The first in a two-part series on global health challenges and its effect on our nation’s security looks at how our military goes after terrorists. How does the Department of Defense go after the enemy? What types of tools and resources do they use to do so? How do they evaluate the success or failure of each mission? These are questions that I have addressed before and found very disturbing, so I hope the responses to these issues and others will set off a fresh debate about our national security and the value of our military in protecting our people, our interests and our country.

One major question is how does our military go after terrorists using just UAVs or remotely piloted aircraft, which flies above and over the earth? Is it done by sending UAVs into the ” airspace” where they can fly into areas of interest and monitor the activities of those wishing to do us harm? If so, that raises some serious concerns about privacy issues, especially given how many countries and industries have already been utilizing such technologies to monitor their own citizens. Does our government want to reveal the types of things it is doing to protect us?

A second major area of concern is the use of RASVs or remotely piloted vehicles. These are often used by terrorists to drop bombs on buildings, or just to drop them from the sky. They go up and into the earth’s atmosphere and then glide back to earth. How does this work? Well, some argue that we already know how this works, because it happens all the time with drones. However, since these aren’t geostationary satellites, we may never know.

Some say that we need to be studying the effects of using RASVs against natural disasters, which is a step in the right direction. But then again, what about when a rogue nation uses one of these weapons to shoot down an airliner? What happens if that happens in the future? How does that affect American operations going into the future, even with the best artificially intelligent robotic UAVs in the world?

Another issue with going to the stars is the risk of collisions with other space debris. When an object is launched into geosynchronous orbit, there’s no chance of that object being able to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. The only thing that can happen is that it will burn up as it re-entry, leading to a huge problem for those who control the re-entry vehicle. Will we be able to take pictures and videos of it, or is it going to crash into the Earth and destroy everything?

If we’re ever faced with a real space weather event, we will need to study these potential scenarios with advanced space weather sensors and protective satellites. In fact, that should be done before a major global cataclysm, which would likely trigger a series of volcanic eruptions, which will further deplete the Earth’s supply of precious metals. Think on this.