{"id":10141,"date":"2011-06-21T04:50:03","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T12:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=10141"},"modified":"2011-06-21T04:50:03","modified_gmt":"2011-06-21T12:50:03","slug":"gadgetry-beckons-future-shadow-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/21\/gadgetry-beckons-future-shadow-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Gadgetry Beckons Future Shadow Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/news.antiwar.com\/2011\/06\/16\/american-wars-will-be-increasingly-secret\/\">my report<\/a> on the incentive for America&#8217;s ruling parties to circumvent accountability and the rule of law by conducting wars in secret, technological advances that enable such choices were front and center. Drones and other unmanned, remote-controlled aircraft seem to be the future of American warfare. This obviously complicates issues of limiting the war-making prerogatives of the powerful.<\/p>\n<p>Sunday&#8217;s <em>New York Times<\/em> featured <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/06\/20\/world\/20drones.html?_r=1&amp;hp\">a piece about this developing technology<\/a>. These killers are getting smaller and more capable. And business is booming&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.<\/p>\n<p>The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of \u201cmultirole\u201d aerial drones like the Reaper \u2014 the ones that spy as well as strike \u2014 to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a growth market,\u201d said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon\u2019s chief weapons buyer.<\/p>\n<p>The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: \u201cspy flies\u201d equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of \u201cWired for War,\u201d a book about military robotics, calls them \u201cbugs with bugs.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/06\/20\/world\/20drones.html?_r=1&amp;hp\">Read on<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my report on the incentive for America&#8217;s ruling parties to circumvent accountability and the rule of law by conducting wars in secret, technological advances that enable such choices were front and center. Drones and other unmanned, remote-controlled aircraft seem to be the future of American warfare. This obviously complicates issues of limiting the war-making [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-10141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10141"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10143,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10141\/revisions\/10143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10141"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}