My new book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 is finally available today. Co-written with Tom Engelhardt, it also launches a new publishing venture of mine — Dispatch Books. For years, Tom (who brought the world Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, Eduardo Galeano’s beautiful Memory of Fire trilogy and about 1000 other books by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Rebecca Solnit) and I have talked about starting up a small press. Now we’ve finally done it.
With Terminator Planet, we’ve carefully put together the best of our joint work on the subject of American robotic warfare, shaped and edited, and added a powerful new conclusion. The result is the first comprehensive history of drone warfare (with a preview of the drone’s possible future as well).
From the opening missile salvo in the skies over Afghanistan in 2001 to a secret strike in the Philippines early this year, or a future in which drones dogfight off the coast of Africa, Terminator Planet takes you to the front lines of combat, Washington war rooms, and beyond. Drawing on several years of research — including official documents, open-source intelligence, and interviews with military officers and Pentagon officials, we offer up a sobering, factual account of robot warfare combined with critical analyses you’re likely to find nowhere else.
Packed with rarely seen Pentagon photos, Terminator Planet provides a rich history of the last decade of drone warfare, a clear-eyed look at its present, and a far-reaching guide to its future. You used to have to watch science fiction movies to imagine where that future was headed, now you can read Terminator Planet — and know.
I hope you’ll take a look and perhaps download it as an ebook or purchase an old-fashioned hard copy.
My new book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 is finally available today. Co-written with Tom Engelhardt, it also launches a new publishing venture of mine — Dispatch Books. For years, Tom (who brought the world Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, Eduardo Galeano’s beautiful Memory of Fire trilogy and about 1000 other books by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Rebecca Solnit) and I have talked about starting up a small press. Now we’ve finally done it.
With Terminator Planet, we’ve carefully put together the best of our joint work on the subject of American robotic warfare, shaped and edited, and added a powerful new conclusion. The result is the first comprehensive history of drone warfare (with a preview of the drone’s possible future as well).
From the opening missile salvo in the skies over Afghanistan in 2001 to a secret strike in the Philippines early this year, or a future in which drones dogfight off the coast of Africa, Terminator Planet takes you to the front lines of combat, Washington war rooms, and beyond. Drawing on several years of research — including official documents, open-source intelligence, and interviews with military officers and Pentagon officials, we offer up a sobering, factual account of robot warfare combined with critical analyses you’re likely to find nowhere else.
Packed with rarely seen Pentagon photos, Terminator Planet provides a rich history of the last decade of drone warfare, a clear-eyed look at its present, and a far-reaching guide to its future. You used to have to watch science fiction movies to imagine where that future was headed, now you can read Terminator Planet — and know.
I hope you’ll take a look and perhaps download it as an ebook or purchase an old-fashioned hard copy.
Drones dog-fighting off the coast of Africa? That’s what the Pentagon envisions and that how I begin my latest article about a weapons system that’s failing to perform as promised, but is becoming ever more disastrously embedded in our world: “A Drone-Eat-Drone World.”
The article includes both the military’s fantasy version of drone-on–drone combat in 2030 and beyond, and the increasingly grim reality of drones malfunctioning, going astray, or simply crashing-and-burning. The drone has been a remarkable fantasy weapon —so much so that the military has penned some wild fictions about its future. Increasingly, however, its reality is proving grimly mundane and far less like that of a sci-fi movie.
Read all about it here.
*(This piece is also the concluding chapter of the new book that I have just published: Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. More on that soon!)
In truth, our leaders should be in mourning for whatever peaceful dreams we ever had. But mention drones and they light up. They’re having a love affair with those machines. They just can’t get enough of them or imagine their world or ours without them.
What they can’t see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of death. And death, visited from the skies, isn’t precise. It isn’t glorious. It isn’t judicious. It certainly isn’t a shining vision. It’s hell. And it’s a global future for which, someday, no one will thank us.
In truth, our leaders should be in mourning for whatever peaceful dreams we ever had. But mention drones and they light up. They’re having a love affair with those machines. They just can’t get enough of them or imagine their world or ours without them.
What they can’t see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of death. And death, visited from the skies, isn’t precise. It isn’t glorious. It isn’t judicious. It certainly isn’t a shining vision. It’s hell. And it’s a global future for which, someday, no one will thank us.
“The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a ‘total war’ against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of ‘Hiroshima’ to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the ‘civilian population wherever necessary.’ “The course, held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to make sure it doesn’t contain similarly hateful material, a process that is still ongoing. But the officer who delivered the lectures, Army Lt. Col. Michael A. Dooley, still maintains his position at the Norfolk, Virginia college.”
From TomDispatch: Here’s the math on what it would mean if any of the three leading Republican candidates were to enter the Oval Office and run the U.S. military; in a word, break-the-bank spending — William J. Hartung, “Throwing Money at the Pentagon, A Lesson in Republican Math”
“If you’ve been fretting about faltering math education and falling test scores here in the United States, you should be worried based on this campaign season of Republican math. When it comes to the American military, the leading Republican presidential candidates evidently only learned to add and multiply, never subtract or divide.”
So William Hartung, military expert and author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, begins his latest TomDispatch post, a wild-ride through the bizarrely inflated Pentagon math of the three leading Republican candidates for president, none of whom seems to have seen a weapons system that he didn’t want to buy. Obama’s Pentagon “cuts” may barely have been noticeable, writes Hartung, but the president still looks like “a T. rex of budget slashers” compared to his Republican opponents.
He concludes, in part, “If a Republican president were to follow through on his campaign pledges, massive Pentagon increases and a dogged resistance to raising revenues would also result in major hits to every other item in the federal budget, from education to infrastructure.”
