Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Wired for War

I was watching a talk on Cspan2 by the author of Wired For War on Monday afternoon, held at West Point. Many authors are lousy speakers, it seems to me, but this guy was pretty good, and was excellent in the Q&A period after the talk.

One officer in the audience asked an interesting question, saying that years ago he had asked about putting guns on pilotless drones and was told no, doing that would not be ethical. Now we are putting not only guns but Hellfire missiles on them. When, he wanted to know, did arming the pilotless drones become ethical? The answer was very short: “9/11.” The speaker said that prior to that date the military would not discuss the use of robotic warfare, but that since that date they cannot get enough of it.

That answer rather disturbed me. Why would we let that event reshape our ethics in such a fundamental way? Obviously we have done, in many ways and most of them disasterous, and this is just another example.

The follow up part of that answer was that it has to do with sheer volume. Since we have an all-volunteer force, the author pointed out, the size of our deployed force is necessarily limited. Since one person can control multiple robotic weapons, the use of them permits greater amount of fighting to be done with fewer forces.

That disturbed me even further. It suggests that we are allowing necessity to outweigh ethics. “Yes, it’s wrong, but we need to do it. So we’re going to proceed and redefine what is ethical to suit what we are doing.” That is not that action of a righteous or moral nation. It is a step down a road whose destination is chaos. A more ethical response to the limitation of forces would be to scale back the mission; to do less fighting.

Another noteworthy thing that the speaker said came during the answer to a question from one of the cadets. It was a quote, which the author said came from a Special Forces major. Note the source, a man from a service more highly trained than almost any other in the art and practice of sudden death. “Anything which makes killing easier,” this major said, “is not a good thing.” Food for thought.

1 comment:

  1. In terms of efficiency, arming the pilotles drones makes some sense. If you have a human controller and a video link, what is the difference between him/her being there? I'm not talking about a robotic scenarion, aka: terminator robots.

    Doing less fighting is certainly a valid issue, albeit (mostly) a political one. That of course, is a whole different blog subject.

    Making killing easier is never a good thing. Machine guns, poison gas, minefields, etc. Yuck.

    ReplyDelete