For the last 18 years, the United States has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on drone assassination warfare. Now, as predicted, other countries are starting to use unmanned aerial vehicles, as seen with the recent attack against Saudi oil refineries. This might have been avoided if the U.S. had not set such a terrible precedent.
Now Drones Are Coming For Us and Our Allies. This Could Have Been Avoided.
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I’d go further than Ted, and say that drones have made the entire U.S. Air Force obsolete. For a few million spent on drones and precision missiles, Yemen can now sink a $13 billion Gerald Ford-Class Aircraft Carrier (and if they do, killing thousands of Americans, will we drop a nuke on Sana in retaliation?). The $2 trillion we will probably still spend on to buy 2,000+ F-35s is now a complete waste of taxpayer money. This is like the 14th-century pike that made it possible for a poor infantryman to beat an armored knight from the nobility. There will now be a parity between small nations and the great powers when it comes to aerial warfare. A Revolution in Military Affairs to use the technical term.
We are world leaders in the science of killing people. Other technologies … maybe not so much.
Although history does show us that once some random piece of technology becomes possible, people start thinking up ways to use it to kill other people.
Cars -> Tanks
Planes -> War Planes
Sky Rockets -> Missiles
Atomic Energy -> Atomic bombs
That is surely “the American way”: cosmically hypocritical, global mass-murdering with a “historic” versatility: from direct military mayhem to, perhaps even more cruel, economic strangulation.
Who will be this generation’s super-ghoul, a la Madeleine Albright, to sincerely claim that the deaths of (0.5-1.0-2.0 million?) Iranian children, caused by US sanction after sanction, “was worth it”?
(Awaiting moderation from September 26, 2019 at 12:05 AM )
Kudos, Ted – a better characterisation of «the American way» would be hard to find….
Henri