The Remotely Piloted American Way of Life: In the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greetedas if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles.
And can you blame Americans for their love affair with the drone? Who wouldn’t be wowed by the most technologically advanced, futuristic, no-pain-all-gain weapon around?
Here’s the thing, though: put drones in a more familiar context, skip the awestruck commentary, and they should have been eerily familiar. If, for instance, they were car factories, they would seem so much less exotic to us.
With U.S. troops marching out of Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s head on a pike, it will be difficult for Barack Obama’s detractors to characterize the president’s first-term performance on the international stage as indecisive, inexperienced, or weak-kneed.
Electoral ramifications notwithstanding, what worries Mark Lagon, who holds the International Relations and Security Chair at Georgetown University’s foreign service master’s degree program, is that Obama’s seeming strength betrays a lack of inventiveness and depth—especially when it comes to projecting soft power, that combination of diplomacy and nonmilitary coercion essential to enduring influence and stability.
In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence. The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.
Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity. It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation, and dissemination” operations center—and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars.
Try to imagineIranian aircraft carriers anchoring in the Gulf of Mexico. Preposterous, right? So why does our military get a free pass to camp out in the Persian Gulf? Keep reading …
Ask a video game geek to name her favorite first-person shooters and you’re likely to get a grocery list of titles like Halo and Quake, trigger-happy bloodbaths just a few pixels more gory than their predecessors, Doom and Duke Nukem. There’s a game currently in development, however, that could change the dynamic without watering down the game. Players plugged into Warco brave an online world carrying a video recorder instead of a flamethrower, and while there is danger around every corner, there are no kill shots.
"An account of the spectacular end of that nearly $4 million drone in November 2007 is contained in a collection of Air Force accident investigation documents recently examined by TomDispatch. They catalog more than 70 catastrophic Air Force drone mishaps since 2000, each resulting in the loss of an aircraft or property damage of $2 million or more."
— TomDispatch on the hidden costs of military drones, or, why robotic warfare is bound to crash and burn. Keep reading …
New Year’s Resolution: Declare War on Iran: Pessimists, skeptics, and conspiracy theorists often have a fairly similar point of view. The difference is in the packaging of their arguments. It’s hard to tell where Guernica’s Russ Baker falls on the Chicken Little spectrum with his latest essay, which questions whether or not the federal government is grooming U.S. citizens for a war with Iran.
Did the United States poison tens of thousands of its own soldiers in Iraq with fumes from burning toxic trash? Before you consider it an outlandish suggestion, I suggest you read J. Malcolm Garcia’s moving account in the Oxford American of two American soldiers who made it back from their tours of duty having escaped insurgents’ shells, bullets, and improvised explosive devices—only to die slow, torturous deaths from the effects of garbage torched in open pits by the U.S. military.
Personal stories like those of Billy McKenna and Kevin Wilkins may only become more common in coming years, according to Garcia, since the U.S. military operated at least 23 burn pits in Iraq before combat operations ended this year, including a notoriously noxious one that often literally cast a pall over Balad Air Base.
Fight Class: In middle-school history classes, war is almost always at the heart of the matter. It’s natural to frame a nation’s story line on its moments of greatest conflict and change, writes eighth-grade history teacher Dwight Simon, but teachers might be doing students and society a disservice by glorifying and even perpetuating violence as a redemptive force. “In how we teach war—indeed, in trying to justify our fascination with war—we have perhaps tried too hard to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice,” he argues.
Simon charged himself with the task of infusing his course syllabus at Epiphany School in Dorchester, Massachusetts, with greater attention to the pain, torture, and death that accompany combat. New lesson plans highlighted six- and seven-figure casualty statistics, photographs of the dead strewn across battlefields, and soldiers’ personal narratives reflecting an ambiguous or negative perspective of war’s worth.
