Global Research, July 18, 2011
The UK Ministry of Defence, in common with the defence policies of other states, is increasing its development, manufacture and use of armed drones. In a report published earlier this year, it stated that ‘a technological tipping point is approaching that may well deliver a genuine revolution in military affairs’. The revolution is happening in and because of a climate of enormous and escalating government debt. Most states that follow the militaristic path have paupered their citizens in their desire to go to war and to suppy themselves with more and more weapons with which to fight those wars.
Both the US and the UK, and by association all the other NATO countries, have vastly overspent on their invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and now Libya, not to mention all the other areas of overspill. Where Iraq and Afghanistan are concerned, one result has been a steady return to our shores of severely damaged soldiers. The medical and social support that these people and their families will need for many years to come is already a drain on the public purse, something we can barely pay for now. But – we will not give up fighting wars.
It is not just the love of technology driving the push towards the increasing use of drones. Ordinary people everywhere, faced with job losses, high taxes and price rises, are beginning to seriously question the cost of war. They know much more now about the waste of resources for very little return. Governments can no longer justify wasting the publics’ money on their adventures. They will try but people’s unthinking acquiescence cannot last forever. So one can imagine the delight with which unmanned armed drones were greeted by the mandarins in Whitehall and the Pentagon. ‘Such an economical way of fighting war’ must have been their reaction.
Cut down the number of personnel, saving lots of wages; no medical care, compensation or pensions for soldiers returning from war; no expensive deployment of troops; no catering in the field; no worries about shipping supplies; no expensive replacement of equipment. One only has to look at the difficulty of supplying fuel to the NATO forces in Afghanistan to understand the waste and the costs of the current conflict. It all has to go in overland, and many of the fuel trucks never reach their destination, so good are the insurgents at attacking and blowing them up.
How easy to start replacing all that with a few trained ‘pilots’ sitting miles away from the target. How clean, how neat, how cheap. The Ministry of Defence will probably tell us they are being financially responsible by using drones instead of armies. The costs of course are met by those at the other end. Despite all the assurances of ‘precision targeting’ civilian casualties far outnumber the supposed deaths of ‘terrorists’. And we can never be sure that those insurgents who are reported as killed actually are those killed. Too many mistakes are made and too many lies told for us to know the truth. All that is clear is that drones are responsible for a terrible loss of life. And all this is against the the law...[Full Article]
