No Chivalry in Drone Bombs

When someone asks me what time period I would like to have lived in, I always claim I would have liked to live in Medieval Europe. I love the style of clothing, I love castles, the notion of chivalry is fascinating, but what I always say mostly in jest is that the warfare was so much more personal. Especially in the early Middle Ages before the longbow, knights and infantrymen would have fierce battles face to face fighting for their lords. I guess these fantasies I had of being a knight came from my love of playing Age of Empires 2 while growing up (and still today!). The reason I bring this up is because of a fairly new modern warfare tactic used by the US: Drone bombs.

If you watch Democracy Now, or read other independent media you see almost on a weekly basis that numbers of innocent civilians are being killed by drone bombs in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Well what are these? They are basically bombs piloted by Americans stationed in Nevada and California killing people 7,500 miles away from the people doing the killing. This always makes me think of my fantasies of Knights, and how sad we have become as a species. The ability to kill other human beings 7,500 miles away, get out of work and then go play with the kids at home while you may have killed other peoples kids on the other side of the world is astonishing, and despicable. Not that my beloved Knights were justified in the killings they did, but when they killed they were right up front putting their own lives on the line, seeing the brutality of war. Our current warfare and where it seems to be headed detaches humanity from killing more and more.

There's a great article on this on the LA times: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-drone-crews21-2010feb21,0,5789185,full.story

The article notes that more pilots are being trained for drones, than for real aircraft. These people are usually quite young as well most are around 19 or 20 operating these drones. So people who grow up killing in video games, have the opportunity to do the same thing, only with real lives at stake. The thing that gives me a sense of hope is that so many people have suffered psychologically from operating these drones. That says to me that even though they aren't up close doing the killing like the Knights did, they still feel for humanity and perhaps understand that this new form of warfare is so detaching. My fear is that future generations will be so used to this that they will loose all sense of compassion and think it to be acceptable to kill people that live 7,500 miles away and call it something so heartless like "collateral damage."