Ladysmith Chronicle, June 03, 2014

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Youngsters take part in the Kinsmen Bullhead Derby during Ladysmith Kids’ Pirate Day Saturday, May 31 at the Ladysmith Maritime Society (LMS) Community Marina. The day featured a wide variety of fun activities, and Cliff Fisher from the LMS reports that there were more young families at the marina this year than he can remember.

SHIRLEY TRIPP

Local couple writes about drone warfare Lindsay Chung THE CHRONICLE

What difference do drones make? How do these unmanned aerial vehicles affect conflict and security around the world? Those are some of the questions husband-and-wife writing team Ann Rogers and John Hill of Ladysmith asked themselves while writing their new book, Unmanned: Drone Warfare and Global Security. The book was published April 20, and Rogers and Hill will be speaking about their work Thursday, June 5 at the Ladysmith Library. “Rogers and Hill combine thoughtful analysis with a flair for fresh and accessible writing,” Christopher Jasparro, co-author of International Conflict Over Water Resources in Himalayan Asia says about the book. “Their contention that we have entered an era of nano-war is disturbing yet bears serious thought by policymakers, war fighters, scholars and the public alike.”

Drones — unmanned aircraft that are (VIU), teaching security. Hill was formerly more formally called UAVs (Unmanned the China Watch editor for Jane’s IntelliAerial Vehicles) or RPAS (Remotely Pi- gence Review, and he has reported widely loted Aerial Systems) — have become the on security and military matters for a controversial new weapon of choice for range of Jane’s publications. He is currentthe U.S. military abroad. Unmanned de- ly the Writing Centre Co-ordinator at VIU. tails the causes and deadly consequences When Rogers was coming up with ideas of this terrifying new development in war- for current lectures for her security stufare and explores the implications for in- dents, she was reading about the use ternational law and global peace, accord- of drones in Pakistan and thought that ing to a press release. would make a good subject for a lecture. “Ann Rogers and John Hill argue that She put drones on the lecture schedule, drones represent the first truly globalized but when she started researching the subtechnology of war,” it states. “The book ject, she found “hardly anybody” was writshows how unmanned systems are chang- ing about drones. ing not simply how wars are fought, but The couple started working on the book also the meaning of conflict itself.” two and a half years ago. Drone warfare is a subject that matches Their research question for the book the couple’s backgrounds and experience. was “what difference do drones make?” Rogers is the former deputy editor of “There’s this technology out there that Jane’s Intelligence Review in London people find interesting, alarming, disturband the author of Security and Power in ing, useful, and we were wondering does the British State. She is a political studies it actually make a difference that there’s professor at Vancouver Island University no one in the cockpit of this aircraft,” said

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Hill. “We took as our sort of theoretical starting point the great Canadian theorist Marshall MacLuhan, who urges us when considering technology to look at not the task that the technology is sort of overtly set but to look at the wide-scale changes that technology brings to human society.” As Rogers puts it: “we know what it does and it’s pretty obvious what it does, but do people do things differently because of it?” After researching and writing the book, Hill and Rogers found that yes, drones do make a difference in conflict. “The difference it makes, or the difference it seems to us to make, is that it lowers the threshold to the application of military-scale force to an extent that it becomes possible and appropriate, in the eyes of those who are applying it, to target individuals,” said Hill. “And that’s what we’re calling nano-war to try to capture that very small scale of target, an actual named person.” See Rogers and Hill Page 3

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