Drones…
Maybe their bad rep is due to the fact that they’re second-rate citizens in the bee hive, but drones are under attack recently. The more vociferous attacks come from people who decry how deadly they are in attacking terrorists. They kill all those innocent people, don’t you know? I’ve rebutted that in these posts, but I can’t refrain from summarizing: (1) Drones and Special Ops are our most effective weapons against terrorists, a battle that must be fought unless you want to return to the Dark Ages of a radical Islamic Caliphate; and (2) drones and Special Ops avoid thousands of battlefield casualties, among our own troops as well as innocent civilians. Here stats don’t lie.
A recent editorial in the NY Times (5/21) titled “The Limits of Armchair Warfare” basically ignores both points in a Ramboesque plea about returning to a conventional boots-on-the-ground mentality championed by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team of brilliant strategists. Our troops fought valiantly, but Iraq is still an ethnic battleground. Wrong in so many things, Biden was right with this one: Iraq should have been divided into at least three countries. That worked in Yugoslavia and will end up being the right solution in Iraq. McCain, that vengeful champion of the surge, also favors boots on the ground. And Mr. Obama’s mistakes in Afghanistan can be summarized succinctly: he listened to that old Pentagon doggerel, although he knew from experimental evidence that drones and Special Ops are the solution.
I suppose some die-hard handwringers are remembering the Terminator series of movies, believing that our Armageddon will come from a final war between human beings and machines. This is also the theme of a long series of sci-fi books written by Gregory Benford politely called “The Galactic Center Series.” (This series has its moments, but I can’t recommend it as a reviewer—I can just hear his publisher saying, “We need the sequel, Gregory!”.) Are robotic drones controlled by massive computers the agents of doom in these movies and books? Bad news for all the people believing in the Rapture if it’s true!
Like every tool human beings have invented, drones represent an issue that isn’t black and white. Hand-wringers, rabid activists, and doomsday believers can’t seem to learn that most issues aren’t two colors—black for evil, white for good, I suppose. Almost every issue touched by the media beyond Beyonce and J-Z’s family problems—well, even that one too—has more than fifty shades of gray. Logical people (I see fewer every day) have a bigger picture. There’s more to using drones than just minimizing war casualties.
In spite of Asimov’s Three Laws, we still have a Frankenstein complex about robots—really about anything automatic or controllable at a distance by a human being in a desk chair using a joystick. This has been the paranoid theme of many movies. Will Smith’s Enemy of the State is one of the best (but how a satellite can see around an object is beyond me). Your imagination can run wild. I used an electronic dragonfly as a spy in Full Medical—when in Rome, do as the Romans do! It’s useful to point out potentially bad applications of technology, but what about the good?
I’ll use my imagination here too. Suppose there’s a warning called in that there’s a bomb in a crowded public space (any parallel to the Boston Marathon bombings is intentional). A fleet of small drones flying over a public place can cover more ground and in less time than fifty cops could. They can detect packages that don’t seem to have owners and direct a few cops to check them out. Better still, a robot like those used in Iraq and Afghanistan could be used to scoop up the package and carry it to a safe spot for detonation.
Consider another example. A person or a family is lost in the wilderness. Happens all the time. Accidents happen, for example, or a person just does something stupid, like depending on moss growing on trees instead of using a GPS. Many times we’re talking about many square miles of rugged terrain. A drone flying a low search pattern can cover much of that area. More can be called in if needed. But they “can see” places human search parties could never get to. The FAA in its infinite head-up-you-know-where wisdom has banned the use of drones in many instances like that. As often happens, the legal system and regulations aren’t keeping pace with technology. (In the case of the FAA, they aren’t even into the 21st century yet.)
Drones are cheap and safe. True, we need some regs. I can imagine complete chaos if the present trend continues where anyone can buy a drone on the internet. You’ll have paparazzi using them to obtain video of nude sunbathing celebrities, for example, or PIs running surveillance for divorce cases, or creeps providing mobile wi-fi porn networks. A drone is a tool. Like a hammer or even a gun, it isn’t intrinsically good or evil. We need regs, and we need to find positive uses. To completely ban it is as absurd as banning a hammer or a gun. We shouldn’t fear technology when it has so much potential. ‘Nough said….
And so it goes….
