How the Fearsome Become the Fearful

A Weapon of Weakness?

How did we become indentured to a culture of fear?  Fear-mongering has become a modus operandi in today's morally corrupt, visionless politics.  It is the stock in trade of authoritarians like our own Stephen Harper and it's effective.

The thing is democracy cannot thrive in the presence of a culture of fear.  It may not even be sustainable in that toxic milieu.

The culture of fear quickly comes to dominate aspects of how we are governed, how the nation state operates.  It even extends into national security structures and how we wage wars.  Until recently war was an interval of conflict between periods of peace.  In case you haven't noticed, peace is gone.  We've descended into a state of permawar, low-intensity conflict fought not to win a peace but out of fear to strike at groups we deem, often incorrectly, as a threat to our society.

I'm doing an online course on remote-control warfare.  It's an awkward term that incorporates drone or autonomous warfare, special operations warfare and for-profit wars waged by corporate entities, the modern version of mercenaries.  It's a 21st century type of warfare that can be dangerously corrosive of democracy.

In better times states jealously guarded their monopoly on violence so integral to the state's ability to meet its cardinal responsibility to protect the citizenry. Now wars have become more complicated engaging state actors with a confusing and shifting mix of non-state actors that run the gamut from militias to rebels to insurgents to organized crime, even banditry.  States have likewise lost their monopoly on lethal, war-waging weaponry and technology.

Some speculate that this dystopian era will end the classic 'nation state' that has evolved in the Westphalian interval.  State sovereignty, borders, the use of lethal force pretty much wherever and whenever, demands a different political reality.

I was struck in reading the transcript of a lecture by prof. Bill Durodie, University of Bath, by a passage that resonates with some central themes I've been canvassing on this blog for several years.  Here are some excerpts.

Since the end of the Cold War not only have we become disenchanted with science, but some suggest that our social networks have become much more fragile or eroded. People no longer participate in the political democratic process in the same numbers as they used to. We've become disengaged from the decision-making processes of our own society. And at the same time, many of the informal social networks that provide a social glue and identity to people, whether they are families, neighbourhoods, communities, trade unions, out of hours clubs, teams, and associations all of those have seen a steady decrease in membership too. 

So what we're now seeing is a world in which we've become disenchanted with the benefits of science, disengaged from the decision-making process, and disconnected from one another. Put together, these make up what some people are describing as a culture of fear, but lends itself towards a politics of fear, whereby people always imagine and project the worst in relationship to any new development. And it's within that broad context that we need to understand the discussions occurring about science and technology and its application to warfare today. Drones and remote technologies are used in a very dystopian, negative way some will accuse.

In summary, if we ask the question, is technology a demon in the contemporary period or the saviour in terms of protecting real lives in the combat space, I think the correct answer is neither. There's a lot of hype about technology from both sides of the spectrum. Risk management, we should remind ourselves, is a means to achieving an end not an end in itself. And the danger is to view technology as the solution to problems or the problem itself. What we need is a clearer sense of purpose and direction for anything that we are doing in society, including the conduct of war. 

If we look at recent missions in Afghanistan or Iraq, what is strikingly obvious is that the purpose of the mission itself has being confused. Was fighting in Iraq to get rid of Saddam? Was it to bring democracy to the region? Was it to liberate women? All of these aims were thrown into the pot together. And the consequence is that there is a confusion as to what it is that we are fighting for. 

If we look historically, it's quite clear that when a society is very clear as to its aims and objectives, it is actually able to put up with remarkable acts of barbarism. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki must rank as some of the most devastating and barbaric acts of human history. But set within a context of the Second World War, where a narrative had been framed and people bought in to the notion that we were in a civilizational struggle, these events went, if not unnoticed, certainly uncriticised for a remarkable period of time. 

Today, far less dramatic incidents, such as drone strikes in Pakistan, bring forward much more criticism. And that's because we live in a period in which we're unclear as to what the purpose and objective is in the first place. If technology is really going to be used to a positive benefit, rather than simply feeding into dystopian narratives, we need to clarify our purpose as a society and engage a much greater layer of the population in a discussion as to what it is that we're trying to achieve.

As we get into these low-intensity permawars, it's increasingly difficult to maintain effective civilian control over our armed forces.  Wars are now fought increasingly in the shadows, remotely.  It becomes harder and more complex to ensure effective oversight and there are political leaders who very much like it that way.  Outsource it to the commercial sector and oversight becomes almost meaningless.

Let's Skip the 5th Generation F-35 and Put Our Money on the 6th Generation Option

The F-35 was a good idea that simply kept going downhill.   Lockheed was going to build the F-22 stealth fighter and the F-35 stealth light attack bomber.   But it was a sucker's bet on the longevity of stealth technology.  And we now know that Israeli and American defense planners have realized this stealth is a "perishable" technology with an effective life of just five to ten years into the future.  What will they call it after that?   The No-Longer Stealth Fighter?

Without stealth the F-35 is a dog.   Even the much superior F-22 has been proven vulnerable to the Eurofighter Typhoon in close-in air combat, the dogfight.

Maybe we should tell the Americans we'll take a pass on the F-35 and wait for the 6th generation aircraft they have under development.  Like the Americans, let's go drone.

In the States the Air Force and the Navy and several manufacturers are coming out with designs for unmanned combat aircraft.   The designs are remarkably similar and resemble the RQ-170 drone the Americans gifted to Iran just before Christmas.   Here's a picture of the Northrop-Grumman X-47B under development for the U.S. Navy.

With a wingspan of 62 feet, the X-47 is considerably bigger than the 45-foot wingspan of an F-18.  Boeing has a similar project, the X-45.   And, of course, Lockheed is also in on this.

Once we give up the delusion that the F-35 is a viable air combat fighter - and it's not - then it is realistic to compare the F-35 to drones as light strike bombers.   Like  the Americans, I'd bet on the drones.

Arms Race Update - Attack of the Drones

North Americans have been largely spared the sort of attacks experienced in other lands. We're surrounded by oceans vast enough to have kept most potential aggressors at bay. The Japanese sent over a few dozen balloons and their subs lobbed a few shells on shore targets but, by and large, we've not had much foreign aggression to contend with.


We did, however, institute a joint US-Canada air defence command, NORAD, to monitor the aerial approaches to our countries and maintain a fighter deterrent to potential aggressors. The focus was mainly on the bomber threat from the former Soviet Union. We deployed a sophisticated, conventional force to meet a somewhat less sophisticated, conventional threat. Well, what about the unconventional?


The Brookings Institute is examining the risk to the North American homeland from attack by unmanned, aerial vehicles, UAVs or drones. The point is no place is out of reach when "..a 77-year-old blind man from Canada designed an unmanned system that in 2003 hopped the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland."


America has gone heavily into drone technology and its potential rivals and its enemies have been watching. Today, two-thirds of military expenditures on drones and drone technology is coming from countries other than the US.

Anyone with the money and a moderate amount of skill can acquire, assemble and launch an intercontinental drone from components freely available on the marketplace. And, as the Brookings report showed, drones can be devilishly hard to track, much less down. They're relatively stealthy and fighter jets have great trouble flying slowly enough to gun them down.

So, here we have an emerging 21st century threat to North American security with an enormously high-tech but potentially ineffective 20th century defence. We know that we're vulnerable, the bad guys know that we're vulnerable and, now, you know it too. It's conceivable that even Peter MacKay and Stephen Harper have finally clued into it ...but then again.

The question is what are we going to do about it? That the threat is real is beyond question. If the bad guys want to hit hard at Main Street, USA, drones are a far better option than highjacking airliners to fly into buildings. These can deliver real WMDs and they don't even have to succeed. The psychological blow is struck as soon as the public learns somebody actually launched one of these drones that could have caused widespread devastation, because, once it's happened the only question on peoples' minds will be when the next one will be launched, the one that will actually get through?

We've spent a lifetime, my lifetime at least, taking war to other peoples' backyards. In fact we're currently waging protracted but ineffective wars in the Middle East specifically (so the Right tells us) that we don't have to fight "them" at home. What if these rightwing nutjobs are wrong? What if their perpetual war actually ensures that the bad guys have every reason to bring their war to us? Tough questions, tough times.