The New American Way of War

[sad sally]

Andrew Bacevich 13 February 2012

For a democracy, waging endless war poses a challenge. There are essentially two ways to do it. The first is for the state to persuade the people that the country faces an existential threat. This is what the Bush administration attempted to do after 9/11, for a time with notable success. Scaremongering made possible the invasion of Iraq. Had Operation Iraqi Freedom produced the victory expected by its architects, scaremongering would probably have led in due course to Operation Iranian Freedom and Operation Syrian Freedom. But Iraq led to an outcome that Americans proved unwilling to underwrite.

The second way is for the state to insulate the people from war’s effects, thereby freeing itself from constraints. A people untouched (or seemingly untouched) by war are far less likely to care about it. Persuaded that they have no skin in the game, they will permit the state to do whatever it wishes to do. This is the approach the Obama administration is now pursuing: first through the expanded use of aerial drones for both intelligence gathering and ‘targeted’ assassination; and, second, through the expanded deployment of covert special operations forces around the world, such as the team that killed Osama bin Laden. The New York Times reported today that the head of the Special Operations Command ‘is seeking new authority to move his forces faster and outside of normal Pentagon deployment channels’.

Drones and special forces are the essential elements of a new American way of war, conducted largely in secret with minimal oversight or accountability and disregarding established concepts of sovereignty and international law. Bush’s critics charge him with being a warmonger. But Obama has surpassed his predecessor in shedding any remaining restraints on waging war.

How exactly the new American way of war will promote the longterm well-being of the United States is unclear. Indeed, the question goes almost unasked. All we know is that there are a lot of people out there who qualify as bad guys. And we aim to kill them all.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/02/13/andrew-bacevich/the-new-american-way-of-war/

[phasma ex machina]

1. America ought to go all Orwellian by renaming its Dept of Defense the Ministry of Peace.

[davidthegnome]

2. Drones... not such a good idea

Terrible things happen in every war. When humans do terrible things, they can be held responsible, put on trial, made to account for their crimes. When drones do them... I guess you can blame the technicians, maybe the companies that build the parts... and who knows how safe they are? If they can be hacked, systematically controlled by enemies, our own weapons could seriously come back to bite us. Maybe I've read too many science fiction novels, but it seems to me that such machines are dangerous in large part because we could lose control of them.

We're entering a new era... I think it's going to be even uglier than the last few.

[sad sally]

3. Were the covert operations to spy on Iran in December thwarted by a "rogue drone?"

Last edited Fri Feb 17, 2012, 04:55 PM - Edit history (1)

(grammer (mine) edited - this subject gets my brain going before my hands)

While the military/CIA was quick to say nothing had gone wrong in the drone's operation and that it certainly hadn't been shot down, there wasn't a plausible explanation. How many other spy and/or armed drones have lost their way and either crashed or inflicted damage on unintended targets? Of course, our secret government won't tell us, even with all the transparency the President promised.
#####

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Drone Disasters
Posted by Nick Turse at 9:00pm, January 15, 2012.
After almost two months in abeyance and the (possibly temporary) loss of Shamsi Air Base for its air war, the CIA is again cranking up its drone operations in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. The first two attacks of 2012 were launched within 48 hours of each other, reportedly killing 10 ___s, and wounding at least four ___s. Yes, that’s right, the U.S. is killing ___s in Pakistan. These days, the dead there are regularly identified in press accounts as “militants” or “suspected militants” and often, quoting never-named Pakistani or other “intelligence sources,” as “foreigners” or "non-Pakistanis." They just about never have names, and the CIA’s robots never get close enough to their charred bodies to do whatever would be the dehumanizing techno-equivalent of urinating on them.

It all sounds so relatively clean. Last year, there were 75 such clean attacks, 303 since 2004, killing possibly thousands of ___s in those borderlands. In fact, the world of death and destruction always tends to look clean and “precise” -- if you keep your distance, if you remain in the heavens like the implacable gods of yore or thousands of miles from your targets like the “pilots” of these robotic planes and the policymakers who dispatch them.

On the ground, things are of course far messier, nastier, more disturbingly human. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has estimated that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have, over the years, killed at least 168 children. In a roiled and roiling situation in that country, with the military and the civilian government at odds, with coup rumors in the air and borders still closed to U.S. Afghan War supplies (since an “incident” in which American air strikes killed up to 26 Pakistani troops), the deeply unpopular drone attacks only heighten tensions. Whomever they may kill -- including al-Qaeda figures -- they also intensify anger and make the situation worse in the name of making it better. They are, by their nature, blowback weapons and their image of high-tech, war-winning precision here in the U.S. undoubtedly has an instant blowback effect on those who loose them. The drones can’t help but offer them a dangerous and deceptive feeling of omnipotence, a feeling that -- legality be damned -- anything is possible.
----
The Crash and Burn Future of Robot Warfare
What 70 Downed Drones Tell Us About the New American Way of War
By Nick Turse

American fighter jets screamed over the Iraqi countryside heading for the MQ-1 Predator drone, while its crew in California stood by helplessly. What had begun as an ordinary reconnaissance mission was now taking a ruinous turn. In an instant, the jets attacked and then it was all over. The Predator, one of the Air Force’s workhorse hunter/killer robots, had been obliterated.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175489/

[davidthegnome]

4. Interesting.

Drones really demonstrate how far our capabilities have gone, in regards to science and technology and automation. Still, where one dreams of building robots to further medicine, another dreams of using them for conquest. It seems like a severely expensive way to wage war, considering how many people and technicians are required to keep the thing in the air. The possibility of malfunctions, especially during critical missions, seems to me enough reason to be more than cautious.

I think though, that in this brave new world we're building, the drones of today are only a shadow of the drones of tomorrow. Who knows, if we live another ten or twenty years, we might think we're living in a Star Wars or Transformers movie.