of ground troops involved on both sides. It just happens that the ones on our side belonged to our allies, rather than being U.S. soldiers. Our machines didn't win a war: they tipped the ballance of power in an existing war between conventional armies.
Amid all our technological self-congratulation, let's not forget that it took thousands of armed men on horseback (literally) to drive back the Taliban forces.
Forget George Orwell and all that other pretentious 'literature' crap. The high watermark of visionary international conflict-resolution scenarios is, and always has been, the fine and epic film 'Robot Jox'. Soon we shall kneel before our chosen heros as they do battle with diamond chip rope-saws and magnesium flare blinders for our pleasure and the scant fossil-fuel remains of a shattered post-apocalyptic warzone.
Achiillleeessss!
I agree that the robotics of war is slowly taking the place of ground troops. But I'll bet a fair number of casulties have occurred in the northern alliance troops.
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
the US was on the bomb side in this war.
sulli
RTFJ.
Jon seems to have completely overlooked one salient point.
Sure the US hasn't had significant casualties on the ground. Because we've let the Indig's do all the heavy lifting.
It hasn't been a drone war at all. We just have let our share of it, be contained to the safer portions of the fight. And we're letting the locals do all the to-to-toe fighting.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Jon in making improper comparisons across the
board!
While it may be true that the conflict has again
evolved somewhat from the war with Iraq, it is
not as pretty as Jon suggests.
Few ground troops and few casulaties???
How about the AFGHAN troops WAGING THE BATTLES
against the Taliban, while the U.S. special
forces engage in only very specific missions.
The U.S. IS using significant ground forces,
it just so happens they are provided by
Afghanistan!
I bet the first Afghan casualty on the U.S. side
died a lot earlier than 3 months into the war!
I don't forsee a future overrun by fighting military machines in the sense of terminator or the matrix. The miliary machines we are beginning to see are more like long distance RC cars that happen to be able to blow things up.
One wonders if the military would be wise to simply create a "Simulation Game", and start training Kids across america to drive these machines. Imagine playing "Battle Bots" across the internet, but really be blowing stuff up.
Wargames comes to mind.
Uhm.. Where was that war again? In Afghanistan, yeah.. I remember..
The war is just another excuse for the military to spend their unused ammunition in a large-scale target practice with mountains and empty buildings as targets. So, let's not call this operation a war, and take it at its face value -- a military practice.
Now, given that, yes, the military has quite a few toys they wanted to test in action, and that's exactly what they're doing.
This is not the warfare of the 21st century.. This is military top-brass in its gleeful excitement at having the opportunity to get more funding on some other obscure weapon/military enhancement.
In other words, this is where my (and your) tax $$$s are going to go to for the next 15-20 years or so..
Enjoy!
What are the northern alliance if they aren't ground troops?
Just because they are not the US of A does not make them ground troops.
It's a tad bit flawed post since there are plenty of ground troops, just most of them are not American.
And anyway, the USA, Britain, Australia etc have sent in the majority of their special forces, which I wouldn't be surprised if they number cumulatively in the thousands. Ground troops will always be required as will the human decision in the battlefield loop.
Umm, there have been plenty of casualties on our side of the conflict, they just haven't been Americans. We've been using the Northern Alliance as our proxy ground troops and letting them suck up bullets instead of our troops. I agree that American firepower has played a large role in ensuring FEWER casualties, but there have still been plenty on the side of our in-country allies. And, as one poster pointed out earlier, it's entirely possible some of our special forces troops have been killed but not reported yet. I don't think that's very likely, but it is a possibility.
While the concept of a drone war is interesting, and even possible, we haven't gotten there yet, and saying that people fighting on one side of the war don't have any emotional investment is INCREDIBLY callous. Just because you don't have any friends stuck in Afghanistan doesn't mean it's the case for all of us. Beyond that, I assure you that the troops getting shot at have PLENTY of emotional investment in the war. Jackass.
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
How can you be such an motherf***** asshole?
But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible.
Drone Wars are already irresistible. A lot of people including myself enjoy watching BattleBots.
Just picture the 200 lbs Nightmare running after Bin Laden. Nice picture huh?
"Animal Farm" and "1984" are the only Orwell I've ever read. What Orwell novels is the author referring to that deal with Drone Wars? I'd like to read them.
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If he thinks that mechanized warfare will lead to no casualty war, he's incorrect. (Um, what about the targets of all those high tech weapons. They certainly won't all be the other side's high tech weapons, they will be people).
If he uses this assertion to conclude that because the citzenry won't be involved in the offensive side of the wars, that they will be more inclined to go to war, then he is on shaky ground. I see no reason why the further mechanization of war could honestly lead one to believe that the "sacrifices of war" would be seriously reduced. Industry would still be destroyed. People would lose their jobs, and some would lose their lives. An aversion to this is exactly why conventional wars are no longer in favor, and why mechanization will not change that fact.
I do grant, the mechanization can lead to greater war between the advanced world and the conventional world, as we've already seen. But extending that to say that advanced countries will be more likely to go to war because technology reduces the costs of going to war is ludicrous and wrong.
I think I'll stop here.
And you are in the loop? Work for JCS perhaps? Or the CIA? Do you have anything, other than wild conspiracy theories to back up your assertions?
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It's a Good Thing for the soldiers, who don't get killed.
It's a Good Thing for the generals, who no longer have to order their men to die.
It's a Good Thing for the families of the soldiers, who no longer have to get The Letter from The Men In Dress Uniform.
About the only group of people it's bad for are the companies that make the flags that get draped on coffins.
Katz, if you wanna talk about how "drone wars" are somehow less moral than wars with casualties, I suggest you visit the Somme (60,000 on the first day, about 1.2 million casualties for the whole battle), or Ypres (400,000, and first use of mustard gas), or Verdun (750,000) any of the other WWI slaughterhouses.
If you don't like "smart weapons", look at the pictures from WWI where artillery shelling stripped the land of trees down to the ground - the closest thing I've seen to it was the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens. Nothing but mud and matchsticks that used to be trees, as far as the eye can see.
Better yet, find a WWI veteran and tell him that you think the techno-wars we fight today are somehow "worse" than the way he fought war.
Even from a wheelchair or hospital bed, I'll bet any one of them would gladly kick your ass all the way back to 1914.
"In any case, future wars will be fought by robots. When that day comes, your duty will be clear...
To build and maintain those robots."
-Military camp episode (Probably not excaly correct wording...)
Wow, it's racist too.
I think that the statistic would be a bit different if we were not campaigning against one of the poorest and technology deprived nations in the world...
...in online gaming? Why blow up all those "real" robots, when it's much cheaper to do it "virtually".
Bin Laden v. "W" in a video game showdown...sounds good to me!
Well, those Northern Alliance guys were humans.
The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight.
Only within the context that that the indiginous people, with the assistance of overwhelming and unopposed US airpower, drove out an unpopular occupying force.
The chief reason the Taliban fell so fast was because they didn't have an airforce or any sophisticated weapons. Let's see how this analysis holds up with North Korea, eh?
While I don't doubt that technology is changing the arsenal, the war is still fought between people. To take it to the begining, the attack of Sept. 11, was about the same as a Kamikaze mission, just using the resources of the foe. The face of terrorism has changed and remote countrol drones and tomahawk missiles are ineffective when sorting out who the village terrorist is. Back to the intelligence game for that.
I don't think we need to look for Terminators quite yet.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You can't simply compare casulaties the way Jon
does... Afghanistan has a very different set of
parameters than Iraq: (1) different population
sizes and densities, (2) different armed forces
sizes and armament, (3) different battlefields.
For all we know, in relative terms 1 kill in
Afghanistan is equivalent to 10 in Iraq and
100 in WWII.
Please take more care evaluating such complicated
portions of world history!
Even for Katz this article is outrageous.
First off, airpower alone did not destroy the Taliban- it (greatly) supplimented the Afgan opposition's ground forces. Just because our tanks and infantry weren't in those mountains doesn't mean there weren't any there. Ground forces will ALWAYS be needed to sweep through and hold captured land.
But as for the larger discussion of the evolution of warfare:
Wars will not be fought off on some designated battlefield where each side sends its combatants (carbon or silcon based) while the generals stay at home. Wars are fought on somebody's homeland, usually for the purpose of taking that homeland for yourself.
Say we conducted this symbolic war in cyberspace or in meat-space with drones. Does this mean when we lose that I have to give up my house without a fight? Not gonna happen!!!
Rob.
I can't believe Mr. Katz wrote a whole article without once mentioning Seattle. These are strange times indeed.
As far as no ground troops go, this is ridiculous. Many other have mentioned the Northern Alliance troops. This is certainly new and worth mentioning. If this works well it will change American War forever.
Also this is/was an economic war mostly. The guy who has the most cash * 'willingness to die' wins. We overpowered their 'willingness to die' with our cash. End of story.
A more interesting topic would be when is terrorism terrorism or is it just plain old rebellion
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There have been plenty of ground troops on the "American" side that have died. The Northern Alliance were our ground troops in this conflict. In that context the above assertions are a bit silly.
There is no doubt that we have some nice technology but much of it was actually proven in Desert Storm.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
Lucas is not a visionary! He makes horribles movies!
The "equalizer" (if you want to call it that) here is terrorism -- if civilians here start dying in scores in retaliation ... public support for this dries up pretty fast.
Um, hello? Have you ever heard of Israel? There people haven't been cowed by forty years of bombings, wars, etc...
We wouldn't bomb Afghanistan when they were abusing their women and blowing up priceless historical artifacts. Not even the terrorist attacks in Yemin and Saudi Arrabia could convince us. Those were just servicemen. It took an attack on civilians to justify this war. And Bush's approval ratings are astronomical (and comically depressing)
Support for military action doesn't dry up when terrorists strike. It grows. When people feel threatened in their everyday life they want only to end that threat. And the quickest way is to destroy the people attacking you. It's also the easiest to understand and demonstrate.
What makes a war difficult 'to swallow' is when there's the people supporting the war don't feel threatened. Like Somalia and Bosnia and Vietnam. That's when casualties become dangerous.
To sum up: Civilian casualties increase public support for war. Because it could be me and you who are killed next time.
(Ugh, this wasn't supposed to be this long -- Sorry)
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
The US strategy relied on the Northern Alliance (and later, other local Afghans). It became clear early on that air power alone could not do enough.
And the same thing happened in Kosovo. It wasn't until local Albanian rebels forced Serbian troops out that NATO air power won the war.
Large scale nulclear wars, though, would in a way be the most "humanless" wars. The US and USSR both planned for a war whose objective was to knock out the other side's missles: there's would make bigger explosions, ours were more accurate. Both sides put their nukes in hard to blow-up places. Some nukes required a direct hit, within a few meters, by another nuke to be destroyed. Of course, lots of people would die in the process, but only as collateral damage...
Sure, robots have their place..But what difference does it really make in the long run?
Every militarized country in the world wishes it's military was comprised of individuals who purely execute orders. Flesh robots, if you will. Mind you, theres nothing denegrating about that label--Countries are liberated, people are saved, and the world's criminals are punished due to the work of "flesh robots". You've got a bad case of function guilt if you think robots will ever supplant people on the front lines -- It simply isn't feasable.
Wars are rarely fought with singular orders. The typical soldier in a wartime scenario relies heavilly upon the information he recieves, the situation he percieves around him, and is capable of making rational & complex decisions based upon that information. Sure, a machine can be taught to do all that, but how is that information going to get there? And if your ultimate goal is programmable warfare, isn't the most flexible solider the human?
Here's a few things to think about before you buy stock in Honda--Flesh robots do not require battery power. Metal robots would be prone to power loss at critical times. Flesh robots can usually continue to fight, even after physical injury. Metal robots would be severely impaired if even one portion of their body is rendered useless. And, above all, we have nukes. It wouldn't matter at all what you put on the battlefeild, 22 kg of plutonium smooshed together at the right angle will kill anything that lives, flesh or metal. Insanely high-tech creations would be rendered completely and totally useless by 1940's technology.
Look, I think robots are cool too, especially ones designed to kill eachother. I just don't think you'll ever see 5000 robots cross a river chest deep in water, scaling the cliffs of Normandy, or making it through a Korean winter. Why bother making metal robots then, when you've already got flesh robots who can do the same?
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Why?
Because there will always be a need for removing excess humans from the planet's surface.
Drone Wars implies that both sides fight with
Drones and that there are limited or no casulaties. I don't think Afghanistan counts here. The Talibans didn't have that many drones, and the US drones certainly attacked live targets.
Your parallel with Sci-Fi themes is false.
D.
However Stanislaw Lem in Peace on Earth proposes a scenario where the warfare becomes completely
automated and the war machines do battle on the Moon.
Ever since the invention of the 'bomb' and the 'airplane', the military has known that you can win any war by bombing your opponent into oblivion, no ground troops needed and, accidents aside, zero casualties on your side. There are reasons for not doing this of course (cost, makes you look bad), but to say that conventional military "wisdom" (is there such a thing?) always included ground troops is nonsense.
But as usual Katz isn't hindered by any knowledge of the subject at hand and so he makes these ridiculous assertions, and then bases some pretentious story on them. Oh well...
Drones, however advanced, will never replace a squad of trained soldiers led by a human commander in the field. They are not as flexible, they don't have the wide variety of abilities of human soldiers, and they have totally different weaknesses (for example, to EMP). Drones are just another tool, like the tank or the airplane or the Gatling gun.
And here I thought Katz was going to talk about how he drones on and on about nothing that interests anyone...
These wars are as much drone wars as my PC is artificial intelligence. We aren't there yet. We may never be.
But unlike AI I think the benefits of this kind of war are hard to deny. Drones don't hate you. Drones don't rape. They don't kill children or torture civilians.
It won't make defeat much more bearable but it may add decency - if such a thing can be present in war.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
you suck
The truth about Jon Katz (and no it's not goat porn)
We hold a lot of material things to be precious.. but there is no material loss comparable to the terrible pain and loss associated with warfare against humans. Perhaps one day we will engage with machinery.. but inevitably it will escalate to loss of human life on both sides.. That is my fear.. that it will be all too appealing to engage.. without comprehending the outcome. War escalates.. it always escalates until one side has been defeated. Once the machines lay scattered on the battleground the remaining forces will take the war to the enemies homes. The danger lies in how easy it is to destroy so many lives at the push of a button. Humans are distinguished by conscience.. if we allow ourselves to become detached from the pain that results in our actions.. we will loose the ability to measure what is just, and fall back a little from what moral humans try to be.
I was under the impression when I read 1984 many years ago that the war wasn't real but a kind of propaganda to unite the people against a common but ficticious enemy. A bit like...
Todays Sig - Eat like a king, drink like a vagrant and laugh like a drain
A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery? War has recently seemed so terrible that civilized societies view it as a last resort. But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible.
Nonsense. What would be the point of a "war without sacrifice"? The point of war is to at least inflict sacrifice on your enemy, and better, to defeat him. If you didn't want to do that, you might as well flip a coin.
The major difference today is not whatever latest fancy machinery is being used. It is that without two superpowers to impose checks and balances on each other, the sole remaining superpower can attack whomever it pleases, and this has so far meant the world's weakest. What Katz calls "civilized societies" have always been happy to go to war as long as they didn't suffer, and now they can.
To me, the more interesting and disturbing occurance has been the "legitamacy" our actions have given others to launch "wars against terror" of their own. India is currently waving a big stick over Pakistan's head to get people deported, and like us dismisses the need for evidence. The real change in war is two nuclear-armed countries finding it perfectly acceptable to go to war despite their new nuclear status.
Lies about crimes
I don't know wether he's a Jew or not, but let's deconstruct Jon Katz (and no it's not goat porn)
The one drone that we'd all love to see sent over is of course John Katz, who, without bothering to read a paper, assumes that the anthrax letters were work of Afgans, when in fact nothing of the sort has been proven (current investigations imply this is a local dometic nutcase)
Maybe its just me, but the concept of "war without sacrifice" sounds like simple tyranny and oppression. If it isn't worth risking your own neck over, then it isn't worth a war. Furthermore, you may kill every living thing in a given area but you will NEVER defeat an enemy until you put a man in the mud to hold the ground and control the population.
Something tells me that we have a long way to go until people are really scared of drones. I bet a good sledgehammer and an Afgan could take a BattleBot any day.
And something else tells me that the lever type of battle-bot wont work. Most humans can either still shoot from on the ground, or will just stand back up after getting flipped. Neat, huh?
Maybe if we had a few million Battle-Bots though...
It's fortunate that the most technologically advanced nations are also democratic, because democracies do not start wars with each other as a rule. If dictatorship is incompatible with the maintenance of such a technological edge (because of the human capital required) maybe the world will become a safer place; however, I'd worry if a nation like China can get to the point of building such weapons systems without also liberalizing its political and economic system.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Jon Katz and Rob Malda are killing slashdot
Nice well written evaluation of the war except I see no mention of the Northern Alliance soldiers. There's no mention of the numbers of Northern Alliance casualties. They have been and still are playing a role in the conflict - I wonder what the addition of their numbers to your premise would do to your argument?
Thanks for the thought provoking article.
Star Wars Episode II - Attack of the Drones!
or...
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of drones?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Yeah, nevermind the thousands that died at the world trade centers, the pentagon and on the three flights -- the civilians who didn't even know we were fighting a war until Al Queda made their first cowardly strike. Some drone war. So unfair. You are tiresome, Katz.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
There was a significant ground war in Afghanistan where hundreds if not thousands of people died. It just wasn't fought using American troops. Katz is overexaggerating and oversimplifying the role of robotic and remote controlled vehicles and munitions in this war. The conflict was won using human ground intelligence troops and vast numbers of "expendable" Afghani soldiers. Even then I'm sure we suffered casualties which were not reported. This conflict doesn't signify the use of mechanical substitutes for human soldiers, but the substitution of cheap, expendable, third world fighters supported by overwhelming American airpower. In fact, most of the robotic and guided munitions had no real impact unless combined with ground support and live grounded human intelligence.
I thought this was a war to keep Katz from droning on and on about another inane topic.
-- he's not heavy, he's my sysadmin!
As significant has been the development and mass production of precision ordnance such as the JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition), which can be dropped from a standard bomber (B-1 or B-52) but is satellite-guided. What's particularly interesting about JDAM is that it is attached to ordinary gravity bombs (of which the US military has a very large stockpile); it converts the current stock of inaccurate weapons to something much more accurate. IIRC something like 60-70% of bombs used in Afghanistan were precision-guided, as opposed to 10% or so in the Gulf and some larger percentage in Kosovo.
It's still not Attack of the Drones because the UAVs don't shoot at anything, or drop munitions. I think this is smart: a human needs to make the final call that the target is in fact what we think it is. AFAIK the Pentagon has no plans to change this division of labor: automated surveillance, humans leading the attack. But someone better informed than me may wish to supply further info here.
sulli
RTFJ.
The *only* unmanned aircraft that released ordinance was the Predator - and it was under direct human control when it did it.
Thermobaric devices were dropped by manned aircraft and are in fact just dumb bombs - they are certainly not precision guided munitions by any stretch
.
I wonder if Katz has ever considered dropping his crack habit?
So the Afghanis fighting against the Taliban were remote controlled drones guided by Quake hardened veterans of the Pentagon's elite clans?
I don't think so.
Maybe Jon has been watching a different CNN from me - but from what I recall there were soldiers busy fighting and dying against the Taliban long before the American's arrived to "save the day" john-wayne style for the gawking eye of the camera.
If anything the lesson of the war against Iraq in the early 90's was that you can't win a ground war by the air. The western allied nations pounded Iraqi ground positions for months before moving in on the ground - and they still had to fight Iraqis on the ground. They didn't run away, they were still there.
Afghanistan was not a vacuum of empty space with nothing but the Taliban and American jets. Afghanis themselves were fighting and dying in order to overthrow the Taliban control - this war was won on the ground not in the air. Certainly the American and British bombardment did a lot to weaken the Taliban and enabled the Northern Alliance to make critical breaks in the Taliban lines that they had not been able to up until that point, but lets not imagine for a moment that this war was won by laser guided bombs and cruise missiles alone. That would be naive to an unbelievable degree.
When you have people on the ground, occupying space, you cannnot remove them unless you go in and physically do so. No matter how many bombs you drop, how accurately you pinpoint your missiles, how many satellite and drone recon photos you take - it still requires people on the ground with guns to take and hold territory for a nation to be conquered.
The fact that America achieved her objectives with little loss of American life is meaningless in this context for a few simple reasons. American objectives were simply to eliminate the Taliban & Al Quaeda's abilities to carry out terrorism. Not neccessarily to "liberate" the Afghani people. It happened that in this instance this goal dove-tailed nicely with the goals of certain Afghani parties whose ambitions were to remove the Taliban from power and institute a new state - so supporting those forces in achieving their goals was the simplest and most effective way of achieving the American goals.
Mostly however it was because America was fighting by proxy. There was little need for large numbers of ground troops to be deployed because the local forces were already in place and familiar with the landscape and the methods of fighting in this region. Also the political consequences both at home and in the eyes of other Muslim nations of a large-scale American invasion were prohibitive. So using somebody else to do the grunt-work of the war made both good political and military sense.
To make up a story in which America won the war by itself with nothing by high-tech gadgets is absurd and meaningless. Any conclusions drawn from such a situation are useless in both a military and political framework.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
The "visionary" Lucas movie Katz is referring to is "The Phantom Menace."
when someone is innocent?
Sorry international readers... some specific 'we' content pertaining to the USA.
Did we actually declare war?
That takes an act of Congress.
Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To...
Clause 11: To declare War... and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water...
Of course, Congress hasn't formally declared war against anyone since World War II. Since then, the United States has engaged in military conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Our soldiers are fighting overseas. We feel as though we're at war at home, but we're not at war under the U.S. Constitution because Congress hasn't declared war.
All Congress did was approve the necessary budget items related to the Sept. 11th.
That being said, what do we do with all the 'detainees' in Guantanamo Bay? Does international law require us to be at war to hold them for any length of time?
pronoblem
Would not China, Russia, and some European countries be deemed superpowers? If so has the US moved beyond that?
Or is it a policy shift? I can't remember a time during the previous admin that they actually admitted the reason for dropping bombs was to kill the enemy (unlike Rumsfield who is rather blunt about it)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
All through history weapons have (sadly) evolved to, amonst other things, seperate the person(s) 'weilding' the weapon from the victim in order to reduce the risk of the victim striking back. It's nothing new. The seperation has been anything from a long stick (pike) to being in a concrete bunker on a different continent (ICMB).
These so called drones are simply the continuation of a develompment process that has been going on for thousands of years.
The 'dramtic' results in recent asymmertic conflicts (Iran Afghanistan) attributed to them are no more dramatic than, say, the Germans Panzers aginst the Polish Cavalry, were at the time.
If the sides are evenly matched they'll eventually run out of each technology and end up hand to hand. c.f. The trenches in WWI.
Reginald Molehusband. Edinburgh, Scotland
Can't we just fight 'en all with boy bands? Oh, sorry, I thought you said _clone_!
Sorry.
Really. I'll go away now.
I am reminded of a Star Trek (Original Series) episode about a completely computerized war.
Two planets had been warrior for centuries, perhaps millenia. Originally, they built great starfleets, rockets, atomic weapons, and launched them against their enemy planet. Thousands would die per attack.
Then they used their advanced computer networks to design new attack patterns, so they would build newer rockets, bombs, etc etc. On the other side, the computers would design new defenses, anti rocket, etc etc And vice versa.
So, with each new interation, the computers could calculate just how effective the new weapon would be, and calculate how many thousands of the enemy would die in the attack. And vice versa on the other side. For example, for every 100 missiles, 1 would get through, 20 square miles would get nuked, and 100,000 people would die.
Both sides could perfectly predict the results of their attacks before the attack even began, or even before the missiles were built to be used in the attack, they could tell by just the design. They could predict the enemy attacks also, perfectly, and could predict when and where their defenses would fail. The two enemies were locked at a stalemate.
So, the two planets made a decision... they would continue to fight the war, but instead of fighting with physical objects like missiles, the war would be fought entirely by computer. The computer would design new attacks and communicate the attacks to the enemy computer, where the enemy computer would make a defense calculation, predict the number of people dead, and the citizens would march themselves into suicide chambers to represent the losses without the mes of nuclear fallout and all that wasted manufacture.
And they did it, for additional millenia, until the survivors on both planets had forgotten what it was that they were fighting about in the first place.
My karma is always 48, because whenever I hit the cap, I flame Katz.
Yemen, which stonewalled the USS Cole investigation, is going after terrorists in a big way all of a sudden.
Best Slashdot Co
The trend in modern warfare has been a steady decrease in casualties among combatants and a steady increase (at least percentage wise) among noncombatants. I think we'll see a future where it is far safer to be actively "fighting" than to be an innocent bystander.
The use of robotic proxies makes me wonder what the drones would be used for once they had beaten their robotic counterparts? I assume they would be used to subjugate resistance among the civilian population. A My Lai without getting your hands dirty?
The point about these future forces not requiring a WWII type total war burden is not necessarily true. We have been burdened with a staggering peace time defense budget that makes other nation's pale in comparison. We spend money as if WWII never ended and seem to be eager to find excuses to use our "defense" forces. Our very definition of national security has been stretched to the limits of plausibility with the most unlikely places and scenarios being labeled as critical to security. The same thing is being done with the definition of terrorism.
It is worth pointing out that the WTC attack was low tech and points out that highly complex systems are vulnerable to low tech attacks (look t DOS attacks on systems). Being highly dependant on advanced remote fighting tech gives you one big Archille's Heel.
In addition, the fact it took months before an American was killed in combat (disputed) just means that all of the ground fighting has been done by Afghanis themselves up to that point. The US wavered as to what to do until it finally threw it's weight behind the Northern Alliance. I doubt there'd be any significant US forces on the ground if it wasn't for the NA.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The original writer completely forgets that there were significant ground troops present in Afganistan war: the Eastern Alliance warriors, that did most of the footwork while Western countries provided supplies and air strikes. In essense, Afganistan war was a civil war with outside powers playing major roles.
A lot of fighters also simply switched sides when the tide seemed to be turning against the Taliban regime, again involving a significant number of foot soldiers, but now doing just "occupation" work.
It is therefore too early to cast out the old military wisdom about the need for ground troops. Rarely we have also seen such advanced technology to be applied on such primitive culture. Automatic robot weapons are of course great against natives that still live in the stone age, but what if the Taliban would have had advanced weapons, too? The story would have been completely different. And then the ground troops would have mattered much more.
Fiction:
Spiders, Part 1: A group of Afghan women have had it up to here with the Taliban...
Spiders, Part 2: US civilians take part in the hunt for OBL and document history by means of massively-distributed, networked, robots, called "spiders", which are airdropped en masse around the countryside.
(I'm still looking forward to Part 3...)
Non-fiction:
Omnicam - a 360-degree camera. One application of which is to mount in a system like...
LOTS: Lehigh Omnidirectional Tracking System, a system whereby autonomous cameras can be dropped around hell's half-acre and human operators alerted when something "interesting" happens.
Sounds a lot like "Spiders", come to think of it. I wonder if this is where the artist got the idea for the strip?
What would be the purpose of attacking machines with machines when the owners of the machines try to fight each other? What would happen if one party won? Would the machines go back home and get repaired? Sounds rather useless, to me at least.
But let's be positive: It's not as useless as warfare nowadays. If this scenarion turns out to be true we would be killing money (read:machines) instead of humans, avoiding direct casualties on either side of the conflict. Less people get killed, which is nice.
However, the resources of both parties are still being depleted, probably indirectly leading to casualties (think famine-stricken populations, collapsed economies, etc).
I'm not a complete pacifist, but I do think war is mostly useless, no matter how the conflict is resolved (man-man machine-man machine-machine).
There are plenty of human casualties in the Afghan conflict. . . but the fight seems especially significant in terms of technology and military conflict.
This is reminiscent of Katz's 9/11 feature; it was technology that was most striking to him during that catastrophic loss of human life, too. Christ, Katz, please have some respect for the people who've died. While it's very possible that "...but the fight seems especially significant in terms of technology and military conflict." is a poorly worded way of expressing that this war has a technological aspect, it certainly gives the impression that you, the author, see that technological aspect as more important than the war itself. As of December 6, 2001, there were at least 3,767 people who would disagree.
"a war, is when two armies fight"
Forget Robot Wars/Battle Bots, They could televise it and then we could see some really good robots doing battle... Stuff robots made for $50 and we have robots made for $500,000
Operation Grapes of Wrath 1996, in which while attempting to take out Hezbollah guerrilas in Lebanon, Israel bombed a UN coumpound, killing over 100 civilians who were sheltering there. During all this a (US supplied) drone was circling, directing artillery. There's an account here.
This is a pretty wierd thing to run an article on. I've been to trade shows where you can buy this kit - pictures here. And I've seen some of the kit in active use in town and cities in the West Bank, and I don't even know if I can find words to describe how strange I find civilians spouting opinions can be. Sorry Katz, some kinds of journalism you can't do virtually.
Substantial numbers of ground troops have been used in Afghanistan - the difference is that the US cleverly used the Afghan peoples' desire for freedom to ensure that American soldiers did not have to get involved in much combat. They largely played the roles of military advisors, tacticians, etc.
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
...that better weapons will lead to anything more than better ways to kill people.
It is very unclear that the drone war is upon us. The first step in the long road to a full drone war was taken three million years ago, when a chimp picked up a rock and threw it at another chimp. The spear, the arrow, the mortar, the bullet, the air bomb raid, the missile, the smart missile, the airplane drone, are just more steps into a fully drone-d war.
But so long as we have green berets crawling in caves the full drone war is far from a reality, although ever closer by the minute.
And contrary to what others say, there will be a day when all infantry is replaced by drones. Whenever a technological breakthrough happens, people point out temporary defficiencies and hence conclude that the new technology will never replace the old.
From Google:
+Animation will never replace actors.
+technology will never replace teachers
+Systems-on-chip will never replace pc boards
+computer art will never replace traditional art
and my all time favourite:
+the internet will never replace good old-fashioned messenger lemurs
Totally incorrect.
As a marine in the Gulf who had hundreds of Iraqi soldiers surrendering to me, I can, without a doublt, tell you that NONE of the soldiers surrendering were lacking food or ammunition.
Yes, they surrendered because of the choice between "death or surrender." But they weren't in danger of dying from starvation...that's for sure.
Get a clue before you post.
well that war is so terrible - lest we should grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee
stipe42
www.pcwatch.com
"Executive Decision" is NOT a deep and insightful look into the nature of Islam and it's people!
Or whatever other hollywood fabrication you're getting your insane views from. Next you'll be saying "But on the other hand, they're all comically incompetent" because you watched True Lies the other night.
The enemies of Democracy are
Last time I broke my arm, I was about half a mile from the ski lodge. I wanted so bad to snowboard down to it, but anytime I got to my feet my vision would go dim and I'd start to lose consciousness.
Last time I broke a bit on my CNC router, it continued to run until I hit the stop button.
I'd say that drones are more capable in some ways of performing with disabilities than we are.
And the reason to make metal robots is that flest robots are afraid to die. Metal robots don't have to be.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
The point of war is to defeat the enemy, not to meet on the battlefield and fight.
must... stay... awake...
Jon speaks of Drone Warfare, and I get the feeling he's speaking of machines fighting each other in the sky or maybe space or somewhere else remote. But is that what we're really looking at?
One must compare the offensive vs. defensive abilities of these drones. An alternative to machines fighting machines is OUR machines killing their people, while THEIR machines kill OUR people. This situation is merely an extension of the idea of a cruise missle.
"Machines fighting machines" requires some defensively deployed machinations. Some of these already exist (patriot missles, aegeis missle/radar system, W's attempt to resusitate starwars), but their capability and ubiquity leave us quite a ways from "Drone Wars" yet.
More likely this new Direct/Proxy type war will grow in popularity. These wars will continue to take place in poor countries b/c that's where there are people who are desparate enough to fight them. They will not be against another superpower's proxy b/c
1) USSR is gone, and China does not (yet) have the ability to engage us in one.
b) Two proxies fighting backed by two powers does not yield the kind of hyper-one-sided engagement that the US likes to find.
This type of war DOES mean that the US will manage to expand it's ideals of democracy and capitalism across the 3rd world.
This does involve some financial expansionism and the growth of an ageographic corporate state, but it also involves the exportation of enough stability to create a market worth exploiting. I think this will be a step up for many nations. Depending on how the Afgani self government does we'll see if it involves the cultural crushing of the third world. I think everyone will be happier if it does not. After that there will be either cultural revolution (Ghandi style) or corporate revolution (our servants become our masters).
Either way from a we could see a big jump in the global quality of life take shape in the next 15 or 20 years to take place over the next 50 years or so. I'm excited for the future families who may be able to exist on the other side of the industrial revolution from where they are now.
Adam
You actually stamp them out. Quick get a pitcher of water and pour it on them and save your foot, man.
It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.
This won't happen. Why? Because the potential for this is already out there, and it hasn't been used yet.
Why not just play a sporting event between the two countries? Why not just take 50 people from each country and put them in a room, and whoever lives wins the war? Because that's not humiliating and decimating enough to the loser, and because the loser always has another battlefield to fall back on -- human fighting.
Remember, these people are at war, which isn't something you do because someone stuck their tongue out at someone else. You go to war because of serious, grave issues. You go because diplomacy has failed. When you go to war, a country can't lose yet still be 100% intact -- because they will just take the fight to the next level.
This is what makes nuclear weapons so frightening. Do you think that any country that possesses nuclear weapons will allow themselves to be taken over without using them, no matter how horrible their use is? Given the choice of being wiped out by a country that invades you or blowing that country up with nukes, possibly creating a lot of pollution (somewhere else), which would most countries pick?
The only reason that nukes haven't been used yet is that the wars fought by the countries that possess them haven't been important enough for their use. We had nukes in Vietnam. We could have used them. But in the end, we didn't care about that country enough to justify using nukes to win the war. Russia didn't care enough about Afghanistan to justify using nukes to win that war.
Bottom line -- the only way that war can be won or lost between two equal powers is if the powers use their most horrible weapons. Those weapons will not be limited to robots because a country will never accept defeat if only its robots lose the battle.
Ralph
I'm not claiming to be the one to do it, either: my military knowledge is at least 20 years out of date. Nevertheless, even at first glance the article seems to ignore several points:
1. There are plenty of ground troops in Afganistan, supplied by the Northern Alliance. Even though they didn't begin making their move on Kabul until US airpower had extensively disrupted Taliban command and control, and yet even though their drive stalled until heavy close air support convinced the Taliban regulars that discretion was the better part of valor, my opinion is that the Taliban government would still control the country if it weren't for Northern Alliance troops and tanks chasing them down on the ground.
2. Recent news reportage from the Tora Bora region describes the cave network there as 'uneffected' by US airstrikes. The airstrikes apparently blew quite a bit of rock and debris over cave entrances, but most of the caves were easily dug out and undamaged inside. US military and political leadership knew this last autumn when they considered using nuclear penetrators to actually destroy the caves. Without ground troops, the Taliban would still be occupying those caves and doing so in relative safety.
3. National borders are quite indefensible: too much ground, too few troops. It's too easy to sneak small groups across imaginary lines in between satellite and aerial recon passes. Most of the bad guys in Afganistan are in other countries now, probably quite a few in Pakistan in my opinion, but which safe haven they chose to flee to doesn't matter. The US tried sensor-laden 'electronic fence' tactics in Vietnam and it worked better than most histories described, but the technology was immature. It's a lot better today and will begin receiving more attention as a result of this experience in Afganistan.
Some preliminary conclusions can be drawn from the above:
A. Airpower alone still can't win a war. Coversely, you probably can't win a war without it, either.
B. One lesson the US learned from Vietnam and the Gulf War is that the American public doesn't mind casualties among allies nearly as much as it minds US casualties. Bosnia/Albania and now Afganistan demonstrates that, for all its major failings, the US government has been fairly successful at getting others to do the dirty work on the ground. When I think of the Northern Alliance my mind automatically wants to call them 'legions' because in effect that's the role they served. Of course, they have their own rules by which they play the game, which is why the US has not gotten nor probably ever will get bin Laden or any of the other high muckity-mucks. Next time something like this happens, be sure that there will be US 'advisors' with each unit of imperial ground troops, serving the same purpose as Soviet commissars served with Soviet units from WWII until the breakup of the Soviet empire.
C. The prevaling Western view of warfare, that it occurs in relatively well-delineated areas between reasonably well-defined groups, is obsolete and probably always has been. Think of it as a historical artifact arising from the enormously destructive effects of rifled, repeating-fire weapons only reinforced by the carnage of WWI and II. Informal warfare, as we learned in Vietnam and Bosnia, is played by different rules. Surprisingly, the US military and political establishments are learning to play by those rules. Don't look for detailed, on-the-spot news reporting from battlefields in the future: it is and will become more critical for the civilian populace at home to be ignorant of the true cost of war.
D. The US way of war is horrendously expensive: even as civilian and military casualties drastically reduce, the economic cost rises steeply. This is the real reason why the Soviet Union broke up: it could no longer pay the bill for a superpower-sized military and, as a military empire, once the armed forces fell apart the political establishment followed soon after. The US, being a vastly richer (economically) country than the old Soviet Union, can afford some limited military adventures from time to time but even they (or we, as I'm a US citizen, although not always a happy one!) can't afford to go to war too often or for too long. In the end there will be a lot of rhetoric about 'winning the war against terrorism' but the real end of this latest phony war will come when the bill arrives in Congress. I've seen numbers such as US$66 billion lately, for the prosecution of the war 'so far'. This is for a limited action, mostly paying for jet fuel, bombs, and maintenance (and bribes. Probably a lot of that.) The price would rise dramatically if many-million dollar jets or tanks were being trashed. Even we can't afford that kind of war for very long. On the other hand, if you can find a bunch of cheap mercenaries and outfit them with (relatively) inexpensive ex-Soviet, Russian, or Chinese weapons, the cost drops quite a bit.
Think 'legion'. As I said before, that's pretty accurate.
Whoa there Tex! Aren't you jumping the gun there Katz? We're nowhere near a so-called Drone War. The technology is nowhere near the Cylon automation that you're describing. First off, all the Raptors and Preditors that are currently in use are piloted remotely by humans through satellite transmission. While some functionality is done by the craft itself, humans are still running the show and calling all the shots. It's more akin to piloting a really expensive remote controlled airplane than having hunter/killer robots that float around dealing death to its enemies. Secondly, no one -- absolutely no countries military is even close to matching what we're currently doing. To have a Drone War, you need two sides. Who is the other side? China? Not likely. Russia? Not with their military budget crisis. Some European nation? Ha! They've got bigger worries at the moment euro. We're at least 50 years away from having anything like sci-fi authors have described. It's a bit premature to start saying that the Drone Wars have begun.
I have to read your book for a class this term, and I was wondering about your methodology for writing.
If I spread out some paper on the floor, take a big steaming dump, and then mail it to a publisher, will I receive a check in the mail and get to see my name on the ugliest-covered book?
But I bet the missiles were directed at all major cities, under the MAD-doctrine (Mutual Assured Destruction). In a real, mass attack, the other side is likely to launch their missiles before the attack can impact. And don't tell me you "know" what would happen in a real crisis, as those missiles could and can be redirected in a matter of no time.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
by manuel de landa, would be a good read by the author of this editorial. according to the thesis, we have been in the process of machine war for centuries, not years. we are a cog in this machine, not necessarily the designer of it. is war necessary might be a better question. i don't think that this is an easy answer, and is sort of like asking, are forest fires necessary? afghanistan is not a war, it is fishing in a barrel. yes, we have the components for sustained technological assault, but do we have the means of sustaining this while being heavily assaulted ourselves? i doubt it. when machines can create machines and adapt to new situations, war will be substantially different. but, what will winning and losing mean? does the lose of human life determine the score? also check the nettime list for viridian comments on the balkan conflicts.
When you think about things, there's a slight risk involved here. More and more these days, machines are running war for us. Some of the greatest AI experts of the age are confidently predicting that these battle-ready robots may, for one reason or another, turn on humanity in a real-life 'terminator' scenario. Kevin Warwick, head of Cybernetics at Reading University, England is one example. He is working, among other things, on ways for machines to 'evolve' their own intelligence. It might not take as much time as we think for machines to take over the show entirely, planning battles and maybe, eventually, starting wars where their country's interests are sufficiently compromised. Once a system like this is in place, it would only take a small amount of file corruption in the wrong place (especially using 'evolved' software, which is likely to be more fragile) for the war machines to go epileptic and/or decide they weren't happy with second place. What will happen in the future is anyone's guess, but I'm thinking that maybe the makers of 'Star Wars' were being overly optimistic when they inserted large droid armies under external control.
"Winston Churchill repeatedly asked his countrymen for brutal sacrifices in World War II. In the new kind of American war, political leaders ask citizens only to keep shopping and traveling. "
This is because unlike Britain in WW2, the US isn't under daily and nightly attack by another superpower. No, this is far from home in a third world country. The two situations can't even be compared.
"Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops. Even as the Afghanistan campaign began, pundits flooded cable talk shows asserting that air power alone wasn't enough, that there would be substantial human sacrifice. Both Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq and the Kosovo conflicts involved the growing used of so-called "smart" laser-guided weaponry, deployed with varying degrees of reliability. But those conflicts also involved either the use of enormous numbers of soldiers on the ground and were controversial in terms of the bomb's precision and effectiveness. "
No war can be won from the air alone. There might not be many US ground forces in Afghanistan, but that doesn't mean there aren't any at all. No, the US bombed the shit out of the country whilst letting *local* ground forces, i.e. Northern Alliance, do the grunt work.
In the Persian Gulf, the air war didn't win - it still took huge numbers of ground forces during a final invasion to complete the job. In Kosovo, the air war didn't win - it was largely ineffective.
"dangerous and complex for the military on the scene, it's hard to imagine a conflict more remote to the majority of Americans, asked to go about their business as usual. "
What are the American people supposed to do? They're not under daily attack! That's the way all remote wars go on when you don't have to expend every piece of energy to fight it. It happened in the Gulf War, it happened in the Falklands war... it's always like that. It's very different to say WW2 where the home situation was so desperate that everything revolved around the war - incidentally, my grandmother's old house in Plymouth (UK) still only has rusting stumps where the iron railing once stood... a symbol of how every piece of life was effected to fight the war (in this case, any "unnecessary" iron taken away for munitions). America certainly hasn't seen anything that bad at home. Americans haven't had to deal rationing, which for Britons went on long after WW2 ended.
Because another poster pretty much nailed it on the head...
Having drones fight the battles for you is good thing, at least from the perspective of one raised under Western culture.
There are two distinct advantages:
1) Humans, who we value much more than drones, don't have to die in the vast numbers that were formally associated with military conflict. This prevents a great amount of emotional trauma for everyone involved.
2) There is a distinct psychological advantage in technological superiority. Imagine not having a chance against your foe because your foe's technology is so much greater than your own. So great, in fact, that your foe needs not to send great numbers of warriors to battle. You might be inclined to surrender beforehand, lest your armies be slaughtered and you disgraced and disposed. I forget the exact quotes, but there's no telling how many wise people have paraphrased "The best way to win a war is to convince your opponent to give up before the fight begins."
Sure, the visionaries of the past could see machines doing the fighting on our behalf. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Romantics might begin debates on the cowardice of using drones to fight a battle of ideals, but, please, spare me such nonsense. No one except the religiously brainwashed and perhaps the terminally ill and racked with pain wants to die: some people are merely resigned to the fact that very are likely to.
My sigs always suck.
Let's just not replace Rumsfeld with a drone. That guy makes CSPAN the most interesting thing on TV when he's on.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
That's nothing like, say a sattelite guided cruise missile, huh?
Jon Katz is one of the least profound or technically astute writer I can think of. When I fire a rifle at someone, obviously I'm having that bullet go and do all the dirty work, because I'm too cowardly to go ram a piece of steel through the guy's chest myself.
The goal of warfare from the beginning is to hurt the other guy while doing your best to minimize your own risks. What's the big difference between a bomber well above a nations strike capabilities dropping bombs and having a drone do it?
Jon Katz has, IMO, said nothing the least bit novel or thought provoking in this article. He's informed us of no new technology, and made a leap of logic any 12 year old could have.
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Drone wars my ass. This was done with a great deal of help from technology, but the actuall war was still fought on the ground with people being shot at. Aparently it makes a difference that the Northern aliance was fighting the ground war instead of the americans. Remember Kososvo? Same shit, only no ground forces. It accomplished nothing untill ground forces were brought in by Russia and the NATO peacekeepers.
Not everything is scifi jackass
It's quiet. Possibly too quiet - The kind of quiet you get when you shove a thick chunk of copper wire in a circuit breaker, a nail in the phase circuit breaker and a bolt in the floor circuit breaker... then drop a screwdriver down one of the ventilation holes of the mainframe's power supply.
I make my way carefully through the emergency-lit computer room to my office, my only detour being a quick circuit breaker replacement tour and a stop at the bin to drop off a badly scarred screwdriver.
I always prefer to start the year off with a bang - or, to be more precise, a series of loud hums, a crackle or two, and a muffled BOOM from the sub-basement.
After all, it's just good manners to let the great unwashed know just who's still at the helm of this operation.
The PFY, meantime, is on holiday, exercising his Christmas bonus to its maximum potential. After all, it's only a matter of time before the Boss realises that there's a duplicate of his credit card out there (again) and calls up the card company.
I did my bit for the PFY's R&R by pushing the Boss's latest credit card statement, envelope and all, into the shredder. Apparently he was under the misguided impression that receiving mail at work is far safer than getting it at his dockside apartment drop box... a mistake that's likely to cost him.
Speaking of the Boss's mail, it's about time to distribute all his waylaid Christmas vendor freebies among the IT troops in a manner not altogether unlike a modern day IT Robin Hood.
"What? Is that it?" a particularly ungrateful antipodean contractor (who couldn't find his bum with a mirror and a torch without a 1:1 scale map) asks after I hand him a bottle of red wine that has better disinfectant than drinking properties.
"Sorry?"
"It's a little, er, cheap, isn't it?" he sniffles.
The things you hear when the PFY isn't around with a nailgun.
"Gee, sorry Mike!" I cry. "I guess it's not like home where you get your pick of the flock for the night as a Christmas bonus."
He lets the slur pass, and grudgingly accepts the bottle, not realising just how well I remember the time, after an agency knees-up, when he dropped me off at the farthest tube station from my destination...three minutes AFTER the Tube stopped running.
Trusting no one, he stashes the bottle in his desk-side footlocker, giving me the chance to stuff a large piece of foam packing over the cooling inlet at the back of his desktop machine.
Thermal overheating time bomb set, I wander off to distribute more New Year cheer.
And not a moment too soon, as the power is restored and the building springs back into life.
When I've run out of blocks of foam and cheap bottles of wine, I grab some of the good stuff and go on my REAL goodwill rounds, dropping off gifts to the telephone operators, the cleaning staff, and, lastly, the building maintenance guy. Know what palms to grease and when - that's my motto.
Having ensured that no one's going to investigate my long-distance phone bill, find the Boss's shredded credit card statements or wonder what's protected by the Armageddon-proof lock on the door marked 'Plant Room No3' in the basement, I return to my office.
As luck would have it, the Boss is waiting for me there with an annoyed expression on his face. It's only a 'generally-annoyed' expression, which means that he's probably not found out about his credit card yet, let alone me calling up his credit company and cranking his limit up so far he'd get nose bleeds just thinking about it.
"What's this about you blocking up the cooling vent of Mike's machine?" he asks.
Bastard!
"Oh, that - it's not sponge, it's...noise damping material."
"?..."
"Noise damping - the material has a gaseous porosity which allows air flow but reduces sound output by a factor of around 10 decibels per megalitre of vacuum-rated European Standard air."
"Err, really? So it's just to cut down noise?"
"Of course!"
"Hang on a minute!..."
I suppose it was a little too good to be true...
"Yes?"
"Why haven't you installed any on my machine?"
I don't believe it...
"Oh, I was just getting round to it - your one is in that old monitor box over there."
He ferrets around in the aforementioned box before pulling out a bit of packing.
"This? It's a bit of machine packing."
"No, it's a sound-reducing, air-cleaning filter."
"Then why has it got 'recycle this packing carefully' printed on the side of it?"
"Because... it was packed in old newspaper and they couldn't print over the top of it."
"Oh... so how do I use it?"
"Well, you make sure that it's hard up against the fan inlet so that no, er, 'unfiltered' air can get through."
"Right, well, I'll let Mike know then," he burbles as he wanders out to destroy his machine.
"No, no!" I cry. "Leave that to me - I'll sort him out."
And sort him out I will.
- The BOFH Troll
or have worked with the military, you just don't know what the hell you are talking about. No matter how many movies you watch, how many stories you read, how many interviews of Tom Clancy (ha) you watch, there is stuff that goes on behind the scenes and won't surface until much later.
Katz is a dimwit who knows jack about what he is talking about. Like a lot of the posts I've read.
Don't even bother flaming me, I DO know what I'm talking about. Wish I could tell you why.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
To talk of winning a war without ground forces is silly. As Ted Fehrenback said. "You can fly over the land, you can bomb the land, you can render the land uninhabitable. But you don't own the land until you stand a 17 year old kid with a rifle on it." As of now, we haven't won the war. The Northern Alliance and other indigenous forces have. Note these groups recent indifference to US preferences regarding the release of high ranking Taliban prisoners.
A military commander should value his soldiers lives higher than he does the lives of hostile noncombatants.
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All this is moot if you propose that the very system and society required to build these 'clones' collapses under its own strength and power, thus leaving its people more focused on scrounging for food and shelter rather than developing the next generation of war-bots.
.. at some point, this western world we live in will reap what it's sowed, and our technological infrastructure will crumble under the more important needs of food, water, shelter, energy, transportation, etc .. it's happened in many other countries, where, technologically, they are behind where they were years ago.
Which is what I buy
I'm of the belief (and studies have been suggesting this) that the action of developing techynology as advanced as these war-bots or whatnot spells it's own death when the people from inside that system become increasingly unhappy. We see this in North America, as rates of depression rise, and people begin question what it is, exactly, that we're protecting here. Once that question begins to make its rounds, ie, "Why are we protecting our society if we cannot, be definition, be happy in it?", I think you're left with the notion that fighting symbolic wars (ie, robots, ideals, etc) will eventually tire a society enough to spell its own demise from within.
Theodore Kazinski (sp?) put it in terms of your primary goals (to survive, to reproduce) and your secondary goals (to mow your lawn, to paint your toe nails red). Once a society is too focused on it's secondary goals, it begins to eat itself from the inside as parts of society begin rebelling against the system and lifestyle that doesn't contribute to a primary sense of fulfillment.
"Old man yells at systemd"
That goes both ways though: Military contractors make a lot of money when there are conflicts (for instance apparently the military is ordering cruise missiles faster than they can be built), so you get a dangerous situation where there are elements that have no personal risk to themselves so they encourage the government (explicitly and subvertly) to engage in conflicts. Behind almost everything there is the almighty dollar.
This exchange has saddened me (as is often the case when I read "political" analyses on /.).
With few exceptions the talk is ugly and uncaring. Drones, smart bombs, and propaganda about "casualties". Where did we learn to return hate for hate? Has this ever appeased hatred? No, only kindness has ever appeased hatred. It takes a courageous people (with courageous leadership) to return kindness in the face of hatred. Evil, greedy, and careless people wage war on the weak -- and then call it justice when it is really revenge (or worse self-righteousness).
I implore thinking and caring people to turn off the media for one week. It is extremely difficult, and many of you will not be able to do it - but it is a worthwhile exercise. The media is like a drug, it dulls your sense of compassion, it damages your psyche, it renders you incapable of reasoned thought. It makes you only capable of thinking in terms defined by it - drones, smart bombs, casualties.
During that week think deeply and compassionately about what is right and wrong. Think about cause and effect. You might be surprised by what you find.
Yeah it's nice being on the correct side of the atlantic.
>
The point of war is to make the other side stop fighting. If I want a neighboring country and they don't want to give themselves up, they will fight. So I must make them stop fighting. If I've been invaded and I don't want to be invaded, I must make the invaders stop invading. If I need to prove that my god is bigger than your god... etc., etc., ad nauseum.
To make the other side stop fighting, you have to make it too costly. War is not about blowing shit up. War is about making it impossible for the bad guys to keep shooting you. There are many ways to do this. Obviously effective is to kill the people who want to keep shooting you. Another way is to starve them; of food, weapons, hope, etc. This drone vs. drone scenario would only settle a conflict if the nations involved were willing to throw resources at it until one ran out of money. If this is the case, then you can settle who wins at the outset by the respective GDPs. At some point, one nation or the other will run out of drones and will face the choice of sending flesh-and-blood people out to try to stop the 'bots or giving up. And history has shown that people are not generally willing to give up too easily.
War will never not have human casualties.
--blob
All sweeping generalizations suck.
It costs industry sudden a sudden boom in production, and larger profits. To produce the bombs, drones, machines, etc, costs cold, hard cash. The industry makes money. The top 1% of American wealth gets wealthier. War is good for buisness.
It costs the media a sudden wave of new stories, specials, and "plot developments" that are garaunteed to boost ratings and draw in marketing dollars. War is good for buisness.
It costs the military "bragging rights" ("imagine what would have happened if we weren't there on foreign soil to protect you") and a continually larger budget for at least the next decade. After all, we need to keep the military maintained just in case we have another incident like this any time soon, so make sure 50% of next year's budget goes to the military. War is good for buisness.
It costs the government the critical eye of the public; after all, when there's a war going on, we can't get too petty and start demanding the government preserve every little tiny right we have, no matter how significant it may seem. War takes top priority, so when little things like national ID systems get installed, we'll be too busy worrying about the war to care. So now that everyone is looking elsewhere, the lawmakers can get away with things they couldn't do during peace time. Meanwhile, the RIAA and their ilk are getting the laws and actions passed that they wanted (think Ukraine; the RIAA's "no blame" ammendment to the Patriot act; etc.) The lawmakers get paid with campaign contributions that they won't even need -- after all, any president who leads a successful war is almost always looked on favourably, and reelection is easy (the best we can do this time around is hope for a "like father like son" situation). Any Congresspeople who support the war effort will be repaid in kind. War is good for buisness.
So when was cost ever an issue?
~A.
student of animation and the fine arts
I believe this is also the case in Australia and New Zealand.
While it hans't (ever?) happened, the Queen can still veto legislation in Canada through her official representative who must assent to all new legislation.
The government has been revealed to lie to its own people, censor and control the media to hide things it doesn't want to know about, and hide things that would be bad PR as matters of "national security". It has done this in the past, and eventually been discovered. The conclusion would be that the government, not seeming remarkably different in demeanor than when these things happened, would continue to do so. In short, the government (and by extension CNN) are not giving you all the information.
So when someone who knows this calls into question the information given by the media, the response is "Well, can you prove it?" Which kinda ignores the fact that of course not, because the information -isn't there-. -If- what he suspects is true, then the information is going to be hidden for as long as possible. And while it may not be proven, past history would demonstrate that is highly plausible.
But since it can't be proven, people keep waving their American flags and trusting GWB and CNN. Because when the gov hides information, no one can do anything but speculate, and no one will believe mere speculation.
But CNN, of course, is gospel truth.
The enemies of Democracy are
There are certainly reasons to suspect that there is in fact no real war at all going on -- that the whole thing is being simulated, as a tool to keep the populace scared, patriotic, and easy manipulable. (Hmmmmm...) But to the extent the wars are real at all, they are no more automated or remote than WWII was.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I found the following today, URL to the site is at the end of the text:
-----
The American Way of War
by Walden Bello
Focus on the Global South, December 2001
Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), globalresearch.ca, 6 January 2002
By Washington's logic, firecrackers should now be going off everywhere, as the counter-terror crusaders zero in on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Tora Bora. However, Europe is cool, there is apprehension throughout the South, and outright despondency blankets much of the Arab and Muslim world.
The reasons are obvious: at least 4000 dead, a large number of them civilians, four million refugees, a return to tribal chaos with the dismemberment of central authority. What bin Laden and his organization did was horrific and inexcusable--but to do this to a country in the name of justice? Once again, the Americans have destroyed the town in order to save it.
Washington, however, will not allow these details to spoil its triumphalist mood. The Taliban and Al Qaeda have been obliterated, but this victory has a wider significance for the Pentagon. Massive, precision-guided air power can win wars, with almost no commitment of US ground troops, and thus with almost no casualties. Ground forces cannot, of course, be totally dispensed with, but they are needed not so much for assault but for mopping up operations against demoralized and shell-shocked survivors of the rain of flame and steel-a role can be filled by local mercenaries like the Northern Alliance.
Air Power Buries the Vietnam Syndrome
What was first tried out in the Kosovo conflict in 1999 has now been affirmed in Afghanistan. This war was the last nail in the coffin of the "Vietnam Syndrome."
With this renewed confidence in what military historian Russell Weigley called "the American Way of War"-massive power, high technology, total victory-Washington is now seriously considering the same sort of intervention in other states that allegedly provide aid and comfort to the terrorists, with Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and Iraq being the prime candidates.
And it would be surprising if the events in Afghanistan have not given a boost to plans for a strong US military role in the war against drugs in Colombia. Newsweek reports that Colombian authorities seeking a more decisive US role are now "trying to show the parallels between the Taliban and their own guerrilla movements..." There is, of course, the not insignificant difference that Afghanistan is desert and Colombia is jungle, but then, is this not a minor problem that American technology can resolve without too much difficulty?
The New Trusteeship
Along with the return of confidence in the American Way of War, there is emerging a renewed respectability in direct intervention in the affairs of developing countries. Even before September 11, many developing societies, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, were already being characterized as "failed societies." Robert Kaplan's 1994 essay in The Atlantic was but one of several influential writings to forcefully expound the view that decolonization had led, not to the emergence of stable polities in Africa and the Middle East but to a descent into "anarchy" that threatened to destabilize the whole world.
Post-Sept. 11, respect for national sovereignty and self-determination has been further eroded in Washington and London, with conservative intellectuals giving voice to opinions that powerful states cannot articulate...yet. One influential formulation comes from Paul Johnson, author of Modern Times:
"...the best medium-term solution will be to revive the old League of Nations Mandate System, which served well as a 'respectable' form of colonialism between the wars. Syria and Iraq were once highly successful mandates. Sudan, Libya, and Iran have likewise been placed under special regimes by international treaty. Countries that cannot live at peace with their neighbors and that wage covert war against the international community cannot expect total independence. With all the permanent members of the Security Council now backing, in varying degrees , the American-led initiative, it should not be difficult to devise a new form of United Nations mandate that places terrorist states under supervision."
Not surprisingly, few of these visions address the fundamental reasons for extreme responses like terrorism: colonial borders that ensured post-colonial conflict, continuing marginalization of the new countries in an inequitable global economic order, continuing Northern control of areas containing massive oil and gas riches to fuel the oil and energy intensive civilization of the West.
The next phase in Afghanistan is turning into the latest experiment for the New Trusteeship or New Mandate System, following the failure of the first major initiative owing to Somalian recalcitrance in 1993. The European Union is asked to provide-under British leadership, of course-a permanent occupation force, while the United Nations is brought in to broker a "representative government" among competing tribal groups to fill the political vacuum. Observing recent developments in Afghanistan, one cannot help but notice that Washington appears to be operating under the following principle: be unilateral in military action, but multilateral in political engineering-thus getting others to take the blame if the political structure collapses.
War Without Borders
The war against terror knows no borders, so the war at home must be pursued with equal vigor. Sept 11 was Pearl Harbor II and the Bush administration tells Americans that they are now in the midst of total war like World War II. Not even the Cold War was presented in such totalistic terms as the War against Terror. Laws and executive orders restricting the rights to privacy and free movement have been passed with a speed and in a manner that would have turned Joe McCarthy green with envy. The United States is only nine weeks into this war, observes David Corn in The Nation, but already legislation has been passed and executive orders signed that establish secret military tribunals to try non-US citizens; impose guilt by association on immigrants; authorize the Attorney General to indefinitely lock up aliens on mere suspicion; expand the use of wiretaps and secret searches; allow the use of secret evidence in immigration proceedings that aliens cannot confront or rebut; destroy the secrecy of the client-lawyer relationship by allowing the government to listen in; and institutionalize racial and ethnic profiling.
The US's European allies have rushed to do the same thing-with many of them taking advantage, like Washington, of the anti-terrorist climate to try to push through a whole raft of legislation that had been waiting on the wings before September 11. Unlike in the US, however, citizens and parliaments are not going as gently into that good night-including, surprisingly, the British Parliament, which shot down Tony Blair's draconian proposal to allow prosecutors to apprehend and indefinitely jail any foreigner suspected of terrorism.
Post-September US legislation is worrisome not only for its domestic implications but for its international consequences as well. What we see is the institutionalization of a regime of legal unilateralism: the latest package of laws and executive decrees self-endow Washington with the power to do almost anything abroad to bag terrorist targets-which US forces proceeded to display just recently, when, in an act indistinguishable from piracy, they boarded without consent a Singaporean ship in the Arabian Sea, overpowered the crew, and launched a fruitless search for terrorists.
Had a suspect been discovered in that shipboard search, the Pentagon could have shipped him to a US base in, say, Germany, tried him there in a secret military tribunal, and, had he been found guilty by a process significantly less rigorous than civilian justice, transported him to be shot or imprisoned in the United States, possibly anonymously. The cooperation of states in whose territory terrorists are apprehended would be nice, but it would not be necessary, thank you.
Deus ex Machina
In classical drama, September 11 was what you called a deus ex machina-an external force or event that swings a destiny that hangs in the balance in favor of one of the protagonists. The Al Qaeda New York mission was the best possible gift to the US and the global establishment in the pre-September 11 historical conjuncture. Just a few weeks before, some 300,000 people had marched in Genoa in the biggest show of force yet of a wave of anti-corporate globalization movement that had gone from strength to strength with demonstrations in Seattle, Washington, DC, Chiang Mai, Prague, Nice, Porto Alegre, Honolulu, and Gothenburg.
The Genoa protests underlined the fact that the legitimacy of the key institutions of global economic governance-the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO)-was at an all time low, as was the whole doctrine of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization that came under the rubric of neoliberal economics or the "Washington Consensus." This erosion of credibility had been brought about by a concatenation of disasters including the Asian financial crisis, the slow-motion disaster of structural adjustment in Africa and Latin America, and the spread of the financial crisis, first to Russia and Brazil and then to Argentina.
What made the crisis of legitimacy of the key institutions of capitalist globalization so volatile is that it intersected with a profound structural crisis of the global economy. The main features of this structural crisis were overproduction in industry, increasing monopolization to counter the loss of profitability, and unregulated speculative activity in the financial markets. When $4.6 trillion in industrial wealth-the equivalent of one half of the US GDP--was wiped out in late 2000 and early 2001, the so-called "New Economy" vanished and collapsed into recession. The global reach of the recession and its depth have given rise to the term "synchronized downturn," which describes a process caused precisely by the greater interlocking and integration of economies brought about by the global liberalization of trade, investment, and finance.
With globalization's promise of prosperity, an end to poverty, and reduced inequality evaporating, it was not surprising that, as C. Fred Bergsten told the Trilateral Commission, the anti-globalization forces were "in the ascendancy."
Before September 11, moreover, an erosion of legitimacy haunted not only the institutions of global economic governance but also the institutions of political governance in the North, particularly the United States. Increasing numbers of Americans had begun to realize that their liberal democracy had been so thoroughly corrupted by corporate money politics that it deserved being designated a plutocracy. In the US presidential campaign of 2000, Senator John McCain ran a popular campaign that was centered on one issue: reforming a system of corporate control of the electoral system that, in scale, was unparalleled in the world.
The fact that the candidate most favored by Big Business lost the popular vote-and according to some studies, the electoral vote as well-and still ended up president of the world's most powerful liberal democracy did not help in shoring up the legitimacy of a political system that had been described by many observers as already in a state of being in a state of "cultural civil war" between conservatives and liberals, a polarization that had roughly half the country on each side of the divide.
Reversal of Fortune
While understanding the deep sense of injustice that makes terrorists out of ordinary people, progressives have always condemned terrorism, not only because it takes innocent lives but also because it provides an opening for the counterrevolution. Indeed, post-September 11 events unfolded according to the historical script.
The smoke from the ruins of the World Trade Center was still acrid and thick when United States Trade Representative Robert Zoellick seized the opportunity it provided to regain the momentum for corporate-driven globalization. Arguing that accelerated liberalization was necessary to counter September 11's blow against the world economy, Zoellick, European Union Commissioner Pascal Lamy, and World Trade Organization Director General Mike Moore led the charge to stampede the developing countries into approving the launching of a new phase of trade liberalization during the Fourth Ministerial of the WTO in Doha, Qatar, last November. The Doha Declaration set the bicycle of trade liberalization that is the WTO back upright and in motion after its collapse in Seattle.
Horst Kohler, managing director of the IMF, and Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, also saw the war as an opportunity to reverse the crisis of their institutions. Kohler has cheerfully cooperated in turning the Fund into a key component of Washington's overall program for strategic states like Pakistan and Indonesia, even as it left a non-strategic country like Argentina, which faces imminent bankruptcy, twisting in the wind. His presidency and his institution threatened by a pincer movement of criticism from the left and the right, Jim Wolfensohn, for his part, has seized on September 11 to project his institution as the key partner of the Pentagon in the war against terrorism, filling the "soft" role of addressing the poverty that breeds terrorism while the Pentagon plays the "hard" role of blasting the terrorists.
As for the crisis of political governance in the US, September 11 has turned George W. Bush from a minority president whose party lost control of the Senate into arguably the most powerful US president in recent times-and one with an overall job approval rating of 86 per cent, according to a recent New York Times poll. Nearly eight in ten Americans support his policy of indefinite detention for non-citizens suspected of being a threat to national security, and seven in 10 support government's listening in on conversations between clients and their lawyers.
Liberals have been thoroughly cowed, with Harvard liberal luminary Laurence Tribe condoning the use of military tribunals and the indefinite detention of over 1200 people, while his equally famous colleague Alan Dershowitz, The Nation reports, "has suggested that the use of torture may be justified, as long as it is authorized by a warrant." Even Richard Falk of Princeton University, an icon of left liberalism, was initially compelled to justify Bush's war as a "just war," though he has since retracted-thank god!
From Locke to Hobbes
The damage to the American political psyche and political system may be farreaching. Americans have often prided themselves with having a political system whose role is to maximize and protect individual liberty along the lines propounded by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. That Lockean-Jeffersonian tradition has been rudely overturned in the last few weeks, as Americans have been stampeded to giving government vast new powers over the individual in the name of guaranteeing order and security. Instead of moving to the future, America's limited democracy has regressed in its inspiration from the seventeenth century Locke to the sixteenth century Hobbes, whose master work Leviathan held that citizens owe unconditional loyalty to a state that guarantees the security of their life and limb.
The extent to which assaults on traditional liberties can now take place with impunity was shown recently when Attorney General John Ashcroft said that critics of the Bush administration's security measures were fear-mongers "who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty [and] aid terrorists." The fact that the liberal Democratic Senators he was directing these remarks at a Senate hearing dared not respond shows how skillfully the conservatives have used the anti-terrorist struggle to win the real war at home, which is the war against liberals and progressives.
Fighting for the Future
The anti-corporate globalization movement that had been surging before September 11 is now fighting desperately to regain momentum. Three developments are particularly threatening:
First, the police, after being pilloried for provocateur-type tactics in Genoa, has regained its confidence in the new context marked by greater public acceptance of limitations on basic political rights. The police's was in full display during the recent IMF-World Bank meeting in Ottawa on November 18-19, when with no provocation and in full view of the press, Canadian police in full riot gear swooped down on a peaceful anti-corporate globalization protest to apprehend young marchers who were doing nothing but marching peacefully.
Second, the definition of "terrorist" that is being used in both European and American legislation is so vague that it can be applied to non-violent groups that espouse civil disobedience, which is an essential weapon of the movement, or to groups that do some damage to property but in a symbolic fashion that harms nobody.
Third, the big anti-globalization events involve the massing of hundreds of thousands of people across borders, and this can now be easily thwarted invoking the new legislation legalizing the arbitrary questioning, detention, expulsion, or refusal of entry to foreigners on the mere grounds of suspicion of their being terrorists, terrorist supporters, or terrorist fellow travelers-in short, anybody that can be conveniently tainted with the terrorist brush..
All this adds up to a chilling effect on mass protests, with the authorities and dominant media all too happy to have the digital images of terrorists attacks blend in the public mind with the militant but peaceful civil disobedience of anti-globalization activists.
Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker?
Washington is savoring its triumph. But while the image it wants to promote is that of America being Luke Skywalker liberating Afghan people from a repressive Taliban Empire, in large parts of the Third World it comes across, as John Lloyd of the Financial Times points out, more as Luke's antagonist, the evil Darth Vader. Indeed, the American way of war reinforces this, with death raining down from an unseen, distant hand. This was war that was impersonal and terrifying to the nth degree, and there is a great deal of truth in Newsweek writer John Barry's comment that, with their unnervingly accurate bombing campaign, "to many Taliban, the Americans must have seemed like creatures from another planet: out there somewhere, in the sky or across the horizon, powerful beyond comprehension."
George Lucas could not have managed a better script for the Empire striking back than the Afghanistan campaign.
There is one thing sure, however: empires always spawn resistance. It is, in fact, arguable that while the US may have won another battle, its strategic situation in the Middle East and South Asia has been eroded by this very conflict. A fundamentalist regime is now a possibility in Pakistan. The Washington-backed Saudi feudal elite is now more than ever isolated from the masses, with a critical mass of Saudi youths apparently regarding bin Laden as a hero-confronting the US with the prospect of Washington ultimately serving as a police force to save the elite from its people. With the bombing of Afghanistan and the Bush administration's strong tilt towards Israel, a deep anger against the US and the West is digging in from Muslim North Africa to Muslim Indonesia, providing fertile ground for the expansion of movements that will seek to wrest power from US-allied regimes.
Will it be advanced technology or popular mobilization that will be the decisive factor in this epochal struggle for freedom, justice, and sovereignty of the peoples of the South against the empire? Will the outcome be Afghanistan or Vietnam? Will the survivor be Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker? The jury is still out on these questions and will be for some time.
As for the anti-corporate globalization movement, Sept. 11 may yet turn out to be a temporary reversal from which it can draw more strength. The massive street mobilizations paralleling big assemblies of the global elite, like the meetings of the IMF and the G-8, have now reached the limits of their effectiveness, and this may well push the movement to come up with innovative strategies combining mass, legal, and parliamentary strategies.
Indeed, if there is a clear silver lining in the post-September 11 situation, it is that three movements that had formerly gone their independent ways-the peace movement, the human rights movement, and the anti-corporate globalization movement-- now find it critical to collaborate more closely with one another. This is a potent alliance that can make a significant contribution to changing the correlation of forces in medium and long term, as the exclusionary, marginalizing, and repressive thrusts of the global system inexorably assert themselves.
The guardians and propagandists of the empire are proclaiming victory too soon. To borrow the World War II imagery that George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft are so fond of invoking these days, we are in not in 1945, folks, but 1941.
Dr. Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South in Bangkok, Thailand, and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines.
Copyright Walden Bello 2002. Reprinted for fair use only.
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BEL112A.html
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
There is no war in recent human history that involved so few humans, at least on one side of the conflict. ... A handful of human soldiers guide and direct the increasingly sophisticated technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks...
Handful? HANDFUL?!?!?! I can't believe anyone who claims to be capable of thinking would say something so ridiculously wrong. Unless you have hands the size of the Pacific ocean, there is no way that all of the humans fighting this war could be described as a handful. Guess what - all those unmanned vehicles, remote sensors, guided weapons - they are operated by humans, as are all of the manned aircraft, ground stations, surface ships, etc. The Predator doesn't fly itself, nor does it give itself orders, nor does it interpret sensor data, nor does it repair itself - humans still do all of that and more, and anyone with even a semi-functional brain could understand that. The humans are still there, they just have more time to spend on directing efforts toward maximum effectiveness with minimal casualties through information superiority. Way to go Katz, you just insulted thousands upon thousands of American and coalition soldiers and support personnel, not to mention all of the hard-working engineers operating slightly removed from the fighting, who are the real reason why there have been "stunningly few U.S. military casualties and American civilian casualties beyond September 11 and the anthrax attacks." First he calls Behind Enemy Lines a good movie, now this. Will someone please keep this idiot away from military issues?
Er, just because CNN isn't reporting death tolls doesn't mean all those bombs we dropped didn't kill thousands of people. And as for ground troops, we had the Northern Alliance. You can't hold a city without ground troops. If there was no Northern Alliance, we'd have troops in Kandahar et al to root out enemies in hiding, etc.
While it's nice to think of a day when wars are held on Battlebots, it's ignorant to say that ground troops were not necessary in this conflict.
"A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery? War has recently seemed so terrible that civilized societies view it as a last resort. But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible. "
Technology isn't making the sacrifices go away. In recent years, America has been distancing herself from the risks. I don't see America making much effort to contribute to the UN forces in Afghanistan. No, America wants their troops out and let other countries take the real risks. The US should take responsibility for its actions and contribute to the repair work. If it wants to bomb the crap out of other countries, it should be willing to accept the risks involved in fixing the mess it has made.
Other examples of avoiding risk are the bombing campaigns. Sure, no Americans get hurt, but there are still huge numbers of other people maimed, killed or suffering because of their actions. In Kosovo, the American ground commitment is a joke because of their fear of taking risks - they forces are in huge fortresses and only venture out for inneffective patrols in large heavily armoured groups. They're certainly not doing the job properly.
Americans are more and more distanced from the horrors of war. Those horrors are still there, but the American people just don't hear about them anymore. This is bad! This emboldens the US and causes more death and destruction in the world, albeit to non-Americans. How is this right? Just because it doesn't effect you, doesn't make it right. Whenever there's war, there's sacrifice by somebody, thus making war easier to wage is not good at all.
Katz's argument doesn't hold any water. The afgan war is not USA taking on the Taliban with air power and machines alone. Did Katz totally forget about the anti-taliban afgan ground troops who at least some new reports have been reported around 50000 troops. They just didn't have any food, ammunition, guns, etc to fight the taliban. Once the US started fully supplying those troops as well using full air power on their behalf then the war changed quickly.
Katz's argument only makes sense if he doesn't consider the anti-taliban forces.
You're a fool if you think the families of your soldier who died would keep quiet about the death of their son or daughter. The families could give a shit if it's classified. And the families have to be told. Think about it. You think a soldier lives in a vacuum? They all have friends and families.
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get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
The BLU-82 Commando Vault (also known as the Daisy Cutter) is a 15,000 lb. thermobaric bomb, not "hyperbaric" as he calls it (although I suppose it makes sense in the way he uses it). And they certainly aren't dropped from unmanned planes. They are pushed out on skids from the back of Special Operations C-130s (or perhaps AC-130s).
For more on the Daisy Cutter and other thermobaric weapons, check the following links:
Also notable: The bomb used in the beginning of Outbreak (1995) was a fuel air explosive similar to the Daisy Cutter.
-- null
It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.
.. the USA is going into another Vietnam" You will never win against them. And honestly, many countries had there "we told you so" speech prepared.
.. big whoop. How do you get them from point A to point B. China does not even have an aircraft carrier. The Soviets are in the same boat (or lack thereoff). They have "had" an aircraft carrier, was in service for three years and is now being sold to India.
Beyond what else was state in your article, you statement here makes it sound "so simple".
Fact of that matter is that in 1930, America had the 18th largest military if you could even call it that. With the Great Depression and the fact that WWI was that war to end all wars (ya right), the US quickly demobilized much of the military. It was not till the rising threat of Germany and Japan in the mid 30's that the US acted to start "building" there military up.
Fact of the matter is, the US have not stopped. I remember statements from many other countries in 1990 that "oh
Well after complete destruction of Iraq and the loss of 300-400 military personal, many countries folled up with "omfg". Though no link can be found, the Sec of Defense for the former Soviet Union was stated we need to "start" developing these weapons.
Scarey fact is that these weapons were being developed as early as the 60's in America where as most other countries are just today starting to to plan these weapons.
Point being, America has a very large techno jump over any other country in the world in weapons.
Another issue is deployment. China has 2.5 million troops, almost doubling the US's active duty. Ya great
The concept of large scale "drone wars" is far, far away. And honestly, I do not even consider the Afganastan conflict your so called drone war. It was a large army (Northern Alliance) with a few special forces with radios and laser markers telling the bombers where to drop there payload. Beyond that it was Soviet tanks, AK-47's,Nissan Pickup trucks, blood, sweet, and tears. About as conventional as it comes.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
I'm not so sure about that. We've already got automatic artillery. We've got flying drones with cameras and weapons. A miniature robot tank on the front lines certainly sounds feasible to me; not from guilt, but from a quick analysis of function and form. And what about landmines? While not classically "robots", these could be classified as the dumbest war robots ever built.
Wars are rarely fought with singular orders. The typical soldier in a wartime scenario relies heavilly upon the information he recieves, the situation he percieves around him, and is capable of making rational & complex decisions based upon that information. Sure, a machine can be taught to do all that, but how is that information going to get there? And if your ultimate goal is programmable warfare, isn't the most flexible solider the human?
All true. But would a drone have to be self-controlled? Why not remotely controlled by the flexible human soldier? Or part both? There are already robots that work as a team; there could be war robot teams, too.
Flesh robots do not require battery power. Metal robots would be prone to power loss at critical times.
Flesh robots require food, get knocked out, and are susceptible to gas attacks. Metal robots could use gasoline, or electrical power (which is available without supply lines, from a ubiquitous source).
Flesh robots can usually continue to fight, even after physical injury. Metal robots would be severely impaired if even one portion of their body is rendered useless.
Only humaniform ones. Insect robots could still travel with three legs gone. Tank robots could still fire even if immobilized.
And, above all, we have nukes.
Eh. So who wants to nuke their own country to glass in order to fight off the drones?
I just don't think you'll ever see 5000 robots cross a river chest deep in water, scaling the cliffs of Normandy, or making it through a Korean winter.
But you will see them floating down the river, flying over the cliffs, and hibernating while they store enough energy for spring. And crossing hostile terrain relentlessly, without food or water.
Why bother making metal robots then, when you've already got flesh robots who can do the same?
Because we can! No, seriously, because it saves the lives of many flesh robots. Not necessarily our own soldiers, but opposing countries' civilians, too.
Why bother waging war, when we could make a neutron bomb and destroy the people, leaving the buildings behind? Because we don't really like killing. It's not good for the economy. At least not in the long run.
Judebert
We're out of dynamite. What we need now is a plan!
For geek dads: Contraction Timer
But on to my main point. There were probably less than 100 people that knew about the Sept. 11th attacks before they happened. But the attacks ended up getting a country of 20 million attacked by a country of 300 million. The actual fighting was carried out by only about 20 thousand on each side. So only about one in a thousand people in Afganistan actually cared enough to do anything more than look out for themselves.
So this was a conflict where only an almost incomprehensibly small number of people actually cared enough to do anything more than sit around and watch. And that's probably why technology was so effective: because the actual humans didn't care, atleast not enough to get killed.
Heh John, did you miss the mass of Afghani resistance fighters?
Drone warfare may come to pass eventually but I don't see this conflict as evidence of that. Certainly the point of this conflict from both sides is to impart damage to real live humans. This may involve remote control weapons but it isn't a battle-bot scenario where the victor claims the spoils and both sides remain physically unharmed.
In fact this conflict points out a more frightening possibility for the future and that is that wars won't be fought on a single battle field. Attacks will occur anywhere, anytime and using any number of remote control means that leaves the victim always looking over their shoulder for the next attack.
I don't even think you need 22kg of nuclear material. Wouldn't a much, much smaller amount be able to generate a sufficient EMP to disable any 'terminator' style machines? Yeah, it would be somewhat unsafe for humans, but it would probably, at this point, be a nearly trivial task to dismantle the now scarecrow like terminators.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
do you expect it's Katz. Oh wow some great Sci-Fi authors have gotten some things right. Have you just woken up and smelled the coffee? Hello where have you been Katz? There is a reason why they are great. You know Jules Verne and the Nautilus, the moon landing? You have noticed these things before haven't you?
It takes a little more then a few R/C airplanes with video cameras and missiles to impress me.
So technology has allowed war to be less brutal and you think that's a bad thing? Conventional warfare has never been shocking enough on it's own merits to eliminate itself from history. Europe literally hacked at each other for centuries and you think by WW1 they would have been adaptive enough in tactics to realize after the first couple of times of slow marching into machine gun fire that gee it doesn't work.
Nope the stupid humans will continue to kill each other for dumb ass reasons much of the time. So one group has finally after all these centuries of stabbing, hacking, shooting, blowing up, radiating people have finally figured out a few ways to make it easier and less bloody for the boys. It's not world peace but I will take what I can get.
>
I think it is important to note that as war becomes more mechanized and human sacrifice is reduced, the governmental constituency, in the case of United States the enfranchised people, become less and less tolerant of casualties. One cause of this reduced tolerance is the widespread media coverage of any casualty which occurs.
Take a step back from the current wartime situation and look at a bigger picture. Take a statistical look at civil sacrifice as opposed to military sacrifice. Please understand that I am not trying to downplay military sacrifice and that I have the utmost respect for those who have volunteered to defend my nation, regardless of what feelings I may harbor towards the nation itself.
The government spares no expense in the development of techonologies which help to remove as much element of risk from the endeavors of the soldiers on and off the battlefield. For example, stealth bombers which cost hundreds of millions of dollars each after development costs to build cannot perform any function that traditional bomber aircraft cannot. They were developed for the sole purpose of reducing risk.
What is an analagous technology in the civilian realm? Take governors in cars. Such technology could greatly reduce risk by prohibiting drivers from exceeding dangeroulsy high speeds. Why don't we have them in all cars? Because we as Americans are willing to take on an increased risk to protect a civil liberty that isn't even legal: the liberty to exceed the speed limit. The speed limit is a rediculously hypocritical phenomenon in American legislation. The people of our nation enact legislation via our representative bicameral legislature, and therefore, our laws are what we want. But we all know that almost the entire constituency speeds not just occasionally, but each time they access our public highways.
I think reducing risk to human lives is a good thing. But why is it so much more popular with military technology than with civilian? Because of the media. If we were forced to look at pictures of the thousands of fatal car accidents that occur each day, we would demand technological improvements and maybe even drive more carefully; we would be willing to accept more inconvenience in our lives to protect them.
I suppose the media should be applauded, indeed, the film industry as well, for exposing the horror of conventional warfare to the constituency. This causes the taxpayers to realize that they do want to spend money to protect human life. It has also changed the way wars are faught: the public does not tolerate collateral civilian casualties, either.
I don't think the public realizes the disproportionate amount of money that goes to these military protections as opposed to the civilian ones. That's the primary problem with our apathetic constituency: the media has to shove problems in our faces before anyone cares about them.
For those who are religious, let us pray that all people are endowed with more than instinctual respect for human life. In an ethics class I took last semester, when we were studying relativism, we came to the rather dissapointing conclusion that the only respect for human life common to all humanity was the protection of life for the preservation of the species; this might not even apply to some who we might call terrorists.
Just my humble rantings.
Having the training and authority to see and exploit a sudden opportunity has great value on the battlefield. It will be a long time before robots can pull this off.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Embalming did not become common in the United States until the late 19th century, after the Civil War. Though most of the war's dead were buried on the battlefield, to be dug up after the war and reburied in the new National cemetaries if Union, or in local cemetaries if Confederate, a few officers and so on were embalmed and sent home. Lincoln was also embalmed, and the way he held together, as it were, during his lengthy trip back to Illinois with several public viewings, seems to have impressed many. One of the sales pitches that undertakers made in favor of embalming was that one could be sure that an embalmed loved one was actually dead and would not be buried alive.
I live under the bridge, in a pile of feces.
X-45 Stats:
Primary Mission: Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD)Length: 27ft
Wingspan: 34ft
Weight: 8,000lbs (empty)
Payload: 3,000lbs
Acquisition Cost: 65% Less than Manned Fighter Aircraft
Maintenance Cost: 75% Less than Current Systems
Timeframe to Deployment: 2007-2010
Unique Qualities: stealth aircraft; wings can be removed; vehicle can be containerized for shipment or storage.
Typical Mission: a typical mission scenario, multiple UCAVs will be equipped with preprogrammed objectives and preliminary targeting information from ground-based mission planners. Operations can then be carried out autonomously, but can also be managed interactively or revised en route by UCAV controllers should new objectives or targeting information dictate.
While I think every reasonable human being agrees that Sept. 11 was a horrible crime of terror, if you take a broader view of things, most foreign policy/military U.S. initiatives since WWII have NOT been about fighting extremism, but rather about expanding America's influence and furthering its own national interests, often to the detriment of other parts of the world.
This has led the U.S. to be one of the few countries to not sign a U.N. declaration banning the use of torture, as well as having the dubious distinction of being the ONLY country to have been both recognized guilty of "unlawful use of force" (which one could argue is tantamount to terrorism) by the World Court AND to have vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law.
The problem is, the U.S. foreign policy game keeps catching up with it: Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, as despicable as they are, were once allies of the U.S., armed and trained by members of its special forces. I think it's time for the U.S. to stop wanting to be one nation above all others, and to become a real, equal partner in the community of nations. That requires renouncing some of the global tactics it has practiced over the past 50 years. One thing it certainly not involves is more hi-tech gadgetry to exert its unilateral will on the rest of the world with less risks to its own armed forces!
And before someone comes along saying that I'm trying to belittle or excuse what happened to the WTC victims: it seems to me that YOU are the ones who are betraying the memory of those innocent victims by using their tragic deaths to further your own political agenda and justify decades of abusive foreign policy. Sept. 11 was a terrible, terrible crime against humanity, but it does not wash away America's own criminal behavior abroad. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Reminder: find a new sig
Give me a break, the "wars" Katz gives as examples (Gulf war and Afghanistan) can hardly be held up as models of modern warfare. One of those wasn't/isn't even a war. We are aiding the Northern Aliance in Afghanistan as others here have pointed out. There is no declaration of war, and the only reason they're calling it a "war" is so Bush can make himself feel important and draw attention from bigger problems here in the US. We have lucked out in the past few decades. Sure, we use a lot of technology to fight our mini-wars in the middle east, why not? I'd hardly say we're at the point of drone warfare. A few remote controlled planes and some satellites will mean absolutely nothing if we ever got into a serious war with a major power (Russia, China, etc.). Where would our modern technology and advanced drones get us then? The loss of human life would be staggering on both sides. The US simply hasn't gone up against someone it's own size in a lot of people's here lifetimes. Katz, you're in for a rude awakening if you think we're all going to be sitting in our recliners watching on TV as color coded drones with color coded laser weapons fight in an imaginary place far from home.
I think this story hints at a bigger underlying issue though that is significant. The view that wars happen in far away places and never really affect us in a negative way seems to be everywhere these days. It's easy to say things like we'll just watch the machhines fight it out on TV because we haven't had our bell rung lately. Even after Sept. 11th we have this false sense of security and invincibility. Kind of the it'll never happen to me syndrome. I worry about our nation being able to defend itself when a real enemy comes knocking. We'll all be so surprised and dumbfounded that they'll roll right over us. Not until we're all looking down the very real barrel of a very real gun will we realize how much all our progress and fantasy "drones" really mean. Maybe then people like Katz will get it.
His usual articles are inaccurate, untimely, and uninteresting.
This was interesting, anyway.
Actually, I'd say that five thousand years of warfare have demonstrated that war is often an extremely effective course of action. Just a handful off the top of my head - William the Conqueror's conquest of England won him the crown, the Russian expansions of the 18th and 19th centuries, pretty much every single war fought by the Romans, Alexander the Great, the list continues....
The whole premise of Mutually Assured Destruction is to make a full-scale war futile - a distinct departure from prior forms of warfare.
- Ed Pichon
I shall not cheese. Cheese is the mindkiller. Cheese is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I hate to point this out .. but the Afghanistan campaign was, in fact, won with a large investment of ground troops. They just weren't American troops. Air power may have been the key to get the Alliance moving, but the war was in fact won by the Alliance, not US airpower.
Display some adaptability.
There is a sacrifice in the fact that the machinery costs a good amount of money. Chances are, the more money put into the machines the better chance they have of winning. In a capatilistic society it poses a large threat. Most people don't like high/new taxes or imports/export taxes on goods they buy/sell just to fund a war that is over something that is kind of meaningless.
i hugged a girl once but that was several years ago.
"Battles by machines"- The classic image of drone wars (as other have pointed out)is machine on machine. There is -no- military power on the planet facing US "drones", even if you would apply that word to UAVs (I, and the military, would not). ...ground troops."- And the examples he sites weren't won. Kosovo is an ongoing police action and people here on slashdot still argue that we should lift the sanctions that were the negotiated end to Desert Storm. And just like Desert storm Enduring freeom -does- have "tremendous numbers" of ground soldiers, just not US ones (a strategy that could yet come back to haunt us).
...Americans," No, read your history. Ike/Nixon lied about body counts (all of the time) and toward the end of Vietnam started getting reporters away from the frontline. This is old hat, and it may be necessary if we accept winning a war as a US goal.
"conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without
"...a very different kind of fight. Early reports suggest..."- "Early reports" means -rumors-. This is a theater of war, information sources are rare or nonexistent. Basing a perspective on "early reports" is silly. "...hard to imagine a conflict more remote to
"technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks with stunningly few U.S. military casualties"- Balderdash. Really, I understand we're all here because we share a fasination with technology but let's still try at to keep a -little- perspective. Our technology, including to a minor degree the spectacularly impressive though hardly drone like UAVs, has helped the militia fighters on the ground win this. But it is those militia, the same infighting badly organized peasants that held the Russian bear at bay for years, that did the early work on the ground (90% of the work on the ground mostly likely) and took the casualties for us. THEY are the ones that did this, not some low bandwidth flying camera platform with two tiny missiles under its wings.
"It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level." Huh? Since when did machine on machine war become "the next level" of Drone War?? That IS drone war, and we aren't there yet. Our cool, tiny little Unmanned planes aren't drones, and to the very limited degree that they can "fight", they're doing it against (backwords and poorly armed) humans, not drones. That is not a "drone war".
"...suggested that wars can't really be won in the conventional sense any longer; even the victors will suffer unacceptable losses." Oh, read a few more of Mr. Keegans books. -Every- war is followed by a small vocal group declaring it to horrific to ever happen again (every one). But remember the Japanese militaries distribution of punji sticks to civilians on the home island (with directions on poisoning them). Remember the fire bombing, the total annihaltion of all life, in Dresden and the ZERO effect that had on the Nazi war machine. Sorry to say it, but War isn't going to end because weapons become more effective. How did this idea of "Drone War" enter the public mind? Popular fiction like Star Wars... and it isn't called "To terrible to contemplate Wars in the Stars so lets hang out with Darth and sing Coombiaya" (no sp, sorry).
"A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea."- Seems to me it's a John Katz idea, even the stylized "war" in star wars shows sacrifice when humans die in waves of damage emanating from the warring drones (wich are after all only proxy humans). There is no war without sacrifice. The US taxpayer will feel the bite of those 4 million dollar cruise missiles (that we're running out of). The Afghani warlords feel it in the blood of their dying comrades.
"Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery?" Because the machinery, just like B52s and B2s, is used to destroy the infrastructure that allows the construction of the machinery. Just like the US bombed the Ruhr Valley in WWII to end German war production (and a damn good plan it was), just like we cluster bombed the runway at Kandahar international airport and went after Al Quaidas communication network. People die when that happens, war -is- horrible, that's why countries don't wage war that isn't critical to their percieved self interest. Thanks for asking ; ) BK425 All of this is my opinion.
This is not a war. This is a dismantling of a band of thugs by an organized modern military. Calling the Afghan side an army is ridiculous - they're a bunch of primitive, tribal, feudal, bearded men riding in Toyota pickups brandishing Kalashinkovs.
Despite this fact, there still are friendly casualties galore. Let's not forget, the U.S. army has been sending in Northern Alliance troops ahead of American troops to suffer the casualties you blissfully believe are non-existant. Indeed, Northern Alliance troops are playing the part of your cherished "remote controlled" drones. There is "substantial human sacrifice" on our side - just not American life.
Yes, America is winning this "war", thankfully, but it is not nearly as clean and antiseptic as you pretend it is.
Seriously, Jon, you seem to believe too much of what you are fed on TV and in the press. The media is so frighteningly sycophantic and uncritical I wouldn't believe anything they say.
I read "Clone Wars" at first...
Now I know he is talking about droning psuedo-writers.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
The point is not the imminence of drones. The point is sensor technology and the ability to know where the other guy is and what he's doing, without revealing yourself.
Think about it. India and Pakistan almost came to blows. When fighting was imminent, both side were drawn up in trenches not all that different from what we saw in 1914 - 1918. Neither side could say for sure where the other guy might be, so both had to do the defense-in-depth thing, with assaults requiring massive amounts of artillery and frontal assaults.
Compare that to the U.S. in Afghanistan. IR cameras. LANTIRN to turn night and clouds into day. Laser designators. Satellites. You know, all that stuff the other side never had. We even had Mullah Omar in the crosshairs, but the commander didn't zap him for fear of legal repercussions.
Special Forces units are now training with robots loaded with sensors. It's cheaper to lose a sensing robot than a person.
In the end, we'll always want to go after people. Even if there are drones on the battlefield, they'll ultimately be getting orders from a person. Target that person and the drones fall dead. How do you target the person? Sensors.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Sigh. SciFi 101, Jon. Drone wars are usually about semi-autonomous machines which a remote controller supervises in large groups, not the current tech which is more of a single operator type.
Now there are things, sort of a BattleTech proxy line of SciFi, where you have Avatars (TM) who represent one person. This could be inferred from the Afghani experiences, but we're really not at that stage yet.
We only just got hellfires on some of the drones this year (been prototyped since last century), and it still needs a team of 2-3 people per machine at this point.
Perhaps at the later stages of The War we'll start to see one-man drones with weapons and armor, but we are not there yet.
[personal aside to Jon - please stop writing about things you know little about - it's very embarrassing to the rest of us here who may know something about these subjects - stick to what you know about, ok?]
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Hey Katz, glad to have to back!
It is definitely NOT true that this was if one-sided in terms of man-power. While there aren't very many Americans and Brits in the field (relatively speaking), there are plenty of native Allied forces, the friendly Afghans themselves. They're doing a lot of the fighting and dying.
And here of course I have to insert the obligatory comment about how Americans think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread, and how the world revolves around them, and how we would all just die at the slightest pretext if America didn't step in to save us all.
The participation of the Northern Allicance and other groups in Afghanistan has been mentioned quite a few times already. They have taken the place of American Soldiers, so to claim that no ground fighters are involved is basically a joke.
.
A total of 3,767 civilian casualties (as of 6th December 2001) is not what I would call an "unconfirmed number of casualties".
But what is basically not mentioned is the huge amount of civilian casualties. Take a look at http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm
The American Media has successfully warped the truth of what is happening in Afghanistan, so as to please the White House and the Pentagon. The numbers of Afghan casualties the American Media mentions showes, that the American Media has basically given up honest reporting and has become little more than an extension of the White House Press section.
At the risk of encouraging a Katz book review, I just thought I'd point out that Michael Ignatieff has an excellent book on these ideas, entitled Virtual War. It's based on the conflict in Kosovo.
As a cover flap says, it was "a war in which US and NATO forces did the fighting but only Kosovars and Serbs did the dying".
Despite the claims of JonKatz, the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan does not disprove the need for infantry. We might not have many ground troops in, but the Northern Alliance has a whole bunch.
What the current conflict does seem to reinforce is that air power vastly increases the effectiveness of infantry. An outnumbered, disorganized force of partisans (the Northern Alliance), was able to establish territorial dominance in a matter of weeks over a mountainous country the size of Texas.
The latter half of the 20th century has demonstrated again and again that air power cannot control territory. The US was unable to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait by applied air power - ground forces were required. Air power alone was not sufficient to stop the deployment of troops in the Yugoslav quagmire. The vast Allied bombing runs in Germany during WWII did not significantly affect production - Krupp produced a continually increasing amount of material throughout the war.
Nor does air power do much to break civilian support for the government in power. Iraq is the first counter-example that comes to mind. In Yugoslavia, support for Milosovich actually increased during the course of the campaign. London, Japan and Germany during WWII are also fine examples - with the exception of Fat Man and Little Boy.
The poor bloody infantry isn't going anywhere. It's all very well and good to speculate on drone warfare - but all we have right now is a limited example of a small number of "drones" being used against a technologically disadvantaged opponent.
- Ed Pichon
I shall not cheese. Cheese is the mindkiller. Cheese is the little death that brings total obliteration.
A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery?
My response to that quote and the rest of the article: what in the hell are you thinking?
A war without sacrifice isn't a war. Your argument for drone warfare is basically the same argument for sport-warfare. Instead of killing each other, why don't we just play a good old game of soccer to settle the conflict? Drones "killing" drones is basically the same thing, except it's like taking your countries to an episode of BattleBots. What happens when one drone army destroys another drone army? The drone army attacks the drone production facilities, then the human army, and then goes after the civilians (unless you surrender.) People will always die in wars, that's the whole point. You fight the war until you realize you can't win because you DON'T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE LEFT to do so.
Oh well, I had a really good argument but I'm sitting here in such disbelief that this actually got posted on Slashdot that I forgot what else I was going to say.
PS - Afghanistan has not been a drone war. There are pilots dropping most of the bombs, and navy seamen firing most of the cruise missiles. Yes, automated machines have been used, but they are nothing without our planes, ships, troops, and most importantly the Northern Alliance soldiers.
~ now you know
No. The most staggering statistic is the one we're not being told: how many people have died on all sides of this war.
"The Taliban and their terrorist friends seem to have been totally unprepared for this variety of war, such a stark contrast to the Soviet's ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan just a decade ago."
au contraire. Every al Qaeda who dies becomes a martyr to inspire those that survive and all thos little Qaedas being trained around the world.
" In the new kind of American war, political leaders ask citizens only to keep shopping and traveling. "
What a crass, cynical attitude but you are correct. To which I would add: And not think about what the suffering of war really means.
"A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea.""
Ridiculous. There have been horrible sacrifices in this war. Countless thousands have died. Countless millions will die of hunger.
And in a drone war, sooner or later one side's robots will be annihilated. Then what? The humans simply surrender without a casualty? I don't think so.
There is a HUGE difference between what we are facing in Afghanistan and what the Soviets faced there. The Soviets were facing an opposition trained and supplied by the USA. The Taliban has no such backing.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I think the actual trend that we're going to see is not one where technology is used to replace the human in armed combat, but to continue to make the individual more effective. As everyone's pointed out, the massed military charges of the World Wars are essentially a thing of the past, mostly due to bigger, better, badder weapons. Today, you can accomplish more with a smaller, more higly trained force of men. That's the trend that's going to continue to develop. Smaller, more specialized forces capable of achieving their objectives quickly and efficiently. Several sci-fi books have been mentioned supporting the 'Drone Wars' theory... but has no one read Starship Troopers? There's just some things that you can't achieve by turning a streatch of land into a sheet of glass.
Insert witty
And Jon also failed to understand the real implications of this War. The real implication is that we moved to the CHEAP phase of combat quickly - that cheaper, faster, better has replaced expensive, powerful, bigger.
War is a combination of strategy, tactics, and applied economics. We can fight a war like this for decades, because we've dropped the cost of operations down to a level where it's cheaper for us to kill them than ever before.
A cruise missile that costs millions is ineffective except in certain conditions. A drone that can fly multiple times and deliver intel, allows us to drop cheap bombs ($2500 instead of $125,000) that are more accurate on positions where they cause more damage.
That is the implication of this war. And that is why we will WIN. And we're only about one-quarter done (maybe one-third at most), and are now in the island hopping phase (we just fought Midway after Pearl Harbor).
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I suppose this shows how "geeky" I am...
It was an original series episode. In the episode, the Enterprise got caught in one of the "calculated" disintegrator beams.
The laws of the planet demanded that the entire crew of the Enterprise beam down to the planet and have themselves put into a disintegration chamber. Kirk, Spock and I believe McCoy were planetside.
The episode ended when Kirk destroyed the "Master" Computer that did the calculations in an effort to show both races how terrible was really was. Aparently, this was to cause both sides to start using real weapons.
Anyway, that is the gist of the story. I wish I wish I could recall the episode name... Of course, someone more "geeky" than me will show me up on that one...
Hehehehe...
--
.sig seperator
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Actually,
I like the book "Forever Peace", by Joe Haldeman the best. Remote control "soldier boy" super robots controlled by nuerally "jacked in" people (i.e., brain shunt, think of computer hook up to brain from back of neck, sort of Ender's Game style). Complete immersion of reality for the person jacked in, except with incredible power. Joe Haldeman isn't a hack writer either, he's won a Hugo, and is considered more or less one of the SF Masters. It's full of insight in to the human condition, and war. Great read if you are interested in the morality of remote control war.
To give you some flavor: The main character is a physicist on his off hours when he isn't jacked in. He finds evidence of something that may kill everybody, but is not sure he wants to do anything about it, because he is sometimes desperately suicidal. He has to deal with his own will to survive, the taking of other's lives, love, and the guilt of killing and death.
Now go read it!
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
Closest I can imagine is 1984, but it's never really made clear if there actually IS a war going on or if it was a pure propaganda stunt. That's part of the magic of that book.
Which, BTW, would make a MUCH more interesting article than the usual Katz tripe.
Some of the nastier nerve agents are effectively gaseous, but work on skin absorption. Or so they told us in the military, anyway, in great detail. The exact phrase, as I recall, is "micro fine droplets suspended in air". If Nerve Gas can work this way, and gas masks become common, it's pretty much certain that someone will develop this sort of thing for an anti-riot agent. A gaseous laxative comes to mind as an especially effective idea. . .
Deconstructing Katz
Says all that needs to be said.
I think with a country like the US, more armed conflicts can be a good thing. Around the begining of the Gulf War, people were saying they didn't want another Hitler. Hitler made lots of attacks and no one stopped him because they were sick of WWI. If we had drones to fight the war, he would have been stopped right away and WWII wouldn't have happened.
How are these even remotely comparable? In WW2, before America joined the war, the English were in real danger of losing! Germany was bombing London (remotely, I might add, using the V2 rocket), civilians were dying, and every last bit of effort was required just to hold off the German forces. Churchill was trying to mobilize the entire country in the face of the very real threat of invasion.
In Afghanistan, it couldn't be more different. At no time were US citizens EVER threatened by the Taliban or other Afghan military forces. The overwhelmingly superior US military + allies simply waltzed in and bombed the crap out of them. The cost of the campaign was small change compared to the US GDP. THAT's why no sacrifices were required by US citizens! It had absolutely nothing to do with the technology involved.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Wait till I create and assimilate
I will create my BORG DRONES!!!!!!!
YAAHAAHA!
My borg cubes will destroy you!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
Actually, there is no economic inidcators that a large, or even full-scale war helps the economy. For every time that, after/during a war, the economy improves there is one where the economy got worse. From little (Mexican/American war) to big (World War 2) we've had economic difficulties immediately during and after a war.
With an all "drone" war, the costs would go up even more. But we'll still HAVE to have casualties, because the point of a war is to say "If you don't do what we say, we'll kill you." Without that threat there's no point in waging war.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Jon Katz most be a General by now!
After WWII, the US Army was seriously cut back, as we tend to do, with the thought that should a war ever need be fought, you'd use the Air Force to nuke the place that needed nuking, and then a few soldiers would march in with rad suits to plant the flag. Then came the Korean conflict, and we knew that this wouldn't work.
The drones are useful as part of a whole strategy. But you need other information sources (Special Forces, allied forces, etc.) to tell you if what you are seeing is a target or not. We're not in the Age of Intelligent Machines yet.
quote: Military historians like John Keegan have recently argued that the devastating toll of warfare
as
quote: Military historians like John Keegan have recently argued that the devastating troll of warfare
I started giggling and had to reread it just to make sure. Sure it's about as amusing as a beavis and butthead "He said penis" joke, sorry mods I kinda thought it was funny. I hope you do too.
It is FUNNY that CNN does NOT report the CASUALTIES on the Afghan side through the
DEATH FROM ABOVE policy. Imagine the frustration
of fighting a faceless enemy. I mean,
its almost as frustrating as fighting
a government's foreign policy. Who do you blame?
Who do you strike back against?
Funny, watching CNN a middle east analyst said
exactly that in response to the "Why do they hate us?" question. Unfortunately the reporter discounted the argument that a depressed, oppressed, repressed people will fight against a faceless enemy by attaching the only face they can: civilian population that supposedly is the source of economic and political Macht in a democracy.
Only a select few (those with resources) have the ability for fight
a drone war, and the consequence will be
terrorism. War on terrorism. Laughable.
Terrorism is an effect, not a cause.
What a horrible situation where a civilian population is ignorant
and isolated from the policy and the
true cost/consequence of war...
The war on Terrorism is a war against ourselves. Scary thought.
Please discount and flame on.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
This article is the most thoughtless piece of writing I've come across in a long time. I don't think that there is a single well thought out point in it, so I'm not going to bother to refute any of it. If this article makes any sense to you, then you need to buff up your critical thinking matrix at bit.
If the subject matter wasn't so serious I wouldn't have even bothered to post this comment. Combat, and war, deserve a maturity of thought that this person doesn't seem to be capable of.
The reason that the US has not needed to have so many ground troops is because it was relying on a proxy army.
What exactly, Mr. Katz, would you consider the Northern Alliance to be if not Ground Troops?
"A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery? War has recently seemed so terrible that civilized societies view it as a last resort. But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible."
If that's the case, then the only targets worth fighting will be stationary civilian ones.
International wars might be waged on the level of terrorism- not truly declared, just a fleet of drones that will fly in one night, decimate a city, with responsibility taken in the morning.
This, however, is only the worst case scenario, and assumes that the military as we know it will be weakened. But this seems to be what you're suggesting- if we fight with only drones, other drones will not be our targets.
Other people will.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
In regards to military weapontry, it takes MORE money to difuse expired weapons then it does to use them...now how long they last, or how long we have given them "shelf-lifes" is the question. I am sure they they last quite long, but probably there are some risks involved with the age...
Walk with Music;
Remember: how is the way paid for? Tax money. Where does that tax money come from? Those same people who are building the bombs and the tanks. So while you may have a job because of a war, you are also paying more taxes because of it. It falsely boosts production figures without leading to any real increase in wealth.
Sure, a company like General Dynamics might thrive in wartime but other companies will find a starvation of capital and demand which makes it difficult for them to operate. Furthermore, an extended conflict drains resources and thus make those resources more expensive (unless the war is stealing more resources to offset).
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Yes, the American military is kicking royal butt in Afghanistan - assisted on the ground by the Northern Coalition, who no doubt are taking more than a couple of casualties themselves.
It is a basic tenent of warfare - you can bomb the living crap out of someone for six months, but eventually you have to go in, dig the survivors out, and put them to the sword/bayonet.
Look at Stalingrad in WWII - the Germans had overwhelming air superiority, but got their butts kicked when they went in. That's not going to happen here, in all likelihood (for one thing, a good percentage of the population happens to want to be "liberated"), but the same arguments John is trying to use here could have been used there to show why the Germans absolutely would win the seige (which, for those of you who are rusty on history, they did not).
War is the adult version of kids on the playground hitting each other until one is forced to cry "Uncle!" and give in. It is complicated by the desire to keep others from joining in, maintaining agreements to restrain yourself appropriately, and the need to keep one's own side in acceptance of actions taken.
But the central premise of war remains making the other side give in to overwhelming pain first. (Ceasing to resist through having died is an acceptable form of giving in.) While it is natural to attempt to avoid taking any pain, it will only be in one-sided conflicts that this happens. Between equals war will inevitably lead to both sides suffering intensely, where suffering is substantially more meaningful than what couch potatos think of as suffering.
I have always been mildly impressed by reading Katz. But between this and the "buried C64 and baywatch tapes" from the last time he opened his mouth make me think that maybe a "war time" Katz is crazy and needs medication.
A robotic war this is not. For one thing the opposition's most advanced weaponry on the table is the land mine and AK47. In addition to the fact that the Northen Allience robots...errr...soldiers are doing most of the dirty work. All we are doing is dropping bombs uncontested -- and sending small groups of people in to point out the targets of oppurtunity -- and try not to step on any landmines. (Does not look like the Taliban had to many SAM's stockpiled.) Don't get me wrong -- I love my country, and respect each and every soldier who goes into harms way for America....But the bottom line is that this is not a very formidible foe -- and chances are we will leave the third world with more friendly fire and accidental casulties than anything.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Two things:
1) Technology as an aide to fighting war (it is still a manmade event), especially if keeps our soldiers further out of harms way while accomplishing their vital mission, is just fine by me. We are not to the technological point of development in AI where we need worry yet about the power of these weapons should they turn on us.
He with the bigger stick wins.
2) To all the social moralists, liberal trash, and "stoopid" heads who bemoan the fall of civilization and their ilogical understanding of democracy... bite me and all of the average joe, hardworking, not as dumb as you would like to fool yourself into thinking, people of the world. I don't think i have seen such a river of revolting, libertarian-socialistic trash in my life.
"Guns don't kill, people do"
The fact that America achieved her objectives with little loss of American life is meaningless in this context for a few simple reasons. American objectives were simply to eliminate the Taliban & Al Quaeda's abilities to carry out terrorism. Not neccessarily to "liberate" the Afghani people. It happened that in this instance this goal dove-tailed nicely with the goals of certain Afghani parties whose ambitions were to remove the Taliban from power and institute a new state - so supporting those forces in achieving their goals was the simplest and most effective way of achieving the American goals.
Very true, just as it is true that neither the current regime in Afghanistan or Pakistan are truly our allies. In fact, they're most likely where many terrorists will come from, regardless of the nice words we say on TV.
Mostly however it was because America was fighting by proxy. There was little need for large numbers of ground troops to be deployed because the local forces were already in place and familiar with the landscape and the methods of fighting in this region. Also the political consequences both at home and in the eyes of other Muslim nations of a large-scale American invasion were prohibitive. So using somebody else to do the grunt-work of the war made both good political and military sense
And this is the trap we in the USA find ourselves in, far too often. It looks good on paper to have others fight our wars and be mercenaries. But the blowback is huge. It is only thru sacrifice of our own, thru our own casualties (if you will), that we learn the horror of war, and understand what we do.
For when we train a man to kill, he can use that skill to kill others we are friends with, or even use it against us. As happened with our proxies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For it is mostly our proxies that seek to kill us.
The saving grace in this War is that we have partially learned this lesson. We now take the risks to our own lives, and suffer small casualties, and thus understand what we risk. And this makes us better - for it is not drones that have died, our honored dead; it is our soldiers and our spies that die and are buried for their service to our country.
And on TV we hear of the loss of these families, and we understand that this is truly War, not some video game.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Kate, did you watch Gundam Wing?! This show already featured automated fighters known as Mobile Dolls LONG BEFORE 20th century had ended.
Another proof of how incompetent slashdot editors are.
> , such a stark contrast to the Soviet's ill-
> fated invasion of Afghanistan just a decade ago.
The soviets had to go against ALL of a united and pissed off Afghanistan that was given weaponry and supplies by anti-soviet powerhouses such as the USA. That is a bit different than ALL of the world going in against a poorly armed and supplied Taliban sect -- that not only had isolated itself from and pissed of many of the population -- but also had managed to get a big section to take up arms against them (the Northern Allience.) Much different Katz.....Sorry
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
There are plenty of human casualties in the Afghan conflict -- though few among Americans -- but the fight seems especially significant in terms of technology and military conflict.
The most staggering statistic out of Afghanistan might be that the first American combat casualty died nearly three months into the "war."
You're ignoring the first battle in the war against terrorism: the terrorism itself. 5000 Americans died. I don't know what numerical system you're using, but that's not "few."
Plus, you act as if this is some of MechWarrior, bots vs. bots. It's not. It's bots vs. people, bots. vs buildings, bots vs. camps. It bears no relation to the sci-fi bot wars of the 'future'. Real people are dying. Many of them, every day. Much more than we believe, actually. The U.S. press isn't publishing the numbers, but the foreign press is. It's high.
Early reports suggest the civilian casualties may be lower than in any other large-scale military operation in modern history.
Don't be suprised when, 8, 15, 45 years from now the real figures come out.
But drone warfare radically alters the equation. Technologically advanced civilian populations --
just as Orwell foresaw -- can send their technological surrogates off to battle one another while humans stay home to wait for the outcome.
This is the purest bunk. If this could work, then why don't we just let the olympics determine territorial disputes? Tie the pole-vault directly to trade embargoes? It's because we have the ability to do more damage to one another that throwing javalins. Consider this:
Two futuristic countries go to war over a continent. For months the sound of exploding drones can be heard over the horizen, as the citizens comfortably go about their business, purchasing copy-protected cds. Then, one day, the war ends. Country A has won. Country A rejoices. But alas! Country B decides they don't want to have won and send over their drones to decimate the population of Country A. You, no one is going to attack meaningless drones if they can just as easily go for meaningful population centres. I'm beginning to understand what all the complaints about JonKatz's ill-thought out posts are about.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
Many of the robot builders really dislike this proven stratedgy saying that it's too easy and prefer to try bludgen their opponents instead. Those builders generally lose.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
..in that, like the B-movie of the same name, I'm not seeing much cool footage of robots duking it out.
And the Taliban ran out of robots fairly quick. I don't count Mr. Walker as a robot.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible.
Mechanized war will never ever stop human casualties, it will only make things worst. Who the hell do you think would manufacture, design, and operate these piece of machinery. Humans! So how do you stop an enemy nation from sending legions of robots to your door? You kill the humans that manufacture, design and operate them.
Meaning what ? Meaning a drone war would probably be the most vicious type of war ever practice on the face of this planet. Civilians would become the primary targets!!!!!! Not some stupid single robot in some warfield.
Add to this that we would probably consume the earth's ressources 100 times faster to feed the battle grounds, which we would not even care about anymore. The only winner would be the last robot standing. Truly this looks a LOT LIKE A CERTAIN T2 movie...
The only worthwhile war ( If that truly exists ) is the one involving a battle field of humans with swords, shields and basic weaponry. This way you get to see who is really the best fighters. Ok it's gory, there is blood everywhere, and it may look more violent than just a guy pushing a little red button to drop a nuke, but IT DOESN'T KILL MILLIONS OF INNOCENTS. ( Obviously nuking hiroshima was a great technological advance that probably killed more innocents than the crusades did.)
Believe me my friends, technology has only made war worst. The idea that technological war would be better could have only come from a really fuckin dumb ass!.
Now i understand why many people hate Kats! He's an idiot. End of Story.
The pen is stronger than the sword...
A major factor in Afghanistan is that we have been lucky in having the rebels do most of the leg-work for us. They're the ones who have been putting themselves at risk. We haven't even put many of our troops in harms way. It would be a much different picture if there were no ground troops fighting on our side. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, all we can do is speculate as to how it would turn out if all we used was mechanicals.
And for that, if we were fighting a war using mechanicals, and it was our mechanicals against theirs, what would make me want to surrender? I've lost too many droids, I quit? I think a big factor in getting leaders to give up is that they can see their people dying. If they aren't dying, where does the motivation come from? Economic considerations would take over. Then it would be like a Magic CCG. I spent more money on cards, so I win! I spent more on mechanical troops/weapons, I win! I hate to say this, but I think I actually prefer man-to-man combat.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
It is disengenuous to say that the Afghanistan conflict was won without the use of ground troops, as the Northern Alliance did, in fact, fight on the ground and take territory and casualties.
While the development of arial drones capable of being directed to fire at ground targets is an interesting development how long before this extends to tank warefare?
:)
I understand current US military training includes the use of tank simulators. How long before the simulator is linked to a tank on the ground?
One could certainly see human beings fighting beside or being supported by such remotely operated planes and tanks in the forseeable future.
The days of the infantry being replaced by autonomous bots is far off - if ever. This doesn't mean they don't have a significant contribution to make to modern warefare.
Satellite controlled cruise missles are one thing for fixed ground targets. Mobile targets such as tanks, planes and human targets demand a different response. A remote operated drone (air or ground) has the advantage that it can can react with human ingeniuty to fluid battlefield conditions without risking the investment in the operator.
For example could not the role of tank-killer perf
ormed by the Apache and A10 in the gulf war be soon supplanted by a remote control drone? We're not at this point yet - the predator itself is too primtive.
There are still significant technological challenges. How do you handle network latency, network security, enemy interfence (ie. jamming) etc.
I'd hate to see a billion dollars fall out of the air because of a million dollar jamming device
America suffered over 5000 casualties before firing a shot.
I think the fact that this war is being fought, on our side, with powerful technology, is somewhat poetic.
I suppose John Katz uses the Simpsons as his main war guide of the 21st century:
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall
mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is
clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
-- Military school Commandant's graduation address, "The Secret War of
Lisa Simpson"
You can't handle the truth.
Robotic weaponry is better in the long run. Because, now while we're friends with the Northern Alliance we can give them the smart weapons. But then, ten years down the line when they're our enemy and using the weapons against us, we can dial in and reprogram the robots to kill THEM.
The reason that this war looks so different than previous wars is only peripherally because of drones and remote warfare. This is a prime example of asymmetrical warfare in its extreme.
In the past, until very recently, any two opponents met with similar capabilities. There were examples of industrial forces meeting iron age or stone age forces (like the American westwards expansion), which were certainly not fun for the less well-equipped force. Normally, though, forces in conflict would have very similar equipment. Take, for example, Panama, where the US massively outnumbered the Panamanians and quickly crushed them. Still, the weaponry was similar. US guided weapons technology was not as well advanced, and the fight was largely an infantry fight, with small amounts of armor, and some specialized air support (like AC-130 Spectres).
The difference here is that the US has a capability that does not exist in any other country in the world. We have not only unmanned aerial recon platforms and satellites, but also laser designators and laser-guided bombs, camera-guided missiles, satellite guided bombs, night-vision gear and the like. Each capability fills in a niche that others don't cover, with a huge amount of overlap. Each multiplies the capabilities of the force. In the end, the multiplier is so large that you get staggering results, like the Gulf War, Somalia, and Afghanistan.
The combination of usage of proxy forces on the ground with small amounts of US, British and similar special forces to bring in all of the US capabilities for warfighting, means that the US has the capability to deliver devastating force with few US casualties.
It's good to be American, really.
Of course, we also have to be mindful of the other side of asymmetrical warfare. The lower-technology force is not ipso facto stupid, and there have been examples of successful attacks (such as 9/11) and even whole wars (Afghanistan) carried out by technologically inferior and outnumbered forces. This means that intelligence and ruthlessness are needed to prevent attacks on the civilian populace. In the past, the civilian populace couldn't be attacked until you got through the military. That is no longer the case.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
The Predator is just a remote controlled, flying camera and missle launcher. There's a person on the other end controlling everything, flying the Predator and launching the weapon. This is a drone? Hardly. Cute article, even if they didn't research what they're talking about. Now, if someone would create a true, sentient, BOLO tank...
This is similar to the development of new crowd-control technology for at uppity people at home. If you pull out the machine guns and kill a bunch of protestors in America, there are serious political repercusions. On the other hand, if you can control and apprehend people without killing them, you achieve your aims without many negative consequences. Americans generally don't like government policies that get Americans killed.
Expect to see "terrorists" popping up in every little country that has something the powers-that-be want but little chance of defending themselves.
Bush sure was lucky to get his very own Reichstag fire...
We're being decieved on many levels as to what the situation really is. We're letting our pawns manipulate us, and if we're not careful, we'll end up at the bottom of a very big pile of problems, all of our own making.
--Mike--
Certainly there is some faction here that finds Katz's post more interesting than his unpopularity? Our collective imaginations are captured by these great writers and they do influence the future scientists and politicians. There is no doubt that what is being worked towards in most tech fields is an AI that allows us the choice between human or machine involvement in war. These recent conflicts do have hints of the future. If nothing else it begs our talented writers of today to dream up less violent futures.
...the drones go to the other countries civilian population and wipe it out. Other than saving a few more soldiers' lives, what's the difference from today's warfare?
The biggest preventer of this is cost. Creating a sufficiently 'smart' drone would be enormously costly. And there is no way that we'd use remote control drones, since you could lose communication easily or someone one could breech whatever security it had and take over control.
This is a (bad) dream that won't be even remotely thinkable for a century or more.
...we lose the motivation to end it.
There is an original Star Trek episode that discusses this very topic -- A Taste of Armageddon.
News Bulletin: Rome, Italy .NET website. It's a good thing they were so complete because the enemy hit the same software opportunity as us. They couldn't stop it though and they lost all but one of their drones.
Allied forces suffered a serious setback today as an unexpected software opportunity caused the Fifth Armored Drone Division to target each other as opposed to the enemy. By the time he could stop the effort Colonel Alex "DarthMaulGuy" Smith, a sixteen year old Miami resident, was only able to save thirty drones.
"I would have saved more but my Mom kept calling me for dinner."
The President, Ronald Reagan (son of the late President of the same name), said "It would have been a disaster except the Chinese-India-Somalia coalition downloaded the plans for the drones from Microsoft's
General Smith, Promoted, said of this, "The Somalians asked me to fix it but Mom made Strawberry Shortcake."
Bill Gates had to say this from his Island Compound of Australia, "Gooday Mate, Yes Microsoft is very concerned about security but if we had plugged the hole the Chinese used then they would have had to develop all this crap themselves. Who knows maybe there stuff would have worked better."
Now back to our regularly scheduled news show on CNN with Britney Spears
She's Sexy, she's cute, and, oh yeah, she's got a little bit of a brain.
Beware the wood elf!!!
This isn't quite true. Convential and modern wisdom still hold that you can't win a war with out ground troops. Though air power can be quite benificial and powerful without troops to hold the ground/capture it, war cannot be won. What of Afgahnistan? Well, we have forgotten about the Northern Alliance and Eastern Alliance. Both deployed substantial ground troops and lost substantial numbers of ground troops to win the war in Afgahnistan.
Nice technological demonstration, here.. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/14/014620 4&mode=thread
..don't panic
If "drone weapons" are the military future of technologically advanced countries, is it not the case that these technologically advanced countries become more sensitive to casualties in combat? Fewer and fewer human combatants are placed in harm's way, but when one of them succumbs to the dangers of the battlefield, a media machine swings into action, informing non-combatant citizens of the names, ages, genders, parents, children, high schools and soccer coaches of the newly deceased. When it's over, it's like we (the non-combatants) have lost a neighbor, rather than hearing a statistic from a distant conflict. The effect of the death of a single soldier on the public psyche is magnified significantly.
(It is not the intent of these comments to diminish the sacrifice made by an individual for his or her country, allegience or ideology, but rather to reflect upon how the rarity of such events in a modern military conflict makes them all the more poignant.)
And the sword has yet a third edge: "developing nations" cannot hope to match the power and precision of a highly advanced military. It is strategically sensible to take the battle off the battlefield, and strike in unorthodox ways, against unorthodox targets.
These unorthodox strikes are all the more shocking and outrageous, both for their unorthodoxy, and probably because of the increased value placed on individual lives by the technologically advanced power.
--
SPOOOON!
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
Congress had a bill up for debate to declare war. It died without passing. Instead, specifically and with a clear understanding of the difference, Congress passed a resolution authorizing the President to use armed forces against a particular enemy and passed funding bills. It's not the same in the eyes of the Congress, and it's not the same in my eyes. Your point would have been valid if that previous bill hadn't come up. Of interest we also have two bills up basically offering to pay any bounty hunters that want to go kill Osama bin Laden for us.
Here is what passed:
S.J.Res.23
One Hundred Seventh Congress
of the
United States of America
AT THE FIRST SESSION
Begun and held at the City of Washington on Wednesday, the third day of January, two thousand and one
Joint Resolution
To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.
Whereas, on September 11, 2001, acts of treacherous violence were committed against the United States and its citizens; and
Whereas, such acts render it both necessary and appropriate that the United States exercise its rights to self-defense and to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad; and
Whereas, in light of the threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by these grave acts of violence; and
Whereas, such acts continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States; and
Whereas, the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the `Authorization for Use of Military Force'.
SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
(b) War Powers Resolution Requirements-
(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS- Nothing in this resolution supercedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.
Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Vice President of the United States and
President of the Senate.
There are two more bills that seems to be stuck in committee:
H.R. 3074 --Air Piracy Reprisal and Capture Act of 2001 will update federal statutes to recognize acts of piracy beyond the high seas by including the skies; update punishment for piracy to allow death penalty.
H.R. 3076 -- September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001 will grant President Bush the authority to issue letters of marque and reprisal to capture, alive or dead, Osama bin Laden and the others responsible for the September 11 attacks.
It will give President Bush the option, if he chooses, but does not require the use of this weapon of war.
Katz claims that Wells had something to say about this drone warfare thing, but I sure can't think of any such story. Can anyone help me out here, or is it just the usual genius of Gen. Katz?
All that has happened is that the US used it's airpower amd smart (accurate) weapons as artillery in support of allience ground forces.
As the US has massive capability here they were able to substitute air power for the "queen of battle" artillery. The allience forces were able to advance from their stalemate at Mazar because the US blasted the Taliban defence to bits.
At this point the Taliban saw the writing on the wall and began a tactical withdrawl that has kept about 70% - 80% of their forces from capture and destruction.
The taliban is probably strong enough to take Afghanistan back and this is what now faces that moron Bush.
;)
Katz is a moron too
CC
The assertion that we prosecuted this war without ground troops is flatly wrong.
In our case, they were called "Allies". I don't mean to diminish the contribution of our special and aerial forces, they clearly tipped the scale from a multi-year stalemate to a decisive victory. Yet our airstrikes would not have been effective without the forward observers in the special forces. In turn, they could not have held positions near the front without protection from opposing infantry. Time and again, history has proven that the only sure protection from an infantry assault is more infantry.
To use this campaign as evidence that technology has made infantry irrelevant is just as absurd now as it has been every other time someone claimed it.
The role of the infantryman is going to be important in any ground action. I don't entirely discount the possibility of an artificial infantryman someday, but we aren't there yet.
As for war becoming painless when drones fight, I doubt it. Even if the battlefront is completely composed of opposing drone-swarms, the concept of strategic deterrence still holds. Absent impervious air-defense, the option to directly attack the opposing civilian population is still available. Such punishment of enemy civilians will continue to be at least as horrific in the future as it was in the days of "Bomber" Harris, General Sherman, or Atilla the Hun.
War is hell, and thus it will remain.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
There was a Kurt Vonnegut short story, if I remember correctly, where man-steered missles are used. That is, a human being sits inside the missle and directs its path to the target. Supposedly computers were worth too much to lose one to aid the missle's navigation, so men were used instead.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Let us take a trip through the odd world of Katz, which bears little resemblance to common consensus reality:
The most staggering statistic out of Afghanistan might be that the first American combat casualty died nearly three months into the "war."
Not being a paranoid, but the Pentagon has on occasion been known to lie about who died and when and when it starts operations on the ground (or even that such operations exist). I feel reasonably certain that, current claims to the contrary, allied Special Ops forces were conducting some business in-theatre before the dates the Pentagon has admitted. It wouldn't surprise me if there were casualties in this time, but a real dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin press officer might consider these "not part of the war on terrorism". They'd be just as dead though.
Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops.
This part remains true after Afghanistan, otherwise explain to me what the US SF and Marines and soon the Airborne will be doing there?
The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight. Early reports suggest the civilian casualties may be lower than in any other large-scale military operation in modern history.
You don't think this could have to do with the fact that the most militarily potent nation in the world (Thank God for that too) is making war on one of the the most abused and battered backwater nations? Or perhaps the fact this is the first large scale war that does not really occur between two state entities - rather between a state and an NGO (Al-Queda)? Yes, the US has removed the Taliban regime, but they held power only by virtue of factionalism and the weakness of their enemies. But in any case, the war was not a general war on a state, so far more surgical strikes and fighting in far more remote areas were likely (terrain of Afghanistan helps here). So civilian casualties could be expected to be lighter. If I ran a war in backwoods Montana, not many civilians would likely be killed either.
Although dangerous and complex for the military on the scene, it's hard to imagine a conflict more remote to the majority of Americans, asked to go about their business as usual.
The conflict isn't remote to anyone who has a friend, family member, or co-worker over there on active duty. I don't think this campaign is as remote to the average American as several other dustups the US has fought in the past 20 years.
Orwell's "Drone Wars" come very much to mind here. So does Sir Arthur Clarke's machine warfare and AI military stories. A handful of human soldiers guide and direct the increasingly sophisticated technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks
Says who? So far, only the Pentagon pretty much. These are the same guys that claimed they were destroying lots of Scuds in the Gulf, then recanted years later very quietly on those figures. I don't suppose they are having _no_ impact, and the greatest impact on an NGO terrorist organization is to remove its state sponsor, so in that sense, there has been an impact. But whether Al-Queda is crippled by military action or by worldwide law enforcement and intelligence actions will probably be debatable and impossible to sort out.
with stunningly few U.S. military casualties and American civilian casualties beyond September 11 and the anthrax attacks.
This, while true, is also part of the grand problem. The fact that Katz doesn't mention all the ground fighting done by the Northern Alliance and all of their casualties and the fact he only cares about US casualties is symptomatic of the attitudes that helped bring us to the horror of Sept. 11th.
It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.
Hello, Americo-centric viewpoint! Pakistan and I believe Israel (from that part of the world) use RPVs. Australia has them. Canada and Germany do too. Canada did some of the pioneering work in this area. RPVs have been in use since the 1970s in one form or another. The newer generation are an incremental step forward and they are starting to mount effectual weapons systems, but it is hardly a whole new technology invented by America.
brutish wars of the 20th Century have rendered both objectives hard to attain.
Not to mention that acquiring land isn't that useful anymore from an economic point of view unless it is easily defensible and sitting on key resources!
Technologically advanced civilian populations -- just as Orwell foresaw -- can send their technological surrogates off to battle one another while humans stay home to wait for the outcome.
This is possibly the most idiotic thing I've heard yet! Did the US lay a beat-down on Al-Queda without on-ground HUMINT and FAC/FAO? No. Did they lay a beat-down on them without Spec Ops and Marine raiders doing cordon and sweep ops and Pakistani border gaurds? No. Did they change the geopolitics of Afghanistan without the Northern Alliance and a stabilization force of INFANTRY not DRONES? No. Afghanistan is a total force effort. We won't know bombing results for five years (when the Pentagon and independent military specialists have had a chance to make sense of the effects of their strikes or lack thereof and where the incentive to give an upbeat report regardless of actual outcomes is removed). But one way or another, it wasn't won by drones without human casualties. And civilians hit by B-52 strikes are dead even if the bombs are smart...
A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea.
No, sadly not. This kind of idiotic view of war was what lead to WW1 (We'll be home by Xmas!) and to a number of lesser conflicts. This is definitely not a new idea. But then, those who cannot remember there past.... err... what was the rest of that?
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Interesting idea, but not quite. This is essentially nothing more than a good old fashioned mercenary war. The Northern alliance is our toady, and We're just standing behind them, striking from outside of the enemy's reach. If the Northern Alliance hadn't been there, we would have needed to send in ground troops. Let me spell it out:
Desert Storm: enemy decimated by air, but only ground troops were effective at taking territory. More than 10 years of bombardment later proves it.
Kosovo: Yeah we dropped a lot of bombs on Serbia, and they gave up. Just ask a Serbian, however, and he will tell you that the economic sanctions (that were also observed by Serbia's neighbors) were far more devestating.
Afghanistan: Special forces troops on the ground gather intelligence and target the drops. Territory is only taken when the Northern Alliance moves out.
Machines have a physical advantage: more durable, more disposable, etc. Machines are still light years behind the human brain in flexibility, however, and though more mechanization in warfare is inevitable (Robotech or Battletech anyone?), It's going to be a very long time before humans are outright replaced.
Wait, are you saying the Northern Alliance are human?!?! I thought they were our robotic drones!
What about those drone palistinian suicide bombers that the PLO stamps out?
The only difference between a man and a machine to a nation state or religion is that the man is worth less.
...a Jon Katz article!!
I feel sorry for the editors. Maybe they should just auto-deny every submission for the rest of the day, I'm sure the trolls are relentless right now.
GG Katz!!!!!
Just put JonKatz and Fidel Castro in the same room. See who can stop talking first.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Prior to the Taliban's colapse, the American media generally over-estimated the Taliban's competence and under-estimated that of the opposition forces. We assumed that they would be able to hold against the Northern Alliance, despite our bombings, and that we'd have to do the job ourselves. That's where the view of massive deployment of troops was put into our minds.
We've seen advances in arial warfare technology, sure, but there has still not been an instance of air-power dislodging a determined enemy from the ground he holds. In "Into the Storm", Tom Clancy quotes a Iraqi tank officer, saying that his unit still had the majority of their tanks even after the air assault. It wasn't until they engaged American tanks that their unit was destroyed. The situtation has not changed much since then, as it was a Northern Alliance offensive, not American bombings, that eventually dislodged Taliban positions. We were lucky to be fighting in a nation that was in the midst of a civil war, and we could rely on one of the sides to do the ground work.
Our success, our lack of casualities, is often mistaken as a result of our military technology. In Desert Storm, the Iraqi's had military technology on par with us: advanced Soviet tanks, artillery, aircraft, missle-defenses. It was superior training and planning that won that war. We had been planning for a decade how to defeat Soviet military tactics (which Iraq implemented), and Desert Storm is the public vindication of those plans. In Afghanistan, they had shown that they could hurt a sophisticated opponent. Technology does not account for our dramatic success there either. There might come a day when our lack of casualities is a result of "drones", but it is not here yet. For now, our armed forces are still very human and in the end, it's still the troops that win the war.
Just in case you forgot, there were thousands of ground troops involved in the war. The Northern Alliance drove the Taliban out on the GROUND with a great deal of support from american air power.
It may have been a 'viedo game' war for most ameican's, but it was a pretty normal war for the locals.
I can imagine the Drone War. On one side, Jon Katz, Slashdot Resident Gasbag droning on about corporate mega-opoly in the post-Columbine era, and in the other side, George Lucas, and his plethora of new Star Wars movies to bore you to death. But just like any other war, no matter who wins, we all lose.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Every time I hear people talk about how robots will "keep soldiers safe" I feel sick. We're killing people. Just because they're not American doesn't mean their lives are worth less (or more). Of the 20 odd million people in Afghanistan, only a few thousand (or tens of thousands) actually support the taliban and their attacks on other societies. The other 19,0xx,xxx people are just trying to get by, to live their lives.
Killing people is wrong, unconditionally. The sooner the US stops attacking countries (through direct action or selling weapons or fighting the drug war), the sooner they'll stop attacking us.
I love to read JonKatz's writings. Very clever, entertaining, and also very accurate. Now if he could only not be so mean to good movies when he reviews them!
Wouldnt it be cheaper and easier to just kill the people controlling the drone? Im assuming it takes a good bit of specialized training and all to operate one. All you have to do is find the little tractor trailer and any idiot with a grenade or even a piece of wire can do it. And the whole point of war i feel is changing. It used to be about killing as many of the other side's men as possible. Nowadays you have more of an economic/political aspect of war where its not necessarily who kills the most, as who cripples the others economy and lamblasts their government with PR and other political upheaval.
I wish john katz was dead
1) And after that you call a guy sitting in WTC and designing a military drone with AI "an innocent civilian". Taliban figther sure doesn't see it that way.
2) Old eye for eye comment: you can flatten all 2+ store buildings, set puppet goverment and do manhunt, but what do you do with with a guy who lost the last reason to live (a child, wife, loved one) due to american bomb? Or due to the american-supported tribe from the north? Well, the right solution is to kill them all, of course.
3) For some reason, an opinion of US citizen which has a military drone at his/her service have a lof bigger weigth than an opininon of an average human from planet Earth. Somehow people don't like this.
4) When this technology will be mature enough, one guy (or dozen) can "go crazy" and decide that they do not want democracy in the US anymore. It will be very difficult to object to this having laser beam on your back. Technological advance for people service, right!
You said: "Nearly half the population of Israel is Palestinian. How much voting power do those folks have? Nearly zero."
More like 1/6 the population of Israel is Arab. They vote. They have representatives in the Kenesset (some of whom bastardize their position by calling for Israel's destruction, but that's my opinion). It's not a perfect situation by far (social and economic discrimination), but they're better-off than 99% of the "Arab" world and can work to change things PEACFULLY. Those who chose to riot last year are getting what they deserve.
The so-called "Palestinians" are the Arabs who fled the fighting when Israel declared its statehood and the Arabs decided to destroy them. They have been kept in PERMANENT refugee status by these same Arab "brothers". They've also been fed lies for years about the "theft of their land". I could go on, but we're suppossed to flogging Katz, not the current war on Israel.
(and you're right about every faith having their extremists. Kahane could have held his own with the ayatollas. And the Zealots of 2,000 years ago make the Taliban look like whimps)
Like all other nations the US tries to get away with as much as it can. The only reason you aren't complaining about the actions of Bulgaria or Thailand is that only one nation has the resources to thumb their nose at the rest of the world. If Monaco was the richest country in the world then you would be bitching about their heavy-handed tactics.
And why shouldn't the US continue this behavior? If a terrorist defies our hegemony then we can and will overthrow a government anywhere in the world. Any nation that is large enough to resist does enough business with the US to keep them from causing serious trouble.
If I step back and look at this situation it does seem morally deplorable, but on the other hand I have lots of stuff, high-speed internet access, and enough security to get by. Someone will need to find a better way of doing things first before the US significantly changes their foreign policy.
What makes you think these villagers were hostile? Even if they were, how many hundred civilian deaths does it take to balance the risk of small losses to your own side?
The right thing to do is to risk your own soldiers lifes to fight your war, not massacre innocent civilians becuase you don't dare to go close to the place.
Killing masses of civilians rather than risking minute losses from your own vastly superior armed forces sends a very clear message to the world about how the US values the lifes of foreigners.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children."
--President Eisenhauer from April 16, 1953.
..Germany/Japan/Iraq/Taliban. The American economy did.
As for human suffering, is dead a Afgan/Jap/Kraut,
worth less than an American?
(Economy leading to Tech and Manuf capacity).
It's pretty cool Americans 'ARE' worth more
than most others, in terms of money.
Where do I start...
1. If Al Qaida is occypying a village that in no way implies that it is "harboring" them. You seem to think that it's the unarmed villagers duty to kill the Al Qaida soldiers in combat, while it is too dangerous for the vastly superior US soldiers to attempt the same thing.
This is after all Americas war. As the worlds by far strongest military power, it should be able to fight it itself.
2. The witnesses are frequently westeern journalists. They go to a village that the US claimed it has not bombed, and find it bombed. Who else is conducting bombings in Afghanistan?
You can find these kind of reports in non US media on the net. Try Australian, British or Canadian media. Sadly, US media pretty much only reprints Pentagon press releases in the name of National Unity.
3. Even the US military claims that the Chinese Embassy bombing was a mistake. Do you have a different theory?
"I'd worry if a nation like China can get to the point of building such weapons systems without also liberalizing its political and economic system."
Democracy is not a requiremnt for a nation to build such weapons. Stalin succesfully induztrialized Russia during a period of about 20 years, something that took about 150 years for the rest of the world. Russia also constructed a copy (more or less) of the Concorde one year before the "real" Concorde was completed. All this was done through enormous investments in human lives, money and with a great deal of industrial espionage.
maybe we haven't declared war because that would validate Al Qaida's claims of being at war with the US. I mean, who are we gonna declare war against? Golem?
If we declare war against Al Qaida, does that mean that the attack on the WTC was an act of war rather than a terrorist attack, and the victims are casualties of war?
True, but in the long term Russia still expended its human capital trying to uphold totalitarianism instead of continuing to improve, and collapsed economically. I'm concerned about the long term here; I don't think there are going to be any totalitarian states left in the world in 20 years, and if so the next 20 years are going to be the crucial ones.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
One small comment -- the US Armed forces do NOT want 'flesh robots' - mindless soldiers mindlessly following orders. That would be both dangerous and ineffective.
Dangerous - it could lead to disasters/travesties when people do not question an immoral or incorrect order when appropriate.
Less effective -- a soldier who understands the commander's intent and the situation around them can react to the unexpected and perform the mission the best way possible, rather than following a static plan.
We need soldiers who can think!
Yeah, Techno fetishists everywhere are already creaming their pants over the demonstration of the new "doctrine" of remote warfare displayed by the US in the Afghan War.
It's certainly good for initial deployment and aerial interdiction and control, but remains untested for endgame positional tactics using soft assets.
But this development is nothing that Our Prophet Philip Dick did not foresee in such stories as Second Variety .
It reminds me of how Twain saw the devastating and immobilizing affect on warfare of machine guns and trench technology in the closing chapters of his 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court .
Or HG Wells foreseeing aerial warfare and the bombardment of cities and civilian populations in The War in the Air .
But because war is politics by any means necessary, when one approach is blocked the street will find a way to express itself through another. If politicized groups and countries cannot hope to use conventional warfare, then they will move on to more promising avenues and asymmetrical opportunities. Things more horribly inventive than destroying buildings with sharp knives and opportunity.
And as so many here have pointed out, most of this is self-serving propgaanda. 30% of munitions dropped still fail to explode. And this article points out, the Rout of the Taliban was largely a social victory. Factions on the ground saw which way the wind was blowing, shaved their beards, and changed sides.
But most of the same local bosses are still running things... why else do you think so many high-profile "Taliban" are being let go. Why is it proving so difficult to arrest Omar, a practically dead, half-blind guy doing a Steve McQueen on a motorbike?
Meanwhile, Blair ran a victory lap in Kabul. Right.
Remember, the Russians also "took" Afghanistan with virtually no resistance within a few months. But their mistake was to stay longer, and eventually the factions started uniting against them. That KC-130 that crashed, they are flying bricks. One hasn't crashed in error since the start of the 1970s. Odds are it was brought down by a shoulder-launched SAM at extremely close range.
And now the Marines are exiting and being replaced by the 101st, who'll be digging fortifying those bases that annoy the Russians so much. They are there for the long haul? I hope they have better luck than Reagan's Marines in Lebanon.
And why are Katz's articles so goddamn difficult to read? Does he go through a rewrite phase where he trys to find longer latinate words whenever possible, replacing anything short and punchy with polysyllabic monstrosities? A dose of Strunk and Whyte would go a long way there.
Da Blog
I find the concept of a multifront over-when-we-say-so-but-could-take-years-so-just-k eep-supporting-us war to be quite horrifying, myself. We should have limited, clearly defined objectives against limited, clearly defined enemies. "All terrorists and their friends" is not a clearly defined enemy, particularly in light of the ludicrous recent attempts to define terrorism.
Er, the problem with this thesis is that it ignores the efforts made by thousands of indigenous anti-Taliban forces. While they may be proxies, they were certainly not drones in the since Katz is meaning. While this is certainly advantageous to the average draft-age american, this does not make a convincing case that we can win all wars in this manner.
Drone vs drone warfare has already been conducted to a degree, with little success on the part of smart weapons to defeat dumb weapons, as in Scud vs Patriot.
In all likelyhood, the future of warfare lies in this asymmetry, not in drone vs drone. This isn't due to lack of want, but because we have typically won economic wars before we have embarked on military wars, and our adversaries do not have the resources to use smart weapons.
I am a bit confused about that as well.
... Like the chickens sundenly stopped laying eggs.)
Orwell Didn't write that many books. As I reember it In 1984 the war was an excuse to get rid of unemployed people, and to cover up the basic inefficency in the system. (You can't get eggs to day becasue there is a war on
However It has been a long time since I read the book. (And I suspect Katz as well).
I also have NO idea what Wells story he is refereing to. I do remeber a story about air combat "The war in the Air"....but I don't remeber drones in that one.
And I do remember a short story about Technolagy used in war ("The Land IronClads") But I always thought that was about tanks. It sort of makes the point that Katz was.....grasping for.
Can anyone write a feature? If I wrote one could i send it in?
D.A.K.D.A.E.---- Deny all Knowledge, Destroy All Evidence
With emphasis on the "Jerk" bit. Sorry I missed the bit where Katz suggested that ""drone wars" are somehow less moral than wars with casualties". Perhaps you could point that out or were you perhaps referring to some article other than the one on this page?
The Cult of Katz bashing seems to have taken to bashing him on things he hasn't even said.
Now back to that powerpoint brief my sub-manager wants
Hmmm...
It's been done, man. =)
Right On
Maybe the writer forgot that there were a large number of Northern Alliance troops that did alot of the dirty work for us.
My handle breaks slashcode, what does your handle do?
If you don't live in the US, don't buy any products made by US companies, and don't pay any taxes or otherwise support your own government if it is friendly with the US then you are not supporting US interventionism. If you are buying stuff from companies like Sony and Philips you are also supporting US interventionism.
It's all very well to talk about how despicable the US government is but in reality many people across the globe depend on them for their material needs. The US government does these things to support US business, and this in turn creates the single greatest source of consumer dollars in the world. Without US consumers many companies outside of the US would lose a lot of their market.
It sure does sound selfish, but your speach sounds like pure hypocricy. Are you walking like you're talking? Otherwise drop the rock and return to the comforts of your glass house.
Drone wars are cheap in terms of human capital (lives) but much more costly than trade-in-peacetime. Trade has no economic downside (REAL trade only occurs when two willing and rational parties mutually benefit from dealing with one another. Externalities don't play into the trade-or-war decision except in terms of "bloodthirst"). War, of any flavor, is a financially costly endeavor. Only a truly bloodthirsty society would waste money on a war of conquest-by-drone when peace brought greater wealth. Such a bloodthirsty society would be unlikely to remain at peace long enough for trade to raise that nations' level of wealth sufficiently to allow the development of technology required to start or sustain a drone war. In short, sustained bloodlust is not a survival skill.
This article is based on the premise that wars can be won without significant ground forces. And in the case of Afghanistan, there *ARE* significant numbers of ground forces - they just aren't wearing American uniforms. The US is/was not fighting the war alone. They were merely providing air support to locals who were doing the ground fighting.
This is a bit of a projection, but have you read any of Saberhagen's Berserker series?
... I don't know. Possibly they are short sighted enough to ignore the consequences even if they did understand, but this is one of the absolute worst ways to go about developing artificial intelligence. This is about the most dangerous way possible. Not only is the intelligence that is being developed in favor of killing people, but it's going to happen by accident, so no safety controls will be in place.
Right now these machines are under human control. The rational expectation is that as time passes less and less human control will be needed. Anyone want to guess how many years are needed before they can last for over a decade without any human control? Then we just pray forever that the failsafes always fail safely.
This stuff is dangerous on a level that the governments just don't understand. If they did
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
A certain degree of truth here, but it seems to me that the Northern Alliance provided the required ground troops.
These "drone wars" will be more moral and acceptable if the other country doesn't stand a chance in a war, like Katz says, Afganistan. Low sacrifice on our side. However, it's when there's a war between two technologically advanced countries when the sacrifice again becomes unacceptable. Let's say you are a technologically advanced country. OK, so, Other Country, send your bots to a designed neutral area where only bots will be harmed (Antartica? An ocean? Canada?) and only money will be sacrificed. No, wait, sending your drones to a designed neutral area would be very unstrategic. Especially when you could attack the human drone controllers whereever they might be, or do the drones have AI? Well, then attack their many power sources (you were going to do it anyway), where human employees sacrifice themselves for their country. Or are they drones too? Well, then attack their manufacturers (the barracks for you RTS fans) with human scientists and manufacturers, before they make another legion of bots (you were going to do it anyway). What you say? They're bots too? The entire war force is composed of bots with AI, even the Commander in Chief? Now we're getting out there. Well, attack their economy (no more money to build bots), attack a large city, and there will be plenty of humans there (you were going to do it anyway). Besides, even if that didn't work, you're only losing bots, no sacrifice on YOUR side. Meanwhile, the other technologically advanced country has the same strategy, whichever one it might be. Now, Other Country, would you like to send a diplomat to perhaps design a peace treaty of some sort? Because it seems like it's going to be a grueling war, and a lot is going to be sacrificed.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
typical bigot stupidity, you got it WRONG. The correct answer is that is mortal, therefore must (eventually) die. Yeesh, these people are so stupid it's amazing they remember to keep breathing at all.
How typical, you people still don't realize what is happening around you...
In days where millions of children are taught (READ: BRAINWASHED) that killing innocent civillians is praised by god,
A drone will do you no good.
I'm sorry to say, but no weapon or robot is a match for a 10 year old with an antitank RPG missile.
Todays mega-bombs (not atomic, of course) will do NO damage WHATSOEVER to a terrorist organization, they all thrive on lack of infrastructure and poverty - you will only be helping them get more local support whereas you would look like an idiot and a coward for bombing through the air rather than send ground troops.
The trend with today's wars, is that a country finances terrorists living in their enemy's land in order to bring about chaos.
Unless massive ground troops are sent to the region,
the terrorists will always win.
Furthermore, at this current form of war, the blood shed would better be the live of soldiers who are equipped and alert,
rather than the lives of civillians.
So, Jon thinks thinks that his is the triumph of the drones. He should probably go read Emilio Douhet - he'll see his theories expanded upon in much greater detail.
For all the talk of how it was the drones who won the war, and how the guys on the ground weren't important - they're wrong, pure and simple. If you go back and re-read the data, you'll find a lot of inaccurate, do-nothing strikes, until one day, BAMM, they start doing precision strikes against front-line Taliban/AQ positions. Guess what - drones have NOTHING to do with that. That date marks when the GB support/designation teams arrived.
Furthermore, you'll note that we had bombers/drones/etc. roaming all over the battlefield - but it wasn't until somebody from the Army, Marines, or Northern Alliance was standing on it that we decided an area was secure.
People have been making this argument since WW1. It didn't work then, it didn't work in the 20s/30s, it didn't work during WW2, it didn't work in Korea, it didn't work in Vietnam, it didn't work in Iraq, it didn't work in Bosnia, it didn't work in Kosovo, and it didn't work in Afghanistan.
Get over it. High tech is not a panacea, however much you'd like it to be. You want to control ground? Stand some grunt, and his rifle on it. All of the other stuff is just there to help.
Some time in the past I understand that there were reasons to be proud to live in the United States, as it was the Land of the Free, it was a democracy where people starting from nothing could get a confortable place in the society if they worked hard enough, etc.
*RANT*
Nowadays, you can kiss freedom goodbye in the USA with laws like the DMCA. The 'democracy' consists of two political parties very similar which exchange power every couple of years, and the population opinion follows what the media dictates it should be.
The goverment is using aggressively it's military advantage to make sure it's economical interest in poor contries prevail (Irak, petrol). America doesn't really want to help poor countries with institution like the IMF, as they depend on these countries cheap labor and ressources for it's own wealth (Nike and the other sweat shops).
The whole capitalist system got out of hand some years ago, with big corporations becoming way too powerful, and publicity creeping in everywhere, even in the schools, in toilets, in your mailbox. The almighty $Money$ value is getting a terribly disproportionate importance. Just after the 11 th sept. event the president showed up to say 'The economy is still strong'. Sheesh. Who care about the bloody money when human lives are involved?
Now what is the most infuriating thing is that americans (only some of them; I'm not saying all american approve their goverment/peer/nation actions and attitude) act as if
1) They were the most important and best people in the world. (Someone will need to find a better way of doing things first before the US significantly changes their foreign policy.)
2) They are the World Freedom Fighters who show the Right Path to other country. (Infinite Justice)
3) They have the right to set rules for the world. (Especially in the computer area. Carnivore and such. ICANN. Encryption)
4) They deserve to be richer than most of other country's people. (I have lots of stuff, high-speed internet access...)
With this attitude it's extremely understandable that some people fell compelled to teach a humility lesson to the USA. Nobody likes the big guy pushing you around and feeling strongly pleased with himself.
*END-RANT*
Now you're probably telling yourself "another frustrated idiot from the Middle-East". I'm Canadian, in fact. The USA doesn't really bully my country alot, except occasionally for things like taxing wood imported from Canada (so much for free market). I'm getting increasingly annoyed at America's arrogance however.
Yeah I know, America ain't as bad as I depict. It feels better now though. Somewhat sorry for the offended ones.
"In the future, wars will be fought with small robots in space, or possibly a very tall mountain. Your job will be to build and maintain those robots."
Never let facts get in the way of a good story - I have to agree with you there.
Stop and take a look at who created Saudi Arabia, Jordan, &etc. out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. While you're there, try to figure out why it's called _Saudi_ Arabia, and not _Hashemite_ Arabia.
(Big Screen at the Central Command Post of Drones blinks...)
Army Computer Specialist scratches head, wonders, "Now that's odd... when did they start using red dots to represent us?"
Too true. In this war, the US provided the intel, the heavy fire, and the leadership while the Afghanis (sic) of the Alliances provided the fodder for what was left of the Taliban guns.
Where are the CNN specials about the Alliance men that were lost? Sorry Katz, not that I"m into the "anti-Katz" stance that some here choose to take, but this time you're wrong.
Just because it's not in the news, doesn't mean things don't happen.
War on terrorism, war on drugs, war on this year's insolent country on the other side of the world-- it keeps Joe Sixpack cheering for Uncle Sam, as Randolph Bourne explains in his 1918 essay, "War is the Health of the State". War whips the people into a patriotic frenzy, and encourages the mentality that those who do not unconditionally support the State must therefore be its enemies. In America, this effect, in combination with our existing conformist and anti-intellectual attitudes, means that anyone who wants to ask questions before we start shooting will likely be labeled un-American, if not traitorous.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
There were plenty of ground troops on the American side in Afghanistan- they just weren't Americans. The US provided air support, the Northern Alliance did the dirty work and exploited breaches blasted in the lines by the US air power. Until a robot ground solider is invented, the lowest common denominator of warfare will continue to be the infantryman.
Michael Ignatieff has book, partly on this subject, which I recommend. It's called (somewhat unfortunately) Virtual War. Using the US-allied nations' air war in against Milosovic in Kosovo, it asks what are the consequences are of technologically advanced nations being able to wage war with impunity.
The enormous modern investment in war-at-a-distance technologies like combat drones and high-altitude precision bombing is largely due to the fact that a war without casualties is a lot easier for a government to wage, politically speaking, than one where its people are put directly in harm's way.
Contrast the difference between WWI, where tens of thousands of soldiers combatants died in individual battles, with the Gulf War, where the loss of one pilot incites media frenzy?
As we become increasingly able to do so, the author asks, what does it mean to be willing to kill for something you're not willing to die for?
Even if both sides had the "drones", war wouldn't be effective until they actually took out human beings. Its the human loss of life that makes war so terrible. A an actual drone war could only possibly serve as expensive entertainment, akin to watching Battle Bots. Thats not war.
Its only war when people die. And drones won't accomplish a thing unless they actually kill. Instead of looking at this like the Drone Wars a more accurate analogy would be "we're going to take out the other guys weapons, so we can go in and kill him".
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
...the Three Laws of Robotics?
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Surely they remembered to code these laws into the Drone 0.99.14 kernel!?!
Holy cow, if they didn't then it is only a matter of time until we become the robot's pets! The fools, those damn fools!
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
Want someone to clean out a trench??? Send in some Mujahadeen. Nasty cave to clear out? drop a couple of bombs, and sendin the Afghanis. Prisoners rioting? Let a hundred or so Afghani soldiers die rooting them out while we bemoan the single US casualty.
This is not a bloodless war. This is not a soldier free war. This is not an air only war. What has happened is that the US has latched onto a populace sick of it's current government and willing to fight -- provided air support that the Afghan rebels could never have afforded and sat back watching by remote control as the Afghan people did all the dieing -- on both sides.
There have probably been thousands of casualties on the 'good' side of this war -- it's just that almost none of them have been first-world soldiers -- and therefore "don't matter" even though the war would bave been a complete bust without them.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
You seem to think that the US has been attacked by Afghanistan and is at war with the country. Not even GWB agrees with that, and there isn't much to say to you if you haven't caught on to that.
Also, for your information, there is no Somalian government.
That's very close to true :)
.au) held a referrendum to decide on the issue. The whole thing came about to honour the incoming PM's election promise to put the issue to the people.
A few years ago we (in
He assembled a bunch of public figures representing various political parties, pro-repulic and anti-republic (ie: monarchist) groups, war veteran reps, aboriginal (native) figures, etc etc. He sat them down in a room for 2 weeks and told them to thrash it out between them, and come up with a yes/no question that could be put to the people in a referrendum. It was called "The Constitutional Convention".
Now I personally (and a lot of other pro-republic people I've spoken to) saw the whole thing as a whitewash. The PM was (and is) a public monarchist - no fascade of impartialitiy here. The discussions ground to a halt in the last few days on the issue of how the new government would work - the "preferred model".
The Pro-Republican group with the biggest numbers and most publicity (the A.R.M.)decided that the best model would be to keep things pretty much the same - Australians would elect the Reps and Senate, the party with the majority gets government, that party puts forward the PM, and then parliament would elect the president.
Pro-Republic Purists rejected that outright, wanting a model where the head of state was elected directly. The Convention was unable to agree on a good model so in the end the A.R.M's model became the default, since they had the most clout. The Prime Minister would only accept a Yes/No question for the referrendum, so Australians were denied the opportunity to select their preferred model. The PM was also opposed to an "in principal" vote, with the details thrashed out later.
So, IMNSHO, the referrendum was defeated because the Australian public rejected an unpopular model.
And this came about because of the PM's inflexibility and the failure of the white-wash "convention" (2 weeks to re-write the constitution and try to please everybody in the process? Hello?!)
(The other factor - as pointed out by styrotech - is the war veterans, who having fought for the British Empire still feel a bit attached to it.)
Following all of this, PM Johnny declared the issue was over, and hurriedly swept it under the carpet.
On the issue of Australia's "freedom", the Brits haven't stuck their nose in for decades. In fact they were a bit surpised when we didn't break away. We're very much self-governing, attachments to the monarchy are little more than ceremonial.
It'd just be nice if we could make the whole thing a bit more official.
He said democracies almost never go into conflict WITH EACH OTHER (emphasis mine). No matter how many examples you find of a democracy going to war with a non-democracy, that doesn't do a thing to disprove his statement.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
[1] (cit.) What's so civil about war anyway?
I think I see the first flaw that seperates this fiction from reality right here. For any suficiently complex scenario, especially when intelligent antagonistic agents are trying to outguess each other, the only simulation that we have is called reality.
The computer would design new attacks and communicate the attacks to the enemy computer,
Second flaw: What's to stop them from bullshitting, eg "yeah we just 'launched' 10^16 antimatter meganukes. Y'all go kill yourselves now please."
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
And that is that a drone vs. drone war will show only drone fighting drones.
In such a conflict, it is muc more likely that the target will be the control systems and supply chain. And since a drone has little self-preservation instict, it means that striking in depth of ennemy territory at strategically or psychologically important target gets more and more likely. And since such targets are in "safe" areas, it means that the number of civilian casualty will be high.
In fact, if you look at the attack of the twin towers, you might begin to understand what it means. Although not performed by drones but by fanatics ready to sacrifice themselves (and a high number of innocents) to a "cause", it has the same pattern: low costs in human live for the attacker but terrible effectiveness due to the highly visible target.
No, I really don't think that, should several parties decide to engage in such a war, civilian casualty and overall wreckage of one's economic will be any less than in the past conflit. The only reason it is so today is the incredible technological and logistical difference between the parties.
Katz, where do you keep digging up this nonsense? Ever heard of the Northern Alliance? Such a typical assumption: there were no ('cept SF troops) American ground forces involved, hence ground forces were unimportant.
And then there is this hogwash about the importance of drones. Sure, as the technology matures drones are getting more and more use in modern warfare, but to label the Afgan conflict 'the Drone War' is ridiculous. I have no figures on this, but I bet the majority of payload has been delivered by conventional strike aircraft such as the ancient B-52 or the F-18. Maybe in the recon department drones are beginning to rival planes in importance, but even there I'm not entirely sure. And if drones weren't used in this conflict, what would have been the effective difference? Have you ever wondered about the state of the Afghani air defence? I mean, what air defence?? Would there have been more casualties? I didn't think so.
Maybe you should look at this conflict from an Afghan point of view, to see it more clearly. You have two mostly infantry based armies of comparable strength deadlocked in
a neverending trench war. Suddenly,one of these two armies gains an ally, which provides it with tremendously accurate recon capacities, and air support by the most powerfull airforce in the world, in the form of several months of continuous bombardments. What do you think would happen?
It's all very cool from a scifi point of view to see all these technological goodies being put to use in a real situation, and it's ok to muse upon the directions this
technology might take, and the implication it will have upon the world, put please, don't
make it into something it isn't, just because you have a column to fill and no inspiration. There's enough hype out there allready, don't add to it.
Time to break out my old Metagaming issue
of the "Rivets" game. (A satire on the
original "Ogre" game from the same company,
now owned by Steve Jackson Games.)
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
If you fall for the belief that just because a group or groups of men and such riding in a pickup is NOT a group of "soldiers", feel free to go there and attack them and see if you survive!
A "soldier" is an "srmy" when a group or groups band together for a common goal/objective; regardless of how close-knit that group or band is, the end result is that you are fighting soldiers, and nothing less.
Technology and money does not grant or deny the ability to call oneself a soldier based on what equipment is used, or how much their weaponry cost, it's the mindset, the ultimate goals of the people banded together to fight an enemy, regardless of who or what that enemy is.
Point expressed: Is 10,000 american men more of an "army" than 10,000 Afghan "rebels" armed with 1940's vintage auto-weapons?
That answer is most definately a NO!
To hold hold this fact up historically, then the continental "army" was nothing more than a large group or groups of farmers armed with VERY primitive weapons(by today's standards).
They too, were no "less" an army than what we have today, it is merely a difference in "time" that decides what is "primitive", but when the objective is the same on either side(to win), any large band of manpower WILL always be rightfully called an army, friend or foe alike, it is still an army.
206.39.38.2, DDN-BLK-36, DOD NET INFO CENTER. 800.365.3642 206.36.0.0-206.39.255.255 NET RANGE.
What?? No ground troops in Afghanistan? There are few US troops, granted... But who swept the taliban away??? Northern Alliance... And that may prove, eventually, to be a huge headache for the US administration (if it really wants stability in the region).
If the US want to impose their views and solutions, they still will have to deploy ground troops... Predator drones don't protect pipelines *that* efficiently.
Merriam-Webster definition of Army (my italics): A large organized body of armed personnel trained for war especially on land.
Claiming the Taliban are an organized entity is like claiming Mr. Reza is a well regulated militia.
An army becomes one when it is well organized and disciplined. The correct term for the Taliban is mob
Not having researched far beyond what the media has been telling me, just having a gut instinct that Osama Bin Laden didn't attack us because of our "freedom", I am a tad confused. Why DID we get attacked? What are the problems with our Middle East (and elsewhere) policies that everyone (specifically those who attacked us) is so pissed off at us about? Is there a main underlying issue here, or is it just a lot of random things? Where is Osama Bin Laden getting the idea that America has a Crusader-like hate for Islam? And could whoever replies, would you mind citing sources wherever you can? That would be really great.
You say the US used hardly any ground troops and that they are not needed. Well I think your wrong have you forgoten about the Northen Alliance and other anti-taliban forces these were the US ground troops.
America simply bomb taliban positions and the Northen Alliance moved in to capture it.
Now I think the reason the US didn't loose many wo/men was because they got them some pawns to do the dirty work.
Take capture some where you have to take control/command of the people in that area. Now you can't do that with long distance weapons like missiles, you need people. If you had andriod like bots then maybe they could take control. But i dont think they (the bots) would find it as easy to control the people/masses then human would. (I talking about a 'peaceful' control the Terminator type where u just kill em all)
-Trevelyan
What most people miss in the war is good for business anology is:
The majority of profit from wars is not in the building, selling, and distributing of arms to blow stuff up. It's in the rebuilding of what you blow up with them.
When you can drop a $213,000 bomb on a $313,000,000 dam, which do you think there is more profit in? Making bombs or making dams?
Another misconception people have: That in order for this connection to work a US company must go in and do the actual rebuilding. Nada. US companies and persons can profit from this both in being material suppliers (concrete, steel, building materials, engineers, transporters, and most importantly - wall street financers of (increasingly) foreign companies that do this kind of work. In addition to this, war also tends to open up tremendous public funds for rebuilding projects.
IMHO, these operations in many parts of the world are as simple as extracting cash/investment out of a country by covert means. Examples of this abound in our involvement in South America. Don't believe me. Follow the money. Look into it yourself. Watch in Columbia as years of invested drug money will be quietly extracted by US supplied arms, and enhanced by CIA operatives on the ground. (See "School For The Americas", and other searches on CIA operations). It's actually preferred to keep US soldgiers off of the ground. If they can get Columbians to kill other Columbians, it's easier to deal with at the polls and in the media.
One last comment: It's not always necessary to use bombs to extract/consolidate wealth in a country. You can also use the IMF as a tool for this. Call in all the IMF loans at once, destroy the economy, big & institutional investors buy up the assets of a country for pennies on the dollar. (See Agentina & the IMF).
The only variant I see on this story is, it gives the government a couple new tools to accomplish it's aims. (Mind you, these are not "new" ideas.) For as long as we have had guided missiles (there are some real interesting reads on the history of guilded missiles, including using pidgeons trained to direct them to their target..No kidding! Yep..back before computers!) Guilded missiles, and other devices of a remote nature have existed for some time. The only thing which has changed is the level of control we have over them.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
The entire premise behind this post is false. There were and are pleanty of ground troops and deaths in Afghanistan. Just ask the Afghan people that are among thse doing the ground fighting and dying.
"...blah blah blah...I don't give a rat's arse...blah blah blah"
You see, the above quote is not intended in support of any Israeli or Jewish cause. I also don't give a rat's arse about the other side of the morality coin. What I do know is that a whole bunch of people are killing each other every day for little more than revenge at this point.
If you were to ask the average eight year old Jew in "Palestine" why the Isrealis kill Arabs, you would receive the answer, "because they kill us". Now turn that question around and ask the Arab/Palestinian child, and you will receive the same answer.
That whole situation is shite. Were I born there, I'd have left when I was 18...earlier if possible. Some patch of treeless, over-dry land is not worth your life.