GROUNDHOG DAY

[Orwellian_Ghost]

DRONING ON

Drone Race to a Known Future
Why Military Dreams Fail -- and Why It Doesn't Matter
By Tom Engelhardt

...

Oh, and there's just one more reason that comes to mind: it so happens that I can see the future when it comes to drones, and it's dismal. I'm no prophet -- it's only that I've already lived through so much of that future. In fact, we all have.

Militarily speaking, we might as well be in the film Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell are forced to live out the same 24 hours again and again -- with all the grimness of that idea and none of the charm of those actors. In my lifetime, I've repeatedly seen advanced weapons systems or mind-boggling technologies of war hailed as near-utopian paths to victory and future peace (just as the atomic bomb was soon after my birth). In the Vietnam War, the glories of "the electronic battlefield" were limned as an antidote to brute and ineffective American air power. That high-tech, advanced battlefield of invisible sensors was to bring an end to the impunity of guerrillas and infiltrating enemy armies. No longer capable of going anywhere undetected, they would have nowhere to hide.



In the 1980s, it was President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly dubbed "Star Wars" by its critics, a label that he accepted with amusement. ("If you will pardon my stealing a film line -- the Force is with us," he said in his usual genial way.) His dream, as he told the American people, was to create an "impermeable" anti-missile shield over the United States -- "like a roof protects a family from rain" -- that would end the possibility of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and so create peace in our time (or, if you were of a more cynical turn of mind, the possibility of a freebie nuclear assault on the Soviets).

In the Gulf War, "smart bombs" and smart missiles were praised as the military saviors of the moment. They were to give war the kind of precision that would lower civilian deaths to the vanishing point and, as the neocons of the Bush administration would claim in the next decade, free the U.S. military to "decapitate" any regime we loathed. All this would be possible without so much as touching the civilian population (which would, of course, then welcome us as liberators). And later, there was "netcentric warfare," that Rumsfeldian high-tech favorite. Its promise was that advanced information-sharing technology would turn a Military Lite into an uplinked force so savvy about changing battlefield realities and so crushing that a mere demo or two would cow any "rogue" nation or insurgency into submission.

...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175137/droning_on

[TexasObserver]

1. Repressing locals only works until the boot is removed from their neck.

That's why the invaders/occupiers almost always eventually lose and retreat. Either their empire expands too far and becomes too hard to maintain, and the locals take it back, or the home folks of the empire get tired of losing blood and money over some remote foreign outpost and put an end to it.

We can leave now, leave next year, or leave in ten years, but eventually the Afghanis will have their country back. Where are they going to go? What are they going to do? They'll do what locals always do: suffer through it, whether it's ten years or fifty.

We will leave in failure. Anyone who thinks otherwise really doesn't get History.

[existentialist]

2. Indeed, and

after World War One it was proclaimed by some that the machine gun had made war so horrible that no one would ever allow there to be any more wars.