The Drone War

One of sci-fi's most enduring prophesies is finally coming to pass -- the Drone War. Visionaries from Wells to Orwell to Lucas have long predicted that warring surrogate machines would someday take the humans' place in a new kind of conflict with enormous political implications as military technology evolves. Battles by machines are entirely different -- socially, politically and culturally -- from anything in the history of warfare, as we are seeing in Afghanistan.

There are plenty of human casualties in the Afghan conflict -- though few among Americans -- but the fight seems especially significant in terms of technology and military conflict.

The Predator spy plane and other unmanned drones and gunships (along with satellites, thermal imaging devices, X-ray scanners, etc.) not only search for the enemy, but fire guided missiles, drop powerful oxygen-sucking hyperbaric bombs, and guide bomb strikes from afar. There is no war in recent human history that involved so few humans, at least on one side of the conflict. The most staggering statistic out of Afghanistan might be that the first American combat casualty died nearly three months into the "war."

Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops. Even as the Afghanistan campaign began, pundits flooded cable talk shows asserting that air power alone wasn't enough, that there would be substantial human sacrifice. Both Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq and the Kosovo conflicts involved the growing used of so-called "smart" laser-guided weaponry, deployed with varying degrees of reliability. But those conflicts also involved either the use of enormous numbers of soldiers on the ground and were controversial in terms of the bomb's precision and effectiveness.

The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight. Early reports suggest the civilian casualties may be lower than in any other large-scale military operation in modern history. Although dangerous and complex for the military on the scene, it's hard to imagine a conflict more remote to the majority of Americans, asked to go about their business as usual.

Orwell's "Drone Wars" come very much to mind here. So does Sir Arthur Clarke's machine warfare and AI military stories. A handful of human soldiers guide and direct the increasingly sophisticated technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks with stunningly few U.S. military casualties and American civilian casualties beyond September 11 and the anthrax attacks. The Taliban and their terrorist friends seem to have been totally unprepared for this variety of war, such a stark contrast to the Soviet's ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan just a decade ago.

It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.

Winston Churchill repeatedly asked his countrymen for brutal sacrifices in World War II. In the new kind of American war, political leaders ask citizens only to keep shopping and traveling.

Military historians like John Keegan have recently argued that the devastating toll of warfare in the 20th Century makes conventional conflicts increasingly less likely. Once a means of expanding territory and amassing wealth, the brutish wars of the 20th Century have rendered both objectives hard to attain. Even before Drone Wars, artillery and aerial warfare along with nuclear weapons suggested that wars can't really be won in the conventional sense any longer; even the victors will suffer unacceptable losses. But drone warfare radically alters the equation. Technologically advanced civilian populations -- just as Orwell foresaw -- can send their technological surrogates off to battle one another while humans stay home to wait for the outcome.

A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery? War has recently seemed so terrible that civilized societies view it as a last resort. But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible.

Comments

Star Trek Episode....

[Arctic Fox]

Rememeber that episode (TNG i think), where two planets ran wars on computers then based on the results, sent appropriate numbers of their own people to death?
I wonder if we'll see anything like that in the future...... (doubtful)
It was a good premise for a show anyway....

A Taste of Armageddon

[tiltowait]

Interesting point. This reminds me of a Star Trek episode.

Nevermind the WTC Deaths

[ink]

There are plenty of human casualties in the Afghan conflict -- though few among Americans

Yeah, nevermind the thousands that died at the world trade centers, the pentagon and on the three flights -- the civilians who didn't even know we were fighting a war until Al Queda made their first cowardly strike. Some drone war. So unfair. You are tiresome, Katz.