speaking of 'thank you for your service': i've been pondering this question of drones, soon to be joined by a host of robotic military devices operated from remote locations. now we've paid a mighty price for the cult of the warrior, of course. and as we see every day from every politician, the cult continues still and is still largely a propaganda device to recruit people into wars. now there was a time when being a good warrior required tremendous physical skill and courage, when you had to be ready actually to stand there with a sword and withstand a charge, and in which to kill you had to face the person you killed. war is perhaps not the very best human invention, but you can understand why people were proud to be able to participate in some ways, and also why doing it extremely well could be regarded as admirable on several different levels.
i often think that technology doesn't make as much difference as people think it does. but that's definitely not true in war. firearms immediately increased the distance between the combatants, made it much more morally possible to kill, and of course much easier to kill many more people. each step in military hardware - artillery, the tank, the airplane - increased this effect.participating in a war by lying in a muddy trench while shells fall and mustard gas wafts here and there is not much like repelling a viking raid. being one in an army of hundreds of thousands can't possibly inculcate the same sort of warrior ethos. really, you're there in that trench just to be part of the wave of numbers; your personal characteristics don't matter all that much.
but the drone thing takes this to a new level. the warriors are sitting in cubicles in nevada looking at pictures; they face no risks and display no courage. so now let's say wars begin more and more to be fought by machine proxies, especially by the great powers (local guerilla movements are not going to have access to these technologies for a long time). this will make it absolutely clear that there is nothing admirable per se about serving in the military; indeed, killing people from remote locations with a machine might well be represented as an act of cowardice.
so, oddly, the whole idea is not at all compatible with the macho warlikeness, which was already getting to be anachronistic with regard to the actual militaries of great powers. now people who are using machines to fight you from a remote location are cowards. but people who put their bodies on the line to fight machines are going to be displaying unspeakable courage. pursuing this course we will, by this standard at least, be gutless pussies fighting actual men. though men like machines, all the techno prostheses are incompatible with a traditional masculinity.
i've often said that, as problematic as it is, masculinity has many admirable features. i don't think it's compatible with operating robots to kill actual human bodies. as we segue into a bureaucratic killing machine in which computer geeks in beehive office complexes unleash a storm of death somewhere in the third world, we might actually want to hold on to a few rock-jawed, ready-to-die soldiers. because if critiques of robotic war as shameful come from this quarter, they will be hard to ignore. however, the momentum is irresistible and could only be interrupted by budgetary collapse. root for default, y'all.
