sailingaway
03-14-2013, 03:48 PM
by Lieutenant Colonel Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army
Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.
— Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers
wisdom.
— Isaac Asimov
AT THE START of 2004, when I was the commander of a military
intelligence company in Baghdad, my company received five of the
first Raven unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed to Iraq.1 The Raven
UAV is a small, hand-launched reconnaissance plane that has probably never
figured prominently in any discussion about the ethics of waging war via
remote-controlled robots. This drone is not armed, nor can it range more
than a few miles from its controller. It looks more like a large toy plane than
a weapon of war.
To my troops, I seemed quite enthused about this capability. Not all of this
excitement was for show. I actually did find the technology and the fact that
my troops were among the first to employ these drones in Iraq to be exciting.
I had fully bought into the fantasy that such technology would make my
country safe from terrorist attack and invincible in war.
I also felt, however, a sense of unease. One thing I worried about was so
called “collateral damage.” I knew that, because of the small, gray viewing
screens that came with these drones as well as their limited loiter time, it
might prove too easy to misinterpret the situation on the ground and relay
false information to combat troops with big guns. I suspected that, if we did
contribute to civilian deaths, my troops and I would not handle it well. But
at the same time, I worried that we might cope quite well. Since we were
physically removed from the action, maybe such an event would not affect
us much. Would it look and feel, I wondered, like sitting at home, a can of
Coke in hand, watching a war movie? Would we feel no more than a passing
pang that the show that day had been a particularly hard one to watch? And,
if that is how we felt, what would that say about us?
It did not take long for a vivid nightmare to bring
my fears to the surface. In this dream, I saw a little
Iraqi girl and her family in a car, frightened, caught
in the middle of a major U.S. military operation,
trying to escape both insurgents and encircling U.S.
forces. Believing the car to be filled with insurgents,
my troops followed this car with one of our Ravens
and alerted a checkpoint to the approaching threat.
When a Bradley destroyed the car with a TOW
missile, the officers in our command post cheered,
clapping each other on the back.
I awoke filled with dread.
I now recognize this dream as a symptom of
cognitive dissonance, the psychological result of
holding two or more conflicting cognitions. In this
instance, my identity as a U.S. Army officer and
all this identity’s attendant values (duty to follow
legal orders, loyalty to my fellow soldiers, and so
on) clashed with my fear of harming innocents. It
also clashed with a growing feeling that there was
something fundamentally troubling about how we
were choosing to wage war.
In this essay, I will not argue that waging war
remotely does not have ethical advantages, for it
clearly does. For one, armed drones and other robots
are incapable of running concentration camps and
committing rape and other crimes that still require
human troops on the ground. Indeed, removing
combat operators from the stress of life-threatening
danger reduces their potential to commit those
crimes that they could still conceivably commit via
drones. Neuroscientists are finding that the neural
circuits responsible for conscious self-control are
highly vulnerable to stress.2 When these circuits
shut down, primal impulses go unchecked.3 This
means that soldiers under extreme physical duress
can commit crimes that they would normally be
unable to commit.
much more: http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20130430_art005.pdf
Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.
— Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers
wisdom.
— Isaac Asimov
AT THE START of 2004, when I was the commander of a military
intelligence company in Baghdad, my company received five of the
first Raven unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed to Iraq.1 The Raven
UAV is a small, hand-launched reconnaissance plane that has probably never
figured prominently in any discussion about the ethics of waging war via
remote-controlled robots. This drone is not armed, nor can it range more
than a few miles from its controller. It looks more like a large toy plane than
a weapon of war.
To my troops, I seemed quite enthused about this capability. Not all of this
excitement was for show. I actually did find the technology and the fact that
my troops were among the first to employ these drones in Iraq to be exciting.
I had fully bought into the fantasy that such technology would make my
country safe from terrorist attack and invincible in war.
I also felt, however, a sense of unease. One thing I worried about was so
called “collateral damage.” I knew that, because of the small, gray viewing
screens that came with these drones as well as their limited loiter time, it
might prove too easy to misinterpret the situation on the ground and relay
false information to combat troops with big guns. I suspected that, if we did
contribute to civilian deaths, my troops and I would not handle it well. But
at the same time, I worried that we might cope quite well. Since we were
physically removed from the action, maybe such an event would not affect
us much. Would it look and feel, I wondered, like sitting at home, a can of
Coke in hand, watching a war movie? Would we feel no more than a passing
pang that the show that day had been a particularly hard one to watch? And,
if that is how we felt, what would that say about us?
It did not take long for a vivid nightmare to bring
my fears to the surface. In this dream, I saw a little
Iraqi girl and her family in a car, frightened, caught
in the middle of a major U.S. military operation,
trying to escape both insurgents and encircling U.S.
forces. Believing the car to be filled with insurgents,
my troops followed this car with one of our Ravens
and alerted a checkpoint to the approaching threat.
When a Bradley destroyed the car with a TOW
missile, the officers in our command post cheered,
clapping each other on the back.
I awoke filled with dread.
I now recognize this dream as a symptom of
cognitive dissonance, the psychological result of
holding two or more conflicting cognitions. In this
instance, my identity as a U.S. Army officer and
all this identity’s attendant values (duty to follow
legal orders, loyalty to my fellow soldiers, and so
on) clashed with my fear of harming innocents. It
also clashed with a growing feeling that there was
something fundamentally troubling about how we
were choosing to wage war.
In this essay, I will not argue that waging war
remotely does not have ethical advantages, for it
clearly does. For one, armed drones and other robots
are incapable of running concentration camps and
committing rape and other crimes that still require
human troops on the ground. Indeed, removing
combat operators from the stress of life-threatening
danger reduces their potential to commit those
crimes that they could still conceivably commit via
drones. Neuroscientists are finding that the neural
circuits responsible for conscious self-control are
highly vulnerable to stress.2 When these circuits
shut down, primal impulses go unchecked.3 This
means that soldiers under extreme physical duress
can commit crimes that they would normally be
unable to commit.
much more: http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20130430_art005.pdf