Trump clears CIA to issue drone strikes

[Dill]

(03-16-2017, 12:28 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I'm not going to say this is bfine's reasoning, but this is mine. By removing your side from the battlefield you are devaluing the life of the enemy. I get if you think it is romanticizing warfare, because it is in a sense. But I still believe in honor and I believe in the value of all human life, not just those that I agree with.

Edit to add: I heard Dave Grossman talk one time, probably 15 or 16 years ago. He wrote a book called On Killing that I have also read. He talked about the efforts of the military to dehumanize their enemy combatants. What they do to try to train the brain of a soldier to kill, because that is not an instinct everyone has in today's world. He talked about the psychological effects it has on the soldiers.

When I think of weaponized drones I think of it as one of the final steps in dehumanizing the enemy. In removing our soldiers from the battlefield, how do we humanize them? I get that to some that will seem a good thing, and I get that some will see it as good for other reasons, but I do not like that we do this. I don't like that we dehumanize the enemy. I know that if you don't it takes a psychological toll on a person, but I don't think that's a bad thing, because I don't want killing to be easy.

But that's my pacifist upbringing. I should note that I heard Grossman at an event held by my church at the UN. So there is context there for where my beliefs lie. I've said before, that bit of me runs pretty deep.

Edit again: 16 years ago this April. It was the spring before 9/11. Just happened to remember the image of the WTC on the skyline.

We share the same values here, Bels, but think we locate control of the problem in different social sites.

1. When I speak of removing our soldiers from the battlefield, I am thinking about saving them, humanized or not. Nazis and Imperial Japanese did not remove their soldiers from the battlefield, and yet they still dehumanized the enemy.
Worry about "dehumanizing the enemy" is the sort of thing that should be going on before people decide to use military force.

2. I understand your fear of placing control of military action in the hands of people with no skin in the game. But that problem is not solved very well by placing US troops in the line of fire.

3. In placing our soldiers on the battlefield, how does that humanize them? Nothing dehumanizes Western fighters like war/combat, especially when it goes on and on and on from months and years.  In WWII ordinary American 18-year-olds became ruthless killing machines in the Pacific and in Europe, hardly more "humanized." Think of the Marines who would behead Japanese, boil the heads to clean flesh off the skulls, then send these home as souvenirs. How apt were they to do that before their experience of war?

4. Seconding Benton's point-- Romanticizing war is in my view a continuing problem, especially in the US where so few ever serve in the military, but live in an environment saturated with romanticized versions of war.  I am not sure what you mean by "honor" above. But national honor was a major stake in both WWI and WWII. Even though we have by far the most powerful military in the world, our current president has succeeded in convincing a portion of the electorate that we are "weak" and laughed at by the world. How might the need to uphold our honor affect Trump's foreign policy?

5. If it becomes necessary to fight, then we should be thinking about how to effect whatever result is needed--free hostages? aggressor expelled from territory?--and not whether we are fighting fair with "manly" weapons or "dehumanizing" the enemy. Once enemy combatants are prisoners, then all the usual ethical imperatives come into force. They may not be mistreated, their property stolen, no torture, etc. But when they are in the field and refuse to surrender, then deadly force must be applied.  That is what war is.  An admixture of romanticism and pacifism muddles decision making when clear sightedness and grasp of consequences for each available option is the paramount need.

6. At a time when the lessons of WWI and WWII (not to mention Vietnam and Iraq) seem already forgotten, I would like to mention one of my WWII heroes--Ike, who hated war and dehumanization and all that, but understood what had to happen in order to take a beach head, to drive Nazis back into Germany. If he could have used drones, he certainly would have. And two weeks into the Normandy invasion I doubt there were any US combat soldiers who would rather "fight fair" than strike from a safe distance.

PS I have read On Killing too, and the section on killing up close, with knives, maybe the opposite of drone warfare.