Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Who's Pivoting Where in Eurasia?

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog//175845/

Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Who's Pivoting Where in Eurasia?

Posted by Pepe Escobar, May 18, 2014.

Consider this: our advanced robotic creatures, those drone aircraft grimly named Predators and Reapers, are still blowing away human beings from Yemen to Pakistan.  Meanwhile, the Pentagon is now testing out a 14,000-pound drone advanced enough to take off and land on its own on the deck of an aircraft carrier -- no human pilot involved.  (As it happens, it’s only a "demonstrator" and, at a cost of $1.4 billion, can’t do much else.)  While we’re talking about the skies, who could forget that the U.S. military is committed to buying 2,400 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, already dubbed, amid cost overruns of every sort, "the most expensive weapons system in history."  The bill for them: nearly $400 billion or twice what it cost to put a man on the moon.