*Makes sense to me.
*Given that this is "Global Guerrillas," I'm a little surprised to see no speculation about drone attacks by non-state actors. If you want to force victims to go "into deep hiding and disconnect from the global system," why not target physical groups of legitimately elected nation-state officials? They're forced by law and custom to meet in famous statehouses that would be much easier to drone-strafe than guerrilla deep-hideouts.
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/01/drone-diplomacy-comply-or-die.html
"Monday, 30 January 2012
"Drone Diplomacy: Comply or Die
"Gunboat diplomacy was the essence of military power projection for centuries. Want to coerce a country? Sail a aircraft carrier battle group into their national waters.
"However, carrier battlegroups are hideously expensive, increasingly vulnerable to low cost attack, and less lethal than they appear (most of the weapons systems are used for self-defense).
"What are nation-states replacing them with? Drones. You can already see it in action across the world as drone staging areas are replacing traditional military bases/entanglements. Further, drones already account for the vast majority of people killed by US forces.
"Of course, the reason for this is clear. Drones are relatively cheap, don't require many people to deploy/operate, don't put personnel directly at risk, can be easily outsourced, can be micromanaged from Washington, and are very effective at blowing things up.
"The final benefit of Drone Diplomacy: drones make it possible to apply coercion at the individual or small group level in a way that a blunt instrument like a carrier battle group can't.
"What does this mean?
"It allows truly scalable global coercion: the automation of comply or die.
"Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability – wouldn't that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation). (((That would be a super-interesting development – a criminal botnet that assembles and deploys drones. Any state can say "you can run but you can't hide," but what if there's no "you" there to intimidate? Fabricated crowdsourced drones are in reach already. The swarm of drones from "AnonymousDrones.")))
"Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.
"If they don't do what you ask, they die soon therafter due to drone strike (unless they go into deep hiding and disconnect from the global system).
"With drone costs plummeting, we could see this drop to something less than
"Death from above," morally A-OK:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/death-from-above
"Hence we come to the basic reason why the drone is so loathed: it represents the latest evolution of a near continuous move away from direct tactical confrontation, strongly linked in the popular mind with basic norms of reciprocity. The emphasis on the moral force of the offensive, in some ways, was a philosophical response to the collision of a given ideal of soldiering with new technologies that made it impossible. Every new disruptive weapon is threatening to intellectuals because it upsets a given system of values, beliefs, and aesthetics they build around the use of force in their era."
(((Okay, I guess I'm an "intellectual" rather than a military theorist (if there's somehow a difference) but I wonder how this guy would react if he found out that some airy Wikileaks-style group of hacker intellectuals had crowdsourced cheap drones and sent 'em out stealthily to specifically target guys who write for "Small Wars Journal." I mean, how fair would that be? I'm guessing we'd suddenly be hearing a lot about the moral loathsomeness of "terror" and how a struggle of that kind isn't "war" etc etc. Nobody's much in favor of THEIR OWN "death from above." They're just keen to justify it when they've got it and the victim doesn't.)))
*George Monbiot waving the bloody drone shirt. We're gonna see a lot more of this as drones get less and less "covert." Pretending people aren't dying from drones is like pretending people aren't dying from AIDS – the unspeakable is unspeakable, when the unspeakable is falling over covered with sores in the public arena, it gets speakable pretty fast. Anybody who walks past a demo and sees police drones knows that there's something up.
*Maybe you could get "drone denial" worked up to the ironclad, iron-headed ideological stage of "climate-change denial," but Exxon-Mobil would have to pay for it. If Exxon buys a drone company, watch out.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/30/deadly-drones-us-cowards-war
*Drone design-fiction (well, semiliterate sarcasm anyway), via @johnrobb :
