"We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You even think like the tube. In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion." Howard Beale
The Pentagon is considering replacing thousands of troops with robots, a military commander said recently, marking the first time a DOD official has publicly acknowledged that humans would be replaced with robots on the battlefield.
Gen. Robert Cone, head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command, made the comment at the Army Aviation symposium on Jan. 15, according to a report in Defense News, a trade publication covering the military. He said that robots would allow for “a smaller, more lethal, deployable and agile force.”
Related: Killer Robots—If No One Pulls the Trigger, Who’s to Blame?
“I’ve got clear guidance to think about what if you could robotically perform some of the tasks in terms of maneuverability, in terms of the future of the force,” Cone said.
DOD did not respond to a request for comment on Cone’s remarks.
If people want to make a moral argument for military intervention they have to reckon with this in some way. And as far as I can tell the only way to do that is to say you hope you don't kill quite as many people as the "bad guys" would have killed if you didn't intervene. That's not good enough. .....All of this adds up to humanitarian war not being a particularly moral decisions except in a rather preening sense of self-regard and presumed nobility on the part of those who need to believe they alone have both the power and the will to “help”. It’s horrible to feel impotent in the face of violence so it’s a natural impulse to feel that someone must step in and stop it. But modern warfare is so powerfully violent (and our attention span so short) that it is almost inevitable that military force will, at best, end up solving nothing. In fact, it almost always makes things worse.
I recently wrote a diary that touched on the issue of
Buddhist Warfare which sought to understand why a religion based on non-violence could condone the preemptive taking of lives especially in the modern period (Myanmar) and which is pertinent in American citizens' contradictory feelings of manslaughter and homicide played out in the judiciary system (Zimmerman, OJ, Mumia). So much anguish over civilian slaughter and yet support for policies, industries and institutions that kill at a distance. And what of the difference between domestic police drones versus national military drones used abroad? What is the acceptable level of death when you vote for a legislator who votes for procuring a weapons system or more critically a trade program that proliferates small arms globally.