The Rise of the Warrior Corporation: Win or Lose on the Battlefield, Big Business Always Comes Out on Top

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It couldn’t be more appropriate that the Air Force prefers you not call their latest wonder weapons “unmanned aerial vehicles,” or UAVs, anymore.  They would like you to use the label "remotely piloted aircraft" (RPA) instead.  And ever more remotely piloted that vehicle is to be, until --  claim believers and enthusiasts -- it will pilot itself,  land itself, maneuver itself, and while in the air even  chose its own targets.

In this sense, think of us as moving from the citizen’s army to a  roboticized, and finally robot, military -- to a military that is a foreign legion in the most basic sense.  In other words, we are moving toward an ever greater outsourcing of war to things that cannot protest, cannot vote with their feet (or wings), and for whom there is no “home front” or even a home at all.  In a sense, we are, as we have been since 1973, heading for a form of war without anyone, citizen or otherwise, in the picture -- except  those on the ground, enemy and civilian alike, who will die as usual.

Of course, it may never happen this way, in part because drones are  anything but perfect or wonder weapons, and in part because corporate war fought by a thoroughly professional military turns out to be staggeringly expensive to the demobilized citizen, profligate in its waste, and -- by the evidence of recent history -- remarkably unsuccessful.  It also couldn’t be more remote from the idea of a democracy or a republic.

In a sense, the modern imperial age began hundreds of years ago with corporate war, when Dutch, British and other East India companies  set sail, armed to the teeth, to subdue the world at a profit.  Perhaps corporate war will also prove the end point for that age, the perfect formula for the last global empire on its way down.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear(Haymarket Books), has just been published.

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Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt