Automated Warfare

The Drone Age ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 27-54
Author(s):  
Michael J. Boyle

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the history of the development of drones. It shows that drone prototypes were in existence at the turn of the twentieth century and that their gradual development and use—either as missiles, target practice, or later, modern surveillance drones—proceeded in fits and starts. In the United States, this creation of drones was possible due to sustained investment by military and intelligence agencies, who took a risk on supporting unmanned platforms when the funds could have been devoted to manned aircraft or satellites. It reviews the history of the use of drones in World War II, the Cold War, and Vietnam, and shows how drones became used in combat in the Persian Gulf War and the Balkans. Finally, it discusses the birth of the armed Predator drone, which could play a central role in the counterterrorism campaigns of the post 9/11 era.

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
David Fitzgerald

The celebrations that took place in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 stood out as the largest seen in the United States since the end of World War II, as hundreds of thousands of troops marched in triumphant parades in almost every major American city and in hundreds of small towns. But the pageantry did not simply celebrate American military and technological prowess. Spectators at these parades also engaged in a novel form of patriotism that emphasized unquestioning support for the troops. Representing a crucial moment in the American public's deepening veneration for U.S. soldiers and veterans, the Gulf War celebrations marked a turning point when the Vietnam-era image of the soldier as a broken or rebellious draftee was finally and purposefully eclipsed by the notion of the volunteer service member as hero.


2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 557-558

Volker Janssen of California State University, Fullerton reviews, “America's Economic Way of War: War and the US Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War” by Hugh Rockoff. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the economic causes and consequences of the wars that the United States fought in the twentieth century. Discusses a century of war; the economics of war; the Spanish-American War; the Philippine-American War; World War I; World War II; the Korean War; the Cold War; the Vietnam War; the Persian Gulf War; and the American economic way of war. Rockoff is Professor of Economics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.”


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault

This chapter details the history of U.S. compliance with the Geneva Conventions, and later the UN Convention Against Torture, from Vietnam through September 10, 2001. The norm of humane POW treatment was solidified by U.S. experience in Vietnam as well as U.S. POW activities during the 1980s and 1990s. Military practice and doctrine from Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf War indicate a strong commitment to upholding the Geneva Conventions and the CAT. By integrating Army lawyers into operational planning and crafting a policy of widely extending POW status, the improvement in detainee treatment that occurred during these conflicts strongly reflects the redress for U.S. lapses in Vietnam.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Rob Wilson

As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginaryneeds to be symbolically confronted and undoneat national as well as global levels.As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōelamented, “To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there.” However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublimeas a trauma of geopolitical dominationand racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (rapturedby these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installingPatriot missilesas signs of theirglobal supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinatedby self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a ‘post-nuclear’era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility:at once urging the globe towards annihilation andyet also towards transactional and dialogical unityat the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, withits “sublime Patriot”missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.


Author(s):  
George Blaustein

This chapter is a centrifugal history of American Studies in the United States and abroad. There have been many crises within American Studies, including calls to rename it, internationalize it, or abandon it altogether. But what was American Studies? What were the original preoccupations of this unusual field, and what were the historical conditions that enabled its establishment and international diffusion? American Studies operated in the knotty terrain of military occupation, reconstruction, and democratization after World War II, but the Americanist century has many points of origin, and it transcends the binaries of the Cold War. This chapter brings together the histories of American Studies in the United States with the less familiar histories of American Studies in Europe and Japan, stretching from the early twentieth century to the Cold War. It also offers a more cosmopolitan history of “American exceptionalism.”


Author(s):  
Hiromi Nagata Fujishige ◽  
Yuji Uesugi ◽  
Tomoaki Honda

AbstractIn this chapter, we will review the evolution of Japan’s peacekeeping policy from the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat in 1945 to the enactment of the Peacekeeping Operations (PKO) Act in 1992. In the first section, we will look at the historical background during the postwar period (in this book, the term “postwar” denotes the period in Japan from its defeat in World War II in 1945 to the end of the Cold War in around 1990), including the rise of anti-militarism, the hidden rearmament, the establishment of the de facto ban on overseas military dispatch, the rejection of the UN’s request for the Self-Defense Forces’ (SDF’s) deployment to a United Nations Peacekeeping Operation (UNPKO) and the aborted plan to dispatch a minesweeper to the Persian Gulf. This section will also examine the Government of Japan’s legal standpoint about the possibility of SDF deployment to a UNPKO. In the second section, we will clarify how the Gulf Crisis/War in 1990–1991 made Japan abandon the taboo against overseas military dispatch. Then, we will review the course of the challenging lawmaking process of the PKO Act, which was finally passed in June 1992. Lastly, we will see the restrictions inserted into the PKO Act, such as the so-called Five Principles.


Author(s):  
Colleen Woods

This book demonstrates how anticommunist political projects were critical to the United States' expanding imperial power in the age of decolonization, and how anticommunism was essential to the growing global economy of imperial violence in the Cold War era. The book shows how, in the mid-twentieth-century Philippines, U.S. policymakers and Filipino elites promoted the islands as a model colony. In the wake of World War II, as the decolonization movement strengthened, those same political actors pivoted and, after Philippine independence in 1946, lauded the archipelago as a successful postcolonial democracy. Despite elite propaganda, from the early 1930s to late 1950s, radical movements in the Philippines highlighted U.S. hegemony over the new Republic of the Philippines and, in so doing, threatened American efforts to separate the US from sordid histories of empire, imperialism, and the colonial racial order. The book finds that in order to justify U.S. intervention in an ostensibly independent Philippine nation, anticommunist Filipinos and their American allies transformed local political struggles in the Philippines into sites of resistance against global communist revolution. By linking political struggles over local resources to a war against communism, American and Filipino anticommunists legitimized the use of violence as a means to capture and contain alternative forms of political, economic, and social organization. Placing the post-World War II history of anticommunism in the Philippines within a larger imperial framework, the book illustrates how American and Filipino intelligence agents, military officials, paramilitaries, state bureaucrats, academics, and entrepreneurs mobilized anticommunist politics to contain challenges to elite rule in the Philippines.


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