Blog Post 3: The Ethics of War

John Borg

           The past few days of this class have been heavily concentrated on the ethical issues that unmanned, military vehicles pose to both civilians and the soldiers who operate them. While there are clear negative consequences with the military’s use of drones, I think the debate of ethics has gravely shifted focus.

            Many proponents of drones have highlighted that the advantages of remote warfare outweigh any potential drawbacks. They champion it as a highly effective, and accurate, manner of fighting that removes, or at least mitigates, many of the negative psychological effects most veterans face after returning home from the front lines and prevents American citizens from having to provide the ultimate sacrifice in order to defend this country. However, critics of this recent trend, such as Al Jazeera journalist Muhammed Idrees Ahmad, claim that the use of drones is a tactic that relies on “routine exaggeration of its accuracy and a downplaying of its human cost;” according to its very vocal opposition, drone weaponry is an indiscriminate murderer that results in immense civilian casualties. Moreover, as Rachel Martin of NPR, found, a large percentage of drone pilots suffer from high levels of stress due to the striking dichotomy between their work and personal lives, causing them to experience a phenomenon known as “burnout.”

While war is generally overlooked because it is believed to be within a state’s legitimate use of force, civilian massacres and humanitarian crimes are common occurrences in most, if not all, wars. The international system, has, for centuries, responded by attempting to regulate armed conflicts. However, these “laws” have been little more than guidelines, with violators facing relatively minor repercussions. Despite the efforts of coalitions like the United Nations, war is an ungovernable situation. It is impossible to infuse law and reasoning into something that is so inherently evil and destructive.

With all these questions of ethics arising from the use of drones, I think the bigger picture is getting lost in the argument: the foundation of this discussion is war, which is not an ethical scenario by any means. I guess I do not understand why so many individuals are concerned about the ethicality of drone warfare when the other option, in some cases, can be much worse. Granted, I very much understand the criticisms of drones that opponents often voice, but it is difficult for me to take many of these arguments seriously because they seem rather hypocritical.

In most of the articles we read that condemned remote warfare, it appeared as if the authors were arguing in favor of the more traditional wars to which our society has grown accustomed; at the very least, they did not seem to offer any feasible alternatives to this increasingly commonplace practice. Yet, in my opinion, turning a blind eye on man-to-man combat but outright disapproving of drone strikes is rather worthless. It is one thing to condemn war and all of its many forms, but an argument that finds one facet of it acceptable and another as a vast overreach of power is irrelevant. War strategies and tactics are not something that can be reasoned out and compromised; in most cases, if a country would even resort to such extreme measures, its government would do anything within its power to achieve victory, often times at the expense of ethics. An individual can either accept this reality of war in its totality or renounce it entirely. You don’t get to pick and chose which aspects of war are more appropriate than others: they all suck.

It is important to remember that war is at the core of this debate; this is not so much a dilemma over the use of drones as much a question of the validity of war. Unmanned aircrafts are not to blame for these controversies, but the weight that armed conflicts have in our society. If it really is true that any option is fair game in times of war, then the argument over drones seems rather insignificant.