Drones and Wargames in the 21st Century

4 He shall judge between the nations
    and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
    neither shall they learn war any more.

                                             Isaiah 2: 4-5 NRSVue

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children. The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes – and we must.

from Jimmy Carter's Nobel Peace Prize Speech 2002

 We heard this past week that Ukraine is using a point-reward system for it's soldiers remotely piloting drones to wreak havoc on Russian targets. The military of both countries has been using drones to kill the enemy and bomb military bases and oil fields. Russia has used them to terrorize civilians, literally hunting them down in the streets. The Ukrainians soldiers can redeem points gained through successful missions at what has been described as an online store. 

This war is an unprovoked attack orchestrated by a monstrous despot in the person of Vladamir Putin and any sane person would hope that Ukraine will prevail and maintain its sovereignty. Canada has welcomed displaced Ukranians and in many churches, including ours, there have been prayers for peace. 

I still find this incentive program disturbing and of course their are moral and ethical issues about the use of drones in warfare going back a couple of decades now. There is a very good film from 2015 called Eye in the Sky, starring Helen Mirren, a drama which looks at the implications of using drones. 

Many of the young people who direct these weapons are part of the generations which grew up using joysticks to play video and online games, so they are equipped with the dexerity and mindset to do their jobs well. But the targets in this sort of warfare are human beings and all of these deaths are senseless. 

Yesterday Matt Galloway, host of CBCs The Current, did a segment on the implications of drone warfare and as usual the guests were articulate and thought-provoking. While I realize the excerpt below makes for a lengthy blog entry I think it's worthwhile. As we approach Remembrance Day we honour those who served and sacrificed in conflicts, even as we recognize the futility of war and as Christian Enemark cogently says, "every war is a tragedy of human failure." 

Matt Galloway:  Christian Enemark is a professor of international relations at the University of Southampton in the UK and has been researching arms control and ethics for two decades. Christian, hello to you.

CHRISTIAN ENEMARK: Hello, Matt.

MG: How have drones changed the way this war has been fought on both sides?

CHRISTIAN ENEMARK: On both sides of this war, drones have been a very cheap and effective way of causing harm to the enemy. It's also the case that almost always, there is a camera equipped onto the drone, which makes targeting more easy. You can really follow an object or a person, and the speed with which damage can be inflicted on either side is just so much faster because of this technology, because of this technology, and that is a kind of added layer of military force being able to be applied across what is, for the most part, a war of attrition involving aerial bombardment and artillery.

MG: Drone warfare has been dogged by ethical concerns long before the war in Ukraine. But again, this, this new Ukrainian drone program with these incentives and, you know, Amazon like store where you can redeem points, for example, how do you see that as somebody who researches ethics in drone warfare?

CHRISTIAN ENEMARK: Sure. Well, I mean, I acknowledge that if we were to look at this only from the Ukrainian government's perspective, we could say, well, the spending of these points is indeed a really clever, novel approach to military logistics, military procurement, because it's easy to see how in this kind of supply and demand way, you can rapidly get resources to those parts of the frontline where they are calculated to be most effective. But of course, we don't only have to look at it that way, because in order for those points to be spent, they have to be earned. And I think the earning of those points, I think, is more closely related to potential concerns from an ethical perspective, as a matter of military ethics, because I think when you cause there to be a resemblance between warfare and gaming, I think you run the risk of undermining a person's sense of the moral seriousness of the deadly and destructive actions that they are taking.

MG: The Ukrainian Minister for Digital Transformation, this is the body in the government that launched this program, defended it, saying, in his words, what is inhumane is starting a full scale war in the 21st century. What do you make of that rationale that this is a war, that there might be some gamification, but at its base level, this is a war?

CHRISTIAN ENEMARK: Look, it certainly is. And every war is a tragedy of human failure. And, you know, countries engaged in them try to do the best they can in a bad situation. And in Ukraine's case, there's no doubt that it is fighting its war in a just cause. It's a war of national self-defence. It's been a victim of an aggressive Russian attack. But, you know, that's not the beginning and the end of the moral story that you can tell about this war or any war. And, you know, when the word inhumanity is mentioned like that, it's important always to remember the potential victims of war and those individuals whose job it is to kill people and break things. And it is sometimes the case that that experience, that prolonged, horrific experience of wielding violence constantly, especially when it's videoed using a drone, that can be very emotionally damaging, very morally injurious to individual warfighters.

MG: What do we know about that? What do we know about how using drones to, I mean, to commit, you know, warfare, what does that do to the drone operators themselves?

CHRISTIAN ENEMARK: Look, there's some evidence emerging from experience with American and British uses of very long range drones in other parts of the world. And occasionally, an individual drone operator will go onto the public record and explain what it was like to kill in the way that they did. And in those circumstances, it's really the camera that is attached to the drone that makes such a critical difference in terms of the experience of killing someone else, especially when prior to that moment of killing, you've been watching that person doing quite ordinary looking things for hours or days leading up to that. And there's a profound sense of the gravity of what you're about to do under those circumstances. So even though a person can be very physically distanced from their would-be victim, the drone's camera really brings the user of force up close to the person who is about to be killed.

MG: I mean, it's interesting some of the criticism has come from Ukraine itself. A former Ukrainian prosecutor who now advises the military said to Time Magazine, and these are his words, we want our people to come back from the war as human beings, not as killing machines. Some of these new systems make that more difficult because the war can start to feel less real. So just finally, I mean, if warfare is increasingly being automated, we're not even talking about artificial intelligence here, but if it's being increasingly fought from a distance and part online, how do we have to rethink the ethics around war, or do we?

CHRISTIAN ENEMARK: I think the ethics of war are really good, just as they are some very old, still good principles about the importance of being humane, the importance of discriminating between combatants and civilians, the importance of fighting in a just cause rather than in an aggressive enterprise. Those ethical standards and expectations are still good in 2025. It's the technology that has to live up to those moral standards and expectations. It's not the case that we should be revisiting or watering down, downgrading our expectations ethically just because a particular technological capability has come along. It rather has to be the case that with each of these new innovations, we keep checking whether or not the design and use of those systems can adhere to the moral expectations that we have.

MG: Is that possible in the heat of battle as war is unfolding?

CHRISTIAN ENEMARK: Universal constant adherence has never been possible, but we always have to be aspiring to adhere to those principles.