Douglas Quan for Postmedia reports on the status of unmanned drones along the US-Canada border. 

US Customs and Border Protection is using a General Atomics MQ-9 (commonly Predator B or Reaper) unmanned aerial drone to monitor the US-Canada border from Washington to Minnesota. Flying for up to 20 hours at a time, at about 6,000 metres, officials say it used to monitor illicit border crossings related to marijuana and drug trade.

Quan reports that the long-term plan is to have the unmanned drones, now common in Iraq, Afghanistan and along the US-Mexico border, to be flying the entire length of the US-Canada border.

Canadian officials were approached for comment:

Supt. Warren Coons, director of the RCMP Integrated Border Enforcement Team, said Wednesday he has not received information about the surveillance program's effectiveness and declined to offer a personal opinion.

Coons said there are no plans to adopt such technology in Canada, but he wouldn't discount it, either. He noted Canadian authorities use other forms of visible and covert technology — he declined to say what — at points of entry and in remote sections along the border. Improved communication between U.S. and Canadian authorities has helped to identify vulnerable areas, he said.

Progressive-Conservative Manitoba MLA Clifford Grayson said he's not aware of any arrests linked to the Predators. Grayson also added that US state legislators have told him the robots have had mechanical and performance issues, especially in bad weather.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

A meme is spreading that argues the current moment parallels a "medieval period" that is variously and often roughly defined. I did so here, discussing Toronto's G20, and here about "medieval modernity" and post-city urbanism.

On December 28, in the Financial Times, Parag Khanna wrote that "the world we are moving into in 2011 is one not just with many more prominent nations, but one with numerous centres of power in other ways. It is, in short, a neo-medieval world." This world, he writes, very much resembles the 12th century.

Now, globalisation is again doing much the same, diffusing power away from the west in particular, but also from states and towards cities, companies, religious groups, humanitarian non-governmental organisations and super-empowered individuals, from terrorists to philanthropists. This force of entropy will not be reversed for decades – if not for centuries. As was the case a millennium ago, diplomacy now takes place among anyone who is someone; its prerequisite is not sovereignty but authority.

Some see contrary trends in the light of the financial crisis. But given the power of the forces pushing a new medievalism, it is too simple to speak of a “return of the state” evident in the bail-out of Wall Street and the stimulus packages of governments. Far more revealing about the future is the crumbling of most of the post-colonial world from Africa to the Middle East to South Asia, where over-population, corrupt governance, ethnic grievances and collapsing infrastructure are pushing many states towards failure.

Khanna's article covers a lot of topics for a few hundred words and is a bit of a hodgepodge of ideas and events. As one example, he labels a "hybrid public-private system of governance" and uses Afghanistan as an example, forecasting a "postmodern arrangement between international extractive companies, the Kabul government, local warlords and foreign peacekeepers."

Other interesting claims include parallels between the provision of public services by powerful families, including a comparison of the Tatas and Ambanis in India with the House of Medici, and the rise of Islamic political philanthropy, like Hizbollah, doing much the same. As the analogy concerns America, which had no role to play in the Middle Ages, the author suggests the EU plays the role of the Holy Roman Empire and the US is a new Byzantium, "facing both east and west while in a state of relative decline." All are barely touched on in this piece, but interesting enough for me to set up a new Google Alert for him.

Cheryl Rofer critically responds to the article, noting some problems with the timing of events and claims toward decentralization. She moves through a long discussion of state accretion during the period and gets more specific about the differences between the 12th and 13th centuries. 

She sums up those centuries with as being about "the human urge toward autonomy and the violent response from the powers that be, and the effects of occupations." That phrase could well apply to our own time, but she notes important differences. The status of the United States differs substantially from that of Byzantium, if only in the massively disproportionate spending on what she calls "defence" (more aptly, weapons, offensive wars, and defensive control and surveillance) by the current imperial power.

Climate Progress directs our attention to a recent speech by the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, given at a Pentagon energy security conference. While politicians, media, and the public dither and procrastinate over de-carbonizing, US armed forces are making focused changes today and preparing for an operating environment disrupted by particular climate and resource predicaments.

[...] we are in fact seeing evidence of climate change’s potential impacts on our security. Near the polar cap, waterways are opening that we couldn’t have imagined it a few years ago – opening trade routes, presenting both opportunity and vulnerability and rewriting the geopolitical map of the world...

We in the Defense Department have a role to play here. Not solely because we should – should be good stewards of our environment and our scarce resources but also because there is a strategic imperative for us to reduce risk, improve efficiencies and preserve our freedom of action wherever we can...

When we consider the estimates of a fully burdened cost of diesel fuel approached $400 a gallon and required 1.3 gallons of fuel to use per gallon delivered at some forward-operating locations, these benefits start to really add up. This translates to fewer Marines maintaining fuel storage and distribution systems, fewer Marines dedicating their lives to protect the convoys in the routes used to deliver the fuel, or as this conference theme tells us: Saving energy saves lives.

In a similar systems approach, the Army out of Fort Irwin employed insulating foam on the roofs of its overseas deployment structures to save millions per month in air conditioning costs.  And they are now working on a shower-water recycling system for their forward operating bases...

Simply put, we cannot think about energy after we get there – wherever there may be. Energy security needs to be one the first things we think about before we deploy another soldier, before we build another ship or plane and before we buy or fill another rucksack… And the demand for energy is not going to ease anytime soon.

This is no small matter. In addition to the newly developing waterways near the polar ice caps in 2008, the National Intelligence Council identified 20 of our bases that are physically at risk as a result of a rising level of the ocean.

 

Full text of the speech is available here. 

Responding to arguments that China is like Japan in the 1980s, two US historians compare China today to the United States in the 19th century.

Summary of 2010s China and 1850s US:

• Predominantly rural, shifting rapidly to urban
• “Workshop of the world” with cheap textiles, consumer goods, and weapons.
• Low-cost, high-quality manufacturing success brings both criticism and praise from other states
• Claims of dubious practices: currency manipulation, intellectual property abuse (reverse engineering, “piracy”)
• Mythological contradictions (capitalism and communism, “One China”; 1850s US “freedom” and slavery, status of women, violence against indigenous Americans).

The authors note the preoccupation with China’s many current challenges, adding that mid-nineteenth century US faced major challenges, too — including economic crises and bubbles.

Useful comparison — to a point. The article helpfully makes the conversation transhistorical and pulls it outside a default view of global linear progress.