Nice! I didn't know about the optparse module -- I'd been using getopt. After the last tool I wrote, I thought "man, it would be pretty easy to auto-generate the usage info from the getopt config." This seems to be what optparse does.
> There is something wrong with killing civilians and unnecessarily invading foreign countries; but there is nothing wrong with using better weapons to do the same job.
You're assuming that these two issues are independent. I'm proposing that handing our rulers robot warriors will result in harder-to-expose killing of civilians and more unnecessary invasions.
Of course, if all the killer robots were working for me, I would deploy them wisely and reduce civilians deaths.
Nonsense. People don't sit down and talk when they have less to lose. They negotiate when they have more to lose.
So what will actually happen is that these ultra-tech tools will just further shield voters from the nastiness of war, and allow their leaders to visit horror on those less technologically advanced.
What I'd like to see happen is the creation of some kind of independent news agency that uses UAV and robot technologies to bring back uncensored, uninvited news back from warzones. Of course if this were truly effective, that news agency itself would become a target.
This is an overly simplistic and dangerous view of warfare. Increasingly, warfare is not about soldiers being sent to fight each other in some empty battlefield.
The pattern of U.S. wars since WWII has been expeditionary warfare where the U.S. sends its troops to fight with irregular forces, among civilians of other countries.
No war is clean, but this is a particularly evil setup, because the worst that American non-combatants experience is the return of their dead or wounded troops. On the other hand, the host country feels the full horror of war.
So, frankly, I don't care nearly as much about the volunteers who are sent to risk their lives as the civilian non-volunteers who are necessarily and inevitably harmed.
This is not a U.S. specific thing. It's just that as citizens of the top military power, Americans are spared the full horrors of war, yet have the ability to visit those horrors on others.
There is a reason why Europeans are not nearly as accepting of warfare.