When it comes to armed drones, is smaller and more precise necessarily better? The question came to my mind upon seeing the news that the U.S. Air Force just successfully test-launched a new weaponizable drone, the ALTIUS-600, making it the smallest drone in operation. Even more remarkably, this tiny aircraft was launched from the second-smallest-drone, the Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie, while the Valkyrie was in flight. There is nothing objectionable about the development of mini-drones. One could even argue they would be improvements, in humanitarian terms, over the use of the much larger Reaper to deliver 500-pound bombs in allegedly “precise” [...]
There is perhaps nothing so difficult or so important as thinking independently in the face of a gathering consensus. Very few people have the courage displayed by Rep. Barbara Lee, who just three days after the attacks of 9/11 cast the sole vote in Congress opposing the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which gave the Bush administration broad discretionary powers to wage war against terrorists. Lee’s opposition was not based on naïveté or ideological purity, both of which can be the source of what otherwise resembles iconoclastic thinking. Rather, she had the prescience and lucidity to see the dangers [...]
Ever since the 2016 referendum on Brexit, the U.K. has been busy reimagining its place in the world. Now, with the umbilical cord between the U.K. and the European Union finally cut, London will have to put into practice its long-stated ambitions for a “Global Britain.” The British government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, published on March 16, offers the first official and comprehensive expression of how it plans to do so. The Integrated Review has a great deal of interest for cyber-watchers. For example, the word “standards” appears more times in the document than “China.” [...]
