One of the things Army Lt. Col. Douglas Pryer is known for is his mastery of words, but he still has a respect for pictures.
Pryer is a former intelligence officer who worked in various command staff in Iraq, Kosovo, Germany, and others. He's also an award winning military author.
Plastered to the top of his most recent report, published by the Army's Combined Arms Center, is a picture from the Terminator movies: a squad of evil looking humanoid machines, undoubtedly looking for human victims.
Pryer even named the paper after the last of these movies. He calls the paper "The Rise Of The Machines: Why Increasingly 'Perfect' Machines Help Perpetuate Our Wars And Endanger Our Nations."
So it's not hard to see what Pryor thinks about the global drone war, even without reading a word.
If a few words had to be picked though, let them be the most terrifying collection.
Along the way Pryer writes that he wishes he believed that America would one day look back at "transnational drone strikes as a morally disastrous policy that our nation briefly toyed with at the turn of the century, before gaining wisdom from this folly."
He believes himself to be optimistic in this regard though. A dreamer. Instead, a combination of an American feeling of blind moral superiority and technological supremacy make the development of Spartan robots seem like a foregone conclusion.
Then he drops this dystopic doozy:
[The U.S. seems bound to develop] robots so advanced that they make today’s Predators and Reapers look positively impotent and antique. These killer robots, though, will share one thing in common with their primitive progenitors: with remorseless purpose, they will stalk and kill any human deemed “a legitimate target” by their controllers and programmers.
There's a lot to the paper, to include Pryer's initial amusement and honest thoughts of ingenuity with regard to his own personal experience with the rise of drones. He also gives Isaac Asimov a shout-out in the beginning, which is totally cool.
It's worth a read, if you're interested in drones — you can get it right here.
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