This article in Esquire is interesting and informative. It is also very much an icon for the disconnect in American thinking regarding war, warfare, and the very real fight on the ground in Afghanistan. There is the appeal of a sterile, almost absurdly clean fight from a console in the United States; no sweat in your eyes or down your back from body armor. No stench of raw sewage, blood, or decayed flesh, the greatest irritant perhaps a pesky fly on the display (you don't need to worry about where or what it might have just crawled on). It is at once obviously deceptive but nonetheless appealing, especially to those who seek seduction...

Tom


We've Seen the Future, and It's Unmanned

October 14, 2009, 8:30 AM
By Brian Mockenhaupt

Every so often in history, something profound happens that changes warfare forever. Next year, for the first time ever, the Pentagon will buy more unmanned aircraft than manned, line-item proof that we are in a new age of fighting machines, in which war will be ever more abstract, ever more distant, and ruthlessly efficient.


The war begins each day on the long drive into the desert, just past the Super Buffet and the Home Depot and the Petco, and the swath of look-alike houses that cling to the city's edge, along the forty miles of the strangest daily commute in America. Air Force Staff Sergeant Charles Anderson plucks his wristwatch from the cupholder and crosses into the war zone. He wears the watch only at work, and the ritual shifts his thoughts away from the everyday, which lately has been occupied by wedding plans and house hunting.