When I first heard about weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), also known as armed drones, (such as Predators and Reapers), my gut told me this wasn’t a good thing. Not because UAVS don’t save American lives. They do.
And my concern is precisely because drones save American lives. I worry about drone warfare because UAVS and unmanned all-terrain vehicles (UATVS) — weaponized robots on the ground — will replace flesh and blood combatants.
Wait a minute. Let me correct that. Drones replace American flesh and blood combatants, not the combatants on the other side. (But that will change all too soon. Another article, another time.)
Quick Aside:
As far as this article is concerned, I make a considerable distinction between weaponized UAVS/UATVS and their unarmed, reconnaissance variants.
Back to the article . . .
Because armed UAVS remove real people from harm’s way, it means fewer body bags coming home to American families, which means drone warfare dulls our senses and removes us, the American citizenry, from whatever conflict we’re presently engaged in.
Thus, America can kill with impunity, while avoiding deaths and injuries of our own.
And that means the American public is out of the loop and unconcerned, and that means politicians — while they’re making their plans to drop bombs via remote control — have little to fear from voters.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating more deaths of American service members. Quite the opposite. What I am saying is that our Village has built and opened a Pandora’s Box with exceedingly wicked potential. And we are pursuing an even greater ability to send highly developed, mechanical mercenaries into battle in place of sons and mothers and sisters and fathers and daughters and brothers and …
You get the picture. My concern is that as it becomes easier and less costly for politicians to wage war, we, The Village, will become less and less concerned with the decisions those politicians make. It will one day be quite simple to send a squadron of weaponized UAVS (and a battalion of heavily armored UATVS across the borders into other Villages.
If you think that’s unlikely, consider this: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were reprehensibly successful in creating the template for lying America into bloody war; and that template included tens of thousands of dead or injured Americans. (And we STILL haven’t been given the truth behind that war.)
Imagine the hell future politicians will be able to unleash when the potential for American casualties drops to zero, and Americans yawn away their indifference.
