YOU TUBE WAR : THE PUBLIC AND ITS UNMANNED WARS

Wars are a human phenomenon, arising from human needs for human purposes. This makes intimate human participation at some level critical, or the entire exercise becomes pointless.

—COLONEL THOMAS K . ADAMS, U.S. Army

“We’ll have more Kosovos and less Iraqs.”

Larry Korb is another one of those deans of Washington’s defense policy establishment. A former navy flight officer, he served as assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. Now he is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. In between, Korb has seen presidential administrations, and their wars, come and go. And, having written twenty books and over one hundred articles and made almost a thousand TV news show appearances, he has also helped shape how the American media and public understand these wars.

In 2007, I asked Korb about what he thought was the most important overlooked issue in Washington defense circles. He answered, “Robotics and all this unmanned stuff. What are the effects? Will it make war more likely? And all sorts of questions like that. People need to think about this.”

Korb is a great supporter of unmanned systems for a very simple reason. “They save lives.” But he worries about their effect on the perceptions and psychologies of war, not merely abroad, but also at home. As more and more unmanned systems are used, he sees this issue playing out in two ways, both of which he fears will make war more likely. “It will further disconnect the military from society. People are more likely to support the use of force as long as they view it as costless.” Even more, a new kind of voyeurism allowed by the new technologies will make the public more susceptible to false selling of how easy a potential war will be. “There will be more marketing of wars. More ‘shock and awe’ talk to defray discussion of the costs.”

Korb is equally troubled by the effect that such technologies have on how the leadership might look at war and its costs. “It will make people think, ‘Gee, warfare is easy.’ Remember all the claims of a ‘cakewalk’ in Iraq and how the Afghan model would apply? The whole idea that all it took to win a war was ‘three men and a satellite phone’ [mocking the network-centric crowd]? Well, their thinking is that if they can get the army to be as technologically dominant as the other services, we’ll solve for these problems.”

He feels that the current body politic in D.C. has been “chastened by Iraq.” But he worries about “when you get a new generation of policymakers.” Technology like unmanned systems can be seductive, feeding overconfidence that can lead nations into wars for which they aren’t ready. “Leaders without experience tend to forget about the other side, that it can adapt. They tend to think of the other side as static and fall into a technology trap.”

This is what Korb means when he predicts “more Kosovos and less Iraqs.” As unmanned systems become more and more prevalent, we’ll be more likely to use force, but also see the bar raised on anything that exposes human troops to dangers. Echoing the Pakistani general’s description of distance war, Korb envisions a future where the United States is more willing to fight, but only from afar, where it is more willing to punish via war, but less to face the costs of war.

THE PASSIVE PUBLIC

Immanuel Kant’s 1795 book Perpetual Peace first expressed the idea that democracies are superior to all other forms of government because they are inherently more peaceful and less aggressive. This “democratic peace” argument (which some two centuries later both presidents Clinton and Bush Jr. cited) is founded on the belief that democracies have a built-in connection between their foreign policy and domestic politics that other systems of government lack. When the people share a voice in any decision, including whether to go to war, they are supposed to choose more wisely than some king or potentate. As one Pentagon official explains, this sense of shared participation and ownership is the key aspect in making the right decisions on when to start and end wars. “The Army belongs to the American population, and not the President or Congress.”

Colonel R. D. Hooker Jr. is an Iraq veteran and the commander of an army airborne brigade. As he explains, the people and their military in the field should be linked in two ways. The first is the direct stake that the public has in its government’s policies. “War is much more than strategy and policy because it is visceral and personal. . . . Its victories and defeats, joys and sorrows, highs and depressions are expressed fundamentally through a collective sense of exhilaration or despair. For the combatants, war means the prospect of death or wounds and a loss of friends and comrades that is scarcely less tragic.” Because it is their blood personally invested, citizen soldiers, as well as their fathers, mothers, uncles, and cousins who vote, combine to dissuade leaders from foreign misadventures and ill-planned aggression.

The second link is supposed to come indirectly from a democracy’s free media, which widens the impact of those personal investments of blood and risk to the public at large. As Colonel Hooker explains, “Society is an intimate participant [in war] too, through the bulletins and statements of political leaders, through the lens of an omnipresent media, and in the homes of the families and the communities where they live. Here, the safe return or death in action of a loved one, magnified thousands of times, resonates powerfully and far afield.” It may not be your son or daughter at risk in a particular battle, but you’re supposed to care because they are part of your community, and it might just be someone you know the next time.

So the media’s effect in a free system is not merely a report on a war’s outcome, as if reporting on a sporting event. Unlike a spectator merely watching a game, the public’s perceptions of events on distant battlefields creates pressures on elected leaders, which can determine when the game begins or ends and even whether another game is played the next week. Too much pressure can translate into an elected leader trying to interfere in ongoing operations, as bad an idea as the owner or fans calling in the plays for a coach to run. But as Korb and Hooker explain, too little public pressure may even be worse. It’s the equivalent of no one even caring about the game or its outcome. War becomes the WNBA.

Many worry that this democratic ideal is under siege. The American military has been at war for the last eight years in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, but other than at the airport perhaps, the American nation has not. With the ending of the draft after Vietnam, most American families no longer have to think about whether their husband, wife, son, or daughter would be at risk if the military is sent to war. By comparison, during World War II 12.2 million men, just under 10 percent of the American populace, served in the military; the equivalent of almost 30 million today.

The military is also far less representative of the broad populace than it was in past generations. Flags once flew on nearly every street, marking which houses had sons off at war. Now, with the end of the draft, entire neighborhoods can lack even a passing link to the military. This disconnection is even more pronounced among the elite that dominate the business, the media, and the politics of both parties. At the time of the Iraq invasion vote, for example, less than 1 percent of all Ivy League university graduates were enlisted in the military and only 1 out of 635 senators and representatives had a child that might be sent into harm’s way.

By the start of the twenty-first century, even the financial costs on the home front were displaced. Industry didn’t need to retool its factories and families didn’t even need to ration fuel or food, or even show their faith in the war effort by purchasing bonds (instead, taxes were lowered for the top 1 percent of citizens). Government leaders were at a loss for how to motivate the public to show support for the war effort. When asked what citizens could do to share in the risks and sacrifices of the soldiers in the field, the message sent from the commander in chief in the White House was “Go shopping.” As one article in American Conservative magazine put it, “Rather than summoning Americans to rally to their country, he [Bush] validated conspicuous consumption as the core function of 21st-century citizenship.” The outcome is a public that became more disinvested in and delinked from its foreign policy than ever before in a democracy.

With this trend already in place, many worry that unmanned technologies may well snip the last remaining threads of connection. The increasing use of robotics may be motivated by saving lives, but by doing so, it does affect the way the public views and perceives war. In turn, it will also affect wars’ processes and outcomes, perhaps even transforming that public into the equivalent of sports fans watching war, rather than citizens sharing in its importance.

CHANGE THE CHANNEL

Josiah Bunting is a former major general in the army. After he retired from service, he became superintendent at the Virginia Military Institute and then head of the Guggenheim Foundation. Bunting is concerned that the American public is turning into “passive” observers of their country at war, and that the new trends of unmanned systems threaten to make it worse. He compares the situation to the book 1984 by George Orwell, “where every 20 or 30 pages there is some oblique reference to ‘the war’ but it has no bearing on life.”

For Bunting, the costs of this disconnect are immense. First, anything that takes away the public’s investment and involvement in a war also takes away any sense of unity for a nation. Instead of a nation mobilized and united behind its men and women in the field, you get the reverse. With robotics, instead of Rosie the Riveter pitching in to support her husband abroad, you just get a rivet that no one cares about. Even worse, any public passivity about war only increases the likelihood of bad policy, and more lost wars. “It makes it easier for leaders to stick in ‘stay the course mode’ when things aren’t going well.” He explains, “The war just becomes bad news, akin to a TV show that you get tired of and want to end. . . . Why [should a leader] change if failure doesn’t matter?”

Jun Ho Choi is a student who works on two-legged humanoid robots at the University of Michigan. Choi would seem to have little in common with an army major general, and yet he has the very same concerns about the public disengagement from war that his robotic systems might bring. “This may be a positive way to improve the military, but I do not believe this is a positive way to improve our lives.... I am worried about people becoming less serious about war since robots are fighting. We might end up having war every day.”

Bunting and Choi are pointing to the first of those concerns laid out by Washington expert Larry Korb. Unmanned systems may lessen the terrible costs of war, but in so doing, they will make it easier for leaders to go to war. Indeed, people with widely divergent worldviews come together on this point. “They [unmanned systems] lower the threshold for going to war. They make it easier, make war more palatable.” “Anything that makes it morally and ethically easier to wage war is not necessarily a good thing.” The first quote is from a human rights expert, whose job entailed trying to shut down the prison at Guantánamo Bay; the second is from a special operations officer just back from hunting terrorists to lock up there.

Unmanned systems represent the ultimate break between the public and its military. With no draft, no need for congressional approval (the last formal declaration of war was in 1941), no tax or war bonds, and now the knowledge that the Americans at risk are mainly just American machines, the already lowering bars to war may well hit the ground. A leader needn’t carry out the kind of consensus building that is normally needed before a war, and doesn’t even need to unite the country behind the effort. Describes one air force officer none too happy with this trend, “Taking the human factor out of warfare cheapens the expense of combat and would lead to more conflict. Furthermore, that uniquely human concept of chivalry on the battlefield helps separate us from the beasts.”

But the technologies don’t just merely remove human risk, they also record all they see, and in so doing reshape the public’s link to war. The Iraq war is literally the first war where you could download video of combat off the Web; as of 2007, there were over seven thousand video clips of combat footage from Iraq on YouTube.com alone. Much of this footage was captured by various drones and unmanned sensors and then posted online. Some of the videos were official, but many were not.

This trend could be viewed as a positive development that builds greater connections between the war front and home front, allowing the public to see as never before what is going on in battle. But so much visibility is not all that it seems. Inevitably, the ability to download the latest snippets of combat footage to home computers turns war into a sort of entertainment, or “war porn,” as soldiers call it. Clips of particularly interesting combat footage, such as an insurgent blown up by a UAV, are forwarded to friends, family, and colleagues with titles like “Watch this!,” much the same way an impressive soccer goal or amusing clip of a nerdy kid dancing in his basement gets e-mailed around the Internet. Comments and jokes are attached, and some are even set to music. A typical example was a clip of people’s bodies being blown up into the air by a Predator strike set to Sugar Ray’s song “I Just Want to Fly.” War then becomes, as one security analyst described, “A global spectator sport for those not involved in it.”

More broadly, it engages the public in a whole new way, but can fool many into thinking they now have a true sense of what is going on in the conflict. It has a paradoxical effect, a widening of the gap between our perceptions and war’s realities. To make another sports parallel, it’s like the difference between watching an NBA game on television, with the tiny figures on the screen, and seeing it in person, where the players really are seven feet, scream, sweat, and smell, and playing in the game yourself and knowing what it actually feels like to have KG knock you down and dunk on your head. Even worse, such clips don’t show the whole game, but are merely just the bastardized ESPN SportsCenter version of it. The context, the strategy, the training, the tactics, and so on all just become slam dunks and smart bombs.

War porn also tends to hide another hard truth about battle. Most viewers have an instinctive aversion to watching a clip of a battle where the person in the clip might be someone they know or a fellow American; such clips tend to get banned from U.S.-based host sites. But many are perfectly happy to watch clips of anonymous enemy deaths, even just to see if the machines fighting in Iraq are as “sick” as those fighting in the Transformers movie, as one student put it to me. To a public with less at risk, wars take on what analyst Christopher Coker called “the pleasure of a spectacle with the added thrill that it is real for someone but not the spectator.” The public’s link to its wars transforms from connection into merely a kind of voyeurism.

ROBOT CHICKENHAWKS

Such changed connections don’t just make a public less likely to wield its veto power over its elected leaders. As former Pentagon official Larry Korb reminded, technology also alters the calculations of the leaders themselves.

Nations often go to war because of overconfidence, which makes perfect sense; few leaders choose to go into a conflict thinking they will lose. Technology can play a big role in feeding overconfidence; new weapons and capabilities breed new perceptions, as well as misperceptions, about what might now be possible in a war. Today’s new technologies like robotics are particularly liable to feed this. They are perceived as helping the offensive side in a war more than the defense, plus they are advancing at an exponential pace. The difference of just a few years or even months of research and deployment can create vast differences in such technologies’ capabilities, creating a sort of “use it or lose it” mentality among leaders. Finally, as one roboticist explains, a vicious circle is generated. Scientists and companies often overstate how great a new technology is in order to get governments to buy it. But “if we believe the hype, it will probably increase the frequency of tactical engagements.”

James Der Derian is an expert at Brown University on new modes of war. He believes that the combination of these factors may mean that robotics will “lower the threshold for violence.” They create a dangerous mixture: a public veto over leaders now gone missing, and technologies that seem to offer leaders spectacular results with few lives lost. It can be very seductive. “If one can argue that such new technologies will offer less harm to us and them, then it is more likely that we’ll reach for them early, rather than spending weeks and months slogging at diplomacy.”

When faced with a dispute or crisis, policymakers have typically looked at force as the “option of last resort.” Now unmanned systems might help the option move up the list, with each step making war more likely. That leaves us back at Korb’s scenario of “more Kosovos, less Iraqs.”

While avoiding the mistakes of Iraq certainly sounds like a positive result, the other side of the trade-off would not be without its problems. Lowering the bar to more and more unmanned strikes from afar would most resemble the so-called cruise missile diplomacy of the 1990s. They may result in fewer troops stuck on the ground (a lesson that many have taken away from Iraq), but, like the strikes against al-Qaeda camps in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, or the Kosovo war, they are military endeavors without any true sense of a commitment, lash-outs that yield incomplete victories at best. As one report in an army journal tells, such operations “feel good for a time, but accomplish little.” They involve the country in a problem, but do not resolve it.

Even worse, Korb may be wrong and the dynamic could yield not “less Iraqs,” but even more. It was the lure of an easy preemptive action that got the United States into such trouble in Iraq in the first place. Describes one robotics scientist of his creations, “The military thinks that it will allow them to nip things in the bud, deal with the bad guys earlier and easier, rather than having to get into a big-ass war. But the most likely thing that will happen is that we’ll be throwing a bunch of high tech against the usual urban guerrillas.... It will stem the tide [of U.S. casualties], but it won’t give us some asymmetric advantage.”

Thus, robots may entail a dark irony. By seeming to lower the human costs of war, they may seduce us into more wars.

WAR, NOT WAR

Whether it’s watching wars from afar, or sending robots into harm’s way instead of fellow citizens, robotics offer the public and their leaders the lure of riskless warfare. All the potential gains of war would come without the costs, and even be mildly entertaining.

It’s a heady enticement, and not just for evil warmongers. The world watched the horrors of Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Congo, but did little, mainly because the public didn’t know or care enough, and the perceived costs of doing something truly effective just seemed too high. Substitute in unmanned systems and the calculus might be changed. Indeed, imagine all the horrible genocides and crimes against humanity that could be ended, if only the barriers to war were lowered. Getting tired of some dictator massacring his people? Send in the bots and sit back and watch his troops get taken down. One private military company executive even slickly pitched a quick and easy technologic solution to the genocide in Darfur as a simple matter of “Janjaweed be gone!,” as if an intervention into an African civil war was just a problem of scrubbing away the bad guys.

Yet wars never turn out to be that way. It’s in their very nature to be complex, messy, and unpredictable. And this will remain the case even as unmanned systems substitute for more and more humans. But imagine if this was not the case, that such fantasies were actually to come true. Even such a seemingly positive outcome of truly cheap and costless unmanned wars should give us pause. By cutting the already tenuous link between the public and its foreign and defense policy, the whole idea of a democratic process and citizenship is perverted. When a citizenry has no sense of sacrifice or even the prospect of sacrifice, the decision to deal out violence becomes just like any other policy decision, like whether to raise the bridge tolls. Instead of widespread engagement and debate over the most important decision a government can make, where blood might be shed, even if only on the other side, you just get popular indifference.

When technology disengages the public and instead turns war into something merely to be watched, and not weighed with great seriousness, the checks and balances that undergird democracy go by the wayside. This could well mean the end of the idea of a democratic peace, which supposedly sets our foreign policy decision-making apart from that of potentates and emirs.

Wars without costs can undermine the morality of even “good” wars. When a nation decides to go to war, it is not just deciding to break stuff in some foreign land. As one philosopher put it, the very decision is “a reflection of the moral character of the community who decides.” Without public debate and support and without risking troops, though, the decision of war may only reflect a nation that just doesn’t give a damn.

Even if the nation acts on a just cause, such as the motivation to stop genocide, war can be viewed as merely an act of selfish charity. One side has the wealth to afford high technologies and the other does not. The only message of “moral character” a nation sends out is that it alone gets the right to stop bad things, but only at the time and place of its choosing, and most important, only if the costs are low enough. While the people on the ground being saved may well be grateful, even they will see a crude calculation taking place that cheapens their lives. As Kosovars darkly joked during the 1998 war, in which NATO was willing to bomb to stop their massacre, but only as long as it didn’t have to risk its own pilots below fifteen thousand feet, “The life of one NATO soldier is worth 20,000 Kosovars.”

With unmanned systems, this bare minimum is reduced to zero. Wars, even the best of them, lose their virtue. They instead become like playing God from afar, just with unmanned weapons substituting for thunderbolts.

This also makes it easier to start playing God when you shouldn’t, for causes that may not be so just. The danger of these new technologies is that leaders can, as professor Christopher Coker argues, “become so intoxicated by the idea of precise, risk-free warfare that we believe what we want to believe. Unfortunately we may slip down the slope and find ourselves using violence with impunity, having lost our capacity for critical judgments. We may no longer be inclined to pay attention to the details of the ethical questions which all wars (even the most ethical) raise.”

Some question whether such wars without risk are even war. If one side is empowered and the other is not, it becomes more like a police action, with the public at home watching the military version of Cops via their video clips. But war is not some police action, where a bad guy is chased down the street in his underwear. As retired marine officer Bing West put it, in the final calculus, “making war is the act of killing until the opposition accepts the terms of surrender rather than accepts more destruction.”

Paul Fussell is perhaps best suited to sum up this question of how a public engages with unmanned war. In 1943, at the age of nineteen, Fussell was drafted into the U.S. Army. The next year, he was sent to France as part of the 103rd Infantry Division, arriving just after the Normandy invasion. In the fighting that followed, he was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart. After the war, he went back to school and became a noted author and cultural historian. Having experienced it himself, Fussell is perhaps the literary world’s greatest living critic of how war can be glorified and romanticized, both by governments and pop culture. His book on this issue, The Great War and Modern Memory, was named by Modern Library as one of the twentieth century’s one hundred best nonfiction books.

Now eighty-seven years old, Fussell is as brutally honest as his topic. War (or, as he once ironically called it, “The Bloody Game”) “is forced travel, no good food, sleeping in the dirt, death and maiming.” Fussell believes that the true horrors of combat are never fully acknowledged by the public and its political leaders during a war and are then ignored by the authors who write the histories, only after the killing is done. “And so I tried to cut away parts of it—tell them what a trench smelt like and what dead GIs smelt like and so forth.” He tells, for example, of the time his unit killed “weeping, surrendering Germans,” or of the morning he woke up to find himself surrounded by dozens of dead bodies. “If darkness had mercifully hidden them from us, dawn disclosed them with staring open eyes and greenish white faces.”

Today, Fussell worries about what all these amazing new technologies will mean for the next generation of war and the public’s connection to it. “If there is no risk, no cost, then it isn’t war as we think of it. If you are going to have a war, you’ve got to involve people and their bodies. There’s no other way.”

Fussell rails against this trend and what it portends. But he admits that he’s a bit of a pessimist and questions whether his efforts will do any good. “In the end,” he laments, “people will support the next war because the TV tells them to.”