Yet even as the Nobel Peace Laureate and Constitutional law scholar continues a war in Libya that his own top legal advisers tell him is patently unlawful and unconstitutional, he is racheting up yet another illegal war that has already reaped a rich harvest of civilian deaths: in Yemen.As Jason Ditz notes, the Peace Laureate is using the increasingly violent civil strife in Yemen as a cover for a vast expansion of his drone missile assassination program in that country.
[...]
[W]ith that wise, far-seeing, 11th-dimensional chess brain that the Peace Laureate is famed for, he is already looking to the future. Now that the government upheaval in Yemen has deprived him of a reliable dictator to assist his illegal war of mass assassination, Obama has decided to build yet another secret base somewhere in the volatile region – at a cost of unknown secret billions.
Military ethicists concede that drones can turn war into a video game, inflict civilian casualties and, with no Americans directly at risk, more easily draw the United States into conflicts.
As though it isn’t easy enough already.
The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year.[...]
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.
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The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536.
The average cost for one of Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk drone aircraft has risen more than 25 percent because the U.S. Air Force cut the order by about 14 percent in its 2012 budget request, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said in a letter to lawmakers. "The primary driver of this average procurement unit cost increase is the fiscal year 2012 budget decision to decrease the Global Hawk procurement quantities from 77 to 66 aircraft," he wrote.
When the government is your only customer, supply and demand take on a serious Catch-22 attribute. Clearly we will have to purchase more.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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