I disagree. The nature of war is completely different. We don't really have actual wars any more, we have ongoing conflicts initiated by the President without a declaration of war and without a draft. The privatization of war is just around the corner.
Modern warfare is no longer about defeating states or protecting one's citizenry from the absurd "total war" concept. We are all entwined in ways that I think nobody can truly fathom, so war between the major powers cannot happen. (and whoever has the nukes will have the last word anyways in that case, so it's pointless) it's about eternal war on whichever agents happen to rankle the state. It's better to have a feedback loop at that point. That's the difference between tobacco and alcohol---you can tell when you're doing something wrong with one. The other sneaks up on you, and evantually, you've lost a lung, and you didn't really even know how it got so bad. Drone/remote warfare makes warfare absurdly trivial. A generation that is used to it, will, I think, quickly devolve into complete neglect of the world around them, and the pain others may go through. They may find it easier to justify future Iraqs. Caskets are a tragedy all around, but they are also a lesson and a reminder that war is nothing to be trifled with, for our sake, as well as for the sake of civilians in the other state.
You're taking a 10 year period and extrapolating that to the future of war. It wasn't that long ago that Iraq invaded Kuwait in a ground war, and we were asked to help defend and repel them. Or the Bosnia was undergoing ethnic cleansing. It's pretty dangerous to assume that type of war is over just because the most recent conflict has been terrorism. This could easily have been said of all modern warfare advances, from knives to guns to rifles to snipers to bombs to missiles. Each further removes the attacker from the defender. And yet, at no point has there been a neglect of the world around them. Military powers have continued to refine their weapons to be more precise and cause less and less collateral damage. Human beings have continued to get more compassionate and more concerned for the civilian toll of war.
Conventional war can be done for good, but there are conventional tools for that. Drone warfare is only very useful in situations where you do not have feet on the ground. As a supplement to a conventional ground war, I have no problem with drones per say, as they will just be a part of the mess anyways. However, drones allow for the pain of war to rage when there are no "official" conflicts, and no feet on the ground, and makes it exceedngly easy and costless for this to happen. War is a measure to be taken with some gravity, drone warfare removes that gravity and the cost entirely, at least for one side. As for the increasing precision of weapons, all of that will be for naught if American drone tactics continue to be used as wildly as they have (double-tap strikes violating international law, civilian "accident" strikes). The American people owe it to themselves to restrain as much as possible those of the political class who make such desicions so as to avoid unneeded bloodshed on their hands. The early tidings and excessive use cases of drones have brought nothing but warrented skepticism to the claim that America cares deeply about civilian casualities. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24557333 http://www.policymic.com/articles/2...e-taps-highlight-possible-war-crimes-by-obama
Have you been reading my posts about drones from years ago? Exactly the same as planes except cheaper and less risk of losing highly trained pilots. This is true for the time period after we built the largest thermonuclear weapons and went into tactical devices. Before that increasing civilian casualties was the point.
And we had those in the past. Expeditions by some British outposts to quell some Pashtun or Indian hill tribe that threatened their colonial territories, things that were so trivial in the context of the time that we no longer talk about them in the history books. That's the equivalent of drones, only now we no longer have the great wars between the capitalist countries. For now.
Yeah, some exaggeration. It is probably only around a million. About 500,000 by bombing and violence. Around another 500,000 by such deliberate obvious results of bombing water and sewerage systems and sanctions against replacement parts, making old folks with serious health conditions camp out in the desert or be without electricity etc. In extreme temperatures. Elective war against folks who have not attacked you is the ultimate war crime.
All wars are elective. Our involvement in the European front in WW2 was elective. The German military never attacked the US. Our involvement in WW1 was completely elective, as we were not attacked at all. Are you really suggesting that Woodrow Wilson should have been tried for war crimes? Give me a break.
#1 I am glad that someone that doesn't even live in the United States knows what a majority of Americans think. #2 Concerning a short term vision by American politicians and the likely hood of it failing, it has been being touted as the failing of the USA for over 200 years now. Simply stated, I wouldn't count on it.
Hey, if we're going to have confessions of an American drone operator, why not the confessions of a CIA informant?
