"And what if the gravest costs are not borne by them at all? This question has become particularly urgent since the advent of armed drones, which, in their capacity to inflict death without risking it, have changed the elemental moral calculus assumed in warfare. A country that does not incur much human cost from its wars is a country that does not think much about them at all. “The absence of casualties isn’t a bad thing,” Kreps said, “but what it does is make Americans not think twice about how they are spending their resources.”

This became evident during Obama’s presidency, as his administration attempted to shift the war on terror away from the Bush-era counterinsurgencies and into a more amorphous, drone-centric program of counterterrorism. Critics have long contended that this was a perverse consequence of mounting concern over the civil liberties violations of the Bush years: a replacement of black sites and Guantánamo detentions with ghostly assassinations by increasingly autonomous airborne machines, the particulars of which would remain far from the view, and consciences, of the president’s supporters.

It was a bargain that many of those supporters were tacitly willing to accept. Polls during Obama’s presidency found that even as large majorities of Americans opposed staying in Afghanistan, most also approved of the administration’s drone strikes — even when a plurality of respondents couldn’t name the countries being targeted."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/magazine/iran-war-trump-drones-ai.html

#USA #Militarism #War #Warmongers #Imperialism #DroneStrikes

#PSA: Prepare for the next round of #oil and #gas #SupplyShock, price hikes and overall #inflation.

The tankers in transit when the #HormuzStrait was closed, have all docked at their destinations and their contents are being processed now. The impending shortfall cannot be compensated by the trickle via the strait after Iran opened it partially. Even the nations exempted from the #blockade won't be immune to the global nature of oil prices.

#warmongers

Here is a Sd.Kfz. 222 armoured car, also for the early war Germans, which did very well in areas with good road networks, but terribly in North Africa and the Soviet Union, seemed a good fit for my Battle of France army

#Warmongers #BoltAction #SdKfz222

For days 811-812 of the #HobbyStreak been working on this Panzer 38 (t) for my Bolt Action early war Germans, one of the more important tanks of the early war, but often overlooked in the game for the Panzer III & Panzer IV

#Warmongers #BoltAction #Panzer38t

"In other words: The side of the story that a broader, McChrystalite perspective includes doesn’t actually exist; since the dawn of time, Iranian “escalation” has been intrinsically driven, unaffected by exogenous variables. Dubowitz makes no mention of the time in 2024 that Israel, out of the blue, lethally bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, or the time, in 2025, when Israel, out of the blue, staged a massive air assault on Iran, or the time a month ago when Israel and America, out of the blue, staged another such assault, this time, for good measure, killing Iran’s leader and several family members. So, needless to say, Dubowitz also fails to mention that the only three times in history Iran has started firing ballistic missiles at Israel—the missiles that Dubowitz and Stephens and Meade and Frum says Iran’s “mullahs” shouldn’t be allowed to have—were in response to those three unequivocal provocations.

If Dubowitz were to acknowledge such facts, he might have to entertain the possibility that there’s some truth to the claim that Iran’s ballistic missiles are meant to serve a defensive function—as a deterrent to Israeli attack. And if Dubowitz headed down that path, who knows where he might wind up? He might even start entertaining the possibility that, whatever the intrinsic motivations of such Iranian “proxies” as Hamas and Hezbollah, they, too, from Iran’s point of view, are meant to serve a deterrent function. (It was only after Israel degraded both to the point of near-impotence that it started launching military assaults on Iran—so apparently they had indeed been serving that function.)"

https://www.nonzero.org/p/why-we-keep-stumbling-into-stupid

#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Warmongers #Iran #MiddleEast #Israel