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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 5
Lesson 7: Do drones make war too easy?Do drones make war too easy?
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Ryan Jenkins (professor of Philosophy at Cal Poly) considers how the increased use of military drones might affect not just how wars are fought, but also their frequency. Do drones represent just another advancement in our tools of war, or will they more fundamentally change our relationship to warfare? Created by Gaurav Vazirani.
Video transcript
Hi, I’m Ryan Jenkins, a philosophy
professor at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. We often say that necessity
is the mother of invention and nothing heightens the feeling
of necessity like military conflict. That’s why, unsurprisingly, war has been a major driver of
technological change throughout history, and militaries have often been
quick to adopt any innovation that they thought might
give them an edge in conflict. And yet new technologies of
warfare are often controversial. Take an example of a technology
that has been used by the United States hundreds of times in recent decades: the “drone”, or
remotely piloted aircraft. These airplanes can
be used for surveillance or can be armed with missiles
to carry out “targeted killing” or assassination missions. All while being controlled from far
away, keeping their operators safe. This program began
under President Clinton, and was accelerated under later
presidents, carried out largely in secret. The program of drone strikes is one of the most controversial
recent additions to US foreign policy. But is there anything special about drones
that makes them fundamentally different as a weapon of war? Yes, drones cause
so-called “collateral damage” when civilians are killed
accidentally in a drone strike. But most methods of killing
cause collateral damage. And some data suggest drone
strikes may actually be more accurate than other methods
of waging warfare. Yes, drone pilots can suffer
PTSD from operating drones, but so do soldiers in battle. Surely, operating a drone is
safer than being on a battlefield. If we are worried about the
potential harm to soldiers themselves, then we ought to prefer using drones
over putting “boots on the ground.” Many of the popular criticisms
of drones fail to show that there is something different and
uniquely, intrinsically bad about them. But what about the
general unease we feel that there is something wrong
with making war “too easy,” or more like a “video
game” than real life? We can call this the “threshold
argument” against drones: because drones make war so
easy, they make war less costly. That is to say, they lower
the “threshold” to war. How do drones make it
“cheaper” to go to war? First, drones lower the
political cost of going to war, since we are no longer risking the lives
of our soldiers to carry out a mission. Second, drone strikes lower the
psychological cost of going to war, because they are so distant
from our everyday lives. Lastly, using drones quite literally
lowers the economic cost of going to war since drones are cheaper than many
other weapons we would otherwise use. And as war becomes cheaper and
easier, it might become more common. Would this be a problem? Well, some wars, like
humanitarian interventions, ought to be fought but are not the world failed to act to
prevent genocide in Rwanda or Darfur not long
ago, for example, in part because it was seen as too costly. Lowering the cost of these kinds
of wars makes the world better. So, it seems like there’s
a missing premise here: We have to argue not just that
drones make war more common, but that more war would be bad. To make this argument, we have to think that most
wars that are fought are bad wars. In fact, that turns out to be reasonable. If the only just cause for war is response
to an unjust attack, like an invasion, then at most only one side of a war
can have a good reason to fight. Resisting that attack or invasion. But then, even the side that
does have a good reason to fight often does other things
in war that are wrong, like commit war crimes
or crimes against humanity, using weapons or
tactics that are forbidden or otherwise offend the
conscience of humanity. In fact, it is hard
to find many wars that have been fought
over the last few centuries that were obviously,
unimpeachably good wars. Stopping the Nazis in
World War II was a good war, but the United States' wars in
Vietnam, Korea, the invasion of Iraq, not to mention America’s dozens of other
military adventures in the last few decades were seriously problematic. And even in World War II, the United States and the Allies
regularly targeted civilians on purpose. So, more war might very
well mean more unjust war. But even if it doesn't lead to
large-scale wars like World War II, or the Vietnam War, it might lead to a
"new normal" that is just as troubling. The widespread use of drones could
lead to a constant low-boil of warfare. Estimates are hard to come by, but in
the last few years with the drone program, America has launched several hundred,
perhaps over a thousand drone strikes, and we’ve killed over
a thousand people. Yet those killings don’t
get much coverage at all, in part because US
soldiers’ lives are not at risk. Those deaths, many
of which were civilians, become just part of the
background noise of life in the US. Because the American public bears so little
cost for these ongoing drone attacks, they overwhelmingly support
the use of drone strikes. But perhaps we
should find it troubling that the United States is
the only country in the world where more people approve of the
drone strike program than disapprove. And yet, if we look at
the history of warfare, we might think that
this is just one more step in the long trend of removing
warfighters further from the battlefield. First, we fought hand-to-hand
with sticks and stones. Then it was bows and arrows. Soon, it was gunpowder and canon. All of them allowing the soldier
to be further from their targets. Drones, which are
operated remotely, are just the latest, and
perhaps ultimate, innovation in this long
technological trajectory. But is there a point at which war
becomes too cheap, or too easy? Can it become so easy that it’s
tempting to engage in immoral wars, and does more war, by
itself, mean more unjust war? Well, what do you think?