Warring Robots

I read somewhere that in WWII the percentage of combat to logistics was 30/70 and, it seems fair to argue, that the logistics played a role in winning that if not every war. Recently, the US has privatized logistics out of concern for the neoliberal ideal of making a buck off of everything especially those things that increase human misery and particularly if someone's crony or another makes that buck.

Today, however, I read an interesting article about how

[t]he Navy, on behalf of the Marines, launched the so-called Autonomous Aerial Cargo Utility System program late last year. According to program documents, the goal of the six-year-program is to produce an “unmanned and potentially optionally-manned” robot to “provide affordable and reliable rapid response cargo delivery to distributed small units in demanding, austere locations and environments.”

At first I thought this would be opposed by Halliburton et alia on the grounds that they need the dough. But then it occurred to me that this is a win win win for the forces of private wars and police. Once the US taxpayers spends trillions to perfect robot pilots and drivers, the Pentagon can sell the methods to make the machines for a buck two eighty and then Halliburton et alia can fire all their employes boost while keeping their contracts at the same level and reap not, as one might hope, the whirlwind but rather the windfall.

With crap brilliant examples of human ingenuity like this, is it any wonder that we hare fighting five or six wars? The business of America is business and war is where the money is.