Cyber warfare and drone warfare are both effective precisely because they are hidden. Cyber warfare stays invisible until it is too late and even then the effects can be ambiguous. Was it an attack, or simply a failure? Drone warfare appears on one side as a video game and although the effects on the other end are about as unambiguous as it gets, Americans are largely blind to it without Americans on the ground. People react emotionally, so without something physical to stimulate some appropriate emotion, terrible events can go unnoticed. There is a reason that images from the war in Vietnam were so important - they absolutely get people to respond.
The issue of drone warfare and civilian casualties has started raising the troubling question for me of how much a foreign civilian’s life is worth. Clearly we are capable of empathizing with strangers thousands of miles away - just look at the coverage of the Boston bombings. It was very easy for the media to focus on and seemed relevant because we are part of the same country. But just because the casualties were American, why is it so much easier for us to sympathize with the handful who died on the other side of the country last week than the 6,000 who died in Syria last month? To make this fit with the theme of this post, I feel like I should say that it’s because we don’t see it in enough detail, but that doesn’t seem to be it. We don’t care about Syrians in the same way we don’t care about those who die in badly targeted drone strikes. Of course protecting American soldiers is important, but it is disturbing to me that we’re trending towards removing ourselves that much more from the consequences of our national policy.
Annalise, I think part of the answer to your question lies in what we might call nationalism, or patriotism, or at the very least a perception of shared language and culture. This can, of course, be taken to pernicious extremes, in the form of xenophobia or, as you point out, a relative apathy about foreign civilian deaths.
ReplyDeleteAs for the visibility factor, I can't help but see links between these covert operations and the previous week's emphasis on the unseen of digital infrastructure and trash. The solution is not as simple as making these phenomena directly tangible, and you wisely note that in the case of Vietnam, images had a huge impact on American public opinion.