Taking the Human Element Out of War: The Ethics of Drone Warfare

“If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study Hell.” – Thomas Merton

Normally, I like to joke around, but today I’ll be (mostly, well maybe a little) straightforward: drones concern me. All too often we discuss them in entirely utilitarian terms. We say, “If drones were more precise they would only kill 5 civilians per strike and then they’d be okay.” I mean, I guess. But to couch the discussion in these terms is to forget that those civilians are people. Admittedly, war is hell. People will die one way or the other and so the fewer dead the better. But what if I were to be your Morpheus, to tell you that drones are wholly unethical?

Imagine yourself sitting in a room, joystick in hand, watching a man half a world away. You see him interact with his children, his wife (or wives), and go to the bathroom. You know him better than your own children. One day, when you get him alone (or in a room filled with men between the ages of 18-45, that’s fine too) you hit the big red button and he disappears into a fuzzy cloud of viscera and plaster. Does any of that seem okay to you? Forget for a second that you may have just killed several innocent people. Is it okay that you just watched and killed a man who may as well have been on Omicron Persei 8? I say, as usual, nay.

I want you to think about what ends wars. Running out of resources is, of course, a factor, but that is not always the largest issue in our globalized capitalist world (did somebody say $16 trillion dollars in debt?). I think that two, very interrelated factors end wars: the trauma inflicted upon soldiers who return and demonstrate the hell that is war and public frustration over increasing violence. Drones make both less likely. Sitting behind a screen, blowing up a Yemeni man, then heading to Boston Market before going home to catch “The Walking Dead” and play with the kids doesn’t exactly sound like D-Day to me. When my grandfather came back from World War Two, after being present at both D-Day and Bastogne, he didn’t talk about it (or so I’m told). His silence was a sign of the horror that was war, and everybody knew it (that and he hit the deck whenever there was a loud noise). Can we really expect drone pilots to demonstrate to our citizens how hellish war really is? Or are they just going to take another bite out of their apple crisp and try not to clock in at five after 8?

When people see how bad war is, they tend to exert some pressure on the government. If the soldiers aren’t coming home (because, well, they never left), then how are everyday Americans supposed to know how bad things really are on the ground? Well, news footage usually helps. Unfortunately, drones make that difficult to come by, especially considering the fact that drone strikes aren’t (at the moment anyway) part of concerted offensives, but are relatively covert strikes against specific targets. So it is unlikely that the people back home will be exposed to direct footage of such attacks, meaning they’ll be less likely to clamor for change. I mean, can we think about the Vietnam War for a second. That conflict will forever live on in the minds of Americans as a hell into which we thrust tens of thousands of our young men, in large part because of combat footage. Now the best we can do is hear that what might’ve been a robot-plane may have, possibly, bombed what might have been a terrorist.

We can continue to discuss drones in other terms, and there are plenty of other ways one can argue against their use. That said, I want the world to recognize that drones raise real ethical questions aside from how many civilians they kill. If we keep letting them be used, we may begin creeping toward a world of permanent warfare in which as Orwell warns us, “war is peace.” We banned poison gas internationally even though it is effective. And as much as I detest most international institutions, I need to ask (much like Dr. Zoidberg), “why not drones?” I fear that if we do not act soon we will creep closer and closer to a future in which humans are not combatants at all, in which a permanent state of war is entirely plausible and all too real.