|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 One of the most
significant and controversial developments in contemporary warfare
is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as
drones. In the last decade, US drone strikes have more than doubled
and their deployment is transforming the way wars are fought across
the globe. But how did drones claim such an important role in
modern military planning? And how are they changing military
strategy and the ethics of war and peace? What standards might
effectively limit their use? Should there even be a limit? Drone
warfare is the first book to engage fully with the political,
legal, and ethical dimensions of UAVs. In it, political scientist
Sarah Kreps and philosopher John Kaag discuss the extraordinary
expansion of drone programs from the Cold War to the present day
and their so-called 'effectiveness' in conflict zones. Analysing
the political implications of drone technology for foreign and
domestic policy as well as public opinion, the authors go on to
examine the strategic position of the United States - by far the
world's most prolific employer of drones - to argue that US
military supremacy could be used to enshrine a new set of
international agreements and treaties aimed at controlling the use
of UAVs in the future.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 One of the most
significant and controversial developments in contemporary warfare
is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as
drones. In the last decade, US drone strikes have more than doubled
and their deployment is transforming the way wars are fought across
the globe. But how did drones claim such an important role in
modern military planning? And how are they changing military
strategy and the ethics of war and peace? What standards might
effectively limit their use? Should there even be a limit? Drone
warfare is the first book to engage fully with the political,
legal, and ethical dimensions of UAVs. In it, political scientist
Sarah Kreps and philosopher John Kaag discuss the extraordinary
expansion of drone programs from the Cold War to the present day
and their so-called 'effectiveness' in conflict zones. Analysing
the political implications of drone technology for foreign and
domestic policy as well as public opinion, the authors go on to
examine the strategic position of the United States - by far the
world's most prolific employer of drones - to argue that US
military supremacy could be used to enshrine a new set of
international agreements and treaties aimed at controlling the use
of UAVs in the future.
Shortly after speaking with a bullhorn amidst the still-smoking
wreckage at the World Trade Center site, President George W. Bush
urged Americans to 'get down to Disney World in Florida...take your
families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.'
Americans, he implied, should not merely offer sacrifices but
return to normalcy. Consistent with this anecdote, his
administration cut taxes, and held of efforts by a renegade group
of anti-war Congress members to introduce a 'share the sacrifice'
war tax for Iraq in 2007. According to the tax's opponents,
Americans were already being 'taxed to death.' The ultimate result
of all of this is that the government has financed the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan entirely through borrowing. As Sarah Kreps shows in
Taxing Wars, the type of debt financing for war that we have seen
since 9/11 could not have been more different from earlier
experiences when wars meant taxation. For instance, in 1914-three
years before America's direct involvement in World War I-President
Wilson urged war taxes as a way to fund defense preparations.
Indeed, the Wilson Administration levied a series of war taxes
before, during, and after the war, amounting to about one-third of
the war's costs. Why, when Wilson was aiming to recruit rather than
repel support for the war, did he introduce measures such as a
hefty war tax that recent leaders have considered politically
toxic? Why was the public so magnanimous in its willingness to
contribute its own resources? By contrast, why did leaders not use
the crisis of war, often used as entrees for introducing war taxes
in the past, in the aftermath of 9/11 to extract resources from the
populace in a way that been customary in the past? More generally,
what explains shifting attitudes towards bearing the financial
burden of war and the move away from war taxes, and the
consequences of that shift? Kreps argues that the starkly different
approaches are the result of public attitudes towards wartime
fiscal sacrifice that vary depending on the underlying type of war
and state-society relations. The public accepted the sacrifices
that the state demanded during the two world wars, an effect of
both the nature of those wars and the public's more favorable views
toward government in that era. However, when these factors combine
to make the public cost sensitive, leaders have pursued forms of
war finance that anticipate opposition and minimize constraints on
the way they use force. In post-1945 wars, the public has become
almost uniformly unforgiving of fiscal sacrifice, which explains
leaders' increased tendency to rely on less visible forms of
finance such as borrowing. The lack of visibility has had an
important knock-on effect too: Leaders have been able to
increasingly operate without the type of decision-making
constraints that were present in earlier war efforts which depended
upon broader levels of public support. Her ultimate conclusion is
both sobering and extremely important: the deterioration of
decision-making accountability with regard to war in the second
half of the twentieth century has allowed leaders to wage
increasingly costly and protracted wars. And because the health of
a democracy can be measured by how responsive leaders are to an
informed and attentive public in times of war, our current
practices suggest that we are edging ever closer to how
non-democracies conduct war.
The 2016 US election highlighted the potential for foreign
governments to employ social media for strategic advantages, but
the particular mechanisms through which social media affect
international politics are underdeveloped. This Element shows that
the populace often seeks to navigate complex issues of foreign
policy through social media, which can amplify information and tilt
the balance of support on these issues. In this context, the open
media environment of a democracy is particularly susceptible to
foreign influence whereas the comparatively closed media
environment of a non-democracy provides efficient ways for these
governments to promote regime survival.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Hampstead
Diane Keaton, Brendan Gleeson, …
DVD
R66
Discovery Miles 660
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|