There's something viral about the wondrous new weaponry an industrial war system churns out. In World War I, for instance, when that system was first gearing up to plan and produce new weapons by the generation, such creations – poison gas, the early airplane, the...
For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here's the good news: Drones are hot! Not long ago – 2006 to be exact – the Air Force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once; now, the number is 38; by 2011, it...
The recent frenzy over "balloon boy" Falcon Heene that dominated cable news was odd, considering the scant coverage of the carnage wreaked by another kind of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The balloon incident involved a 6-year-old boy who was thought to be...
In early June, 2009, I was in the Shah Mansoor displaced persons camp in Pakistan, listening to one resident detail the carnage which had spurred his and his family's flight there a mere 15 days earlier. Their city, Mingora, had come under massive aerial bombardment....
In Jayne Anne Phillips' Lark and Termite, the skies over Korea in 1950 are described in this way: "The planes always come … like planets on rotation. A timed bloodletting, with different excuses." The most recent plane to attack the Pakistani village of...
