At present, the United States government spends hundreds of billions of dollars in an effort to keep this country safe at home and defeat its enemies abroad. Much of the money is well spent but, often, I can’t help but feel we are wasting precious resources fighting “the last war.” As I argued in this piece a few weeks ago, we should instead be ”studying the first six months of the next war.”
To end this end, I’d like to introduce you to a revolutionary new technology which could, in the words of the chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force, be a real “game-changer.” The Air Force calls the technology Micro Air Vehicles (or MAVs) and they are small, robotic drones (roughly the size of small birds) that could conceivably follow a terrorist back into a cave in Afghanistan and eliminate him.
The Air Force claims the drones will be “unobtrusive, pervasive and lethal” and they could be ready for action as early as 2015.
It, perhaps, goes without saying that the technology also poses some legitimate civil liberty concerns here at home, but the future seems to be moving inevitably in this direction and I’d much rather have the U.S. government aggressively pursue this technology than our enemies.
It also seems to me that this is the type of technology the Pentagon should be investing more in than, say, the new $500 million next-generation F-35 jet fighters or yet another $5 billion aircraft carrier.
For, in the end, it is not how much we spend on defense that counts, rather it is how wisely we spend our money that really matters.
