A Maverick Marianist university
October 23, 2009 at 2:07 pm | In UDRI | Leave a CommentTags: LOCI, UDRI, University of Dayton
So UD has had at least one military contract to work on the Maverick missile, as mentioned in the previous blog entry below. That was news to me.
Here is information about the Maverick:
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/agm-65.htm
The Maverick is the “most widely used precision-guided missile in the world,” according to Spacewar.com – and what name in the media could be more trusted than Spacewar.com???
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Laser_Guided_Maverick_Missile_Meets_Urgent_Air_Force_Need_999.html
Now, while I’m sure some folks at UD would object that they are not making the explosive in the Maverick, they’re just making the laser that guides it, so don’t blame us, etc.; and while others, like Joe Haus over at LOCI, would say, “Damn right we work on that missile – it is helping keep America safe, it takes out evildoers, and if the occasional civilian is killed by mistake, that’s an unavoidable part of war,” etc., etc.; the point here is, if the provost of UD left a civil war in the Middle East because he did not want to kill Muslims – he wound up at the wrong university.
UD’s peace-loving provost, again
October 22, 2009 at 2:03 am | In UDRI | Leave a CommentTags: Joseph Saliba, LOCI, UDRI, University of Dayton
Some months ago the Dayton Daily News profiled Joseph Saliba, the Provost of UD, and mentioned that he left his home country of Lebanon during a civil war because he “wasn’t the type to carry a gun,” in his words. I blogged about this on July 4.
The University of Dayton Magazine, the alumni publication, runs a similar story in its current issue, and quotes Dr. Saliba at length about his decision not to fight in the war. It’s not that he was chicken – he didn’t want to shoot his friends:
“One third of my [high school] classmates were Muslims, and I just couldn’t see myself going and fighting against the people I lived with and I considered my dear friends. . . . We have studied together, we have eaten together, we have lived together, and now I’m going to go kill them? That just didn’t make any sense.”
I sure can’t argue with that.
Now Dr. Saliba is provost of UD, which received $328,000,000 in defense contracts from 2000 through 2008, defense contracts which sure as hell ended up helping kill a lot of Muslims.
The amount of $328m is from governmentcontractswon.com:
The site attributes one of the contracts to the Maverick laser-guided missile . . . marvelous. I wonder how many Muslim wedding parties those have hit.
Dr. Saliba lost friends in the civil war, the article goes on to say, so he clearly knows more about war than I do, and has obviously made his peace with the military contracting at UD . . . if a guy like this sees no problem with UD’s work on A-10 warplanes and the rest of it, I despair of our ability to make any progress.
Well, maybe his grandchildren will agree with me someday . . .
The next war
October 9, 2009 at 2:35 am | In General Peace | Leave a Comment
- T-shirt from Northern Sun
A t-shirt from our friends at Northern Sun.
Scott Simon, the Fighting Quaker – #2
September 26, 2009 at 6:13 pm | In General Peace | Leave a CommentTags: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Quaker, Scott Simon
Again this morning I had the pleasure of hearing Scott Simon endorse war on NPR. This time it was a retread of what former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in the Washington Post this past July 10th — the idea that our war in Afghanistan is justified in part because the Taliban mistreated/mistreats women.
The Taliban certainly did/does mistreat women, but if we go to war in every nation where women are oppressed, we will find ourselves in an Orwellian forever war. (Or perhaps a Haldemanian forever war — I need to keep my dystopian-lit references straight.) I worked alongside a battered women’s shelter in Honduras for a couple years; if our armed forces can improve the treatment of women, I guess we should send a division there too.
(Earlier in his program, before he got to the ‘Scott’s World Police Corner’ segment, Simon interviewed a guest from the grossly misnamed Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the same place that employs Robert I-Never-Met-A-War-I-Didn’t-Like-Except-The-One-I-Might-Have-Actually-Served-In Kagan. The Carnegie Endowment guy spoke with relief about Iran’s misbehavior; he must be glad that the government of Iran is still providing us a passable excuse to bomb them.)
As I wrote about Simon back in June:
“I wish that, just as often as he rallies his listeners to support various wars on Saturday mornings, he might also caution them to be careful about getting entangled in certain other wars. Perhaps he could worry aloud about our deployment of soldiers in Colombia, or the Philippines . . . but somehow he never gets around to that. [I stand by this assessment! I haven't heard Simon discourage military intervention anywhere since my first post.]
“Simon has written that he was drawn to pacifism and being a Quaker in the 1960s. I haven’t read anything in which he outright disowns those beliefs; he just chooses to be a pro-war pacifist Quaker.”
Syria dodges (dodged) the high-tech bullet
September 3, 2009 at 8:04 pm | In UDRI | Leave a CommentTags: P.W. Singer, UDRI, Wired For War
Let me expand on the Syria thing I mentioned below.
(It makes me think like Whitman:
I sing of Syria! / Damascus! / City of broad shoulders . . .
Wait, that’s Sandburg. Anyway — )
I seem to recall that back in 2003, right about when the statue of Saddam was coming down in Iraq and most Americans thought that war was going swimmingly, some folks advocated toppling the regime in Syria next. I ask myself – does my memory serve? Is that right? Am I making that up?
No, I am not making it up, it turns out. Here is an item from the Daily Telegraph in which David Wurmser, a former aide to Dick Cheney, advocated removing the Syrian government:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1565235/US-must-break-Iran-and-Syria-regimes.html
Now, if you will turn to page 321 of your Wired for War . . . P. W. Singer discusses the concern that overconfidence in our weapons’ technology could make it easier for us start wars. Having earlier described Predators, and armed robots, and laser-guided swarms of self-propelled bombs, and on and on, Singer writes that all this technology might tempt us into starting wars at the drop of a hat because we’d be so confident we would win, and because all the technology would make it less likely that our soldiers would be harmed.
This is one thing that bothers me about all the military research conducted at UD and elsewhere. If it is “successful” and we do end up with nifty new laser-targeting capabilities, and harder/lighter fuselages for our drones, and 37% better layered sensing, and so on, I fear this will just make it easier for us to get embroiled in more wars, and those wars might not turn out the way we want (remember that statue of Saddam coming down, again). I think Syria is a perfect example of how easy it might have been for us to start yet another war — which would now be biting us back just like Iraq and Afghanistan are — had we had, back in 2003, all the gadgetry that so many engineers and researchers hope we will have in 5 or 10 years.
Look, Up In The Sky — Is It Armed?
September 1, 2009 at 7:19 pm | In UDRI | Leave a CommentTags: IDCAST, Tech Town, UDRI
UD is boasting about a UAV it flew around Dayton a couple weeks ago to celebrate the opening of Tech Town, which is a technology-oriented business incubator and research center. A project of UD, the Institute for Development and Commercialization of Advanced Sensor Technology (IDCAST), is the “anchor tenant” of Tech Town; as usual, IDCAST is a partnership with the Air Force which researches “sensors and remote sensing technology” which “have applications for the military, homeland security and surveillance.”
Isn’t this terrific?? Think of it – if we would have had more UAVs with better sensing technologies five years ago, we probably could have invaded Syria and taken out that evildoing regime without risking very many soldiers’ lives. And now we could be counting that as another successful war along with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, over at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, they are boasting about research of theirs related to green roofs and urban farming:
Getty Lee To The Rescue
August 18, 2009 at 8:49 pm | In General Peace | Leave a CommentP. W. Singer, in his book Wired For War, quotes engineers who accept military funding to design robots (likely to be used in warfare) who claim that they do not think about the moral implications of their work. One researcher, when asked about the “implications of arming robots,” responds, “I stay out of politics.” Another, who is creating a robotic vehicle, professes that “I am ignoring all of this to build this vehicle.” From page 174.
Also: “When it comes to weighing any major ethical questions, as one DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] program manager put it, ‘That’s way above my pay grade. That’s not my department.’ “ (Page 175)
I was mentally putting together a written reaction to this Shirking of Ethical Responsibility, which would be concise and somewhat whiny as usual, when I realized that Getty Lee, the famous Canadian poet, had already addressed the issue. He wrote:
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
–A line which any stereotypical engineer (under age 50) should be plenty aware of, for God’s sake.
If you are taking Pentagon money to design robots which you know very well can carry around Gatling guns – you are involved in politics. Aagh, don’t engineering programs mention this? Aren’t there ethics classes? If an engineer thinks his swarm of self-propelled laser-guided bombs is a good thing that is going to truly keep America safe and prosperous, then I disagree with him but I’m glad he is at least thinking about his work; but if he just designs them and sticks his head in the sand about what they will be used for, and what kind of blowback they will elicit – that’s cowardly.
Civilian killed in drone attack
August 5, 2009 at 4:10 pm | In General Peace | Leave a CommentA U.S. drone attack near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has apparently killed the wife of a Taliban leader:
I don’t like this, because (1) I don’t think it is moral to kill your enemies’ wives, and (2) pragmatically, this killing of civilians has got to lead to blowback against our troops eventually. Doesn’t it?
Maybe it is acceptable to kill your enemies’ wives and other family members if you are making an honest attempt to kill your target? Had our bombers killed Heinz Guderian’s wife in 1944 in an honest attempt to get Heinz himself, would that have been objectionable?
What if our involvement in that war had dragged on as a lower-intensity conflict for 8 years and we were killing Nazi wives in 1949?
At some point in our Afghan war, is it morally imperative to say, “Eight years on, these guys are not enough of a life-and-death threat to us that we are justified in killing their civilian family members”? How about twenty years on?
Maybe the Afghans and Pakistanis along the border should consider themselves lucky that we have drones and are therefore not just simply carpet-bombing their villages?
I am still going with (1) and (2) above.
UN report – civilian deaths in Afghanistan
August 1, 2009 at 3:08 pm | In General Peace | Leave a CommentTags: civilian deaths Afghanistan
The United Nations released a report yesterday (July 31) about civilians killed in Afghanistan in the first six months of the year. They put the number at 1,013, a significant increase over the same period in 2008. About 30% of these were caused by U.S. forces, international allies, and the Afghan armed forces; the remainder and obviously the majority were caused by the Taliban and other “anti-government elements.”
(CNN covered the report; bless them for doing so, but they got a statistic wrong — they say that 30.5% of the dead were from Western airstrikes, but actually the airstrikes accounted for 20% of the total 1,013. [Page 10 of the report.] The 30.5% figure is for total deaths attributed to U.S./international/Afghan army forces, again.)
The UN report separates the airstrikes into those “pre-planned” and those requested in support of troops in firefights; the second type tend to kill more civilians, the report says (page 12). With more U.S. troops being sent to Afghanistan, we might expect more firefights, more requests for air support, and more civilian deaths.
Page 13: “There is a strong feeling of anger and disappointment among the Afghan general public engendered by the civilian casualty toll arising from operations conducted by PGF, in particular those caused by airstrikes, which is undermining support for the continued presence of the international military forces, and the international community generally.”
The CNN report:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/07/31/afghanistan.civilian.deaths/index.html
The UN office with a link to the report:
http://unama.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?tabid=1741&ctl=Details&mid=1882&ItemID=4981
Just Give Me My Slurpee Straight
July 30, 2009 at 1:50 am | In Militarized Marketing | Leave a CommentTags: g.i.joe, slurpees
So we get Slurpees at 7/11 the other day and over the machine there is a giant poster of four people ready to shoot us. One guy was actually ready to shoot us and stab us. It was an ad for the new GI Joe movie, I eventually figured out, although I honestly didn’t get that from the poster — I had to go to Slurpee.com.
Is it alarming at all that people brandishing guns are considered a swell ad campaign for a beverage? Does this advertising brighten our day? If not, why do we put up with it? Would Martians find it odd that we decorate our convenience stores like this? Anyone else notice this? Anyone?
Of course we went ahead and bought the Slurpees anyway.
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