Newsgroup: it.cultura.religioni.cristiani
Titolo: [POL] ecco la prossima guerra:

*** RISE OF THE MACHINES ***
By Conn Hallinan
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary
available in full at
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0404machines.html
 .)
The press had lots of fun with the recent robot debacle in the Mojave
Desert. Competing for $1 million in prize money, 15 vehicles headed
off on a 142-mile course through some of the most forbidding terrain
in the country. None managed to navigate even eight miles. The robots
hit fences, caught fire, rolled over, or sat and did nothing.
However, the purpose of the event was not NASCAR for nerds, but a
coldly calculated plan to construct a generation of killer machines.
Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),
the Mar. 13 "race" was part of the Department of Defense's (DOE) plan
to make one third of the military's combat vehicles driverless by
2015. The push to replace soldiers with machines is impelled by an
over extended military searching for ways to limit U.S. casualties, a
powerful circle of arms manufactures, and an empire-minded group of
politicians addicted to campaign contributions by defense
corporations.
This "rise of the machines" is at the heart of the Bush
administration's recent military budget. Sandwiched into outlays for
aircraft, artillery, and conventional weapons, are monies for unmanned
combat aircraft, robot tanks, submarines, and a supersonic bomber
capable of delivering six tons of bombs and missiles to any place on
the globe in two hours.
DARPA, the agency behind these Buck Rogers weapons systems, has a
mixed track record, somewhere between silly and sobering. The
mechanical elephant it developed for the Vietnam War was not a keeper,
and one doubts that the robot canine for the Army, aptly dubbed "Big
Dog," will ever get off the drawing boards. But DARPA also gave us
stealth technology, the M-16 rifle, cruise missiles, and the unmanned
Predator armed with the deadly Hellfire Missile.
According to U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), chair of the House
Subcommittee on Procurements, one-third of U.S. tactical-strike
aircraft will be unmanned within the next 10 years. 
The military's interest is in part a function of the Vietnam Syndrome:
lots of aluminum caskets and weeping survivors play poorly on the six
o'clock news. While so far the Bush administration has managed to keep
these images at arm's length by simply banning the media from filming
C-130s disgorging the wounded and the slain, as casualty lists grows
longer, that will get harder to do.
The lure of being able to fight a war without getting your own people
killed is a seductive one. "It is possible that in our lifetime we
will be able to run a conflict without ever leaving the United
States," Lt. Col. David Branham told the New York Times last year.
A high-tech machine war would allow the U.S. to quickly strike over
enormous distances, an important capability in the Bush
administration's pre-emptive war strategy.
In his book Virtual War, historian Michael Ignatieff asks the question
"If western nations can employ violence with impunity, will they not
be tempted to use it more often?"
The "impunity," of course, is fantasy. Our military may indeed be able
to kill at enormous distances with its Frankenstein killing machines.
But all that means is that civilians, not the military, become
targets. Ask the relatives of those who died in the Twin Towers, the
embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the nightclub on Bali, and the
commuter train in Spain if high tech war has no casualties.
(Conn Hallinan is an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus
(
www.fpif.org
) and a Provost at UC Santa Cruz.)
For more analysis from FPIF see:
Rumsfeld's New Model Army
By Conn Hallinan (November 4, 2003)
http://www.presentdanger.org/commentary/2003/0311transf.html

Gli esperti del DARPA dovrebbero leggere il bel racconto di
fantascienza "Superiority" di Arthur C. Clarke; risale ai primi anni
'50 ed una volta era quasi una lettura obbligata per gli studenti del
MIT di Boston.