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Terminators to Tripoli
Killer drones in Libya: The global expansion of remote-controlled warfare.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the next stage of the most important military invasion of the 21st century. It isn't the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya. It's the invasion of warfare by unmanned vehicles.
This is the invasion's third stage: global expansion. Pakistan has been a pilot experiment—or, rather, a remotely-piloted experiment—in unmanned warfare. Drones have won the confidence of presidents of both parties. Gates' announcement signals that they will now be deployed beyond Pakistan, to Libya and any other place where we need to kill people without risking American lives. (AP Photo)
The invasion began quietly years ago, with scattered, occasional reports of drone strikes in Pakistan. As these reports accumulated, it gradually became apparent that the U.S., without putting troops on the ground or sending pilots into Pakistani air space, was using drones to wage the world's first remote-controlled war. That was the invasion's first stage.
The drone campaign began as President Bush's war. Then, with President Obama's election, it crossed the political aisle. The rate of drone strikes tripled, and Bush's war became Obama's. (On Friday, a U.S. drone killed another 23 people in Pakistan.) That was the second stage.
Drones were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, but only as adjuncts to U.S. air and ground forces. Only in Pakistan did we wage a fully remote-controlled war—until Thursday. That's when Gates and Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced another American drone campaign, this time in Libya.
This is the invasion's third stage: global expansion. Pakistan has been a pilot experiment—or, rather, a remotely-piloted experiment—in unmanned warfare. Drones have won the confidence of presidents of both parties. Gates' announcement signals that they will now be deployed beyond Pakistan, to Libya and any other place where we need to kill people without risking American lives.
The quiet, early days of the drone war in Pakistan are over. Unmanned aerial weapons have become an American boast. "Gates: Obama OKs Predator Strikes in Libya," says the headline on the Department of Defense Web site. The arrival of our killing machines is now part of the U.S. message to Muammar Qaddafi, the people around him, and our allies.
Why are we sending drones a month after we entered the Libyan war? Because the war has evolved to require them. Thanks to NATO's air campaign, Cartwright explained, Qaddafi's forces "that are out in the open know that they're going to probably perish if a NATO bird sees them. So you're seeing a much more dispersed fight, people that are digging in or nestling up against crowded areas, where collateral damage is." To evade or deter air strikes, Qaddafi's men are traveling in unmarked vehicles and relocating to cities where they can use nearby civilians, in effect, as human shields.
To kill the bad guys without killing innocent bystanders, we need vehicles that can get close enough to our targets—and inspect them long enough—to be sure that what we're looking at is the bad guys. And then we have to hit them with weapons precise enough to avoid collateral damage. Drones have proved they can do this. Even critics concede that in Pakistan, the drones' civilian casualty rate has declined from 25 percent to 5 percent.
In Libya, Cartwright observed, drones will give NATO the "ability to get down lower" for "better visibility" on its targets. "They're uniquely suited for … urban areas where you can get low collateral damage," thanks to "their extended persistence on the target." Any pilot who tried to fly low enough, or hover long enough, to get the same level of visual confirmation might be shot down. And we can't have that, because Obama has promised us an almost risk-free war.
On Thursday, Gates reaffirmed the pledge with which Obama began the Libya campaign: No ground troops. When reporters asked whether the drones' arrival signaled "mission creep" in Libya, Gates said no. "The president has been firm, for example, on boots on the ground," Gates reiterated. With the drones' help, Obama intends to keep that pledge, waging a war without footprints. He won't even have to risk another downed American pilot.
Drones alone can't win the war in Libya, any more than they've won the war in Pakistan. But they increase our ability to kill the enemy while sparing civilians and avoiding risk to ourselves. To that extent, the unmanned invasion of warfare is a force for good.
On the other hand, it may also create a new kind of mission creep.
"If we tried to overthrow Qaddafi," Obama warned Americans three weeks ago, "we would likely have to put U.S. troops on the ground to accomplish that mission, or risk killing many civilians from the air. The dangers faced by our men and women in uniform would be far greater."
But if drones continue to improve and to take over the conduct of war, the risks to civilians, U.S. troops, and pilots might diminish to the point where we feel emboldened to attempt the overthrow of other dictators. In that case, the unmanned invasion of warfare might turn out to be the most significant invasion of this century, but certainly not the last.
(Readings I recommend: Spencer Ackerman at Danger Room points out that drones need spotters on the ground, so if we don't use "boots" for that in Libya, we might be using the CIA. Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann analyzed the first six years of the drone campaign in Pakistan in a 2010 New America Foundation paper. They updated their assessment four months ago in Foreign Policy. Bill Roggio and Alexander Mayer calculate a lower rate of civilian casualties at the Long War Journal. P. W. Singer wrote a terrific overview of drone warfare and the future of unmanned systems in Slate last year.)
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70 Comments so far
Show AllI'm convince that the powers that be want this to drag on and get expensive.
Uncle Sam, is being bled financially.
Ahh, the leverage we could have if we only threatened Quadaffi with drones! "Stop the killing or your a dead man!"
It should be a universal policy around the world, when someones' government commits atrocities, people of the world demand a stop to it, and instead of killing a bunch of misguided people, threaten the one who can make a difference!
If the powers that be include the OIl Companies, the IMF, World Bank and international banking, then yes, this will drag on.
This has everything to do with oil and the seizure of a sovereign nations natural resources. It has *very* little to do with 'humanitarian aid'.
Humanitarian aid? Right. We're killing innocent people, so they aren't killed by their leader. That makes all the sense in the world.
We are going to protect every civilian in Libya even if we have to kill every one of them in order to do so.
Agreed that this is all about oil.. but they want this to get over fast. Foreign oil companies have spent billions investing in oil infrastructure since the west signed its pact with the devil. All of which is at risk of being destroyed. Even if this was over next week, it will take years before they make up the time lost. Some twenty thousand oil workers have left and delays are costing billions in lost revenues.
How much are we paying at the pump now? Now that's incentive!
Before the US and its cronies went into Iraq the production cost was about $2 per barrel with futures trading above $112 that leaves a lot for profits. Today.. not quite as lucrative due to security issues. Mainly pipelines being blown up.. so much of the effort in Iraq is the protection of oil infrastructure. My guess is Libya has similar extraction costs so there is more profit motive compared to say oil sand production.
Clearly you buy into the propaganda that we are there to help the Libyan population. So why was the UK SAS doing in Libya, in the first place.
Libya was a country that used oil sales to provide first class health, education and housing to its population. Now those oil sales will be used to line the pockets of international oil corporations. That is reason #1 why we are there. Reason #2 why we are there is line the pockets of our military contractor corporations with our tax dollars.
Please cough out the propganda, and see that that the great evil Kadaffi is mostly guilty of not giving oil profits to OUR rich.
Who in the world is going to tell the Obomber to stop killing people around the world.
Last time I added it up the great USA has killed over 10 million poor people around the
world.. since I got my draft notice in 1970..
I think the world is about tired of the usa and we will live to see the usa spent into
third world status..
could not happen soon enough..
I am tired of paying to kill people around the world.
Jill--
Exactly. Libya has little or nothing to do with ridding the world of another evil-doer. It's another profit center for the Amerikan weapons dealers and their pals in the oil cartel.
Yup, war means PROFIT. Way things are going Raytheon (sp?) will have to outsourse the building of those "smart" bomb guidance systems.
The only thing on-target about the drones is your comment.
As Jill notes, Obama states that Manning is guilty despite the fact that he has never seen the inside of a courtroom. The irony here, of course, is that Obama declares, apparently with a straight face, that we are a nation of laws. This would seem to be a variation of what Richard Nixon once said when he said that if the president does something, no matter how questionable, then it is always legal. Here we have Obama declaring that Manning broke the law even though Manning has never been tried for his alleged crimes and since he has not been tried in a court of law that then means that Manning has not then been convicted of a crime. But yet former constitutional law scholar and now President Barack Obama would have us believe in his omniscience that Bradley Manning has broken the law. It would seem that just the suspicion of someone supposedly breaking the law is the raison d'etre for allowing the military with the apparent full knowledge and compliance of the government to then torture someone who has never been tried in front of a judge or a military tribune for the crimes that he has been accused.
With his assertion that Manning "broke the law, Obama comes across as Manning's judge and jury. Obama's attitude toward Manning is also reminiscent of a scene in the classic 1950s film 12 Angry Men when juror # 8, played by Henry Fonda, tells juror #3, played by Lee J. Cobb, that he just can't wait to be the defendant's executioner. He also tells juror #3 that "I bet that you would like to pull the switch on him." But this situation with Manning is even more egregious since Manning has not even been tried in a court of law for the crimes that he has been charged. One wonders if Obama also can't wait to pull the switch on Manning if he were to ever sit in the electric chair.
Will the reporters and journalist of this country rise and stand up for Manning? Will the Sunday talk shows condemn the treatment that Manning has received this weekend as well as condemning Obama's rush to judgment against Manning? Unfortunately it appears that as each day passes there seems to be less likelihood that any morality and ethics and integrity will ever reveal itself in this less than grand and allegedly democratic country that we live in.
♦♦♦ Reply moved to "President Obama Speaks on Manning and the Rule of Law" by Glenn Greenwald* ♦♦♦
* http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/23-5
Jill (Apr 23 2011 - 10:57am) -- I've been urging impeachment for months. Is there an organized group promoting that? Who do you think might file articles? Too bad Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (a Democrat from San Antonio) isn't still around; I'm pretty sure he would have had the courage to file.
"Will the reporters and journalist of this country rise and stand up for Manning?"
The journalists and reporters didn't stand up for Eugene Debbs and the Wobblies (IWW - Industrial Workers of the World). Why should they stand up for Manning?
Two words to Obama: Valerie Plame.
Two more words to Obama: Double Standard.
So this is the "invasion of warfare", killing all the "enemy" but not the leader who "has to go" that would be what? Assassination of suspect Americans is legal but if they killed the leader of the "enemy" that might shorten the war.
This Moslem War is not being fought to be a short one, since that would threaten to kill profits of the racket.
Just today in Pakistan:
"At least 25 people were killed in the drone strike, which targeted what one Pakistani official termed a "militant guesthouse" in Hasan Khel, near the region's main town of Miranshah, Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder in Islamabad reported....
Reports indicate that at least seven women and children were among the dead, Hyder said."
enough said, love folk
Yep, what kind of article is this? In one paragraph, it asserts that "Even critics concede that in Pakistan, the drones' civilian casualty rate has declined from 25 percent to 5 percent."; but a few paragraphs before that, it says "(On Friday, a U.S. drone killed another 23 people in Pakistan.) ", and links to an article that says at least 5 were children and 4 were women.
And as others said, the general point of view that finds nothing wrong with a foreign power judging from the air who is worth living and who deserves to die is disgusting. I have a depressing hunch that the majority of Americans and Europeans accepts this and doesn't find it in any way messed up though :-/
Maybe the Pentagon is changing the definition of a terrorist to reduce the civilian casualty count? If it tries to explain away the killing of children because they're "terrorists-in-training," while women are "terrorist incubators," then practically everyone becomes a legitimate military target.
The Foreign Policy article that gave the 25-to-5 percent reduction estimate admitted beforehand that "...it's not possible to differentiate precisely between militants and nonmilitants because militants live among the population and do not wear uniforms, and because government sources have the incentive to claim that only militants were killed, while militants often assert the opposite."
The AP just reported that local tribesmen in Misrata may take over the fight from regular army troops against the rebels so that the drones can't distinguish between them.
Ugly little piece of militarist propaganda from Slate.com (owned by the WashPo)...why did CommonDreams run this without warning?
"To kill the bad guys without killing innocent bystanders, we need vehicles that can get close enough to our targets—and inspect them long enough—to be sure that what we're looking at is the bad guys"—gotta love the simpleton diction of that! Did George Bush teach the nation to speak?
Drones are nothing but aerial terror-machines, designed to "loiter" in the "enemy's" airspace all but unseen and unheard, striking fear into the hearts of those on the ground: the potential collateral damage.
See Truthout for a recent report on how we'll soon see drones in U.S. airspace: http://www.truth-out.org/lobbying-report-drones-fly-through-congress-enter-us-skies/1302937200
As Mr. Assange has clearly demonstrated to us, politicians, soldiers, pilots, marines, and Task Force 20 members are robotic drones without consciences--just as Henry David Thoreau invited us to observe in his exhortation to Civil Disobedience long ago.
“Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts / a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.”
In the post-script to this article, it mentioned a piece by Spencer Ackerman that points out that drones need to have spotters on the ground. Why even bother with the drones then? Just give the "spotters" grenades or poison darts or whatever to get the "bad guys", if accuracy is the point.
We are still risking people, combatants and civilians; no matter how thinly you slice it, it's still baloney. Whoever is making these drones is the only winner in this war. Presidents' need to avoid military funerals should not be a basis for military strategy.
"But they increase our ability to kill the enemy while sparing civilians..."
Sparing civilians? Yeah, right. Tell that to the wedding parties or other groups of noncombatants that have been disintegrated by these murderous remote controlled video games.
And even if civilians are not killed, who the fuck gives people the right to decide who deserves to die and who deserves to live? This is terrorism, and a worse form of it than any religious fundamentalist form, because it's cynical and realist and is aimed at keeping power, not creating a better world and achieving justice. Which, btw, is what most non-state terrorism is about. The sense of justice is often distorted, but most of the time there are real grievances, real pain and real death behind it. The West, and America at this moment, have none of that. We're just killing for power and control, not because we were wronged by Lybians or whoever (it's the other way around of course).
I also have no sympathy whatsoever towards the dipshits who control these drones as their job. In addition to this every other organ of violence is going this way too, including the police, and this makes it very difficult to sympathise with policemen and soldiers, even as fellow human beings. The aim is to gather and excercise overwhelming power, without any possible response from the victim, violent or non-violent, the complete denial of human dialogue, replaced with godlike killing machines. I don't know, I can't feel anything but pure evil in this. Stuff like this makes it very hard from me to even try to understand the motivations and humanity of people behind this. For me, this is easily as evil as anything in human history.
Thing is, I believe in and admire Western Civilisation, science and technology, philosophy and culture. I don't think there's anything comparable to it in the world. No other civilisation has the same or even comparable achievements as ours, in terms of actionable knowledge of the physical world. But stuff like this makes me think that maybe it is all for the worse. Automation is used to destroy human life: to take time away from personal life and turn it into a life as a cog - even though it could be used to increase and improve human life, to make it free from material wants and available for happiness. Material abundance is turned into consumerist slavery. Technology is used to make murder efficient and safe. Science is used not to free people but to manipulate and control them. It's based on the work of free and safe people, but it's used to turn people's lives into mental and physical slavery and to kill them. Philosophy is used to justify imperialism. Education is used to spread indoctrination. And the stuff I listed, science, technology, philosophy, education are the best achievements of our civilisation. This is a bit crap, isn't it.
"This is terrorism..."
It's only 'terrorism' when the other guy does it.
If you are going by a strict US interpretation that is...
>>I also have no sympathy whatsoever towards the dipshits who control these drones as their job. In addition to this every other organ of violence is going this way too, including the police, and this makes it very difficult to sympathise with policemen and soldiers, even as fellow human beings. The aim is to gather and excercise overwhelming power, without any possible response from the victim, violent or non-violent, the complete denial of human dialogue, replaced with godlike killing machines. I don't know, I can't feel anything but pure evil in this. Stuff like this makes it very hard from me to even try to understand the motivations and humanity of people behind this. For me, this is easily as evil as anything in human history. <<
I wonder what would happen if a couple of these killer-video-jockeys, after a long hard day at war in an air conditioned office in Las Vegas, arrived home to find their entire, completely innocent, families splattered about in amorphous piles of dead meat. War is hell, eh? I hope to God nothing like this ever occurs. Well, actually it occurs every day in Pakistan at the hands of these self-same killer-video-jockeys, but you get my drift. As long as it doesn't occur in our country is all that matters to us exceptional "Americans".
Jill (Apr 22 2011 - 6:31pm) -- Maybe "Frontline" would do this. The rest of the MSM will never do it. But you're exactly right to call for those interviews.
Remember back on '01 when "W" said that the pilots who flew the jets into those buildings were "cowards" and Bill Maher lost his job for criticizing the presidents words and saying that pilots dropping bombs from 30,000 feet were the cowards? And the Dixie Chicks were banished from prime time? Guess now that we've gotten everything down to another electronic video game, the pilots of those drones should be given medals for bravery in the face of the enemy. Perhaps not the Medal of Honor, but at least the silver star. Ticker tape parades for all.
Some political big-wig said that in an article the other day. He was lamenting that the brave and courageous drone pilots were ineligible for medals even though they were fighting just like a ground-pounder in the combat zone.
All I could figure our is that it must be very dangerous commuting across Los Vegas to spend eight hours in a Barca Lounger targeting "bug splats" while sipping slurpies or Lattes brought to his chair by some private.
Returning to the wife and kiddies at the end of the shift must be equally harrowing. By all means, give them a hero medal!
The mind boggles.
"Killer drones in Libya." - Yeah, got that right. Sen. John McCain is in Bengahzi, in 'moral' support of the CIA backed rebels. The same rebels who were able to open a central reserve bank that was instantly recognized by the financial PTB as legitimate.
Something VERY hinkey is going on behind the scenes, folks.
Here we have a great adjunct to yesterday's Chomsky article, "The Lies Behind the West's War on Libya," http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27936.htm
A short excerpt:
"The question that anyone with even minimum intelligence cannot help asking is the following: Are countries like France, England, the USA, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Poland who defend their right to bomb Libya on the strength of their self proclaimed democratic status really democratic? If yes, are they more democratic than Gaddafi’s Libya? The answer in fact is a resounding NO, for the plain and simple reason that democracy doesn’t exist."
Thanks for the link karlof, good informative article.
Big effing deal that the Preds will be roaming the skies of Libya.
We've had them prowling the US/Canada border for at least three years, and just last year the US Government gave approval for domestic use.
As the saying goes: "We are all Palestinians now."
The most dangerous threat to the American people is our own Military and Homeland Security. They could care less about the average American and are there to solely protect the power and wealth of the 1% elite. " In Pakistan, the drones civilian causality ( translation murder of innocent civilians ) rate has declined from 25% to 5 % ". Wow! I guess that makes everything hunky dory! Of course, unless you or your family happen to be in the 5% category! Also,the 5% figure is probably just more BS.
Holy Hellfire, fellow parishioners. This Good Friday message perhaps is a sign that the Apocalypse may really be approaching on the near horizon.
Bluntly put, the phrase "the invasion of warfare by unmanned vehicles" is nothing but conceptual gobbledegook.
Throughout most of this article, William Saletan is speaking sheer gibberish, a strange dialect of disingenuous RandCorp newspeak, dreamt up somewhere in the deepest bowels of the national security bureaucracy's psy ops department - a macbre language designed to lull us into believing this new, improved form of murder by hi tech remote control Predator drone is qualitatively (or morally) different from other, more ancient blood stained methods. I most emphatically is not.
War is the darkest human activity, but a human activity in its very essence. People (invariably testosterone driven males) invade. It is men who design and manufacture the machines, men who deploy and target the machines, and men who finally push a button so that their machines kill other men. Warfare doesn't get "invaded" by anything. This is gobbledegook - disembodied gibberish of ominous, Orwellian scale.
"Why are we sending drones a month after we entered the Libyan war?", Mr. Saletan asks. "Because the war has evolved to require them", he and General Cartwright respond.
More gibberish. It is mortal men who direct and shape the course of their war, not vice versa. What an inversion of cause and effect, what a sick and sickening variation upon the old metaphor of the bad carpenter blaming his tools. And such a Good Friday message to share! Like Pontius Pilate, let us now join together, to collectively wash our hands of moral responsibility, blaming the carnage to follow upon unseen, mechanical forces acting beyond human control.
"Drones alone can't win the war in Libya, any more than they've won the war in Pakistan. But they increase our ability to kill the enemy, while sparing civilian casualties and avoiding risk to ourselves. To that extent, the unmanned invasion of warfare is a force for good."
Happy Easter, everybody. What indeed would Jesus say?
Time to take the toys away from the boys. The merchants of death are speaking in tongues.
Bill from Saginaw
Well said.
Obama, your robotic drone murder king. No charges, no trials, no judge, no jury, just summary robotic drone executions by Obama in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen.
Next: conservative's drones that kill liberals
ez -
Technologically feasible in our lifetimes. The whole mindset reminds me of the irritating fad for buzzing urban high crime neighborhoods with police helicopters back in the late 1970's, the theory being that the noise and search lights overhead would scare the criminals so bad they would all stop doing drugs and stay indoors.
Anyway, the idea of domestic drone cops targeting liberals for Hellfire treatment is going to take some research and development work. What about collateral damage to independent voters?
What if the American civilian liberals do like Ghadaffi's military forces supposedly do, and adapt by donning business suits for men, big hair for all the women - carrying around Ayn Rand paperbacks, blending into the general population so as to cynically use Republicans as civilian shields?
Is a 25% collateral damage error rate, a 5% mistake percentage, 1%, .005% rate or whatever an acceptable margin of error when it comes to keeping the homeland safe?
These are serious issues requiring further technical study. How about you and I apply together for a national security contract grant to do the consulting work? If we gotta blend in anyway, we might as well get a dribble of leftovers from the Pentagon gravy train.
Bill from Saginaw
Some blacks and homosexuals are convinced that AIDS was an ethnic weapon
They could home in a missile or insect sized bomblet to the GPS location of your ipad, iphone or Google account Selection could be based on what you read and where you have been.
I'll bet some cold evil-ass company is working on that interface right now and lobbying for a contract.
jclient -
The part about using the GPS component of your ipad, iphone, or cell phone is already a reality.
I am a criminal defense attorney. In at least three recent felony cases I've worked on, the police used what here in Michigan is called a "ping" - essentially a cooperative access to cell phone account user information apparently spawned by the Patriot Act - to physically locate a person for whom an arrest warrant or search warrant had been issued, in real time. By the same token, I've reversed the same GPS tracing capability to corroborate an alibi defense. How could the defendant have been sticking up the liquor store, when his or her retrievable cellphone records and the microwave relay tower records clearly show Johnny or Jenny Badass were yacking away merrily on the other side of town at the very moment the 9/11 emergency call was received?
The ability of government to use GPS to physically locate the cellphone, ipod, or other device contemporaneously is already awesome. The same target location capability already in use to arrest or surveil people could indeed be used to whack them, if drones in the sky become an expected cultural phenomenon, and faceless powers-that-be behind the screen of deniability decided to take off the gloves and go riding on the dark side..
Bill from Saginaw
>>to physically locate a person for whom an arrest warrant or search warrant had been issued, in real time.<<
Actually the "ping" can only locate the telephone.
"Actually the "ping" can only locate the telephone."
Bull. Shit.
The 'ping' can also turn on the cell remotely, operate the microphone to act as an omnidirectional mike in the area, download all recent calls (over 100), download the onboard memory of names and numbers, recent texts, etc. If it's connected to the wireless network, all of it's functions and data can be copied remotely.
As for the 'locate' crap, how far is your cell from you RIGHT NOW?
I'm not sure, liberal, I may have left it in your limousine. Let me "ping" it to see. Maybe its a bit too technical of a nitpick for you. I am not tethered to my phone. Are you tethered to yours? I hate the damn things and as soon as my contract is up it's gone.
Oh. I almost forgot. If the battery in your key fob is dead I can still get you into your car. Call me and I'll tell you how.
I'm worried now Bill. Hey! Do you want to borrow my cell phone for the day!
I think they'll call those vehicles of corporate control??
Dateline 2012 The Obama administration announced today that the TSA will be authorized to use Predator drones in homeland security operations in the US. Experts agreed this action will probably earn Obama a second Nobel Peace Prize. God bless America and Our great fearless patriotic leader.
Yikes!
I don't need to repeat what many previous commenters have pointed out, but I do want to note what an insidious piece of droneophilia this article is.
Frankly, I only began skimming through the article in the first place because I know that Saletan is a worthless centrist bloviator-- I assumed incorrectly that the horror of the Amerikan Imperium's burgeoning automated warfare had penetrated even Saletan's thick skull and wonky myopia, such that he was moved to public criticism. I expected a cheap thrill of superficial gratification.
By mid-skim, having reached the bits Jill, Bill from Saginaw, arkay, and others have quoted, I realized that Saletan was actually touting the "progress" of New & Improved Drone Warfare! He really is the caricature of the Sensible Realist.
Before I'd even reached my teens, I'd developed a keen appetite for science-fiction paperbacks. I recall, with affectionate amusement, a summer afternoon when I was laying on a sofa on our front porch, reading some sci-fi book or another.
I was still in high school. My Serious sister, a couple of years older than I, was in her militant feminist university-student phase. She came into the house, stopped, and scowled at me. Why was I wasting my time, and mind, on such worthless, escapist trash? Was I afraid to read about REALITY?
During this transient tongue-lashing, she held up a book she was carrying to show me what "reality" is: "Labor's Untold Story", by Boyer and Morais. It is a very good book, by the way. I still smile when I think of her righteously waving the tome at me as I lay, shameless and unrepentant, on the porch sofa.
I guess I should be grateful that my sister didn't clock me over the head with it. It was a pretty big book.
But I digress. The point is that those worthless, escapist sci-fi stories, along with innumerable TV shows like "The Twilight Zone" and movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey", hammered on a seminal modern tragedy: Manunkind invents, discovers, or acquires marvelous and powerful technology to do its bidding, meet its needs, and serve its noble purposes.
But ultimately, to their suffering and sorrow, the humans find that it is the machines that are running THEM, and that the Utopia they aspired to by technological means turns out to be a lethal, doomed dystopia.
My sister's disapprobation notwithstanding, I'm certainly glad that I wasted my time acquiring enduring wisdom and insights from sci-fi stories. I don't know if Saletan read "Labor's Untold Story" when he was in his teens. But WHATEVER he was reading, I guarantee that it was WAY more escapist than sci-fi.
Anyone who touts the "up" side of "the global expansion of remote-controlled warfare" may be readily written off as collaterally damaged beyond repair.