The drone of war

On international cooperation, long borders, and the buzz of drones overhead

Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Finland, and Norway have agreed to cooperate on the creation of a "drone wall" to keep track of "unfriendly countries", in the words of Lithuania's interior minister.

■ Diplomatic circumspection aside, there's only one country with which all six of the cooperating countries share borders, and it's the one that's still conducting an invasion against Ukraine, Poland's neighbor to the southeast. It's the same country that's instigating trouble along Estonia's border waters and jamming GPS signals for airplanes in the region.

■ Technology, broadly speaking, has always been attractive in defense and warfare for its usefulness as a force multiplier. Unfortunately, it does not replace the considerable investment that must be made in uninspiring stuff like border fortification upgrades.

■ Dwight Eisenhower once lamented, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

■ It is good that those countries are cooperating, because their cooperation compounds the deterrent effect of any one country's defenses. It is very bad, though, that they (quite rationally) recognize the need to commit their precious resources to such defensive activity. We shouldn't even for a minute forget that tensions have risen due to the actions of only a single government, and that all the costs the world bears are consequences of those actions.