Armed Drones and the Ethics of War: Military Virtue in a Post-Heroic Age by Christian Enemark

Author:Christian Enemark [Enemark, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Political Science, General, Human Rights
ISBN: 9781136261213
Google: cX-_AAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18509363
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

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Drone operators and the warrior ethos

In circumstances of power inequality, and when there is doubt about the justice of going to war, opposing combatants are traditionally held to be moral equals. Each is as blameless as the other for the overall conflict (jus ad bellum), and all are equally required to fight justly (jus in bello). This moral equality is a point of commonality among combatants across countries and cultures, and even between armed enemies in war it is sometimes a source of mutual respect. The moral equality of combatants is, moreover, the basis for a warrior ethos; a sense of professional identity and purpose built around virtues and rules. The precise content and contours of this ethos vary across time and space, but it always has sociological significance too as a means of differentiating warriors and non-warriors (civilians) within a given society. Some authors prefer to draw a sharp distinction between the terms ‘warrior’ and ‘military professional’ because the former, they argue, evokes the caricature of someone who is old-fashioned, ethically non-constrained and even barbaric. Roger Wertheimer, for example, refers to ‘pre-professional warriors [who] have often been enthusiastically ruthless, glorying in plunder, pillaging, raping, enslaving, massacring, torturing, untroubled by any doubt that the victor may despoil the vanquished at his pleasure’.1 For present purposes, any such distinction is rejected in favour of the notion that ethical ‘constraints and worries have traditionally been seen as part and parcel of the ideal military character’.2 This then enables the warrior ethos to be seen as integral to military professionalism.

The previous chapter's discussion of radically asymmetric use of armed drones by the United States occasioned consideration of what counts as war. This chapter examines whether or how drone operators count as warriors, and the central themes for discussion are risk and courage. Mindful of the unique moral space that war potentially provides for killing someone justly, important questions include: is risk an essential characteristic of war, and is courage an indispensable characteristic of a warrior? Absent those characteristics, is killing rendered ‘unwarlike’ and thus divested of its moral potential? Arguably, by enabling risk-free killing, drone technology poses a fundamental challenge to war's precarious moral status. In the conduct of war (as a form of violence distinct from law enforcement or murder), the just war tradition demands that warriors use force in a manner that is militarily necessary, that discriminates between combatants and non-combatants, and that anticipates generating harm that is proportional to the expected military benefit. To require a drone operator to adhere to these principles is to assume, however, that he or she is waging war in the first place; that the killing being done has moral potential because it is warlike. The purpose of this chapter is to test that assumption by suggesting that it is not enough for a drone operator to use force in accordance with jus in bello principles. Rather, before being entitled to use force at all, there is a condition of reciprocity: a warrior is justly

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