Does it take a special kind of courage to be a combat soldier—who pulls the trigger from an office, thousands of miles away?
I think it was the scent of the oregano growing in my garden that triggered what was more of a gut reaction than a thought; the smell, holding it in my hands, the physical sensing of skin on plant. Being aware that I could only have those sensations by actually being there in the garden was juxtaposed with the thought that I could be more easily hurt than a man amidst a battle taking place on the ground in Afghanistan.
A strange thought for our strange times indeed, now that we have reached a point in the evolution of society and war—if war can evolve—where a man tending his vegetable patch in urban “Anywhere” might come away from a few hours of light labor with more complaints of pain than a soldier at war. I know they say that oregano has some strange and mighty power and people are advised to sip only a few drops in a full glass of water for whatever ails them, but I’m inclined to think that what caused my episodic herbal awareness was more of a coincidence.
I had read an article published in The Guardian from August 2012. It profiled the U.S. military’s increased use of drones or what the men interviewed for the article apparently prefer to call remotely piloted aircraft, (RPA), and I can see their point.
When I think of a drone I think of a faceless, lifeless automaton, more of a “thing,” than a person. Planes without people anywhere on board being flown by remote control is amazing but more normal somehow and easier to accept than the idea of robots of war on missions of their own accord. We are all familiar with controlling things in our lives remotely. Our TVs, cars, lights, and now our war planes can be controlled from the comfort of wherever we happen to physically be.
The article ends with a quote from a lieutenant colonel in an officers’ bar decked out in what sounds like classic tough guy style meets the Addams Family, “adorned with a replica medieval suit of armour, a framed tomahawk and oil paintings of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.” The topic of the interview is bravery. Everyone the reporter talked to is said to have“bristle[d], at any suggestion that waging war by remote control requires less bravery than traditional combat.” There’s a certain defensiveness to what I imagine would be at best the good natured ribbing that flying a drone is not fighting.
The Lt. Col. is quoted as saying that the bravery needed to fight a war by remote control is different than the bravery needed for traditional combat: “Ours requires moral courage. We take moral and legal risks. If I pull the trigger and I’m wrong I have to live with the consequences.” Which strikes me as strange because legal risks and consequences sound more like the everyday troubles of Wall Street types, and greedy bankers, not soldiers. And to say that a pilot fighting a war by remote control has to live with being wrong doesn’t make sense as an example of the difference between traditional wars and wars by remote control.
I don’t doubt that traditional combat soldiers have to live with the consequences of what they do as much as a pilot waging war by remote control. I’m guessing, therefore that the colonel may have been describing something else, like the shift in the mind set of a soldier waging war by a keyboard and a wireless headset.
Fighting in front of a monitor streaming images of a place in the world you’ll never set foot in, you are part of a larger enterprise—a machine if you will—that relies on intelligence and technology more than brute force. You are brave in this increasingly wireless and virtual New World that we all participate in to varying degrees when you face the challenge of change. The strength and bravery a man needed in battle for all of time preceding us, is not needed when the weapon is triggered by invisible signals beamed from the surface of the earth to satellites orbiting around the world.
Is it really any surprise that as warriors come to rely on technological strength more than brute force it only makes sense that our everyday notions of toughness and bravery should also change? There’s a famous speech by Theodore Roosevelt which conjures up images of the fearless man—The Man in the Arena—the man who gets in there and does it, whatever it is that has to get done. A worthy man is bold, courageous, brave, physically fit, tough, practically able to leap tall buildings in a single bound or at the least as he says so poetically, able to “quell the storm and ride the thunder.”
Hell, we don’t even make things as much as we used to with our own hands, and so getting things done in war or life relies less on physical strength, than on intelligence and know how. Selfless service and answering a call to the highest duty of a citizen may not be completely dependent on physical strength or even physical presence as much as it used to be, or as much as it may be in the future, but soldiers at the most ideal, embody noble virtues of what it means to be a man, what it means to be tough.
So as a soldier must be comfortable with uncertainty and detachment from traditional notions of what it means to be tough, to have courage, to be brave, so do the rest of us. Bravery on the virtual front is followed by a drive home that gives a soldier time to “decompress” “listen to music, take a deep breath, [and] compartmentalise” as he transitions “to husband, father, [and] family man, according to Chad an RPA pilot quoted in the Guardian article. Now once his fight is over, life resumes somewhere on the outskirts of Las Vegas in the sparse desert and on the interstate in rush hour traffic. He is like the rest of us in the suburbs of daily life and the grind of the rush hour commute, moving in a new direction.
Read more: On Being a Good Man
Image credit: RDECOM/Flickr
What does it take? Sociopathy, plain and simple. Only terrorists pull of a bombing… and then wait for the ambulances to arrive before bombing again, which is what drone operators do. That’s straight up murder, killing doctors and grieving kids. No way around that.
I have no idea what piloting a UAV is like. I would suggest that there is no moral difference between triggering an IED line of sight with a garage door remote and a hellfire missile with a satellite link. Not sure what the statement above means- but the concept of insisting our enemies are cowards bothers me on some level. Me, I’m of the opinion that the 911 attacks were reprehensible attacks committed against non-combatants, as more than one person has observed. I will opine that tactically it was brilliant insofar as the Taliban Air Force won the only battle… Read more »
Actually, there would be a difference between line of sight and satellite. If you were to activate ballistics by line of sight you would be doing so in real time, whereas doing so via satellite would imply a “latency” i.e. a time gap between when you “pull the trigger” and when the firing actually took place of as much as 3 or 4 seconds (same as a satellite tv link). That would not necessarily comply with the Geneva convention which stipulates that a combatant do everything possible to ensure that there are no civilians in a strike zone before firing,… Read more »
I should say, if you were to define a coward by the fact that they “Plant the bomb and run away” you might be tempted to think that the people who pilot UAVs (or even B-2s, if you think about it) are cowards, but there is an important distinction to be made. The people who are piloting UAVs are a part of a legitimate, mandated military, which is answerable to the Secretary of Defence, the Commander in Chief, and ultimately the electorate of the United States of America. There is a difference between somebody who carries out an order of… Read more »
Tom. I think the poem should be modified: I did the job other people needed done, wouldn’t do, but wanted somebody else to do. I am sceptical of the suicide issue. Some years ago, the NYT tried to make a case of it, pointing out that suicide in the military is higher than among the general population. I’m sure they were hoping nobody asked what the rate in the military is compared to the civilian age cohort like that of soldiers; primarily young men. Because the rates are the same. IOW, being in the mean military doesn’t cause excessive suicide.… Read more »
I had almost got to the end of writing a very long post about all sorts of things, including how there is no morality in refusing to face terrorism, and how I think the responsibility for the lives lost in the war against Al Qaeda rests with the people who planned and carried out 9/11, and then the screen refreshed and I lost the lot. Another time, maybe. But… There was an old former soldier buried in Ireland last week, he had been estranged from his family and friends and there was a call for members of the Irish Defence… Read more »
If bravery is the question, psychological trauma is often the answer. The suicide rate of soldiers working remotely is even higher than for those in ground combat. That means that the quoted “drive home that gives a soldier time to ‘decompress,’ ‘listen to music, take a deep breath, [and] compartmentalise’ as he transitions ‘to husband, father, [and] family man'” doesn’t work. The men and women who figure out where to send these aircraft and the ones who fly them can get PTSD just as easily as someone deployed overseas. Imagine spending the day making life and death decisions for people… Read more »
The difference is those “10 men” killed noncombatants intentionally. They targeted those who would not and could not fight. The heroes take out the trash. Men get arrested; dogs get put down.
It must really help to think of the enemy of “non human” doesn’t it, makes it so much easier. This has been done in every war in history. Your enemy isn’t human, they are “japs”, “trash” etc.
These people sitting in the desert 1000s of miles away from the enemy are not heroes. The men and women on the ground in Iraq, and Afghanistan are heroes.
BTW, just to let you know 33 years of service and counting here.
“They targeted those who would not and could not fight.” Isn’t that what our drone war does? Isn’t that sort of the point? Put U.S. soldiers out of harm’s way, so we can put the bad guys IN harm’s way and eliminate them with little threat to U.S. personnel? There’s very little an enemy combatant (or innocent bystandard) on the ground can do when bombed by a drone circling at 16,000 feet above them. At that altitude the missile is probably nothing more than a speck until is far too late. I respect and honor your service but I have… Read more »
Hi Andrew, I have not served (I’m Irish, we have a small armed forces, we’re officially a neutral country, although the forces we do have do some very important peace-keeping work with the UN in places like Lebanon, and just recently Mali) but I do have some small connection to this issue; some years ago I worked on equipment which was used primarily to test air-planes, the American military, among others, used it to test fighter planes, and it has applications for military planes and UAVs today. I did a lot of thinking about the issue, as somebody who had… Read more »
I hope I haven’t caused any offence to anybody who has lost somebody in a war with that quote by the way, or with anything else I had to say. Wars are won by sacrifice as well, I know, and it’s probably the bravest who fall. Don’t mean to be flippant at all, just trying to make the point that we wouldn’t expect a military commander to risk lives unnecessarily, and we probably wouldn’t think that he was moral for doing so. It seems a difficult place to distinguish morality.
In “The Great War Bow”, about the English longbow, there was a reference to the fact that, in some cases, archers received either confession or absolution in advance of a fight which was different from that provided the men-at-arms because they would not know who they killed, or see them. Something like that.
Which means an artilleryman would be in the position of an archer while a grunt and a UAV trigger-puller in the position of the medieval man-at-arms.
Funny thing, history.
Richard, That’s interesting, I spent a part of my life haunted by the thought of the people who were underneath the bombers we helped to put in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan. I didn’t see what happened or to whom, but it could only have been grotesque, an abonimation before God, or nature, or both. Young men don’t think. The way I see the Afghanistan, it was the fault of one man, or a small group of men. As I said before, there would have been no morality in not responding to that. It’s bad enough to have to… Read more »
I don’t know that Bush bypassed the UN. The UN was referred to by Daniel Moynihan, an ambassador there some decades back as a group of “cannibal republics”. When they put Syria on the Human Rights Commission, the moral authority is gone.UN troops have been referred to as “pedophilic sex tourists with guns.” The Presbyterian Church, having noticed difficulties in the Balkans some years ago, reluctantly came up with the concept of “humanitarian intervention”. It takes a good deal of effort to get them to use the “F” word, (fight). But they can be dragged into admitting the conditions for… Read more »
Jeez, Richard, why don’t you say what you really think! 😉 European journalism as an incestuous echo chamber, I like that. I recognise certainly Irish journalism in that but I wonder does journalism shape society, or does society shape journalism? By that I mean do they just tell us what we wanted to hear in the first place? Definitely it seems as though in the U.S., for instance, “conservatives” consume media with a “conservative” view, while “liberals” consume media with a “liberal” view, it seems to me that a lot of people just like to have somebody reassure them that… Read more »
Some time ago I heard a saying that stuck with me and made me to go HMMMMM
“We live in a world where 10 men , fly 4 airplanes into buildings and killed thousands and were called cowards, in this same world 1000’s of men and women drop bombs daily from 1000s of miles away from the enemy and they are called heroes”
These guys just push the trigger, or the button, or whatever. It takes others to figure out who, where, whether.
Sort of like a submarine launching cruise missiles into Libya. Nobody missed a meal and nobody was hunting our subs in the Med. Worked the regular shift, ate what is supposed to be pretty good chow.
Problem with redefining bravery is we still need grunts. The rise of the home-bound button-pusher does not change that.