America’s “Beautiful” Weapons

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

W.J. Astore












12 thoughts on “America’s “Beautiful” Weapons

  1. The beautiful weapons go back to chariots, bow and arrow and catapults. The USA is still fighting WW 2. Massive amounts of fire power will not win these wars we find ourselves entangled in. We have created an enemy that is totally dedicated to their cause. Their numbers maybe small but they have the Western World living on the edge.


  2. Comments by Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, reveals a level of clueless thought or as some have suggested a sociopath who values order over all. Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross recalled the scene at Mar-a-Lago on April 6, when the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping was interrupted by the strike on Syria.

    Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross praised the fact that there were no protesters in Saudi Arabia. He did not see “a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there. Not one guy with a bad placard.”

    Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in the Center for Middle East Policy, told CNBC afterwards that Saudi Arabia is among the “most repressive” of free speech in the Middle East, adding: “Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy which forbids any political protest or any manifestation of dissent. It is also a police state that beheads opponents.”
    I read these comments and thought a profound intellectual vacancy exists here in the mind of Billionaire Wilbur Ross, but then I made a course correction and discovered that place where Ross resides. A place where where extreme military action can be admired (from a distance of course – bravery for this type of person increases the farther away they are from the actual battlefield.) and at the same time place a high value on a society where no dissent is permitted (Saudi Arabia). Is this place called Fascism???


    1. Good points, but I don’t think you need pathology to explain this. Ross is simply a billionaire who wants to keep his place in society. I’m sure he felt quite at home among the rich elders of Saudi society, as did Trump.


  3. “Why do we place so much faith in weapons?  Why do we love them so?”
    Because in essence the large majority of Americans have not evolved beyond the cowboy stage. Until recently Western were 1 of the Americans’ favourite movies: if, as a director you wanted to make a good start or earn some decent money, all you had to do was do a Western, almost irrespective of the quality.


    1. Yes. I’d add: Cowboys — and Indians. There’s usually a “savage” people that needs to be suppressed and “civilized.” Suppression comes with superior firepower through “force multipliers,” whether it’s Colt six-shooters or lever-action rifles of the past or the Hellfire missiles of today.

      It’s a nexus of ideology and technology. The ideas are empowered by the technology, and the technology empowers the ideals. For example, technology lends credence to the idea that we’re “superior” and, in a sense, more civilized because our technology is better. For American troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the peoples there are often seen as benighted, as backward, as savages. I recall talking to a friend stationed in Iraq; “sand people” was a term borrowed from “Star Wars” to describe Iraqis as primitives, as savages.

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  4. Interesting that the aircraft depicted is the A10 “Warthog”, a rare case of a weapon given a name doesn’t evoke power and dominance. For almost all of our mighty armory, the lifetime of an item is spent sitting idle without ever being used before being scrapped, or in intensive use for practice or showing the flag such as our carrier battle groups. Then, there are the weapons that do see action such as the Tomahawk, the Reaper (oh, those lovely names!) and they are deployed thousands of miles from the U.S. on targets that are essentially helpless against them – they are slaughtering tools.

    We have, then, a huge unemployed armory, a very tiny active armory and none of it doing anything remotely connected to defense of the United States, a country threatened by absolutely positively no significant armed force. Your implication that it all has very little to do with practical application and much to do with imagery in the head is to the point. The fact that much money is made from weapons is the real reason they are pushed on us and on other countries, but to put it past we the people, the imagery is the big thing.

    Here is another way weapons, small arms, bring in the dough while causing mayhem elsewhere:


    1. Thanks. Yes, I’ve liked the A-10 since it was designed and fielded beginning in the 1970s. My choice of photo was driven more by all the missiles hung on the A-10. And of course the plane itself is built around its 30mm Gatling gun, which is devastating. I’m not sure if they’re still using depleted uranium rounds, but if so, it’s even more dangerous, not just as a penetrating round, but in the damage it does due to lingering radiation.

      On DU ammo and the (temporary?) suspension of its use against ISIS, see here:


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