Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Air Force has it far worse than the Navy in terms of existential fears, primarily due to the rapid rise and unbelievable dissemination of drones, where seemingly now every military unit has their own miniature air wing of what would have recently passed as toys.
Drones ply the liminal space between the physical and the digital - pilots fly them, but aren't in them. They are versatile and fascinating objects - the things they can do range from the mundane (aerial photography) to the spectacular - killing people, for example.
Where land mines are indiscriminate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt.
What am I doing with my life? Am I just going to some humdrum job that I don’t really want to be at, doing some minuscule task, getting paid to be a mindless drone? Or am I out there living life, on my terms, the way I want to live it, doing the things that I want to do?
Everyone knows drones are being deployed outside the US for assassinations. Let's say you even believe in drones. Shouldn't we have a system that would "justify" their use? i.e. we did this attack, because these bad guys were there, and here's what we did. We don't even have that.
If you look at the history of innovation, the innovations coming through the defence department have been some of the most important innovations ever. Little things like drones, sensors, and the Internet of Things are defence-type initiatives, but the big one is the Internet itself.
The Iranians have shot down drones. They tried to destroy the Saudi oil fields. They tried to storm our embassy. So, when my Democratic friends say we need appeasement, well appeasement hasn't worked. And I think that we've learned, with respect to Iran, that weakness invites the wolves.
Armed drones have become Barack Obama's way to engage in terrorist-infested hellholes without putting 'boots on the ground.' For years, the CIA has been running a secrecy-shrouded program of targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and more recently in Somalia, Syria and Iraq.
Amazon has overreached. In service of its fledgling drone delivery operation, Prime Air, Amazon appears to be planning to force communities to accept drone flights at any time of day or night - and is working overtime to ensure that states and cities cannot protect their residents from drones.
Of course, one of the most disturbing features is the fact that while we have had roughly a ten year pause in the arms race where a lot of good work was done, this has now come to an end. For what we are seeing at the present time are new developments in anti-missile weaponry, drones, and so on.
I'm witnessing the problems that the federal government is passing down in terms of drones, in violation of our civil liberties, spying on our citizens, death panels in the form of the government taking over the health care system and the national debt they're just saddling our grandchildren with.
In full accordance with the law - and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives - the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qa'ida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.
The only thing I heard Speaker [Paul] Ryan say that made sense was, we actually really need to look at this and see what makes sense and what doesn`t, because electronic detection in those kind of - and drones and other types of border protecting devices seem to be much more effective in certain places.
The use of drones is rapidly transforming the way we go to war. On the battlefield, a squad leader can receive real-time data from a drone that enables him to view the landscape for miles in every direction, dramatically expanding the capabilities of what would normally have been a small and isolated unit.
Immigration is the most difficult issue I've ever dealt with, and I've dealt with some tough issues: drones, gays in the military, WikiLeaks, Guantanamo. But immigration is hardest because there are so few people willing to talk and build consensus. Everybody's firmly made up their mind. It's a polarized issue.
How can you claim infallibility and claim that in these 114 [drone] strikes there was just one mistake -- one person killed that was a civilian -- and at the same time say, 'Well, we don't really know how many people were killed or who they were, but we know they weren't civilians'? I don't know how you can do that.
'Duty' is a refreshingly honest memoir and a moving one. Mr. Gates scrupulously identifies his flaws and mistakes: He waited too long, for example, for the military bureaucracy to fix critical supply issues like the drones needed in Iraq and took three years to replace a dysfunctional command structure in Afghanistan.
Barack Obama is not a man of The Gut, and it is driving official Washington crazy. This is a good thing, because resisting The Gut is what the Constitution is all about, especially in its war powers, which this president is conspicuously contemplative about exercising, at least in every context except launching drones.
Two days after the Boston marathon bombings, there was a drone strike in Yemen attacking a peaceful village, which killed a target who could very easily have been apprehended. But, of course, it is just easier to terrorise people. The drones are a terrorist weapon; they not only kill targets but also terrorise other people.
My personal fascination with the power of the crowd has been growing: Exactly what can a 'crowd' accomplish? We know crowds can raise billions of dollars, create Wikipedia, and even design and build small autonomous drones. But how about something large and complex like designing a new car, and maybe someday even a spaceship?
We have no regulation of drones in the United States in their commercial use. You can see drones some day hovering over the homes of Hollywood luminaries, violating privacy. This question has to be addressed. And we need rules of operation on the border, by police, by commercial use, and also by military and intelligence use.
We never used to blink at taking a leadership role in the world. And we understood leadership often required something other than drones and bombs. We accepted global leadership not just for humanitarian reasons, but also because it was in our own best interest. We knew we couldn't isolate ourselves from trouble. There was no place to hide.
We, the great American nation, decided that we've got 138 military bases around the world and we've now figured out that we can buy these drones from the Israelis, and we've decided that the way to proceed is to use this new technology to go and kill anybody that we don't like or who disagrees with us or who we might perceive as making an existential threat.
Here you had John McCain and Lindsey Graham in a very principled way standing up and defending Barack Obama. You had people like Gene Robinson and a lot of other liberals, who said, and this I personally agree with, however flawed Rand Paul was as a messenger, we need a debate about this. The administration has not been forthcoming enough about its drone policy.
A drone strike is a terror weapon, we don't talk about it that way. It is; just imagine you are walking down the street and you don't know whether in 5 minutes there is going to be an explosion across the street from some place up in the sky that you can't see. Somebody will be killed, and whoever is around will be killed, maybe you'll be injured if you're there. That is a terror weapon. It terrorizes villages, regions, huge areas. It's the most massive terror campaign going on by a long shot.
Drone strikes, Albert Camus would argue, are not just meant to kill. They are programmed to terrorize. In this regard, whether the missile strikes its intended target or incinerates a goat-herder and his flock is incidental. In fact, the occasional killing of civilians may well be a desired outcome since collateral deaths intensify the fear. This is punishment by example, not for any particular crime or impending threat, but merely because of who you are, where you live, what you might believe. These new circuitries of death are meant to humiliate, subdue and dehumanize.
