The world arms trade is a multi-billion dollar industry with a strong economic impact on its major exporters. This is a look at the biggest international arms suppliers and buyers, and the United States's recent dramatic jump in market share.
A collaboration between GOOD and Column Five Media.
Curtis Bell writes in the New Scientist: "War is becoming more and more dependent on robots such as the MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles now being used in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Autonomous robots that can move, perceive, decide and kill on their own are in the offing, as political scientist and military commentator Peter W. Singer... 
I'm watching the season premiere of Lost right now, and I just saw the USAF commercial with the tag line, "It's not science fiction, it's what we do every day."
I call bullshit. I looked it up, and yeah, it's bullshit, but as David Sirota's Salon article points out, it's brilliant marketing. Reminds me of some USAF ads I saw back in... 
This is a disturbing story. Those unmanned drones we've been using in Iraq and Afghanistan had some unforeseen security holes and got hacked:
Insurgents in Iraq intercepted live video feeds from the drones being relayed back to a US controller and revealing potential targets. A US official said the flaw was identified and fixed in the past 12... 
In the Spring of 2009, the photographer Richard Mosse traveled to Iraq, where he captured arresting images of U.S. soldiers working and living in what used to be palaces of Saddam Hussein. These visions of western soldiers at rest in imperial palaces are both intensely jarring and oddly playful, and they underscore the... 
In case you missed it, Nicholas Kristof had an interesting piece about Afghanistan late last week where he posits that instead of a doomed-to-fail attempt at counterinsurgency, we should spend the money on education instead. Why? Because "for the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly... 
In the minds of far too many Americans, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are little more than ideas: words and phrases bandied about by politicians, dinner party talking points for the moderately informed, momentary segments blipped above ticker stats on cable news shows. Yet no matter how far away those zones of conflict... 
Self-preservation is something that most humans take quite seriously, and that a few take to extremes. Faced with the real or imagined threat of attacks levied by nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry, some people opt to head 25 feet underground, surrounded by concrete and complex air-filtration systems, surviving off... 
