Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence--those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
-Aldous Huxley
A friend of mine the other day, himself a longtime blogger, wrote about the problem of finding something relevant to discuss each morning, an issue that arose for him only after several years. Here I am, musing over the same limitation this gray New York morning, in this 131st posting.
This blog has been a diary of the pandemic era, covering everything from the joys and losses of farming, to travel, to political folly, to memories of wars and things past.
I feel as grey as the sky outside. The 7:45 horn just sounded down the hill, an artifact of the days when the Corning plant would summon the locals to work making glassware. The snow has mostly melted, and I can't help wondering if spring has arrived early. My hopes that a vaccine would free me from this lovely old Victorian prison are slamming against the realization that I am neither old enough, nor sick enough, nor enough of a Republican campaign contributor to have much prospect of a needle stick any time soon. P is a free person now, fully vaccinated. I am not, and likely won't be until the end of summer at the earliest.
Peg's also vocationally free in a way I'm not. Rounding third in her career, with the ability to work anywhere and as much or as little as she chooses, she would have what most might consider almost ultimate freedom, but for the anvil of me and my tethered career constantly dragging us back to a place that's gone mostly mad by the look of things. Her sacrifice is not lost on me.
But let's not go down that rabbit hole, when there are so many others available in the lacunae of my addled, late-middle-aged brain.
This morning I thought about writing on the subject of dogma as one encountered it in the military, and in particular in how we employed the F-15 back in my steam driven era. Instead, in my predawn readings I ran across an essay from this time last year, proclaiming something none of us crusty fighter pilots much want to hear--our century may not quite be at an end, but we can see it from here:
In truth, this secret has been hiding in plain view for a while. As computer technology has improved geometrically, and the ability to gather and assimilate the data necessary for situational awareness in the aerial battlefield has expanded, it has become clear that the "limfac" (limiting factor, an acronym one frequently encountered in military writings) is the guy trying to manage it all while connected to the complicated tangle of equipment required to keep him alive and sentient at 45,000 feet, or at 9 Gs while fending off a missile.
As the article points out, it's not drones that will replace the fighter pilot; they still require a human to drive and make decisions, as well as a datalink that a savvy adversary will find a way to snip. Rather, the future battlefield will be dominated by the completely remote and autonomous hunter-killer, programmed not just to detect, discriminate, and kill, but also to learn from its battlefield experience, if "experience" is the right word for a machine.
And these flying machines will not only learn, but transmit that learning among themselves as they fall upon a formation of enemy aircraft, or an enemy airfield or communications center, in swarms of flying, thinking bomblets that may be no bigger than a baseball, because there's no need to accommodate a man. It's already happening:
I love that the general in charge is a woman, and that someone with a sense of history named the program "Golden Horde", after the Mongol swarms that fell across Central Asia and Europe 800 years ago, dealing a deadly lesson in the obsolescence of European arms that was somehow lost until Nathan Bedford Forrest reacquainted the Western world with the lethality of swift, well-armed cavalry 600 years later.
When I left the Air Force in 1994, part of what led to that decision was an acute sense, often articulated by me in the Officer's Club bar after several longnecks, that I had just participated in the last great air war. I was half-right, as it turned out. Desert Storm was probably the last great air war executed by flawed humans like myself, physically present in the battle space. My sense turned out to be prescient, as our prehistoric propensity for war comes to rely on warriors with the sort of computer savvy as my stepson, who scratches his head every few weeks at my clueless, old guy technology queries.
In a way, I was blessed to leave when I did, and to find my way into a profession that can get away with being technologically hidebound. I tell myself I'm just as effective in court with an easel and a butcher paper pad as with a multimedia presentation. No one believes it, but I do better legal research sitting in a pile of musty books than most of the young lawyers whose research is only as good and insightful as their online search queries. Everything in law comes down to deep thinking, pattern recognition, and as a trial lawyer having a gift as a raconteur. There is a place in the legal terrarium for an old dinosaur like me. Which I guess is why this season of life seems to have a lot more color for me than it does for my old squadron mates who never left the defense fold, and are confronted with their senescence every day.
We all get old. We all get obsolete. We tell ourselves that all our former technical prowess has been replaced by wisdom, but that relies on an ability to analyze our accumulated lives and draw larger truths applicable in a present that would have been completely foreign to us as we experienced those things at the time. But reflection is a lost art, it seems. Some avoid the hard work of distilling something useful from our past by busying ourselves in shopping, the cornucopia of on-demand television, exercise, or--if you're a lawyer in private practice--telling yourself it's a waste to spend a single waking moment doing something for which you can't can't bill.
These experiences of the moment have a value of their own, of course, but the advantage of old age (and there aren't many, friends) is context, and context requires reflection. And we all find ways not to reflect, particularly not on our own obsolescence. Go there, and it won't be long before you peer over the horizon and realize the end of the ride is coming up soon. But that's true whether we acknowledge and reflect on it or not.
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