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Drone Warfare Denounced as Just Another Version of the Failed Revolution in Military Affairs
8 December 2011
The combination of drone warfare and secret special operations missions which the Obama Administration has come to heavily rely on for its current war drive in the Mideast cockpit, especially Iran, was effectively denounced as another failed concept of the Revolution in Military Affairs during a panel discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) yesterday morning. During his opening remarks, retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Robert Blackman noted that there is a desire (specifically, in a new CSIS report on the future of the ground forces which declares that "the era of large-scale conventional wars has passed") for what he called "immaculate warfare," that is, warfare from a distance, where we don’t suffer casualties. "In order to be successful," he said, "you have to be part of the operating environment," with boots on the ground. Later, during the Q and A, EIR asked the general if there was a possibility that the strategy of using drones and special operations forces to go after alleged terrorists in places like Somalia, while the conditions of life for the populations there don’t improve, could backfire on us. "I think it absolutely has the potential to backfire on us," Blackman said. "It’s a conflict between people, and to believe that we can take that element out of it, that we can fight a war 10,000 miles away from Whiteman Air Force Base [in Missouri, where the U.S. fleet of B-2 bombers is based-editor] misses the reality of it." Blackman referenced retired Admiral Bill Owens, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who postulated in the mid-1990’s that the technology of the Information Age would give us perfect knowledge of the battlefield. "My gosh," Blackman said, "we don’t know, in places like Afghanistan, what’s going on around the next corner or over the next rise of the ground." Even the American Enterprise Institute’s Thomas Donnelly, who just yesterday released a war-mongering report on "Containing and Deterring a Nuclear Iran," worries that the strategy of using unmanned drones, special forces, and stuxnet-type computer viruses may already be backfiring on us. "If it drives our enemies, who have a different cost-benefit analyses than we do," he said, "to do things like hire Mexican Zeta hitmen to go blow up Georgetown restaurants to kill Saudi ambassadors [sic] that’s a lot of blowback." Of course, Donnelly’s solution is to go for the big war, which he advocated in the form of endorsing the maintenance of a large force- presence in the Persian Gulf and by calling for the U.S. military to be organized as a "regime-change force," which is the only way, he claimed, tha one can effect political change. |