By Tom Engelhardt

There’s something viral about the wondrous new weaponry an industrial war system churns out. In World War I, for instance, when that system was first gearing up to plan and produce new weapons by the generation, such creations -- poison gas, the early airplane, the tank -- barely hit the battlefield before the enemy had developed countermeasures and was cranking up his own production line to create something similar. And this process has never stopped.

The wonder weapon of our present moment is the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, now doing our dirty work, an endless series of targeted assassinations, in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands. Such weapons always come with wondrous claims. Here’s a typical one from a recent Wall Street Journal editorial: “Never before in the history of air warfare have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones.” When it comes to war, beware of any sentence that begins “never before,” and the claims of future breakthroughs or victories that go with them.

It’s easy, of course, for the editorial writers of the Journal to pen such confident sentiments thousands of miles from the war zone. They would undoubtedly feel quite differently if their hometowns and neighborhoods were the targets of such “precise” weaponry, which has nonetheless managed to kill hundreds of civilians.

Drones, of course, do just what they were meant to do, as surely as did poison gas, the airplane, and the tank early in the last century: they kill. That’s indisputable, but the promised “breakthroughs,” whether aimed at destroying enemy fortifications, enemy networks, or the enemy’s will, seldom follow so reliably. And yet once the wonder fades and the overwrought claims with it, the wonder weapons remain in our world -- and (here’s the viral part) they begin to spread.

There is no evidence that the drones are breaking the back of either the Taliban (Afghan or Pakistani) or al-Qaeda in our distant wars, but plenty of evidence that they are helping to destabilize Pakistan and create intense anti-American feelings there.

Now, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates indicated on arriving in Pakistan last week, we are thinking of giving the Pakistanis their own unarmed surveillance drones, while from Iran to China, Israel to Russia, powers everywhere are rushing to enter the age of 24/7 robotic assassination along with, or just behind, us. You might think that this would give the Pentagon pause, but a prospective arms race just gets the blood there boiling, and when it comes to Terminator-style war, the U.S. Air Force has plans. Boy, does it ever!

-- Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

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