Mark Shields Quotes

The drones are really interesting - how have the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan? Because we've upped the drone strikes and most of the country doesn't even really know what that means or who we're killing or... it's such a new weapon that we don't know what the long term impacts of that kind of military action is going to be.

We're setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you're sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us. I don't know if that's necessarily such a good thing.

The front[line] of wars is increasingly non-human eyes peering down on our perceived enemies from space, guiding missiles toward unseen targets.

Where land mines are indiscriminate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt.

Generally speaking, it's a very hard thing to wrap your head around that a drone operator in Nevada can be releasing munitions in the Middle East.

When you go into a country like Libya where a large chunk of the population wants the old regime back you could end up with a protracted civil war. That we're now in a stalemate was both entirely predictable, and predicted. That we're now relying on drones is disturbing. How vital can a cause be if we're not willing to risk American lives to defend it, and instead use robots and remote control operators? It gets me back to the larger feeling about the intervention - there's just not a compelling reason for us to be involved.

And for the people who promote drones as the answer to everything, there is a danger from being distanced from the reality of the ugly mess of war.

The truth is that, in trying to get at terrorists who are in countries that either are unwilling or unable to capture those terrorists or disable them themselves, there are a lot of situations where the use of a drone is going to result in much fewer civilian casualties and much less collateral damage than if I send in a battalion of marines.

In this way, it seems to me that, since 1984, my book on the logistics of perception has been proved totally correct. For instance, almost every conflict since then has involved the logistics of perception, including the war in Lebanon, where Israel made use of cheap drones in order to track Yasser Arafat with the aim of killing him.

Few years ago I did a movie, Good Kill, about drone pilots and for four or five months I'm obsessed with the Air Force.

The automation of warfare has, then, come a long way since the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

The United States is the first nation to regularly conduct strikes using remotely piloted aircraft in an armed conflict. Other nations also possess this technology. Many more nations are seeking it, and more will succeed in acquiring it.

Needless to say, there is no opportunity to interrogate or learn anything from a suspect who is vaporized by a missile launched by a keystroke executed thousands of miles away.

More and more, modern warfare will be about people sitting in bunkers in front of computer screens, whether remotely piloted aircraft or cyber weapons.

The use of drones is rapidly transforming the way we go to war. On the battlefield, a squad leader can receive real-time data from a drone that enables him to view the landscape for miles in every direction, dramatically expanding the capabilities of what would normally have been a small and isolated unit.

Drones can be a highly effective way of dealing with high-priority targets, but they should not become the drug of choice for an administration that is afraid to use successful, legal and safe tactics of the past.

The combat man isn't the same clean-cut lad because you don't fight a kraut by Marquis of Queensberry rules. You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself. He does the same to you.

I think we would find, if you study the conduct of guerilla-type wars, that the Obama Administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon Administration ever did.

I know that 'boots on the ground' is a scary phrase and that the Western world has gotten used to sterile attacks.

I've got no problem with drone strikes.

Armed drones have become Barack Obama's way to engage in terrorist-infested hellholes without putting 'boots on the ground.' For years, the CIA has been running a secrecy-shrouded program of targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and more recently in Somalia, Syria and Iraq.

The drones are a terrorist weapon, they not only kill targets but also terrorise other people.

First, separate ground, sea and air warfare is gone forever. This lesson we learned in World War II. I lived that lesson in Europe. Others lived it in the Pacific. Millions of American veterans learned it well.

It's so hard to go to war at home. Go to war, go home, repeat. And that is the future of warfare. Forget about remote control drones, there's going to be remote control tanks.

Nowadays wars are not declared. They simply start.