{"id":17793,"date":"2016-07-23T13:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-07-23T18:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=17793"},"modified":"2016-07-23T13:00:48","modified_gmt":"2016-07-23T18:00:48","slug":"the-surveillance-state-drones-and-the-end-of-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/07\/23\/the-surveillance-state-drones-and-the-end-of-society\/","title":{"rendered":"The Surveillance State: Drones and The End of Society"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"annotatable\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-17794\" src=\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/07\/drones3.jpg?w=620\" alt=\"Drones3\" width=\"620\" height=\"349\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"annotatable\">The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying attention. I\u2019m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding human infantryman as a weapon of war. Or to put it another way: the end of the Age of the Gun.<\/p>\n<div class=\"anno-right\">\u00a0You may not even realize you have been, indeed, living in the Age of the Gun because it\u2019s been centuries since that age began. But imagine yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries before it), the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse archer\u2014a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life training in the ways of war. Imagine that guy\u2019s surprise when he was shot off his horse by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long metal tube and just two weeks\u2019 worth of training. Just a regular guy with a gun.<\/div>\n<div class=\"anno-right\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"anno-right\">That day was the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity. For centuries after that fateful day, gun-toting infantry ruled the battlefield. Military success depended more and more on being able to motivate large groups of (gun-wielding) humans, instead of on winning the loyalty of the highly trained warrior-noblemen. But sometime in the near future, the <i>autonomous, weaponized drone<\/i> may replace the human infantryman as the dominant battlefield technology. And as always, that shift in military technology will cause huge social upheaval.<\/div>\n<div class=\"anno-right\"><\/div>\n<p class=\"annotatable has-annotations\">The advantage of people with guns is that they are cheap and easy to train. In the modern day, it\u2019s true that bombers, tanks, and artillery can lay waste to infantry\u2014but those industrial tools of warfare are just so expensive that swarms of infantry can still deter industrialized nations from fighting protracted conflicts. Look at how much it cost the United States to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, versus how much it cost our opponents. The hand-held firearm reached its <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gizmag.com\/kalashnikov-ak-47\/12306\/\">apotheosis<\/a> with the cheap, rugged, easy-to-use AK-47; with this ubiquitous weapon, guerrilla armies can still defy the mightiest nations on Earth.<\/p>\n<p class=\"annotatable has-annotations\">Read the Remainder at <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/qz.com\/185945\/drones-are-about-to-upheave-society-in-a-way-we-havent-seen-in-700-years\/\">Quartz<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<div class=\"anno-right\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying attention. I\u2019m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding human infantryman as a weapon of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[74,4445,1317,4912,7748,4479,4333,5542,65,3712],"tags":[5001,748,13039,1558,60,5314,4799],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17793"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}