Shadow Government by Engelhardt Tom Glenn Greenwald

Author:Engelhardt, Tom, Glenn, Greenwald [Engelhardt, Tom, Glenn, Greenwald]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook, Political Science
ISBN: 9781608464272
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2014-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

Our Robot Military

Although early drone technology was already being used over North Vietnam, it’s in another sense entirely that drones have been heading into America’s future since 1973. There was an eerie logic to it: first came professional war, then privatized war, then mercenary and outsourced war—all of which made war ever more remote from most Americans. Finally, both literally and figuratively, came remote war itself.

It couldn’t be more appropriate that the US Air Force prefers you not call their latest wonder weapons “unmanned aerial vehicles,” or UAVs, anymore. They would like you to use the label “remotely piloted aircraft” (RPA) instead. And ever more remotely piloted that vehicle is to become, until—claim believers and enthusiasts—it will pilot itself, land itself, maneuver itself, and while in the air even choose its own targets.

In this sense, think of us as moving from the citizens’ army to a roboticized, and finally robot, military—a foreign legion in the most basic sense. In other words, we are moving toward an ever greater outsourcing of war to things that cannot protest, cannot vote with their feet (or wings), and for whom there is no “home front” or even a home at all. In a sense, we are, as we have been since 1973, heading for a form of war without anyone, citizen or otherwise, in the picture—except those on the ground, enemy and civilian alike, who will, as usual, die.

Of course, it may never happen this way, in part because drones are anything but perfect or wonder weapons, and in part because corporate war fought by a thoroughly professional military turns out to be staggeringly expensive to the demobilized citizen, profligate in its waste, and—by the evidence of recent history—remarkably unsuccessful. It also couldn’t be more remote from the idea of a democracy or a republic.

In a sense, the modern imperial age began hundreds of years ago with corporate war, when the Dutch, British, and other East India companies set sail, armed to the teeth, to subdue the world at a profit. Perhaps corporate war will also prove the endpoint for that age, the perfect formula for the last global empire on its way down.

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