The Devil’s Arsenal: the weapons of war

The US Army Human Terrain System has largely been a disaster…The Pentagon is pushing a new version of HTS and one way of doing that is convincing allies to join in and perhaps share costs.  This new update to the humanterrainsystem.army.mil shows the push is on with Australia et al.

Biometrics is a counterinsurgency tool. Some argue it’s necessary to sort the goodies from the baddies, which may be fine if the controllers can be trusted, but does experience bear that out?

Late last year it was reported that local and NATO forces are amassing biometric dossiers on Afghans with a plan to issue biometrically backed identification cards to 1.65 million Afghans. Human rights activists are concerned not only about who will ultimately hold the information (finger prints, iris scans etc) but the potential for a database to be used to eliminate political or ethnic rivals.

War is an abomination in any shape or form. Unfortunately it seems to be an inevitable co-relative of human "civilisation", so if it can't be stopped then countries that wage war must be held to account for their conduct by the international community, even countries that are our allies. When it is our country that is waging war then our government must be held to account for its conduct by all of us as citizens.

Holding to account countries that wage war means requiring them to disclose exactly what kinds of weapons they put to use against the people of other countries, particularly where those weapons can have enduring catastrophic personal consequences for their victims.  If the war is just, and the conduct of the country waging it ethically and morally sound, what possible basis is there for concealing exactly what is being done in our names and exactly what weapons are being used to do it?