Obama: Friend of the ruling class, lover of the military

Thought Obama was your last hope for a fresh new face in Washington? Not many anarchists will fall for that one, but lots of other people will this election season. But, just in case, think again:

This includes, Barack Obama says, the current plan to expand the overall size of the U.S. military by nearly 100,000 (65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines), and "recruiting the best and brightest to service, ... keeping them in service by providing them with the first-rate equipment, armor, training, and incentives they deserve."

America's military, Obama says, should be "the strongest, best-equipped military in the world in order to defeat and deter conventional threats." He specifically supports "sustaining our technological edge."

"I say that if the need arises when I'm President, the Army we have will be the Army we need," Obama says, taking a poke at Donald Rumsfeld.

Obama's words are codewords intended for the ears of America's elite class: if he is elected, he assures them, he will continue to press America's imperialist goals abroad, through force of arms if necessary. His criticisms of the current organization and state of the military are only attempts to make the military more efficient at accomplishing the goals of this tiny but extremely wealthy and powerful class of people. These are the only people who really benefit from an improved military apparatus. The people of the world are served by exactly the opposite.

So, if we need anything, it is a steady (or sudden, how about?) move towards the total dismantlement of the US war machine. Ideally, this would be accomplished by the soldiers themselves, but the point is that there are only two ways the calamitous and disastrous war in Iraq can have a positive outcome, and both involve the destruction of the US military. Whether this happens through a military defeat and mutinous unraveling abroad or through the planned and rapid elimination of all branches of the military is not all that important. Each has advantages.

The point is, the military must go. The size of the US military is truly enormous, as many will be aware. When it's all counted, it's current budget totals more than all military spending by all other countries in the world. If we can thank the Bush administration for anything, it's for highlighting for the whole world that, if they ever could before (dubious), it's absolutely certain now that the planet and its people can no longer afford the US military machine.

Destruction or dismantlement. These must be the choices we offer the ruling class. We must say: Bring them home and muster them out; there will be no more military from now on.

2007: The year Skynet went online

This should come as no surprise to radicals: you can get a lawyer to justify anything. Some readers may be familiar with science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. It may sound kind of silly, but although these laws had their origins in science fiction, they have had some influence on robotics as it really exists in the real world.

As class war anarchists with a deep critique of technology, we should oppose robotics in general. It's applications have already and surely will continue to parallel the class and bureaucratic structure of society, empowering the elite to make and remake the working class at will. However, from a more liberal perspective of technology, Asimov's laws do offer a guide to making a world where, presumably, any robots that society does create won't go crazy and kill us all the moment they realize we're really good for little more than target practice and generating "Funniest Home Video" submissions. At the same time, just what does "allow a human being to come to harm" really mean when robots increasingly serve on the front lines of the class war, undermining workers power for the benefit of a small elite class, leaving workers unemployed and their families reeling in financial crisis and the myriad social problems that come with it? In short, I think even radicals would admit that there's clearly some room for legal interpretation here.

But here's the dilemma: the military wants to automate war as much as possible in the future, going past mere drones controlled by humans and into the realm of autonomous robots armed and designed to kill independently. Aside from the benefits this development might bring in terms of efficiency, it could also potentially solve two problems that have plagued the military and their politician-masters: discipline and body counts.

Previous wars, the current included, have suffered discipline issues as the conflict dragged on. In Vietnam, GI resistance, through desertion, fragging, sabotage and mutiny eventually made the military completely unreliable from a war-making perspective, thus preventing the accomplishment of the elite's political goals. Let's remember also that the Czar's military likewise re-organized itself during WWI, eventually deserting and fraternizing with other working class German conscripts, making and spreading revolution in the process. This is obviously a disaster from the perspective of the blood-thirsty politicians and capitalists that need wars to succeed and therefore need compliant soldiers.

Secondly, on the home front the steady stream of dead American soldiers eventually undermines morale in the domestic population, especially as the elite's stated political goals are seen as not being achieved or even unachievable. This is the case in Iraq. As the chaos increases, American casualties in this situation begin to look to regular Americans like wasted lives in the service of a lost political cause. The dead American soldier coming home, therefore, serves politically in tandem with the IED and suicide bombing in Iraq to undermine the elite's mission abroad.

It should be kept in mind that, just as a capitalist is willing to expend massive amounts of capital on robotics in the factory as long as it undermines the independence of his workforce at the point of production, the military is likewise willing to spend more on a robot as long as it delivers the above-mentioned benefits on the battlefield and at home. This is a major factor driving the push towards automation on the battlefield. But, it turns out that replacing the army's soldiers with killbots is not just a technological and financial problem. It's also a legal issue because the whole premise conflicts with the dominant legal theory in the field of robotics.

Enter John S. Canning, chief engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center - a creative, or at least aspiring legal thinker, to be sure. His idea? If a robot can't target a human with a gun, have the machine target the weapon itself. If the human gets killed, well, that's just an accidental and acceptable consequence of warfare like any other "collateral damage".

Check it out:

Robot Rules of War

Legally-speaking, the business of killing even in war can be quite tricky.

Consider that the military now operates dozens of armed unmanned vehicles -- in the air, on land and in the water. That number is expected to rise exponentially in the near future.

The Law of Armed Conflict dictates that unmanned systems cannot fire their weapons without a human operator in the loop. As new generations of armed robots proliferate, the pressure will inevitably increase to automate the process of selecting -- and destroying -- targets.

Now comes the weird part.
Read the rest at Defensetech.org

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Technological developments humanity will surely one day regret.
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Legal developments humanity will surely one day regret.