Osler's Razor

Today, we are a nation at war, and we have been continuously for the past seven years. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, thousands of lives have been lost, and realms of tragedy we don't know about have been created.

The start of this all was a single incident. That incident followed decades in which the United States viewed war as something that had to do with technology and spending, unmanned missiles and bomber drones. Meanwhile, there was less and less attention paid to soldiers, the humans who died in the Revolution, the Civil War, the War to End All Wars, and then the wars that followed that.

There must be some kind of cruel irony in the fact that the first successful attack on an American city in the past century was accomplished by fewer than twenty men whose most sophisticated weapon was a box cutter. For those of you who never stocked shelves, a box cutter is a stubby knife used to rip open boxes. They are a ubiquitous tool for many people who make American commerce work, and it used to be legal to carry them onto planes.

So, those 17 guys carried box cutters onto four planes, and used them to bring down several enormous buildings. All of the aircraft carriers, all of the NSA surveillance satellites, all of the robotic weapons and stealth bombers and advanced tactical systems, the trillion dollars worth of machines, were helpless against that bagful of humble box cutters.

I wish I could say that America learned from that, that what happened was that we realized that we had suffered a great loss at the hands of individual (evil) creativity, not technology, that our post-human technology had been turned against us, but we did not. Instead, we continued down the same course. Our soldiers are kept in humiliating conditions, deprived of decent health care, and too often treated as an afterthought. Why? Well, giant weapons systems-- there's real money in that, I guess, the flow of our money that goes from government to contractor to sub-contractor with little bits dropping off at each stage.

So now we have a whole new Department with a huge budget, all-new sophisticated weapons on the way, control of Iraq, etc. etc. And what do they have?

Not much really... their numbers are down, I read, and they are losing power where they are. In a few years they may be ground down by our technology to a fraction of what they were... maybe if we continue to succeed, they will be down to just a handful of motivated individuals with box cutters.