The drone combat in the Red Sea reminded me of a book review I wrote back in 2015.
Enjoy!
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“This is the essence of the wars the United States now fights,” writes William M. Arkin. “Individual targets — fixed, mobile, and now even individual humans — are identified and validated and located and tracked from the ground or the sky; they are identified through imagery, electronic emissions, communications, or other intelligence. In this kind of war, the strikers are more abundant than good targeting information, and the data itself, like a camouflaged enemy, masks the intelligence.”
In Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare (Little, Brown and Company; 391 pages; $28.00), Arkin provides a detail- and insight-rich, if rambling, survey of the technology used in “global war on terrorism.” With four decades in “national security,” including a stint in army intelligence during the Cold War, few authors are better equipped to explore the subject.
Starting with “the urban legend” that in 1991, some Iraqi soldiers were “so stupid that they tried to surrender to a drone,” Unmanned traces the rapid evolution of UAVs. During the first assault on Saddam Hussein, the Pioneer “wasn’t any kind of magic bullet; in reality, ground commanders and operators found [it] difficult to employ and limited in its usefulness.” But during the 1990s, pilotless aircraft matured, aided by real-world testing in Iraq and the Balkans.
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