On Killing Remotely by Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Phelps

Author:Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Phelps
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Regardless of which side of the debates mentioned above you fall on, it should be obvious that we are in an unsettled state with the acceptance and understanding of RPAs. A healthy debate over the moral, ethical, and legal use of weapons is definitely a good and necessary thing. Similar outcries in the past led to the outlawing of chemical weapons and land mines and a reduction and regulation of nuclear weapons and ultimately lead to a more just war and a just peace. Unfortunately, across the span of the past two decades, the warriors fighting with this weapon system on a daily basis, navigating this complex environment and public debate, have been the ones most affected and suffering from the unsettled nature of it in the interim.

So are RPA crews at war? Go ask the Reaper crew who blew the legs off an enemy fighter with a missile and then watched his son push him home in a wheelbarrow. Have RPAs changed the nature of war to targeted assassinations? No. RPA crews are at war and therefore from a legal, moral, and ethical standpoint are entirely justified in killing enemy combatants. Assassination is murder, targeted killing is what occurs during a military conflict. RPAs have not changed the nature of war, but they most certainly have changed the character or means of fighting a war. In the next chapter I’ll explore how this change in character has impacted our perception of what it means to fight with honor and how it has impacted the enemy’s perception of us when we fight with RPAs.

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