What happens with the fighting spirit of humans, if you outsource soldiering to robot soldiers and drones?

Today FT-Magazine, published in England and not in the US, included an edited version of the following letter I sent them related to an article that did appear in the US. It is somewhat strange since my letter, as you will be able to see, was foremost directed to the US.

Like drones, robots also present challenges to the national psyche of their users (“Robot soldiers”, July 18/19) – the possibility of a diminishing human fighting spirit hiding behind drones and robots. 

I think it is hard to visualise the same type of national “good feeling”, with homecoming parades and memorials, when scientists and mechanical engineers have done the real fighting. And what will be more important for the advancement of a military career in the future: knowledge about robots or knowledge about your men? Will the traditional drill sergeant just become a figure featured in History channel documentaries? 

What keeps me coming back to these issues is that 70 years ago my father was freed from a concentration camp in Germany by courageous American boots on the ground… not by drones or robots. 

Per Kurowski 

Rockville, Maryland, US

Just because they are private doesn’t make the credit rating agents less bureaucrats

Sir John Authers in “The Short View” of May 2 asks the relevant long term question “should the S&P’s ratings be this important”, and answers with a no “As we have learnt from the credit crisis, it is dangerous for so many to put so much weight on one rating agency’s judgment”. He is right. The fact is though that as long as the regulators keep empowering these agencies to decide so much on how much capital the banks have to set aside for each credit based on the ratings, too many will indeed put too much weight on one rating agency’s rating, and there is no way around it.

I just ask what if those credit rating agents had worked for the regulators. All hell would have broken loose. Our confusion arises from not being able to see through the veil that the outsourcing to the private sector signifies, so as to comprehend that the credit rating agents are just simple credit-risk-measuring-bureaucrat-commissars.

All we need is “outsourcing”

Sir, after reading John Gapper’s “A cleverer way to build a Boeing” extolling the virtues of almost full outsourcing with as opposed to chaining itself down an as close to 100% local component production as possible, I cannot but sadly reflect that in my country Venezuela, if offered to help produce a 2% of the A380 it would currently have rejected it on the grounds that I must be an effort by the Empire to penetrate it.

Outsourcing seems as a constructive road to world peace there is and in this sense we should perhaps promote a rule that states that no country shall be allowed to contribute more than 5% of the components of any weapon. I can almost hear John Lennon rewriting a song.

But what about a bachelor degree in being happily unemployed?

Sir, as you say June 14 happiness lessons might not be a subject to add to the national curriculum, but perhaps some core course in how to be an unemployed with socially acceptable behaviour could be useful in times of so much outsourcing and migration.