The Province of Uncertainty
A lone US Marine in Vietnam (1966)
This is a history, so it will spend a lot of time in the past. But the past is a continuum that slides seamlessly into the present, and any attempt at Big History (even a very short one) is at least in part an attempt to understand the here and now. It is useful, therefore, to recall how war actually works in the present – the last hundred years, say – before plunging back into the past. Never mind the strategy or the technology for the moment; just concentrate on the experience of the people who do the fighting on the ground.
War is the province of uncertainty; three-fourths of the things on which action in war is based lie hidden in the fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.
Karl von Clausewitz
As we were going into the position, there was a large rice field we had to walk across, and I remember that I had to send somebody else across first. Now there was one moment of hesitation, when he looked at me: ‘Do you mean me? Do you really mean it?’ And the look I must have given him – he knew that I meant it, and he went across the field.
I started sending them across in twos, and it was no problem. Then I took my entire force across. When we were about halfway across, they came up behind us, the VC [Viet Cong], and they were in spiderholes, and they caught most of my unit in the open.
Now tactically I had done everything the way it was supposed to be done, but we lost some soldiers. So did I make a mistake? I don’t know. Would I have done it differently [another time]? I don’t think I would have, because that’s the way I was trained. Did we lose less soldiers by my doing it that way? That’s a question that’ll never be answered.
Maj. Robert Ooley, U.S. Army
There is no good answer. In combat, officers have to make their decisions fast, without adequate information, while people (whom they generally cannot see) are trying to kill them. Those who get it wrong often die – and so do some of those who get it right. The best they can do is to cling to the rules that previous generations of officers have distilled from practical experience, even though they know that those rules are no guarantee of success. At best, they shift the odds a bit in your favour.
Major Ooley was trained in battle drills that aimed to reduce the risk of an unpleasant surprise, and limit the damage done if it happened anyway. Tactical doctrines are indispensable but never reliable, because there is no certainty about where the enemy is and what he is doing. Ooley fought a long, losing war in Vietnam, but even in short, victorious wars like the ones fought by General Yossi Ben-Chanaan, bad outcomes can’t be avoided altogether.
During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Ben-Chanaan commanded an Israeli tank brigade on the Golan Heights. On the sixth day of the war, with only eight tanks left, he managed to get behind the Syrian front line.
… once we arrived to the rear we took position, and all their positions were very exposed. We opened fire, and for about twenty minutes we destroyed whoever we could see, because we were in a great position there.
I decided to charge and try to get that hill, but I had to leave a couple of tanks in cover; so I charged with six tanks. [The Syrians] opened fire from the flank with anti-tank missiles, and in a matter of seconds, three out of the six tanks were blown up. There was a big explosion in my tank. I blew out, and I was left there… And also the whole attack was a mistake, I think.
General Ben-Chanaan, as the commander, was riding head and shoulders out of the turret to see the situation better. It’s a lethally exposed position if you come under machine-gun or artillery fire, but it’s the best place to be if an anti-tank missile penetrates the hull. Ben-Chanaan was blown out of the turret; his crew down in the body of the tank was incinerated. He was a competent officer, but his attack failed and some of his men died. Commanders almost always have to accept a certain level of risk, because things are moving fast and they cannot afford to wait for better information.
The armed forces, with their uniforms, their rigid system of ranks, and their general intolerance for deviations from the norm may seem over-organised and inflexible in peacetime, but peace is not their true working environment. In battle, the seeming absurdity of commands given and acknowledged in stilted terms, of absolute obedience to the most senior person present, of obliging every officer to report his situation in this format rather than some other (when there is no obvious advantage in doing it one way rather than another), are all useful because they reduce the unpredictability of an essentially chaotic situation.
Rank Necessity
Even the most bizarre aspect of military organisation, the distinction between officers – who make the decisions – and the rank and file – who have to carry them out – makes sense in this peculiar situation. All military organisations are divided into two entirely separate hierarchies of people covering roughly the same span of age and often, at the junior levels, doing much the same kind of job. Army officers at the age of twenty are placed in charge of enlisted men who are older and more experienced than themselves. Indeed, the 20-year-old Second Lieutenant, fresh from a year of officer cadet training, is legally of higher rank than the most senior NCO in the army, a Regimental Sergeant-Major who will typically have served at least 18 years before attaining that rank – and all armies make it very difficult to transfer from the enlisted ranks to the officer caste.
The officer/enlisted ranks distinction has its roots in the political and social structures of a distant past when nobles commanded and commoners obeyed, but even radically egalitarian states like revolutionary France or Bolshevik Russia never abolished it. It had to be preserved, because it is the duty of officers to expend their soldiers’ lives in order to accomplish the purposes of the state.
You’ve got to keep distant from [your soldiers]. The officer-enlisted man distance helps. This is one of the most painful things, having to withhold sometimes your affection for them, because you know you’re going to have to destroy them on occasion. And you do. You use them up: they’re material. And part of being a good officer is knowing how much of them you can use up and still get the job done.
Paul Fussell, infantry officer, World War II
Red Army shoulder marks, c. 1943
Officers are managers of violence: except in the most extreme circumstances they do not use weapons themselves. Their job is to direct those who do and make them go on doing it even unto death. This does not mean they do not care for their men, and it certainly does not mean that they are avoiding danger themselves. Indeed, officer casualties are usually higher proportionally than those of the enlisted men, mainly because they must expose themselves more in order to motivate their soldiers. In British and American infantry battalions in World War II, the proportion of officers who became casualties was around twice as high as the casualties among enlisted men. Similar figures apply for most other armies that have seen major combat in the past two centuries.1
It occurred to me to count the number of officers who had served in the Battalion since D-Day. Up to March 27th, the end of the Rhine crossing [less than ten months]… I found that we had had 55 officers commanding the twelve rifle platoons, and that their average service with the Battalion was 38 days… Of these 53% were wounded, 24% killed or died of wounds, 15% invalided, and 5% survived.
Col. M. Lindsay, 1st Gordon Highlanders2
The peculiar role that officers must play also gives them a special perspective on how the world works.
Professional Ethics
The military ethic emphasises the permanence of irrationality, weakness and evil in human affairs. It stresses the supremacy of society over the individual and the importance of order, hierarchy and division of function.
It accepts the nation state as the highest form of political organization and recognises the continuing likelihood of war among nation states… It exalts obedience as the highest virtue of military men… It is, in brief, realistic and conservative.
Samuel Huntington3
Much of Huntington’s classic definition of the ‘military mind’ would have applied even in the distant past, but military officers have now become a separate and specialised profession.
Are they really a profession in the same sense as the medical and legal professions? In most respects, yes. The officer corps is a self-regulating body of specialists which chooses who may join it and even who gets promoted (except at the highest levels where political considerations often predominate). The military profession is the monopoly supplier of the service it provides, and it enjoys some special privileges (like early retirement) because that service makes special demands on its members. Like doctors or lawyers, military officers also have a wide range of corporate interests to defend and advance. But there is one big difference: what soldiers call the ‘unlimited liability’ of their contract to serve. Few other contracts oblige the employee to lay down his life when the employer demands it.
Politicians may… pretend that the soldier is ethically in no different position than any other professional. He is. He serves under an unlimited liability, and it is the unlimited liability which lends dignity to the military profession… There’s also the fact that military action is group action, particularly in armies… The success of armies depends to a very high degree on the coherence of the group, and the coherence of the group depends on the degree of trust and confidence of its members in each other.
What Arnold Toynbee used to call the military virtues – fortitude, endurance, loyalty, courage, and so on – these are good qualities in any collection of men. But in the military society they are functional necessities, which is something quite, quite different. I mean, a man can be false, fleeting, perjured, in every way corrupt, and still be a brilliant mathematician or one of the world’s greatest painters. But there’s one thing he can’t be, and that’s a good soldier, sailor or airman.
Gen. Sir John Hackett
There are bad officers, of course, but the lack of those ‘military virtues’ is what makes them bad officers. Those who have lived among military officers for any length of time will know that, while diverse in other respects, they are an uncommonly truthful and loyal group of people. Nor is this distinction confined to the officer corps: Stephen Bagnall, who served as a private with the 5th East Lancashires in Normandy in 1944, wrote in his memoir of the state of grace amid evil that prevails, by necessity, among front-line soldiers; of ‘the friendly helpfulness and almost gaiety that increases until it is an almost unbelievably tangible and incongruous thing as you get nearer to the front. A cousin writing to me recently… said, “Men are never so loving or so lovable as they are in action.” That is not only true, it is the beginning and end of the matter.’4
But it is not the whole of the truth.
Korean War. One infantryman comforts another while a third fills out body tags, August 25th, 1950
Managing Breakdown
I went where I was told to go and did what I was told to do, but no more. I was scared shitless just about all the time.
James Jones, US infantry private, World War II
If blood was brown, we’d all have medals.
Canadian sergeant, northwest Europe, 1944–45
During World War II, the US Army used questionnaires to find out how affected its soldiers were by fear on the battlefield. In one infantry division in France in August 1944, two thirds of the soldiers admitted that they had not been able to do their jobs properly because of extreme fear at least once, and over two fifths said it had happened repeatedly.
In another infantry division in the South Pacific, over two thousand soldiers were asked about the physical symptoms of fear: 84 percent said they had a violent pounding of the heart, and over three fifths said they shook or trembled all over. Around half admitted to feeling faint, breaking out in a cold sweat, and feeling sick to their stomachs. Over a quarter said they had vomited, and 21 percent said they had lost control of their bowels.5 These figures are based only on voluntary admissions, and the true percentages are probably higher in all categories, especially the more embarrassing ones. James Jones’s remark about being ‘scared shitless’ was not just a colourful expression.
This is the reality with which officers must contend in combat: soldiers whose training and pride, and even their loyalty to their close friends around them, are finely balanced against physical terror and a desperate desire not to die. They can turn into a panic-stricken mob if that balance tilts just a bit, so their officers must work very hard to keep them in action. In major wars of recent times, almost everybody falls apart eventually; the trick is to keep them from all doing it at the same time.
The dead and wounded in a major pre-20th-century battle often amounted to 40 or 50 percent of the men engaged. It was rarely less than 20 percent. Given a couple of battles a year, the infantryman therefore stood an even chance of being killed or wounded for each year the war continued – a very discouraging prospect. But the battles each lasted only one day, and for the other 363 days of the year the soldiers were usually not even in close contact with the enemy. They might be cold, wet, tired, and hungry much of the time, but for half the year they probably got to sleep indoors. The likelihood that they would be dead or wounded within the year could be dealt with in the same way other people deal with the eventual certainty of death: ignore it. Things are very different now.
There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat’. Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure.
US Army investigation into the psychological effects of combat6
The casualty toll in a single day of battle has plummeted since the 19th century: the average daily loss for a division-sized force in intensive combat in World War II was about 2 percent of its personnel. The problem is that battles can now continue for weeks – and the battles follow each other in quick succession.
The cumulative loss rate is about the same as before, with infantrymen facing an even chance of death or a serious wound within a year, but the psychological impact of combat is very different. Troops are shelled every day, the enemy is always close, and they live amid constant death. This inexorably erodes men’s faith in their own survival, and eventually destroys everybody’s courage and will. ‘Your courage flows at its outset with the fullest force and thereafter diminishes; perhaps if you are very brave it diminishes imperceptibly; but it does diminish… and it can never behave otherwise,’ as Stephen Bagnall wrote.7
The U.S. Army concluded during World War II that almost every soldier, if he escaped death or wounds, would break down after 200 to 240 ‘combat days’. The British, who rotated their troops out of the front line more often, reckoned 400 days, but agreed that breakdown was inevitable. Only about one sixth of casualties were psychiatric, but that was because most combat troops did not survive long enough to go to pieces.
The trajectory of combat infantrymen was the same in every army. In the first few days of combat, they would experience constant fear and apprehension (though they would try to hide it). Once they had learned to distinguish the truly dangerous phenomena of combat from the merely frightening, their confidence and performance would steadily improve. After three weeks they would be at their peak – and then the long slide would begin.
By the sixth week of continuous combat, reported two Army psychiatrists who accompanied a US infantry battalion in 1944, most soldiers had become convinced of the inevitability of their own death and had stopped believing that their skill or courage made any difference. They would go on functioning with gradually declining effectiveness for some months, but in the end, if they were not killed, wounded or withdrawn from battle, the result was the same.
As far as they were concerned the situation was one of absolute hopelessness… Mental defects became so extreme that [the soldier] could not be counted on to relay a verbal order… He remained almost constantly in or near his slit trench, and during acute actions took little or no part, trembling constantly.
S. Bagnall, The Attack, (1947)
At this point the ‘two-thousand-year stare’ appeared. The next stage was catatonia or total disorientation and breakdown.8
Yet relatively few units collapsed, because there was a constant flow of replacements to replace the casualties (including those suffering from ‘combat fatigue’). Most units in prolonged combat in modern war, therefore, are an uneasy mixture of some green and unsure replacements, some veterans (many of whom are nearing breakdown), and a large group of soldiers – the bigger the better, from the unit’s point of view – who are still in transition from ‘green’ to burned out.
Combat effectiveness over 9–12 months’ active duty
These are the people whom an officer must ‘use up’ to get the job done. Their state of mind was eloquently described by US Army Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall, a veteran of World War One and an historian of World War Two and the Korean War.
Wherever one surveys the forces of the battlefield, it is to see that fear is general among men, but to observe further that men commonly are loath that their fear will be expressed in specific acts which their comrades will recognize as cowardice. The majority are unwilling to take extraordinary risks and do not aspire to a hero’s role. but they are equally unwilling that they should be considered the least worthy among those present…
The seeds of panic are always present in troops so long as they are in the midst of physical danger. The retention of self-discipline… depends upon the maintaining of an appearance of discipline within the unit… When other men flee, the social pressure is lifted and the average soldier will respond as if he had been given a release from duty, for he knows that his personal failure is made inconspicuous by the general dissolution.9
And until the end of the Second World War, the armies were unaware that most of their soldiers, even if not running away, weren’t actually killing anybody.
Basic Training
Tens of millions of men and growing numbers of women have seen combat, and yet there is something mysterious about it. The giving and receiving of death is not a normal transaction.
The military makes demands which few if any other callings do, and of course emotionally disturbed people talk about being trained to kill… The whole essence of being a soldier is not to slay but to be slain. You offer yourself up to be slain, rather than setting yourself up as a slayer. Now one can get into very deep water here, but there’s food for thought in it.
General Sir John Hackett
To the layman Hackett’s definition of the ‘essence of being a soldier’ sounds laughably romantic, but there really is food for thought in his words. Soldiers know they may die, but left to their own devices, most of them are remarkably reluctant to kill – and if they do kill, even in combat, many of them are deeply affected by it.
You think about it and you know you’re going to have to kill but you don’t understand the implications of that, because in the society in which you’ve lived murder is the most heinous of crimes…
I was utterly terrified – petrified – but I knew there had to be a Japanese sniper in a small fishing shack near the shore…and there was nobody else to go… and so I ran towards the shack and broke in and found myself in an empty room.
There was a door which meant there was another room and the sniper was in that – and I just broke that down. I was just absolutely gripped by the fear that this man would expect me and would shoot me. But it turned out he was in a sniper harness and he couldn’t turn around fast enough. He was entangled in the harness and so I shot him with a .45 and I felt remorse and shame. I can remember whispering foolishly, ‘I’m sorry’ and then just throwing up… I threw up all over myself. It was a betrayal of what I’d been taught since a child.
William Manchester
Manchester was a 23-year-old corporal when he fought in Okinawa in 1945, and the idea of killing somebody had probably never crossed his mind until he fell into the hands of the US Marine Corps. Of course he was distressed by what he had done. The scoffers will say that his problem was just a ‘modern sensibility’, pointing out that his 17th- and 18th-century ancestors regarded public executions as a form of entertainment. And if the shoe had been on the other foot, they will insist, the Japanese sniper would not have been equally upset by killing Manchester. Yet the armies themselves take the problem seriously.
‘We are reluctant to admit that the business of war is killing,’ wrote S.L.A. Marshall in 1947, but today’s armies are well aware that their recruits are at best reluctant killers. That’s why they isolate their new recruits right away for a period of six to twelve weeks to do what they call ‘basic training’. It has very little to do with teaching them how to use their weapons.
A new recruit responds to drill instructors, Marine Corps Recruitment Depot, San Diego.
Basic training is a conversion process, in which the recruits are subjected to unremitting physical stress and psychological manipulation. The goal is to suppress their civilian identities and give them a whole new set of values, loyalties and reflexes that will make them obedient and even willing soldiers. Generally it works, although the civilian identity is only submerged, not eradicated. Manchester killed as a trained soldier, but then reacted to his deed as the person he had been before.
‘I guess you could say we brainwash them a little bit,’ said a US Marine drill instructor at Parris Island, the Marines’ eastcoast training base, a full two generations later, ‘but they’re good kids.’ They have always been good kids, but until the end of the Second World War the military didn’t realise that most of them stayed unwilling to kill after all their training. It was the same S.L.A. Marshall, then a colonel serving as a combat historian, who discovered through post-combat interviews with American infantry units in both the Pacific and European theatres in 1944–45 that only a quarter or less of the soldiers had fired their personal weapons even in intense combat. They did not run away but, said Marshall, when the moment came, they could not bring themselves to kill.
Natural Born Killers?
The man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat still has such an inner and usually unrealised resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility… At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector
S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire (1947)
This came as a great surprise to the military, whose leadership had always assumed that most if not all soldiers in combat would fire at the enemy, if only to protect their own lives. But they took this problem very seriously and changed the way they trained their troops. Gone were the long, grassy firing ranges with bulls-eye targets at the end; soldiers now fire at pop-up targets of human figures that disappear again if the soldier has not fired in a couple of seconds. They call it ‘laying down reflex pathways’.
They also addressed the soldiers’ reluctance to kill in more direct ways. By the 1960s Marine Corps recruits were shouting ‘Kill’ every time their left foot came down as they ran during morning Physical Training sessions. The training seemed to work. As early as the Korean War in the early 1950s, Marshall reported that half the men were firing in combat, and by the late 1960s in the Vietnam War almost all the soldiers were allegedly firing their weapons during some perimeter defence crises.
Marshall assumed that the problem had only arisen during the Second World War because most soldiers were no longer directly supervised by their NCOs and officers on the battlefield. For most of history, the combat environment was an extremely crowded one. In a Roman legion, on the gun deck of an 18th-century ship of the line, or in a Napoleonic infantry battalion men fought practically shoulder to shoulder. The presence of so many others going through the same ordeal imposed a huge moral pressure on each individual to do his part – and the presence of their NCOs meant that any shirking of their duty would immediately be punished, sometimes by death.
Even in the trenches of the First World War, the soldier had other men close around him, and could often see his whole company during an attack. But by the Second World War the lethality of artillery and machine-gun fire had forced infantrymen to disperse so widely that each man was effectively alone and unobserved in his own foxhole. In these lonely circumstances, Marshall theorised, the soldiers were free to avoid killing without bringing shame or punishment on themselves – and most therefore did just that – whereas the people on the machine-guns and other crew-served weapons, observed by their comrades, continued to do their duty as expected.
A logical implication of Marshall’s discovery is that the reluctance to kill another human being is universal. If German and Japanese soldiers had been significantly more willing to kill, either because they’d been raised in a particularly warlike culture or because they had been more effectively brainwashed, they would have enjoyed immense superiority in the volume of aimed fire they produced, and would have won every battle they fought against American troops.
From a human point of view, it is good news that most people of every nationality and culture have a strong objection to killing other people, and avoid it if they can. It is less encouraging to learn how easily they can be tricked into doing it anyway by some elementary psychological conditioning and training. But after Marshall died there was a major academic effort to discredit his findings: his research methods were sloppy, the critics said; his results were distorted by wishful thinking; he just made it up.
There was substance in the criticism of his research methods, but a side-effect of the controversy was to make people look for evidence of the same behaviour in other times and places, and they found it. They found that many soldiers had been silently refusing to kill more than a century ago.
Ninety percent of the 25,574 abandoned muskets picked up after the Battle of Gettysburg (1863) in the American Civil War were loaded, which makes no sense if the soldiers who dropped them, presumably because they were killed or wounded, had been firing as soon as they loaded their weapons. Indeed, almost half the muskets – twelve thousand – were loaded more than once, and six thousand of them had between three and ten rounds loaded in the barrel, although the weapon would explode if actually fired in that state. The only rational explanation is that many men on both sides of the conflict were unable to evade the highly visible process of loading, but only mimicked the act of firing. And many more, we may presume, did load and fire, but just aimed high.
Gabreski in the cockpit of his P47 Thunderbolt after his 28th kill (July 1944)
A small minority of men appear to be ‘natural-born killers’ who don’t need to be persuaded. This doesn’t mean they are murderers, but they do not feel the usual reluctance to kill when the circumstances make it necessary and even praiseworthy. For example, the US Air Force found that during the Second World War less than one percent of its fighter pilots became ‘aces’ (the term originated in World War One, signifying that a pilot had destroyed at least five enemy aircraft); and they found that those few men accounted for between 30 and 40 percent of enemy aircraft shot down. Meanwhile the majority of its pilots never shot anybody down at all. There is no evidence that the majority were worse pilots; more likely they just lacked the killer instinct.
‘They looked like ants’
As the average distance between the trigger-finger and the target increases, the inhibitions of those who aren’t natural-born killers drop away. Even 500 metres will do it. Hein Severloh was a 20-year-old Wehrmacht private manning a machine-gun overlooking Omaha Beach in Normandy when American troops came ashore on D-Day, 6 June 1944. His bunker was one of the few not destroyed by Allied bombing and naval gunfire, and his machine-gun accounted for at least half of the 4,184 Americans who were killed or wounded in front of that bunker on Private Severloh’s first and last day of combat. He fired it for nine hours, pausing only to change gun-barrels as they overheated, mowing down American soldiers as they exited their landing craft in the shallow water 500 metres away.
‘At that distance they looked like ants,’ said Severloh, and he felt no reluctance about what he was doing. But then one young American who had escaped the slaughter came running up the beach during a lull in the fighting, and Severloh picked up his rifle. The round smashed into the GI’s forehead, sending his helmet spinning, and he slumped dead in the sand. At that distance, Severloh could see the contorted expression on his face. ‘It was only then I realised I had been killing people all the time,’ he said. ‘I still dream of that soldier now [in 2004]. I feel sick when I think about it.’
If 500 metres of distance provides a degree of insulation from the reality of what the weapons are doing to human beings, ten times that distance straight up makes it completely invisible.
It seemed as though the whole of Hamburg was on fire from one end to the other and a huge column of smoke was towering well above us – and we were on 20,000 feet!
Set in the darkness was a turbulent dome of bright red fire, lighted and ignited like the glowing heart of a vast brazier. I saw no streets, no outlines of buildings, only brighter fires which flared like yellow torches against a background of bright red ash. Above the city was a misty red haze. I looked down, fascinated but aghast, satisfied yet horrified… Our actual bombing was like putting another shovelful of coal into the furnace.
RAF aircrew over Hamburg, 28 July 194310
Seventy-five years later, the bomber pilot of World War II has morphed into the Strategic Air Command ‘combat crew’ doing correspondence courses for MBAs as they wait for the ICBM launch order that mercifully never comes, or the drone operator killing his or her ‘targets’ on video from thousands of miles away.
Do Drone Pilots Dream of Exploding Sheep?
What I really like is the variety of prospects available to me. I get to play lots of different types of sport. And I think the pay is pretty good. I pay hardly anything on rent and bills, so more of the money I earn is my own. Flying UASs is great fun and puts us at the centre of all missions in Afghanistan.
Online British army recruitment ad for ‘GUNNER –
UNMANNED AERIAL SYSTEMS’11
The first armed drone attack was in 2001, but much-improved technology has led to a great acceleration in armed attacks since about 2008. In Afghanistan there were up to 40 strikes a day in 2019, and the NGO Airwars estimated the total lives lost to drone strikes in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Somalia as of December 2020 at 55,506 people.12 The United States Air Force is now training more people to fly Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) than fighter and bomber pilots combined, and the scale and geographical scope of these ‘counter-terrorist’ operations has reignited the old, uneasy debate about the moral status of those who kill people (many of whom are civilians) from the sky.
The appalling casualties (around 50% fatalities) suffered by British, Canadian and American bomber crews flying against Germany in World War II largely protected them from criticism about the morality of their actions, but drone pilots are not risking their own lives. Even inside the armed forces themselves, questions are being asked about their moral status, framed mostly as questions about whether they deserve to be granted the same honour and status as people who experience combat in person.
Even if the drone operators wear flight suits to work (as they do in some air forces), the real ‘war-fighters’ do not want mere ‘cyber-warriors’ to debase the currency of heroism that gives them value in their own eyes and those of others. A Pentagon proposal in 2013 to create a ‘Distinguished Warfare Medal’ specifically for drone pilots that would rank above some US decorations for valour in combat caused outrage in armed forces and veterans’ organisations. The American Legion’s national commander, James E. Koutz, said his organisation ‘still believes there’s a fundamental difference between those who fight remotely, or via computer, and those fighting against an enemy who is trying to kill them.’13 The secretary of defence cancelled the new medal after two months.
Among civilians, the concern is different. It is that this god-like technology enabling individuals to kill invisibly and invulnerably from the sky is morally deadening and will lead to huge abuses, especially as the operations are conducted with great secrecy. They rightly mistrust military enthusiasts like Air Marshal Greg Bagwell, a former Royal Air Force deputy commander of operations, who advocated recruiting ‘18-and 19-year-olds straight out of the PlayStation bedroom’ to operate the weapons.14 But in fact the drone pilots of today are not morally dead. They are far more aware of exactly who their victims are and precisely what happens to them than were the young men high above Hamburg in 1943.
Most drone strikes today occur in the context of ‘counter-terrorist’ and other counter-insurgency operations, in the midst of civilian societies that are not mobilised for war. Basic morality and the formal doctrines of counter-insurgency war both require that drone attacks against small groups of insurgents – and often single ‘terrorists’ – do not cause mass casualties to the innocent people around them (including the families, friends and neighbours of the targeted individuals). Drone operators typically spend hours or even days observing the daily lives of their targets so that they can first confirm their identities with confidence, and then find a time and place where they can be hit without endangering the lives of others.
That is the theory. The practice is sometimes less diligent, there is occasionally great time pressure, and many mistakes occur that take innocent lives. But drone operators often do get to ‘know’ their targets, and even their families, before the kill is made. They may also be required to loiter in the area afterwards to see if the target was killed, who comes to the funeral, etc. – to say nothing of the oft-denied ‘double-tap’ attacks that take out the rescuers and/or mourners later the same day. The lives of the operators are never at risk, and investigations by the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine have shown that they are no more prone to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) than other service members who have not been exposed to combat: around 2%-5%, which is not far off the 12-month prevalence of PTSD in US civilian adults. Many drone operators do, however, suffer from powerful emotional reactions to what they have seen and done, and 11% reported high levels of ‘psychological distress’.15
The term ‘moral injury’ is gradually gaining ground in military medical circles (against considerable resistance) to describe this distress. In an unpublished paper, one former drone operator linked this phenomenon to ‘cognitive combat intimacy’, a relational attachment forged through close observation of violent events in high resolution. In one passage, he described a scenario in which an operator executed a strike that killed a ‘terrorist facilitator’ while sparing his child. Afterwards ‘the child walked back to the pieces of his father and began to place the pieces back into human shape,’ to the horror of the operator. The more they watched their targets go about their daily lives – getting dressed, playing with their kids – the greater their ‘risk of moral injury,’ he concluded.16
In all these operations human beings are still in the loop. It’s what comes next that really worries people.
The LAWS of War
I suspect we could have an army of 120,000 [in the 2030s], of which 30,000 might be robots, who knows?
General Sir Nick Carter, British Chief of Defence Staff, November 202017
The British armed forces are having trouble recruiting enough people to meet even their current authorised manpower limit of 82,050, so one can understand their interest in non-human supplements. Most militaries in developed countries face a similar problem. Moreover, ‘robots’ can be programmed to perform tasks in battle that would cost too many lives if humans had to do them, and if they are ‘killed’ in large numbers they do not provoke the kind of political backlash at home that accompanies high human casualties. But if the behaviour of these robots in combat has to be supervised by human beings there is no saving of manpower, and a great loss in reaction time. In particular, kill/don’t kill decisions need to be taken in a split second.
The unwelcome but unavoidable conclusion is that, in order to be useful in combat, these robots must be what is known as ‘Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems’ (LAWS), free to make their own killing decisions. This would take us deep into ‘Terminator’ country, where nobody in their right mind would want to go. Or rather, they would never go there if you put the choice like that, but of course that’s not how it would ever be stated in practice (and the weapons in question would not resemble Arnold Schwarzenegger in the slightest).
None of these hypothetical LAWS will become a reality before considerable advances have been made in artificial intelligence (facial recognition software may be coming along nicely, but few robots can even dance yet). It will be very hard to design weaponised robots to operate safely (from their own side’s point of view) in the complex battle spaces created by human armies, but very big and largely ungoverned spaces that shelter extremists or rebels will present tempting opportunities for earlier deployment. Ten thousand next-but-one-generation LAWS with no requirement for drone pilots could track and winnow insurgents in the rural parts of a country the size of Afghanistan at a quite reasonable cost.
At $5 million a copy for mass-produced, state-of-the-art LAWS drones, a capital outlay of $50 billion spread over five years with a recurrent annual spend of $10 billion will buy you a killer drone to cover each five-by-five-mile area of rural Afghanistan – all for a fraction of the US ‘war funding’ budget.* Any sign of insurgent activity, such as carrying a weapon, and the target gets zapped. There’ll be collateral damage, of course, but you’re not talking about your fellow countrymen here, so how much do you really care, given the miserable available policy alternatives?
We are probably a decade or more away from a mature LAWS technology, but unless there is an international consensus to ban it in the relatively near future it will come to pass. It will not necessarily be the United States that crosses the Rubicon: once any major power acquires the technology, the others will surely follow.
The impact on large-scale, high-intensity warfare may prove quite modest, since in that kind of war even human decision-makers are free to kill with little restraint, but the effect on counter-insurgency operations could be very great. LAWS would lessen political pressure to end ‘forever wars’ in places like Afghanistan or Somalia, and ruthless autocratic regimes would have a powerful new tool to help them hang onto power indefinitely.
Poison gas and biological weapons have been outlawed with some success by international treaty, and less formal international understandings have largely eliminated pernicious but not decisive weapons like land-mines and blinding-laser technology. Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems are not yet inevitable, and a network of NGOs led by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has been working since 2013 to put a United Nations-backed ban on LAWS on the international agenda. At the time of writing, 30 countries have explicitly supported such a ban, and another 67 have expressed a positive interest in it.18
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
David Wreckham on an anti-killer robot leafletting drive outside the British parliament in April 2019.
Notes
1. John Ellis, The Sharp End of War (North Pomfret, VT, David and Charles, 1980), 162–64; Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behaviour of Men in Battle (London, Random House, 2003).
2. M. Lindsay, So Few Got Through, London: Arrow, 1955, 249.
3. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State, New York: Vintage, 1964, 79.
4. S. Bagnall, The Attack, (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1947), 21
5. S. A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier, vol. II (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1949), 202.
6. Lt. Col. J. W. Appel and Capt. G. W. Beebe, ‘Preventive Psychiatry: An Epidemiological Approach,’ Journal of the American Medical Association, 131 (1946), 1470.
7. Bagnall, op. cit., 160.
8. Appel and Beebe, op. cit.
9. Col. S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire, New York: William Morrow and Co., 1947, 149–50.
10. Martin Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg (London, Allen Lane, 1980), 244.
11. https://apply.army.mod.uk/roles/royal-artillery/gunner-unmanned-aerial-systems
12. See airwars.org. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism gives much more conservative estimates of 14,040 ‘minimum confirmed strikes’ by US armed drones and 8,858-16,901 ‘total killed’, of whom only 910-2,200 were civilians. Airwars also counts unannounced American drone strikes (including those in Pakistan), and strikes by Russian drones in Syria, Turkish drones in Iraq, Syria and Libya, Saudi Arabian and UAE drones in Yemen, and so on.
13. https://www.legion.org/pressrelease/214756/distinguished-warfare-medal-cancelled
14. Patrick Wintour, ‘RAF urged to recruit video game players to operate Reaper drones’, The Guardian, 9 December 2016.
15. D. Wallace and J. Costello, ‘Eye in the sky: Understanding the mental health of unmanned aerial vehicle operators’, Journal of Military and Veteran’s Health (Australia), Vol. 28, No. 3, October 2020.
16. Eyal Press, ‘The Wounds of the Drone Warrior’, New York Times Magazine, 13 June 2018.
17. Sky News interview, 8 November 2020.
18. For a full discussion of the legal issues involved in regulating the development and use of autonomous weapons, see Frank Pasquale, ‘New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI’, Harvard University Press, 2020.
* This is currently ca. $69 billion / year and is supplementary to the defence budget.