The World’s Cutest Drone: No Bombs on Board

Drones have often been used in war theaters, but that doesn’t stop this little military drone from being pretty cute. It was deployed by the British Army in Afghanistan and it measures only four inches by two inches.

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Mine Kafon: Seek & Destroy Landmines

Landmines are a terrible remnant of war, and there are literally millions still left around the world that injure and kill people on a regular basis. This unusual looking contraption is a cheap way to get rid of a lot of landmines, which could allow local populations to get rid of many of them easily without risking more lives.

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Amazing Photos in In Focus’ Afghanistan in May

Chinook helicopter with paratroopers

{via In Focus}

Noam Chomsky & Christopher Hitchens on OBL and 9/11

George Scialabba on Hitchens when he writes about Noam Chomsky.

Over the last decade, Hitchens has reenacted the drama of Dorian Gray: his prose style has waxed ever more elegant, while his political judgment and his polemical morality have decayed.

American intellectuals, whose responsibility it was to lead the national conversation beyond uncritical acceptance of the premises of state policy, failed entirely.

If the American citizenry ever learn, in relation to their country’s international behavior, Auden’s simple yet difficult lesson that “Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return” (or their benighted sympathizers do), it will be despite rather than because of the efforts of Hitchens and the large majority of American intellectuals who, about these matters at least, agree with him.

Suppose someone says that Pearl Harbor so inflamed American feeling that the firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though morally indefensible, were all but inevitable. Does saying this absolve the American officials who ordered the bombings or imply that the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians who died as a result was “richly deserved”? By Hitchens’s logic, yes.

Noam Chomsky’s reaction to OBL’s assassination.

It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

War Stories @ McSweeney’s

Nathan Bradley’s latest column details forgiving and living with Afghans.

War Stories By Nathan Bradley

This is Nathan’s fifth column over at McSweeney’s, and it tells the story of Khan, the electrician that kept his company alive during the cold winter months.

Gigantic Crane Lifts Korean Battleship Out of the Water!

I’m always amazed at the incredible machines that exist nowadays. Check this one out. It’s a massive crane that’s powerful enough that it can lift a warship out of the water. Where is this happening? Asia, of course – more specifically South Korea.

Read more @ Technabob

Booting Up Baghdad

Silicon Valley execs travel to Baghdad to see if they can boot up the city.

ISAF Soldiers In Kabul, Afghanistan

ISAF soldiers in Kabul, Afghanistan from the Big Picture

Generation Kill The Cradle Of Civilization S01E02 (HBO)

Generation Kill is an American war mini-series on the US cable channel HBO that explores the lives of the men in a U.S. Marine Corps battalion as they serve their country during the early days of the second War in Iraq.

The mini-series comes from the creative team behind HBO’s critically acclaimed The Wire. It is based on Evan Wright’s book of the same name, which finds its origins in a series of essays published in Rolling Stone Magazine. The essays were written during his stint as an embedded member of the Marines’ First Reconnaissance Battalion. It was adapted by David Simon and Ed Burns.

Wright’s portrayal of the soldiers in Generation Kill is the first glimpse of a fighting force raised on a palpable culture of violence (slickly produced war movies, gangster rap and rock in particular), who are street-savvy beyond any generation of soldiers prior, and how they deal with the disjunction between Hollywood war and actual war, their biographical influences and bureaucracy.
Vaughn From Filthy Skies

Just like some of the other wars in the last century were socially and psychologically dissected, Generation Kill does the same for the Gulf Wars. It is much needed since these types of incisive examinations in popular culture are rare for the moment, as there is no palpable end in sight for the war on terror and that soldiers are living through these moments as we speak. This makes the Second Gulf War a controversial subject to say the least.