Future Wars

As technology increasingly creates opportunities for attack systems are we in danger of eroding our ethics?

In short no but there are other risks.

The question pertains to attack systems such as armed UAV drones and instances such as the air strike on suspected Taliban commanders within Aziza bad in Aug 2008 by an American armed UAV. The subsequent estimate of thirty deaths by US sources was promptly and embarrassingly contradicted by a UN investigation revealing 90 deaths which had profound consequences for US military commanders albeit after deliberate delaying by the Administration.

The damage was essentially shrugged off and poses the basis for this concern for ethics to be eroded. The arguments to this issue are on the one hand that remote devices such as Predator are controlled by human hand and therefore not entitled to be labelled as exclusively robotic. However the fact that they are controlled by human remote ability in a different country means that the operator is so dislocated from the environment that the controller isn't subjected to the grim realities of the environment that subsequently he is not privy to the second order effects his attack system produces that the troops on the ground are. It cultivates such remoteness that controller is alienated from the impact of his system.

Scaremongers would like you to believe that this does erode ethics. Clausewitz believed technology to be evolutionary and very much a linear progression and warfare sanitised by using instrumentalising thought & development. However he also advocated vehemently at the same time that human element can never be discounted from the equation of warfare. COIN similarly has taught us that it is impossible to interface without boots on the ground and the essential human element.

However the philosopher Jeremy Bentham living at the same time as Clausewitz believed in utilitarianism, the idea of maximising content of the greatest number of the people in one swift stroke. The Silver Bullet phrase seeks a gold plated approach through technology and is most readily justifiable method and economic means to gain the strategic upper hand militarily. In order to do this you invest and pursue solely in technology. As has been mentioned by Col Evans yesterday warfare will speed this process up...because the war necessitates its need and feelings of national fervour will justify the pursuit. This leads to the fundamental contradiction between the development of technology and our squeamishness to its potential. The irony is that unless our society (or society in the West) has the backbone to back the systems being developed you are in economic terms creating redundancy and this perpetuates the myth of the silver bullet.

Defensive Aid Suites on tanks (reactive armour) have also caused collateral damage causing