The Drone War

One of sci-fi's most enduring prophesies is finally coming to pass -- the Drone War. Visionaries from Wells to Orwell to Lucas have long predicted that warring surrogate machines would someday take the humans' place in a new kind of conflict with enormous political implications as military technology evolves. Battles by machines are entirely different -- socially, politically and culturally -- from anything in the history of warfare, as we are seeing in Afghanistan.

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.

Comments

Re:Bah

[Liquid(TJ)]

ANY cost is worth saving lives, I don't think anyone will disagree with that. But will this new war on terrorism be effective? So far it's elmiminated the Teliban, but that organization had a lot more to do with limiting Americian corperation's exploitation of forign markets than it did with oversees terrorism. And while no doubt Bin Laden's prople have been hurt, I wonder if all the fighting has done nearly as much damage as funding crackdowns and investigative work has...

The Teliban is the arch enemy of American Globalism. If you like globalism, you hate them; if you hate globalism, you probibally still think it's the lesser of two evils. I'm glad they've lost power, but I'm not sure that forcing them out militarilly was a good thing, at least at this point. It left a power vacumm that I think could do as much harm as good. In the short run at least, we seem to be setting up the same system that we fought to remove from Somilia in the early ninties!

I wish the US had taken a calmer approach to terror after Sept. 11th. Terrorists can hide from the global police network if they concentrate on that, but with the world's new intrest, I doubt they could stay hidden and do thier "work" at the same time. Eventually, increased inteligence funding could pay off all by itself, without a need for loss of civil liberty at home and national sovernty abroad.

I am not a geo-politics expert, so don't believe any of this.

Re:Warning, bogon flux

[td]

The citizens of a democracy have a need to know what actions their government takes on their behalf, and the outcome of those actions; otherwise they are wrongfully denied their right to elect a government that behaves in accordance with their desires.

The argument that some things cannot be done except in secret is not an argument for secrecy, but an argument that there are things that government cannot do. (For example, secret kangaroo court military tribunals in violation of due process.)

Civilian Casualties and the American Media

[DarthSepulsive]

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.

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. A total of 3,767 civilian casualties (as of 6th December 2001) is not what I would call an "unconfirmed number of casualties".

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.

Re:Security != Justice ?

[opkool]

This is, in fact pretty hilarious.

The fact is: most of the UN members are bunch of representatives from non-democratic governments.

Most of them torture their own citizens, forbid human rights to their citizens while they claim for themselves (while traqveling to democratic countries) the same rights that they deny to any visitor to their own country.

Please, do not make me laugh.

UN is a non-fucntional body. It is a mirage.

How can you have China, for example, in the Secutiy Council? The same China that is non-democratic, that abuses its own citizens, that is a nest of corruption, that holds foreign land under military rule, that excludes foreign nationals to have rights... unless they have the money to bribe, of course.

And the same goes for manyt extremist countries that held seat and vote in the UN Council.

How do they dare (how do you dare) to support resolutions against democratic countries and elected governments?

Do not be so childish as to close your eyes to the fact that every single country looks towards expanding its influence, power, money and all that that you only seem to associate to the US.

Tell that to the governments of Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Iran, Somalya, Syria, Pakistan...

In the US you have the right to critisize your Government. You can vote them off from office if you do not like them. You can demonstrate against government policy. You can sue the government.

Try that in a random country from the UN Council. Chances are that, just thinking about this will be a sure passage to torture, inprisonement and possibly death.

Be real. Accept the fact that realpolitik rule the world. This is not an utopy. This is Real Planet Earth, not a Star Trek Federation of some sort.

Re:OK, let's kill soldiers instead.

[Keith McClary]

The message we're sending now is different:

"If you have a beef with us, and don't use diplomacy to address that beef, you will be exterminated, and your beef will go unaddressed. Your followers will also be exterminated, and be unable to carry on the cause. The only way to live long enough to have your grievance aired is to negotiate with us."

The big beef in the Arab and Islamic world is that you've been meddling in their affairs for decades. They would like you to stay on your own side of the world and mind your own business. Is that negociable?

Re:You're kidding about that Terrorism thing...

[Malcontent]

Israel is a bit different.
1) Israel is the occupying force. Palestenians are trying to gain a country they lost and are living under israeli rule.
2) The ratio of palestenians killed to israelis killed is HUGE (close to 10 to 1). Of course you'd never know this listening to US media.

Both the israelis and the palestenians know the following.
Palestenians would rather die then to live under israeli occupoation. Israelis would rather kill palestenians then to move out.

As long as the ratio of dead arabs to dead jews stays high the US is just fine with it as is israel and the rest of europe.