As many as 180 people, from military lawyers and commanders to private contractors from Raytheon andNorthrop Grumman, are required to maintain each patrol of three to four Predator or Reaper drones around the clock.
.. Working up to 12 hours a day, sometimes six days a week, analysts watch their targets up close for months on end. They often witness their subjects’ final moments. In follow-up surveillance, they may even view their funerals.
“Watching targets go about their daily lives may inspire empathy,” said Julie Carpenter, a research fellow at California Polytechnic State University who has studied human-technology interactions in the military.
.. “We can say we see children and we think you shouldn’t do it. But it isn’t up to us,” one former analyst, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. “We are completely outranked, and at the very bottom of the food chain.”
‘Hi, I’m Uncle Sam and I’m a War-oholic’
Historically, when a nation declares war, it does so to mobilize national will, as the U.S. clearly did in World War II. Accompanying our wars of recent decades, however, has been an urge not to mobilize the people, but demobilize them – even as the “experts” are empowered to fight and taxpayer funds pour into the national security state and the military-industrial complex to keep the conflicts going.
Recent wars, whether on drugs or in the Greater Middle East, are never presented as a challenge we the people can address and solve together, but as something only those who allegedly possess the expertise and credentials – and the weapons – can figure out or fight. George W. Bush summed up this mindset in classic fashion after 9/11 when he urged Americans to go shopping and visit Disney World and leave the fighting to the pros
Nato & Russia: Border Tensions
KATARZYNA PLEJNIS TRIES hard not to think of the missile launchers, tanks and thousands of Russian soldiers stationed just a few miles from her house in northern Poland. That is until the live fire exercises wake her up in the dead of night.
“You can hear the shooting at four in the morning,” says Ms Plejnis, who lives in Braniewo, a small town a few miles from the border with Kaliningrad, the heavily militarised Russian enclave squeezed between Poland and the Baltic states.
.. So far this year, more than 20,000 Nato troops have taken part in exercises in the region and 30,000 more have been put on standby, in what Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, has described as “the biggest adaptation of force structures since the end of the cold war”.
.. According to the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), a pollster whose main client is the Russian government, more than half of all Russians now see war with Nato as a real threat.
.. “Fear about external threats has replaced economic concerns as the main driver of public sentiment,” says Mikhail Dmitriev, an economist and sociologist in Moscow. Pollsters say this has helped Mr Putin maintain popularity ratings at a historical high level of more than 80 per cent despite an economic slump ..
.. He accuses Nato of warmongering, citing the decision last year, to create a Joint Expeditionary Force Agreement. “They have also increased fighter jet flights close to our borders. That is in violation of everything Nato promised Russia,” he says.
.. “If only there was no war,” says Nadezhda, an elderly woman using a popular phrase that embodies ordinary Russians’ fear of conflict.
What was the general moral belief among German troops during World War II?
I served in the U. S. Army for 27 years, with my service starting with the war in Vietnam and ending with Operation Desert Storm. Since my primary area was Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, I got to speak with or interrogate soldiers and intelligence operatives (spies, if you will) from many other countries – the Soviet Union, the various countries which were part of the Warsaw Pact (Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, etc.), Cuba, North Korea, Iraq as well as American allies like England, France, Italy, etc.
The one thing common to just about all was the belief that they were patriots serving their country.
I have no reason to doubt that the average German solider in World War Two felt the same way.