Remember that recent unpleasantness in the Gulf? I clearly recall hearing politicians and uniformed military people telling me how they could now fill a missile with 100,000lbs of high explosive, fire it from a hundred miles away and post it through Saddam Hussein's letterbox. Minimal collateral damage, they said. Surgical strikes.
Here we are several years on, and people in the Horn of Africa continue to starve, refugees in Darfur and other troubled places queue up for meagre rations that arrive via hazardous and unreliable distribution channels. At the same time international boundaries seem to hold no fear for US and Russian empire builders, provided that there's a big enough prize on the other side of it - oil, pipelines, reconstruction using our own Western corporates.
With the same breath, politicians claim that a rag-tag-and-bobtail army of untrained but highly motivated militias is able to either steal or keep all our aid at bay indefinitely. This is assymetrical warfare - we send in aid workers and they send in ground troops. It's not hard to see why it doesn't work.
There's also another way of looking at these asymmetries, so attention all arms dealers worldwide. I'd like to place an order right now for a Tomahawk Cruise missile, please. Just the one for now (I think we should test this idea). I'd like some modifications too; it needs no warhead, you can use the extra space saving for more grain and essential medical supplies. I'd like it to have a range of a thousand miles, so we can fire it from the Mediterranean into the Darfur region and I'd like it configured and calibrated so that it can reach the vicinity of a large refugee camp, where I'd like it to come safely to earth. Once it has come to a complete stop, I'd like it to unlock its cargo bay and allow poor starving people to use the contents. We'd be posting supplies, laser guided, to the letterbox of the most needy people in the Sudan.
I think this is called "beating swords into ploughshares". There's more we could do. How about unmanned planes filled with essentials for the poor of any war-torn area? If we send in enough of them, they can't shoot them all down.
All contributions welcome, by the way - I understand these things can be quite pricey. The only problem is that we hate and fear our enemies more than we love our starving brothers and sisters.