The US was accused last night of summarily executing the six alleged al-Qaida members killed in Yemen on Sunday by the first act of what experts say could be a new age of "robotic warfare".

As the embarrassed Yemeni government remained tight-lipped about the assasination on its soil more details emerged of how an unmanned CIA predator drone found the six men in a car and killed them with a Hellfire missile.

This would be remarkable pre-9/11, but clearly the war on terrorism is a war against an enemy without a clearly defined enemy territory. Is that not obvious?

What was once assassination is now an attack against enemy combatants, regardless of their geographical location. It is a terrible thing that 9/11 unleashed upon us. Can we put that genie back in the bottle?

That robots are slaying people by our command sounds remarkable at first and reminiscent of SF stories I read in my youth, but memory tells me this is hardly new. The Nazis deployed remote controlled exploding tankettes in World War II. Guided/cruise missiles have been around for a long time (not to mention ICBMs.)

Perhaps what is new here is that we can send robots to operate covertly inside the boundaries of other Nations with less worry of having one of our own people caught or killed while doing some dirty work. If the robots have no identifying marks, that would be even more politically tempting - "plausible deniability."

Deniability is mentioned as one of the appealing features of airborne laser weapons, which can silently and accurately destroy a target without leaving any bits that say "made in U.S.A" behind.

The assertion that the attack inside Yemeni territory is the first time a nation has had its sovereignty violated by unauthorized acts of war is also silly. Didn't we bomb Sudan's aspirin factory just a few years ago? Didn't we lob cruise missiles against Bin Laden in Afghanistan without asking the Taliban?

12:35:21 PM    comment