The Miniaturization of Flight

I learned today that around a million “drones” were packaged for this Christmas this year; indeed I saw a kiosk at a nearby mall busily demonstrating and selling them—the devices swirling around in the air. They came in two varieties: those with and those without a camera.

Miniaturization is probably part of all evolving technology, biological or mechanical. The most memorable for me are clocks: huge things that once needed tall towers—and brass bells to broadcast the time to those who couldn’t see the towers—or by night. Now watches are easily worn on the wrist. The radio figures in my memories too. The first one I saw as a child at grandmother’s house had a vast, black horn. Radios were big—pieces of furniture. One such—too nice to discard—still lives in our garage, and has so lived, protected by wrapping, for thirty years. Now radios have become small enough to fit into an ear.

TVs, computers, telephones. The list of objects miniaturized is quite long but, deep down, associated with humanity’s growing skill in making transistors ever smaller. Transistors are the fundamental amplifying and switching devices of electronics—and therefore central in communications and computation. The illustration included (from Wikipedia here), shows the diminution of the size in these devices. The last of these, a so-called small-outline transistor, has a an internal diameter ranging from 1.9 to 0.5 millimeters.  

When you think about it, the miniaturization of flight has taken rather a long time. It has required development of real-time radio guidance so that the “pilot” can constantly pinpoint the object’s location—and the locations of other objects in its immediate vicinity. Those problems have now been solved—although I wonder what millions upon millions of such devices—each using the limited wireless spectrum—will have on other forms of communication.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. For about $150 (that’s a little drone with a camera), our eyes can already take a ride although the beggar is still slouched on a sunny veranda.

Game of Drones

I owe that title to a headline in our local version of the Erickson Tribune. Sometimes you see a headline that produces literal envy. I wish I’d thought of that! That article tells the story of drones, as it were, replacing the milkman and the UPS/FedEx delivery truck. My subject is the word’s etymology. We’re having another word-centered morning. The word that set us off on that, however, goes back into the past—and the origin of drone sort of capped our morning’s “round” (in the musical sense). Percept began, precept followed, and we ended on drone.

Percept surfaced late last night as Brigitte read an article titled Philosophy of Nature published by International Catholic University (link)—an odd word when stared at. We know it all too well in its verbal form, perception, but its noun form, meaning “a (thing) taken (in),” but with emphasis on that unsounded thing, is almost never used except in such philosophical context as in the referenced paper above. Per in this concept means “thoroughly” the cept comes from the Latin capere, “to take, to grasp.” 

In precept the pre comes from prae, meaning “before”; the cept is once more “grasp.” Thus “that which comes before,” presumably, we’re properly capable of grasping something. The word means a maxim, rule, an order, or instruction. Percept is solidly objective; precept is a quite immaterial “rule” or “guidance.” The preceptor, therefore, is a teacher or a guide.

Now for that famous drone. I have what follows from English Language & Usage (here). Evidently the drone has quite a history already; it’s actually older than I am. It originated in 1935 when the British Royal Navy demonstrated a remote-controlled aircraft in target practice. That plane was called DH 82B Queen Bee. A U.S. admiral attending that demonstration, one William H. Standley, returned home and there asked Commander Delmer Fahrney to develop something analogous for the U.S. Navy. It was Fahrney who originated the word by naming such flyers drones “in homage to the Queen Bee.”

By the time of World War II, two kinds of drones had been fashioned and were being tested: target drones to be destroyed and assault drones to do the attacking. In the dim future lay the drone that accidentally landed on the White House lawn and in the immediate future will deliver the papers—once targeting has been tuned up a little more.

Incidentally, George R.R. Martin, the man whose novels gave birth to Game of Thrones, was a man I’d known slightly in my science fiction days. Once, while assembling an anthology of stories, he included one of my novellas in his collection. I still glow faintly from that close contact with future celebrity.

Imminent Threat

One drawback of a “news fast” is that it denies us the opportunity to polish our linguistic skills. Let me illustrate this with a current controversy (those on a fast might wish to skip a sentence). Evidently killing American citizens using drones is Okay if they are an imminent threat to the United States. Here imminent means “near at hand” in time; threat means “a hostile intention.” The use of drones in such a context is preemptive—in that nothing has actually happened as yet—except awareness of an intention to commit a hostile act. Soon. This is the Bush doctrine personalized, as it were.

How far is Yemen from the U.S. coast? 7,129 miles away—15 hours by air. “Imminent” therefore means about 15 hours. The presumption is that the targeted Individual not only has the intention but is also the person to carry it out. Otherwise problems arise, even if “preventive war” were justified. What happens to the logic if the Individual acts through surrogates? The droning of the fellow might be justified if the surrogates had sworn on some holy book that they will only commit the terrorist attack while the Individual is still alive—and furthermore, word of his death can reach them fast enough, therefore before they explode the bomb. If no such oath was sworn, and if the Individual is not coming himself, the droning is just vengeance—in advance.

Evidently, since George W. Bush, preventive war has become acceptable, indeed unquestioned—itself a curious deformation of logic. Under that logic, the probability of attack is viewed as certainty—which is a linguistic error of the first order. But given that it is accepted, the citizenship of the Individual becomes the really core issue in this new doctrine. Why is his American citizenship controversial? The controversy must derive from American exceptionalism—another idea that seems to have achieved transcending status. Killing an Arab is Okay, indeed shrugged off. He need not even be a threat, imminent or otherwise. Enough for his demise to be known to be on the wrong side of history. But an American citizen? That’s a being above mere human status. The right to equal treatment under the law has been modified, evidently, as we’ve expanded the concept of preventive war. The American citizen must be physically located on United States territory to deserve the right. If he is elsewhere, it is best for him to keep his intentions to himself.

News fasts will also prevent us from delighting in such discoveries as the following. A drone is not just a pilotless plane. It’s also a male bee that makes no honey. And it is also a kind of dull recitation in which the words, for all practical purposes, make no sense at all: as the words of this new doctrine—or of the Bush Doctrine that gave them birth.

Torture Then, Assassination Now

Predator drones firing Hellfire missiles killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen on September 30, 2011. Al-Awlaki was a U.S. citizen born in Las Cruces, NM in 1971. This was part of the vast collective insanity that plays out in the skies above us while down here all seems normal in up-scale Grosse Pointe Farms. Sunshine. Children going to school accompanied by parents weekdays. Down the street a lawn was dug up a couple of weeks ago to replace a defective sewer line. Now, thanks to Tocco Mannino Landscaping services, a new lawn completely hides the devastation. In the sky unspeakable madness. Some years ago I studied lawyerly documents showing why we could engage in torturing people. Today’s news tells me that the Obama administration evidently ordered al-Awlaki’s killing based on another lawyerly document justifying the event—provided that al-Awlaki could not be taken alive. It turns out that he might have been—taken alive. He and three companions were traveling by car and had stopped for breakfast. Helicopters might have landed and surrounded him. We’re not at war with Yemen, to be sure. Nor were we at war with Pakistan when we landed copters to grab bin Laden. I wonder. Was there also a lawyerly memo justifying military action in Pakistan before we landed?

Droning On

Thanks to a virus that seems to have affected the computer systems of the drone program of the U.S. Air Force, we learned yesterday of Creech Air Force Base. It is a small facility in southern Nevada across the highway, as it were, of Indian Springs, NV, a little place with 1,302 inhabitants. If you get tired of the splendors of Las Vegas, about 40 miles northwest of there, on U.S. 95, you can refresh your luck at Indian Springs Casino. The town is also home of the Southern Desert Correctional Center. The poignant fact in the story we read is that pilots report to work at Creech combat-ready; they’re wearing their flight suits. They work in a small concrete building seated in front of displays screens and guide drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and other places using a joy stick.

Clouds of War

We don’t know where the electron is. All we know is its probability of being, well, inside this cloud, right here. Statistics conquers all. Based on the most recent orthodoxy, there are no “laws” of nature—only high and low probabilities that matter will behave in certain ways. True. The probabilities that I will fall when I walk out of the tenth story window of this building, right here, are extraordinarily close to one. But in theory at least—meaning that it is permissible to think this—somewhere, sometime, a million years ago but, for that matter, perhaps tomorrow, someone will go on a walk and start rising into the air, getting ever more desperate, until, not even visible to the naked eye of his dog, who lives by other odds, he gets into the stratospheres where the oxygen’s no more.

Destruction at a distance is my subject, actually. It is associated with artillery, bombing, and drones. In David McCullough’s biography, Truman, Truman is quoted as saying (p. 439 of the 1992 Touchstone edition), “It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are.” Reasonable estimates from Japanese sources put deaths in Nagasaki at 87,000, in Hiroshima at 90,000, suggesting that the trade of 177,000 for 250,000 was numerically the better bet—provided, of course, that the same probabilities applied in both cases and that only two cases were possible—an atomic attack or the slow grind of warfare on land. It wasn’t at all certain that a quarter of a million Americans would die; different strategies might have kept numbers much lower; that around 170,000 Japanese civilians, among them a small number of Japanese soldiers and sailors, would be boiled, burned, and blasted to ash—that was a great deal more probable. The case is further “clouded” by the fact that the civilian inhabitants of the two Japanese cities (and surely some were children) were not, as it were, organized state forces opposing that flower of our manhood.

The third way might have been to stop U.S. advances and to tighten what was no doubt a serious blockade of the island of Japan. Time would have eventually produced a Japanese surrender. Japan was already on its last leg. But inside the vast clouds of public opinion, impatient expectations, and the mood of the times generally, the rational solution wasn’t even contemplated.

Destruction at a distance by an explosive device—or bio-bomb—treats opposing states as if they were single bodies made up of cells and directed by a single mind. Therefore the laws of war have been obsoleted by another rather questionable and very nebulous theory under which non-combatants, not least children, are combatants, become combatants by the mere fact of belonging to the enemy domain.

We don’t know where the enemy is. All we know is its probability of being, well, inside these borders here. Shock and awe will do it.

Thinking of drones, it occurs to me that small numbers of casualties and shielding verbiage, as in collateral damage, in no way change the underlying moral situation in any way. I ought to withhold a carefully calculated amount from my income taxes because drones are immoral; I am, after all, as a U.S. citizen, directly responsible. But it turns out that the amount I should withhold gets washed out by the mere fact that TurboTax rounds numbers before submitting them to big brother, one of whose obedient cells I happen to be.

A Trailer for the Dark Ages

Trailers are misnamed—because they’re really previews. Having just recently noted virginal Miranda under assault by our AG, today the New York Times leads a front page story (bottom left corner) with: “The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes…”

“Killing” is a refreshingly direct expression—and shorter than “assassination.” Now I sort of wonder when, precisely, it became a shrug-off to kill or assassinate non-citizens? When, precisely, did “regime change” become a legitimate enterprise, used almost with the same causally neutral tonality as “changing my underwear”? When Saddam Hussein decided on “regime change” in Kuwait, why the global uproar? Or is “regime change” only the prerogative of the most powerful?

When and how did the concept of human rights morph into a more nuanced, delicate, shall we say sophisticated distinction between citizen rights and those of “lesser people”? And only briefly. Because our concept of citizenship is itself involved in an eye-blurringly rapid transformation, under which citizenship is in the eye of the beholder, namely the eye of the cop on the beat, say in the State of Arizona or in a CIA-eye staring at a screen in one of the Carolinas as it directs a drone over the wastes of Yemen.

But if the trailer thrills you—be assured that there is much, much more to come. To a theater near you. Or even right at you, right through the door, unannounced, innocently cybernetic, unaware of its own explosive nose.

Trailers were named that because, although previews of coming attractions, they were spliced to the tail of movies.

Added Later:

Brigitte points out, having read the above, that these matters are calmly, seriously, learnedly, analytically discussed on C-Span and PBS with nary a sign of emotion. Sometimes the measured, scholarly tone is jarringly out of place. All this is madness. Really. This is not a case of developing the “policy implications,” the “international reactions,” the “political consequences” of the obvious and scary incoherence of slashing amorality everywhere. These matters are actually and seriously dangerous. They are.

Functional Equivalents

Suicide bombing has a deeply irrational element: it targets the innocent. It is intended to harm a collective and, doing so, to influence collective behavior. But the only behavior this sort of thing arouses is rage against the people who sent the bomber—and against the collective of which those people are a part. Carpet bombing in World War II was a functional equivalent—but, being destructive on a greater scale, it was more effective if equally immoral. The drone is a closer equivalent—precisely in lacking effectiveness. It is a hybrid. Its operator can never have the information necessary to distinguish between combatants and others. It, too, is a distance-weapon and will therefore kill the innocent. It produces the illusion of being more precise but lacks the overwhelm of a downpour of bombs. Those who use this method—as those who send the suicide bomber—have yielded what little remains of moral high ground in warfare industrial style. Indeed all this really makes me wonder if “just war” doctrines still retain any relevance at all.