re: #228 kirkspencer

OK, on to the subject at hand. I have several concerns regarding the use of drones. They’re strategic in nature, because tactically they make a lot of sense.

Basically, I’m afraid that drones will finish cutting the break lines on declarations of war. They’re easy, from our point of view they are pretty much bloodless, and as a result Congress doesn’t get much pressure to tell the president to wait for a declaration of war.

And since drones suffer the same problem as aircraft it puts us in a major potential bind. That problem, by the way, is that it takes a couple of boots on the ground to actually hold that piece of ground. Air, barring genocide, does not conclude wars. Air power advocates have argued “this time is different” pretty much since they began trying, but it doesn’t work.

Add to this the easy way this can slip over into domestic use. From surveillance only to heavily overseen overwatch to … I dunno.

It annoys me that I find myself in agreement with Senator Rand, but stopped clocks and all that.

It’s not a new concept. The British did “air policing” in the Middle East and Africa between the two world wars.

Policing the Empire and activities in Great Britain

Following the end of World War I and the accompanying British defence cuts, the newly-independent RAF took up the task of policing the British Empire from the air. It was argued that the use of air power would prove to be a more cost-effective way of controlling large areas than by using conventional land forces. Sir Hugh Trenchard, the Chief of the Air Staff, had formulated ideas about the use of aircraft in colonial policing and these were first put into practice in 1920 when the RAF and imperial ground units defeated rebel Somaliland dervishes. The following year, in 1921, the RAF was given responsibility for all British forces in Iraq with the task of ‘policing’ the tribal unrest. The RAF also saw service in Afghanistan in 1928, when following the outbreak of civil war, the British Legation and some European diplomatic staff based in Kabul were cut off. The operation to rescue them, the Kabul Airlift, was the first evacuation of civilians by air.