A well-written, thoughtful discussion of the broader issues raised by the introduction of futuristic technology to war.
Despite a title that sounds like science fiction, this is a down-to-earth look at the problems facing the American military, now and in years to come.
Latiff is a retired Air Force major general and is the director of Intelligence Community Programs at George Mason University. He spent much of his service time researching new weapons technology, and in the opening chapters, he features some of the recent creations and what they may be once they are ready for the battlefield. Readers will get a solid nontechnical overview of developments in such fields as robotics, drones, biotechnology, and genetics, with hints of their possible applications to battlefield situations. Among the things the future may hold: a pill that lets soldiers forget traumatic combat experiences and, as a result, avoid PTSD and a drone capable of deciding on its own, in milliseconds, whether a potential target is a threat that it should eliminate. But Latiff is interested in more than the tactical implications. He puts particular stress on the ethical dimensions they call up: whether deleting a memory is an intrusion on the soldier’s personal integrity and whether life-and-death decisions should be entrusted to machines without a human in the loop. Already, we are seeing how drone pilots, often far removed from the targets they strike, can be traumatized by the choices they face. The author contends that the general detachment of most Americans from military matters—with an all-volunteer Army, few families have any personal stake in whether the nation goes to war—enables politicians to promote military solutions to any foreign policy issue or to vote for bloated defense budgets to boost employment in their districts. Latiff also calls out senior officers who inhabit a bubble populated only by other military personnel. This cleareyed focus on the larger dimensions of the military enterprise raises the book above the narrowly technical discussion of new weapons and the tactics they require.
A well-written, thoughtful discussion of the broader issues raised by the introduction of futuristic technology to war.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-94760-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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