The government trumpets the ability of our soldiers to kill people on the other side of the world and still make it home for dinner. But as the use of unmanned aerial drones (UAVs) accelerates because they are cheap and, more importantly, leave no American boys in harm’s way (just the enemy), does their use represent a legal, moral and ethical dilemma for our country?
The legal dilemma is that we are using these weapons to attack targets inside other countries without their permission. According to International law and the UN Charter, that is a crime. Outside of the legal dilemma of violating another nation’s sovereignty with the drone attacks, the moral and ethical dilemmas raise a concern we as a nation should be thinking about.
One of the best methods of keeping peace in the past has been the experience of war on the personal level, the horror and illogicalness of it. We have been blessed in the past with leaders who had these life-changing experiences which tempered their judgments on initiating conflict when it mattered. Our nation has historically had a large veteran population that created a public force for thoughtful consideration on the part of our political leadership.
My service during the Vietnam War in the Navy Seabees left me with an aversion to war, not from having bullets fly over my head, for that luckily did not happen, but from being in an environment where the byproducts of war — the young men who will never be the same because of terrible physical and mental wounds — were my constant companions. It is these experiences that have engraved on my mind that war has to be the absolutely last resort.
As less and less U.S. citizens can claim military experience, fewer and fewer people who stand for office have military service on their resumes. This is a feature of the all-volunteer military we adopted after Vietnam. More young people now are opting for other endeavors, including higher education and making money, but serving the nation comes later these days.
Those who find the military attractive as a career option or as a way to spend eight years and earn some money for college are, by and large, poor. When you consider only 0.5 percent of a population of 300 million is in uniform, the likelihood of having a government of folks who have never worn the uniform is a distinct possibility, if not a foregone conclusion.
This means we will have a government dependent solely on the advice of our military leadership. If this had been a reality during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a nuclear war would have been the end result and we might not be having this discussion.
The moral and ethical dilemma of using these unmanned weapons is taking the personal horror out of war. No longer will the soldier see the enemy die in person on the battlefield, but only what the satellite camera or vehicle radar records. This is creating a further disconnect from the reality of war and the further cheapening of human life by us.
This unmanning of the frontlines (hence you are less likely to get wasted if you enlist) is part of the advertising copy of our military in their message to prospective recruits.
As our technology increases, along with our ability to wage war and cause even more horrific levels of human suffering, it is incumbent on us to raise the ethical and moral standards that govern the use of this technology. Glorifying the sneak attack, the shot in the back by snipers and accepting the death of innocent civilians as collateral damage — which these kinds of technology represent — is out of our character as Americans.
If we care to remember, it was the absence of a warning that made the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor even more of a thing to be avenged, which we did in the tens of millions dead over in the course of the war on the Japanese people.
We have to ask ourselves if we are accomplishing our goals of defeating al-Qaida and the Taliban by killing hundreds of innocents, or are we assisting the recruiters of these elements every time a UAV attacks a target in Pakistan? Wouldn’t this be the time to use our special ops forces who are much better suited to these tasks and who will be able to ensure innocents will not die?
Reducing war to the level of a video game is not in the continued self-interest of this country, for it heightens the chance for it to be the first choice and not the last choice, as it should be in all situations.
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