Smile when you look up at the sky. There's always someone watching! The future belongs to drones, remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with sensitive reconnaissance electronics and powerful precision weapons. Drones provide the kind of weapons system strategists have always wished for. They allow a military force to exert power while minimizing its own risks, and to carry out precise, deadly strikes, without sending its own soldiers into danger. There are new sensors that allow drones to seek out their own targets, not even needing to rely on human remote control. Automatic homing of drones brings now autopilot wars!
Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) is hard at work supplying the world's drones. IAI's biggest client is Israel, a country with more drones in its skies than any other in the world. No other company has sold as many drones as IAI, and Israel is the world's second largest exporter of drones, after the US. While other armies are just beginning to experiment with remote-controlled aircraft, the Israeli Air Force recently celebrated the 40-year anniversary of its first drones.
Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production. If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some alleged good can justify it — there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Men who are free to produce, have no incentive to loot; they have nothing to gain from war and a great deal to lose. Ideologically, the principle of individual rights does not permit a man to seek his own livelihood at the point of a gun, inside or outside his country. Economically, wars cost money; in a free economy, where wealth is privately owned, the costs of war come out of the income of private citizens — there is no overblown public treasury to hide that fact — and a citizen cannot hope to recoup his own financial losses (such as taxes or business dislocations or property destruction) by winning the war. Thus his own economic interests are on the side of peace.
In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, however, we are in big trouble. The truth is that foreign spying, meddling, and outright military intervention in the post-World War II era has made us less secure, not more. And we have lost countless lives and spent trillions of euros for our trouble. Too often official government lies have provided justification for endless, illegal wars and hundreds of thousands of resulting deaths and casualties. http://venitism.blogspot.com
The Butterfly Effect proves that you only need a major warmonger to transform a minor incident to world war. Winston Spencer Churchill's sadomasochist career lasted half a century, and no other Western warmonger was more calamitous for his country and civilization than Churchill. More than any other kleptocrat, in 1914 and 1939, Churchill lusted for war, his weird ac-dc foreplay, and pushed his country to turn two European wars into world wars. Both times, he succeeded, and those wars, that together took the lives of a hundred million Europeans, were the most infamous mortal blows on humanity. If Churchill did not interfere, Hitler could have wiped out communism from the surface of Earth by 1942.
Adolf Hitler had limited geopolitical aims, just to liberate Eastern Europe from
the yoke of communism, but the excitable warmoger Churchill overreacted. Hitler
was not out to conquer the world, he loved and admired Britons, he let the
British army evacuate from Dunkirk, and he built a defensive line between
Germany and France, the Siegfried Line. Churchill's decision to bomb a shattered
Germany between January and May 1945 was a war crime. When Churchill entered the inner Cabinet as First Lord in 1911, Britain was the first nation on Earth and
ruler of the greatest empire since Rome. The sun never set on the British
Empire. When Churchill left in 1945, Britain was a poor island. He was a Great
Man, at the cost of his country's greatness.
Before becoming premier, Churchill received envoys from Hitler in 1938 and met
with Nazi Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, who sought to convince Churchill,
who favored war, of the benefits of appeasement. Ribbentrop, the host, and
Churchill stood together in front of an enormous map in the German Embassy in
London, while Ribbentrop explained how the Germans could eliminate communism.
He assured Churchill that the British Empire would be left untouched. Churchill, however, was not convinced.
Most Americans opposed entry into World War II, primarily because they had experienced the destructive idiocy of U.S. intervention into World War I, a war that accomplished nothing more than the wasteful sacrifice of thousands of American lives, not to mention giving rise to Adolf Hitler and, ultimately, World War II. Even though World War II saved Europe from the Nazis, the Eastern Europeans were delivered into the hands of America's communist partner in WW II, the Soviet Union.
Out of sight and out of mind appears to be the motto for most citizens. Like past imperial powers, war has become both constant and largely invisible. Military personnel die and funerals are held; service men and women are injured and families suffer. But most citizens go about their lives with little sense that their government is sending fellow citizens to kill and to die in their name.
On the ultimate test of hawkdom, the willingness to send U.S. troops into harm's way, Ronald Reagan was no bird of prey. He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totaled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war, the 1986 bombing of Libya, one day.
He resorted to military force far less often than many of those who came before him or who have since occupied the Oval Office. After the 1983 assault on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan found no good strategic reason to give our regional enemies inviting U.S. targets. Whereas Bushes and Obama embraced the Wilsonian notion that America can help transform parts of the Middle East into democracies, Reagan considered the Middle East a jungle and Middle East politics irrational.
In his celebrated essay The Stalemate Myth and the Quagmire Machine, Daniel Ellsberg drew out the lesson regarding the Vietnam War that came out of the 8000 pages of the Pentagon Papers. It was simply this: Policymakers acted without illusion. At every juncture they made the minimum commitments necessary to avoid imminent disaster, offering optimistic rhetoric but never taking steps that even they believed offered the prospect of decisive victory. They were tragically caught in a kind of no man's land, unable to reverse a course to which they had committed so much but also unable to generate the political will to take forward steps that gave any realistic prospect of success. Ultimately, after years of needless suffering, their policy collapsed around them.
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