Technological Warfare

When you consider how wars were fought long ago, we really have come a long way. It used to be that you would have to formally address your opponent, face them honorably in battle, and fight til the last man dropped. It was a lack of strategy, really. Back then, no one dared to try anything outside the established conventions. But what do we care about those now? We have so completely abandoned those rules, we don't even have to physically be there anymore. Now we just tell our super intelligent machines where to go and they take care of it. Sounds like something out of George Orwell's nightmares.

I am all for the strategic use of technology when it comes to warfare. I am thankful for the men and women we have on the front lines, but if we can keep most, if not all, of our people away from the actual war zones, I say full steam ahead. But it seems as we learn more and more about the way our government uses these drones, the more people want them gone, as if the physical drones are the problem. It isn't the technology that creates these moral issues, its the organizations behind them. Machines don't have morals, we do.

Whether or not you have drones that can fly autonomously into enemy areas and wipe out massive amounts of people at the push of a button doesn't change the issue of killing civilians, it only makes it easier to do so. It is impossible to have a war without civilian casualties, especially with the modern state of warfare. Soldiers on the ground with guns kill civilians, tanks kill civilians, missiles from manned planes kill civilians. Is it just because we are killing them from afar that we now have second thoughts?

For me,  it represents a necessary evil. Of course it is terrible that innocent people die when a drone pilot makes a mistake. Whether or not I believe it is easy killing a tiny figure on a screen, when you know for a fact that it is a real person somewhere, is another questions entirely. But the technology is only going to improve. We will only get better at picking out correct targets, minimizing blast radii, avoiding mistakes. Clearly, there is a record that shows that the drone program has been successful in regards to many members of terrorist organizations, it is not as though the program comes with no benefits. And as Mayer says at the end of her article, we really have nothing else to throw at them.