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“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns,” Jack Nicholson, playing renegade Marine Colonel Jessup, barks at Tom Cruise in the film A Few Good Men. But at least one thing has changed about the truth Cruise supposedly couldn’t handle. “Men with guns” aren’t the only ones fighting our wars. There are also robots.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also called drones, now allow U.S. pilots to live at home and work at a computer, where they conduct surveillance and missile strikes against Al Qaeda, Taliban and insurgency targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (also, on occasion, killing civilians). So Colonel Jessup would no longer be right that our soldiers are “out there on that wall” in the heart of darkness, guarding a blissfully ignorant civilian world. The lines have blurred, complicated by the computer screen’s “third space,” neither the battlefield nor home, where these soldiers fight their battles.
As P.W. Singer describes in his fascinating book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and the Conflict in the 21st Century, we are at the dawn of a new era. We may soon be able to wage wars without putting any of our own soldiers’ lives on the line. While saving lives is undeniably a good thing, Singer and others worry about other aspects of this transformation.
Courage, they say, is the attribute that has always defined the warrior class. Fighting with drones and robots thus signals the destruction of the military identity. It also may be a strategic blunder. As Singer reports, though drones serve our military advantage, they may be costing us the very “hearts and minds” we’ve all been told are so crucial to winning the current conflicts. As a prominent Lebanese moderate, Rami Khouri, tells Singer: "The average person sees [drones] as just another sign of coldhearted, cruel Israelis and Americans, who are also cowards because they send out machines to fight us.”
This should be taken with a grain of salt. The insurgent tactics employed against the U.S. and its allies, from roadside bombs to hiding behind civilian shields, haven’t exactly been examples of “courageous” combat. The idea of honorable warriors fighting face-to-face was already nostalgic when Homer composed The Iliad, and as Singer himself points out, individual courage on the battlefield has been mourned at least since the catapult and the longbow made it easy to kill from a distance. It may make sense to worry about the strategic effects of being perceived as cowardly, however hypocritical the charge. But the accusation is bound up with an image of war as a contest of valor in which the winner confirms the rightness of his cause: an idea that we can and must reject. One of the greatest insights of the modern humanitarian sensibility is that war is not an opportunity for honor—war begins only where civilization has already failed. Criticizing robotic warfare shouldn’t send us back into the arms of Colonel Jessup.
Besides, Jessup probably didn’t play a lot of video games. Singer rightly wonders if young soldiers in Nevada, who alternate between playing Halo 3 during their breaks and piloting drones in Afghanistan (using a similar interface and controller), have a sense of the very real effects of the bombs they drop. But the video game analogy is frightening for another reason. Video game narratives, from alien invasions to historical war simulations, cast fighting as a decision about when to push the button. Even in games that impose some cost for shooting the wrong target, you still win by shooting the right one: otherwise, the controller in your hand would feel useless. But in actual modern wars the average soldier spends many more hours waiting, hiding, and riding around than shooting. According to famous studies, the vast majority of soldiers have avoided actually firing their weapons, and exhibit an aversion to killing that has to be trained out of them. Ordinary soldiers, in other words, have often been in silent resistance against the framework of war, concentrating on surviving the insanity around them rather than annihilating their enemies. This is the opposite of the courage Singer and others are worried about, but we’ll feel its absence much more.
To read Singer’s book is to be awed at just how brilliant our scientists and engineers are, and just how many of them spend their time finding new ways for us to blow one another to pieces. Like all creative types, though, the new roboticists are often making flattering self-portraits even when they don’t realize it. The vision of humanity that emerges from their work casts the designer in his lab as something of a god, while the ordinary soldier—who gets tired or bored, panics, cries or vomits when his fellow soldiers die—is a liability, the classic “human error” that computer programmers are always seeking to eliminate.
But moral conscience works in mysterious ways. It isn’t always a matter of the head commanding the body, as the people programming the Geneva Conventions into robots would have it. Smart people in lab coats, like Richard Oppenheimer, have often watched helplessly as their creations were used in ways they abhorred. Meanwhile, the ordinary “grunt” has been behind some acts of despicable violence, but also some of the few acts of humanity in the midst of warfare. These aren’t necessarily grand heroic deeds, but—more often and maybe more importantly—small actions and failures to act that undermine the logic of military strategy (like George Orwell passing up a sniper shot at a man who was “half-dressed and was holding up his trousers”). These decisions emanate not from the logic of the designer in the lab, but from a sympathetic pang, weak stomach, or trigger finger that just wouldn’t pull.
It should be possible to accept the lifesaving potential of the new robotics but still think that peace is the ultimate goal—not mechanically perfected warfare. For those of us who feel that way, it’s not courage or valor we need programmed into our robots. It’s fear, revulsion, and the other “human errors” that have always told us war is not a test of honor, a video game, or an engineering challenge: it’s hell.