Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
...there are significant ground forces, they are just not Americans.
... 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.
"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
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.
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"
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
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...).
The Economics of Website Security
...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!
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.
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.
"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"
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!
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
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."
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?
Best Slashdot Co
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.
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
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.
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
a country like China or India, that has billions of 'expendable' people, but little in the way of technological or military sophistication.
What? Do you really still believe that India and China are developing countries? Both are nuclear powers, and China bought much of the former Soviet Union's rather sophisticated air defense systems and fighter jets after the collapse. Their navy keeps buying Russian subs and surface ships.
They have also announced that they're aiming to put a man on the moon in a few years time.
Unsophisticated, my ass.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
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.
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.
I can't believe Mr. Katz wrote a whole article without once mentioning Seattle.
Or Columbine. Strange days indeed!
"Information wants to be paid"
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
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.
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.
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
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
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?
Wasn't that part of the plot behind that horribly bad Robin Williams movie Toys?
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.
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
It must be a short story or essay because I can't find any reference to it at all on any of my usual searches. I likewise am curious what exactly it is that Jon was referring to though.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
"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
No man on the earth today is innocent. But 5000 (I pulled that number out of my butt, so don't quote me on it) people including children the WTC buildings are definitely NOT guilty of crimes warrating death. You yourself are not innocent, does that mean Achmed Turbantop is justified to kill you, your wife, children, and/or everyone in your neighborhood? If you know he had the intent to do so, would you continue on peacefully, hoping it didn't happen soon, or would you take measures to defend yourself and those around you. Or did that piece of gum you stole in 7th grade invalidate your right to life. That right should only be taken when absolutely necessary to preserve the lives and rights of others. i.e. Murderers forfeit that right and are executed (or killed in self defense) to protect the lives of those not guilty of the same.
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.
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
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.
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.
When in actual combat, the crew of a tank is competely buttoned up, and see the world through periscopes. How difficult would it be to replace those periscopes with video cameras, build remote controls into the various controls, put in an automatic loader, and drive the thing remotely?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
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.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
"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.
I've decided it's time to get a grip on my total fixation on robots!
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
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?
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
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"?
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!
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.
"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
Well, if a cutaneous-absorption "instant laxative" agent were developed and deployed over a large crowd, it'd also double as a gaseous noxious agent, wouldn't it? ;-)
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.
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
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.
Side note: ...which is what scares the hell out of me with regards Pakistan and India.
Each nation has so few nukes that a pre-emptive first-strike on its opponents' nukes is a viable option. They need to cool it for a few years until each side has a second-strike capability and deterrence can work.
> , 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.
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...
Oh god... Why would you ever want to use that? Why would you, the police force, use a weapon that's going to force you to arrest thousands of people who all just pooped their pants?
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
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
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--
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!!!
Not even a lot of R2-D2 units with M-16s strapped to their sides.
:)
...I have exactly what you're looking for...
...It's the tri-optimum way!...
If you can understand this reference, you're one of the lucky few who got to see a masterpiece.
It's been a long time.
Nice technological demonstration, here.. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/14/014620 4&mode=thread
..don't panic
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.
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.
I agree, but here are the two key points I would like to take from both your and the previous post:
1) Our country is -not- better than these non-democratic countries. While we, the citizens, may have more freedoms than others, at the same time the actions of our government have been as despicable as many. In fact that only derisive you heap upon China that couldn't be said of us is undemocratic.
2) Just because other governments do crappy things doesn't excuse our own government when it does crappy things. The gov may be quick to critisize governments we aren't fond of for their human rights abuses, but we will stand to the end behind our own actions or those of our friends (such as Israel).
You're right we are not living in a utopia, but similarly we cannot afford to act like we hold the moral high ground. In order to actually claim that ground, the first step would be an honest look at ourselves and holding ourselves accountable for what we have done before we begin pointing fingers at others. Enlightenment begins within, they say.
By that token, I'd ask you to take the post you replied to as just such a wakeup call. We could talk all day about China and Russia and what they've done... But first lets talk about us.
P.S. I find it ironic that someone who would be preaching how we are in Real Earth not Star Trek would talk about "democratic countries and elected governments", as if we could vote the CIA out of existance. I think you need to face reality as well.
The enemies of Democracy are
The fact is: most of the UN members are bunch of representatives from non-democratic governments.
You mean, like Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, South Africa (post-apartheid), to name some of them? Yes, these are all a bunch of undemocratic dictatorships! How DARE they vote for a resolution condemning torture.
So, I guess you support the U.S.'s decision not to support the resolution that would have banned torture...does that mean that you condone the use of torture?
BTW, the US has also blocked a U.N. resolution that would have defined what IS terrorism, even though the U.S. military manuals do define it as the use of force OR threat of use of force against civilians in order to attain political goals. Of course the U.S. would never agree to this, since it would put an end to their use of "low-intesity conflicts" around the world...
UN is a non-fucntional body. It is a mirage.
It is mainly so because of interference from the US. The fact is that the US, as the world's last superpower, would not allow any other authority but its own. Great way to make friends with the rest of the world, guys!
How can you have China, for example, in the Secutiy Council?
Easy, China is a nuclear power. That's how they got in the security council in the first place.
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...
That one exactly. You forgot to add: who's had "Most Favored Nation" status with the U.S. for quite a few years, now! The U.S. routinely supports foreign dictatorships, as long as they fall in line with american national interests. You're so keen to mention realpolitik, you should know this by now!
Note that the fact that it's happening doesn't make it right, and doesn't mean that we shouldn't denounce it. Don't underestimate the power of public opinion...after all, it's pretty much all that we have left as private citizens...
How do they dare (how do you dare) to support resolutions against democratic countries and elected governments?
Again, you ignore the fact that most democratic countries and elected governments voted in favor of these resolutions, and that the U.S. was usually isolated in voting against (although Israel nearly always votes with the U.S.). In any case, a resolution should be based on its merit, regardless of who supports it. The one I mentioned condemned torture - that doesn't seem too difficult of a moral choice, in my view. But perhaps you have a different view of this...
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.
Yes, it's great for a citizen to be able to be able to criticize the U.S. government...though if you do that right now you could possibly lose your job or be labeled a traitor...
In any case, the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on democracy. The U.N., whatever its faults may be, also remains an essential part of world diplomacy. One shouldn't dismiss it in such a way, even if one can lament about it's usual lack of effectiveness.
Chances are that, just thinking about this will be a sure passage to torture, inprisonement and possibly death.
Which is exactly what the resolution that the U.S. opposed was about. That, in addition to its cozying up with such brutal regimes as China, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, etc. makes it an accomplice to crimes against that democracy you seem to nominally cherish.
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.
Oh, but I do understand the workings of realpolitik! I have often debated with idealistic PoliSci student about how you need to understand how the world works before trying to change it. You, on the other hand, seem to think that there's nothing we can do except exercise a nearly-meaningless right to vote once every two years or so...As I said, just because governments (even the U.S.'s) are corrupt, doesn't mean we shouldn't denounce corruption and injustice, and strive to make this world a better place. Otherwise, we might as well all just give in and renounce democracy altogether!
Being real doesn't necessarily mean becoming a cynic. The important thing is that the U.S.'s foreign policy is unjust, and concerned only with American interests. This creates a world where it is increasingly isolated, its allies going along more out of fear than respect. That is not a healthy situation.
Reminder: find a new sig
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.
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.
Most of the time, lately, simply suggesting that maybe something the U.S. did might have had something to do with making people hate us enough to blow the crap out of the WTC is enough to get them frothing at the mouth. What?! Are you saying those people deserved to die?! But that's just an emotional knee-jerk reaction. Obviously there is no justification for acts of terrorism. Yet at the same time it's not like they blew up the WTC for no reason. It is a true statement that actions of our government lead to Sept. 11. Obviously at some point the terrorists had the decision to make of whether or not to actually do it, and they made the wrong one. But that does not mean we are innocent.
The enemies of Democracy are
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
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
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.
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.
"Our current president got fewer votes statewide in Florida, the last contested state in the election where his brother is Governor, and Nationwide than his opponent. "
Gotta love that pair of canards. For the first - the votes have been reviewed _exhaustively_ at this point. Based on the standards Gore and the DP wanted to use, he lost. Period. He would have lost _even if_ every ballot had been counted to his standards. You might also take note of the DP's desperate attempts to get overseas military ballots disqualified en mass. For the second - total popular vote isn't the way the system works _and everybody who bothers to read the rules knows it_. If total popular vote was how the issue was decided, _both_ sides' campaign strategies would have been different.
The electoral vote system, as it stands, is as fair and reasonable as any other solution. It's also the agreed-upon solution (what, you don't like living in a republic?). Don't like it? Try either of the following:
- convince enough people to change the system
- get your friends out and voting. 40% of the electorate stayed home last time.
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.
Nah. Places like Zimbabwe. Venezuela. Burma. Indonesia. Vietnam. Algeria. Congo.
BTW, the US has also blocked a U.N. resolution that would have defined what IS terrorism, even though the U.S. military manuals do define
it as the use of force OR threat of use of force against civilians in order to attain political goals. Of course the U.S. would never agree to this, since it would put an end to their use of "low-intesity conflicts" around the world...
As opposed to everyone else's use of same? France, Germany, Russia, China - all those "caring" countries... BTW - care to cough up a cite on that resolution?
How can you have China, for example, in the Secutiy Council? Easy, China is a nuclear power. That's how they got in the security council in the first place.
Cool! People who don't know their a** from a hole in the ground. You obviously don't have the faintest clue about what you speak. Care to try that one again?
Being real doesn't necessarily mean becoming a cynic. The important thing is that the U.S.'s foreign policy is unjust, and concerned only with American interests. This creates a world where it is increasingly isolated, its allies going along more out of fear than respect. That is not a healthy situation.
As opposed to, say, France's foreign policy, which is an enlightened model devoid of self-interest, and totally focussed on only that which is bent on improving the world as a whole? Which is, of course, why the French gov't decided to locate a Red Cross refugee camp right next to the Chunnel, then blame all subsequent problems on Britain's "lax" refugee laws?
Stop and look through the books. There are more "democracies" that aren't in the UN, than there are countries that actually respect the rule of law. Zimbabwe is a "democracy" - but you'd never guess it by the way they run the country. Venezuela was, until that jackbooted thug Chavez rewrote the constitution to suit his own needs.
BTW - care to cough up a cite on that resolution? No. Look it up yourself and prove me wrong.
[snicker] You've been reading Chomsky, haven't you? You're refering to that bit in 12/97.
Well, that's kind of a racist attitude, wouldn't you say? After all, they did invent the mother of all modern weapons: gunpowder! But the fact is I do know what I'm talking about, you don't. The five permanent members of the security councils (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China) were, at the time, the only countries with nuclear capability. Or perhaps you have a better explanation?
No, nothing racist about it whatsoever. You don't know what you're talking about, and you've just demonstrated it twice. Here, let me walk you through it.
When was the UN created? 1945.
When was the UN Security Council created? 1945.
When were the permanent members of the UN Security Council selected? 1945.
Who were those members? US, USSR, UK, France, and Communist China.
Who among them had nuclear weapons? Only the US.
Why were they selected? Because they were the "big 5" countries that had won WW2.
When did the various members of the UNSC get atomic weapons? USSR: Aug 29, 1949; UK: Oct 3, 1952; France: Feb 13, 1960; Nationalist China: never
When did Communist China get it's first nuclear weapon: Octobe 16, 1964
When did Communist China lose its UN Security Council seat? 1949.
When did Communist China receive its UN Security Council seat, displacing Nationalist China? 1971
Permanent Security Council seats have _nothing_ to do with the criteria you specified.
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
Among others. I'm quite an avid reader, and I like to read conservative sources as well as progressive ones. I like to make my own mind. What I like about Chomsky is that he always documents his writings - as compared to William F. Buckley, who, well, does not.
You're right. He does. His logic just doesn't work out, though. He's very good at making his argument - but, from what I've seen, it ultimately leads off into the swamp.
"People who don't know their a** from a hole in the ground." That sounds like a racist statement to me.
Please, demonstrate to me what is racist about that statement. It is a statement that you do not know what you are talking about, pure and simple. Race does not at _any_ point enter into the statement. It is not racist, sexist, religiously skewed, biased on account of age or sexual orientation. Hell, it doesn't even violate the ADA. It simply says "you don't know what you are talking about" and is equally applicable regardless of any of the above qualities. That you choose to interpret it as racist says more about _your_ agenda than anything else.
Well, I admit you have me there. I guess I've been mistaken about this for quite a while, now.
Hmmpf. 'Kay. Though they're _supposed_ to teach the basics of this stuff, and make it clear where to get more.
However, that still doesn't excuse the fact that the U.S. has voted against a resolution condemning the use of torture,
I looked into it a bit. You should ask _why_ the US chose to vote against that particular resolution before complaining too loudly about it. The way it was written, it had several loopholes written into it to condone "liberation" groups who happened to have decided that blowing up airliners full of civilians was a dandy way to get their point across. Just as an example, remember that airliner that went down off the Comorros (I think thats it) a few years ago - the one with the dramatic footage of the place cartwheeling into the sea? Well, the group that did that would have gone right through that loophole. The Libyan crew that did Pan Am 103 would have gone right through that loophole. The LTTE terror squads would have gone through that loophole. Hell, the guys who raided the Indian Parliament would have gone through that loophole.
Also, a lot of other _good_ resolutions have been vetoed by other UNSC Permanent members. Do you know the _only_ reason the UN authorized a presence in Korea in 1950? Because the USSR had decided to boycott the UN shortly beforehand. D'you really think the UN would have authorized what wound up being authorized if the USSR had been in its seat?
as well as being found guilty by the World Court of unlawful use of force against Nicaragua,
Almost every country that's done _anything_ internationally has been wracked up under those statutes.
then killing a resolution that would have forced countries to respect international law (not international mob rule, as you seem to think).
Ummm, I would respectfully suggest that you need to bone up on just what "international law" really is. Note - it is NOT law as engaged within a given country.
The fact is, Nicaragua tried to use legal means to defend itself against unlawful agression, instead of retorting to terrorism (which is bad, we all agree).
To a certain extent. To a certain extent they didn't. In 1988, they rolled over the border into Honduras. The Hondurans were scared enough that the US wound up deploying a 4 BN task force. Note also that Nicaragua was doing a lot more than just "defending itself" during that period.
But the fact is that it doesn't matter if the U.S. is right or if it's wrong: by force of its might, it sets the rules, rigging them in its favor. Might makes right, the american way.
No, it does matter. However, relative to the other players out there, are you willing to continue making the assertion that the US is the big bad bully?
As for the "it sets the rules, rigging them in its favor", every country does that, whenever it has the chance. Do you honestly think those stalwarts in the EU don't do it? Please! I recall reading an interesting description of how France manipulated Airbus and the EU to force an American company to divulge its avionics secrets (for systems employed on Airbus aircraft), then proceeded to heavily subsidize a newly-created French company to drive (I think it was Litton) out of the European avionics market. Or look at Japanese import restrictions. Or... I think you get the idea. _Every_ country rigs the rules in its favor, as much as possible. That being said, given the chance, no other country has tried to create things like the IMF (currency/economic stability) or the WTO (which is a fundamentally American conceit and creation). Other countries may bitch about American behavior _in_ the WTO structure, but they wouldn't have it to complain in in the first place without American stubbornness.
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.
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
Plenty of gases do affect by skin contact. The trouble is that skin is pretty tough stuff, so in order to make it effective by skin contact, the gas has to be quite potent. This automatically makes it insanely damaging to eyes and lungs, which are not as tough. Mustard gas springs to mind here.
Nerve agents are by definition indiscriminate, ie. they'll affect every nerve in your body. There is no other way - the nerves in your arms and legs to allow you movement are identical in structure to the nerves in the muscles around your chest which allow you to breath. So a nerve agent which will immobilise a person will also kill them in ~2 minutes from lack of oxygen to the brain. Leaving someone braindead in a coma may be technically non-lethal, but it doesn't sound to me like a good option!
What would be needed is something with intelligence. I can only think of nanotech here - design little critters programmed with a map of the human body that know which nerves to go for. The kind of thing that Bill Joy goes apeshit over.
Grab.
All of this rests on the aforementioned War Powers Resolution of 1973 [cornell.edu], which has never to my knowledge faced a Constitutional challenge.
;) There was no declaration of war from Congress (though Adams could have gotten one had he wanted it) there was not even any specific statutory authority (aside from increased spending on the navy and the reinstitution of a standing army). In that instance the vagueness of an undeclared war was a virtue since a few skirmishes at sea and a military build-up let the French know that they couldn't just harass our shipping without any response yet an all out declared war would have been a disaster to our fledgeling republic.
You will recall though that the war powers act was passed to LIMIT the authority of the President and to reassert the sole authority of Congress when it came to the use of military force. I also mentioned the Quasi-war with France during the administration of John Adams which predates the War Powers Act of 1973 by just a teensy bit
But I see no particular advantage in being vague in our current situation. Congress should have declared war against the Taliban regime as well as against Al Queada as well as displayed a willingness to add to that list should other nations unwisely choose to ally themselves with Al Queada. Al Queada is a shadowy and vague entity itself but it seems to have just enough of a definite form to make itself a definable target - especially in Afghanistan where it had a sizeable military force.
I share your concerns about the potential for abuse in an open-ended and poorly defined war. In my opinion we should remove the Taliban regime from power - done. Destroy Al Queada's infrastructure and capabilities - partly done? and declare victory. Hunting down Al Queada war criminals can continue after the war is declared over and the campaign against terrorism can revert to a largely law enforcement matter (though occasionally utitilizing the military). But that law enforcement role will be reinforced by a foreign policy doctrine that holds states responsible for the actions of their proxies. If you are foolhardy enough to support a terrorist you had better pray he doesn't do something foolish like attack the US. While terrorists make difficult targets their sponsors do not and without their sponsors they ineffective and only negligible threats to national security.
I respectfully disagree. I find that his arguments are most compelling, and usually quite devastating - though they do go against those of the mainstream press. In any case, Mr. Chomsky can take care of his own in a debate, that's beside the point.
Well, I'll grant that they're definitely _interesting_ arguments. One thing I've noted, though, is that Chomsky tends to make an argument, then redefine the terms in use to stack the deck. Given that he's a linguistic analyst by trade, that's a pretty evil way to make your point (IMHO). But yes, he can generally hold his own, by confusion if nothing else.
Okay, I think we misunderstood each other. You're saying I dont my a** from a hole in the ground...I though you meant the Chinese - you have to admit, in the context of the original post, it could be interpreted that way. Well, I retract my comment, then. It's certainly not racist to insult me (though not in very good form).
Point. It isn't necessarily racist to call the Chinese gov't clueless, either. If I'd been refering to "Chinese" as an ethnographic group, you might have a point, though.
Well, since I'm self-taught, I don't know who you're referring to with "they".
A decent high school history/civics program, perhaps? 15 years ago, that was pretty basic stuff.
That being said - basic sources to try are a good library with ILL, or a university library. Also, go chat up whoever teaches the IR (International Relations) coursework at your local CC. That should get you started. I long ago learned to use primary sources where feasible - one of the reasons I dislike Chomsky, for example (Ghod, his books are harder to read than Tolkein).
But I appreciate you not gloating over my mistake We can disagree over politics and stay civil at the same time - though that's not often the case on online forums!
Too true! Sorry for getting a little over-the-top.
All that in the resolution against torture? I find your interpretation doubtful...
If you're talking about the 12/91 resolution, yes, there really is such a loophole - big enough to drive a truck, or in the specific case the ANC, through. Y'see, the resolution language was cobbled together, and a caveat was put in to cover groups like the ANC in "post-colonial" situations, which pretty much gave them a free hand to hit back at anybody in the West, or anybody they decided to declare was advancing the colonialist agenda.
Countries which have suffered from terrorism such as France, Italy and Egypt would not have voted for such a resolution if it had contained those loopholes.
Sorry to disillusion you, but they did vote for it, and it did contain those loopholes.
In any case, these loopholes could have been ironed out by further negotiations. Perhaps you can point me to those particular sections in the resolution that you feel were legally unsound? Or are you quoting someone else on these?
Gaack. Now I can't find the references. Look at the text of the 12/97 resolution, though, and you'll see language removing all "post-colonial liberation movements" from the definition of terrorist.
It does bring an interesting question, though: at what point do "liberation movements" go across the line and become "terrorists"? Don't forget that the British press described the american revolutionaries as "terrorists"...
Actually, I'd like to see a real, honest-to-ghod primary source quote on that. I've seen it bandied about, but I question whether it was really said.
Personnally I think that as long as the targets are military, then it's okay, but attacking civilians is terrorism. After all, soldiers realize that, by choice, they are at risk of being killed by the enemy. But you can bet that those palestinians who attacked and killed Israeli soldiers will be labelled as terrorists, while the contras that terrorized Nicaragua in the 80's are still considered as "freedom fighters" by the old guard of the american right.
Well, recognition and acceptance of the Laws of War (inc. targetting rules) is a big start. Which means civilians are Right Off the targets list. So suicide-bombing a pizzeria really doesn't make it as "liberation" activities. Nor does indiscriminately shooting up a residential neighborhood. Nor does lynching someone held in criminal custody. That being said, I don't necessarily disagree that the Israelis go over the line, too.
As for the contras/Sandinistas - that was a dirty war on _both_ sides. The Sandinistas were pretty nasty, too - they did a pretty thorough job going after civilians while they were on the outs, and I was really wondering if they were going to go back to their old ways after Ortega lost the Presidency to Chamoro (?).
Not that it would have mattered. The US would have gone in anyway
We were already _there_. The question is whether the rest of the UN would have helped. However, since an awfully large number of UN resolutions are on precisely that point (legitimizing things that countries would otherwise do anyway), that's kind of a specious argument, isn't it?
Well, that's not quite true, it it? There actually have not been a lot of western democracies that have been found guilty of unlawful use of force against another country. France in Algeria, perhaps? Even then I'm not sure. And those that have don't even come close to the U.S. as far as "war by proxy" is concerned.
Most of the countries that participated in the Gulf War, just for example, have been filed against under those statutes. That covers most of the Western democracies you're citing...
They only did so after being denied justice, and in order to attack the death squads who launched their attack from across the border. Today, it is found quite acceptable by most of the contra supporters for Israel to do the same when Hamas or Islamic Jihad launch attacks from Palestine.
Interesting. So it's morally acceptable for Nicaragua to invade another country without even bothering with the niceties of a declaration of war, but not acceptable for Israel to do the same with folks who _have_ declared war on Israel?
Which is it? If the Contras are terrorists, then what are Islamic Jihad and Hamas?
A better way of saying it would be that the contras were about to be beaten, so the US sent in reinforcements in order to help their proxy military/terrorists. You're right though, Nicaragua was doing more than protecting itself: it was openly defying the U.S. dictatorial policies towards Central America, which of course was simply unacceptable! Cuba was enough of an embarassment already...
A "better" way to say it? Honduras asked for our help - the Contras weren't the ones who invited 4 BNs of US infantry into their "country".
Or let's look at this a little differently. Try putting that model on the Kurds. Is it morally acceptable for the Turkish Army to roll into Iraq to shut down Kurdish terrorist/liberation (pick your term) groups operating across the border? If not, why? And how do you define the difference?
That's the big problem with the argument-line you're advancing. Groups that meet (generic) your political viewpoint are acceptable, and whatever they want to do is cool. Groups that don't aren't, no matter if they're well-behaved or not.
Yes, it is by far the biggest, baddest bully. Of the bullies, it is also the only western democracy.
If you really believe that, then once again, you don't know what you're talking about. You should look into German actions behind the Croat secession from Yugoslavia, for example, or French actions throughout the world. Either of those rebuts your case. France, in particular, has a pretty bad track record. Belgium doesn't look too good these days, either.
If Joe Sixpack really knew what his country did in his name, I guess maybe things could change for the better - but Joe doesn't care.
Maybe, maybe not. Empire has a wierd logic, and people are willing to accept things in the abstract that they won't accept up-close-and-personally.
You are right in the economic sense - but as I recall we're talking about politics and military matters here. You know, foreign policy, terrorism,
low-level conflicts, torture, the U.N... You're veering off in a totally different direction.
Pshaw. They're pretty much bound up together as issues, esp. as you're defining them. if you don't realize that, you need to go back and read some more.
Also, note that the "rules" thing applies in the strictly politico-military sense, as well. Case in point: Look at the terms of the Israeli/Egyptian peace treaty, and see if there isn't some "advantage" being grabbed there, too.
As far as political/military matters are concerned, however, the U.S. is far above and beyond the rest. In that arena, no one compares to them as far as "setting the rules and rigging them in their own favor" is concerned.
Not always. Some of those "setting the rules in your favor" situations are more "setting the rules level - and we'll compete you into the ground." As I said, there wouldn't _be_ a WTO to use as an arbitration/trade standards forum if it weren't for the US. There are many more examples of that out there.
Hmmm...the IMF's record is less than stellar. The recent case of Argentina is a good example of that...
Agreed. However, a lot of that is courtesy of Argentinian behavior, not the IMF per se. If you've got someone on a beer budget who likes to buy Mercedes', is it his fault, or the banker who won't extend his line of credit, when he goes into bankruptcy?
Look, we're obviously on opposite end of the spectrum on the matter. Shall we agree to disagree?
Obviously. Works for me.
"...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.