Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare - Hardcover Book on Modern Military Technology | Perfect for Military History Enthusiasts & Defense Policy Researchers

Masterful reporting by a deeply seasoned investigator of the ever-greater secrecy of the warmaking industry undergirding world economy. Arkin has for decades gone far beyond usual national security reporting on militarism, espionage, policy, law and civil liberties.The book is packed with hard to come by, detailed information of the technology, inventors, producers, buyers and deadly implementers of highly targeted remote-controlled killing machines, a vast apparatus employing hundreds of thousands of "unlaborers," corporations, institutions and office holders supporting the sorely misnamed "unmanned" enterprise. Maybe more manned than the legacy manned armaments.Arkin goes below the publicity-driven acronymed programs to examine how they specifically work, or fail to work despite promises and generous budgets generated by slide shows and summaries featured by Team Snowden feeding its hundreds of media recyclers."Illusion of Perfect Warfare" is apt for not only the warmaking industry but its promotional cohort, virtual reality media.Arkin provides a close read of the real threat to national security hidden by digitally illusory law, politics, consumerism.This book could change the political discourse of the 2016 presidential campaign, so will likely be ignored by the leading candidates, all of them subservient to the Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and above all blind faith in official secretkeeping .If Edward Snowden had the foresight to release his full cache to an experienced journalist like Arkin, the public would know far more about the elaborate and comprehensive technology of NSA and its allies to pry into the most minute, private aspects of lives, work, pleasure, business, religion, politics, finance -- literally "everything" as the head of NSA dreamed of gathering, most likely did and the agency continues to expand under diverting cover of the comparatively scandalous, shallow reporting of the Snowden material.Arkin has written a superb background, present and future of "the Snowden era."