Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Tuesday, 1 February 2011

January 31, 2011
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Making Mahem (It's Spelled Correctly!)

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In his State of the Union address, President Obama lauded two fruits that fell from the tree of government support for the basic research of “cutting-edge scientists and inventors”: the Internet and GPS. Though he didn’t mention it, that wasn’t just any old “government support” and they weren’t just any old “cutting-edge scientists and inventors.” We’re talking about government-supported work for the U.S. military and for the scientists in its employ.

As it happens, both came from work done by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and both have definitely embedded themselves in our lives. Here’s a third glorious invention that’s just now coming home to roost: the unmanned aerial drone presently fighting a much-boasted-about “covert” war of escalating ferocity in the Pakistani borderlands. The initial work for the earliest of these, the Predator, also came out of DARPA’s intellectual chop shop, and now, Peter Finn of the Washington Post tells us, one of its children, “a bird-size device called the Wasp” (another DARPA project), could soon be flying over your home in Anytown USA, beaming live video to law enforcement agents on the ground.

The same Predators, now launching Hellfire missiles in Pakistan, are also being deployed to the Mexican and Canadian borders. (The Mexicans, too, are deploying drones, not always on their side of the border.) Other kinds of unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly becoming surveillance tools for law enforcement agencies and even the local police. Soon enough, such a 24/7 eye-in-the-sky could be in your neighborhood and over your house (and even, one day, undoubtedly as part of a catch-the-bad-guys reality show, on your TV).

Americans are generally so detached from their wars that they don’t think about the ways those wars and the weaponry and gear first tested in them could come home. In fact, not just in the air but on the ground, those distant conflicts have already come home far more fiercely than we realize, helping to militarize American society, even if in ways that we hardly notice.

And if any of this worries you, keep in mind that the eager-beaver scientists of DARPA are no less madly at work today than they were decades ago seeding the future, as Nick Turse, TomDispatch Associate Editor and author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, reminds us. Tom

Overkill
Future Weapons, Future Wars, and the New Arms Race
By Nick Turse
In the future, the power of magnetism will be harnessed to make today’s high explosives seem feeble, “guided bullets” will put the current crop of snipers to shame, and new multi-purpose missiles will strike targets in a flash from high-flying drones. At least, that’s part of the Pentagon’s battlefield vision of tomorrow’s tomorrow.
Ordinarily, planning for the future is not a U.S. government forte. A mere glance at the national debt, now around $14 trillion and climbing, or two recent studies showing how China's green technology investments have outpaced U.S. efforts should drive home that fact. But one government agency is always forward-looking, the Department of Defense’s blue skies research branch, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
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