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James Sitter
Adam Padgett
ENGL 102
11/16/2016
Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles: Murder or a Technological Advantage?
As technology continues to be the focus on everything people in this world do, whether to
make jobs easier, production cheaper, entertainment better, or build advantage during war, a
moral question comes into play. There comes a point where the advancement and advantages of
technology either protects human life or makes the decision to kill another human during war too
easy to make.
Technology can do so much throughout the world when it comes to helping people, but
like everything else, war is also a business. War has been one of those constants throughout
humanitys existence. Technology has also been a constant of war. However, when technological
advancements in the past were made, they never compromised the main element of war. That
element is human life. Throughout wars in history, technology was used to protect humans as
much as possible or to harm them. Now that we have Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, the
human element has been almost entirely removed from war.
Is this not a good thing? The only real answer is a double-sided one. It is good that human
life is being much more preserved. However, the decision of war is where the real moral question
lies. The fact of the matter is, morally, it is easier to start a war without human life involved on
one side. Where it becomes even more morally differentiated is when you start looking at the

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person asked to do the killing. As a soldier on the ground, it takes a lot more strength and belief
in what youre doing in order to kill someone. It isnt like you can push the button and believe
that its all a video game. While talking about the distancing of troops and their enemies on a
personal and moral level, Coeckelbergh writes, the implication of this particular lack of
knowledge seems to be that the pilots [of drones] cannot respond in a sympathetic, empathetic
way towards the people on the ground, and therefore cannot exercise full moral responsibility for
their actions (Coeckelbergh 89).
Technology has been a hot topic ever since war existed, drones just happen to be one of
the latest controversial advancements in war technology. Everyone wants to get the upper hand
in combat. Some countries and some technology may cross certain ethical bounds to gain that
upper hand. One of these ethical issues is that a drone strike compromises the ability of the US
and its allies in the WoT [War on Terror] to gain valuable intelligence information from the
eliminated target (Romaniuk et al, 238). This is a huge issue as troops on the ground might be
able to detain certain targets and possibly deny future terrorist attacks if they had gathered some
information. Some people might say that drones can be used to gain this intelligence from
potential targets before striking. While certain intelligence can be gained by these methods, one
could argue that the amount of intelligence gained through screen watching is very limited, not
to mention lacking respect for the enemys life. As Paul Lauritzen states in his book The Ethics
of Interrogation, [i]f we understand human dignity to reside at least partly in the cognitive
capacities associated with the ability to make informed choices and to reason prudentially in
relation to those choices, then action that intentionally strips humans of those capacities can be
said to violate basic human dignity" (Lauritzen 286). We cannot strip the rights of people to face

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fair interrogation away. This very action shows the distance we have created between us and our
enemy.
While I cant argue the effectiveness of the targeted killing by drones, I can argue that
other killings could have been prevented. Having served on the ground myself, I know the
difficulty in the decision to take human life. You cant compare a soldier on the ground making a
conscious decision to end another human beings life with [k]illing [that] can be done within
office hours (Coeckelbergh 88). Soldiers constantly push their bodies to the limit during a war.
The same can be said about their minds as well. So many people can watch blood and gore on a
TV show without having and effects from this at all. However, if you have to physically kill
someone or watch one of your friends die for a mission that you believe in, it becomes a very
different issue.
War has consistently tried to put distance between sides through the advancement in
technology and how the evolution of warfare has constantly done this. Coeckelbergh summarizes
how the first technological advance in war was the creation of weapons, and then swords and
hand-held weapons evolved into arrows and long-distance weapons (Coeckelbergh 90). This
evolved into guns and cannons. Do you see a trend here? The trend is the increased distance
between two soldiers. Why is it that distance is the main goal of technological advancement? I
believe the main reason is that distance allows us to look at our enemy as a stat line, not a human
being. As Coeckelbergh states, [i]t is easier to kill if you throw a stone at someone who is
located a bit further away from you (Coeckelbergh 90). Drones have done this to a whole new
level. Think of a soldier who deployed. These men and women almost never come back as the
same person. In fact, Laura Goodwin has conducted several studies about this phenomenon
named Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). She stated in her research paper that her studies

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were able to confirm that combat experience is temporally related to PTSD [Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder] (Goodwin 400). The same cannot be said about watching life and death
through a TV screen. Although many acknowledge that drone pilots and other involved in the
practice reflect on their own work (Coeckelbergh 97), this cannot be considered the same as
fighters see[ing], smell[ing], and feel[ing] the skin, the bodily movements, the breathing, the
sweat and perhaps the blood of their opponent (Coeckelbergh 90). Drones make killing easier
for people because they dont have to look at people as human beings. They dont have to worry
about being too close to his opponent and that he wants more distance (Coeckelbergh 90).
Governments dont have to worry about extra health-care for these veterans or even shipping
them into another country. Drones allow soldiers to play a video-game war for the first time
without having to fear for their own life.
Many people have lost loved ones during the war. It always has happened and always
will. There is a certain aspect of war that requires human beings to lose some of what makes
them human. It forces people to detach themselves from life. This presents several risks like
depression, alcohol misuse and multiple physical symptoms [that] are associated with persistent
PTSD (Goodwin 399). Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is something that most people dont
understand what that situation is like so they dont discuss it or treat it as a taboo subject that is
not to be spoken about. From my perspective, although we sacrifice parts of us in order to kill, it
also allows us to show the respect in the war that each member is due. If a family is going to lose
their son or daughter, do we not owe it to them to understand ourselves that the undeniable
certainty of responsibility [is] on the part of the killer (Grossman 114)? So why are we using
drones? So many families are scared of watching their family members die by drone strikes in
war-stricken areas. Some of these families were innocent bystanders. In fact, the families of the

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victims often get angry calling US drones strikes [] illegal and indefensible (Akbar 129).
Why is it okay to instill fear into others without having to face that fear ourselves? It isn't okay.
The real way that you lose your humanity is by not facing enemy's face to face. It's by killing
them and going home to your family for dinner without ever really having to think twice about
the life you just took.
Drone warfare became a staple of President Bushs presidency. It became something he
was known for. People like Scott Romaniuk, in fact, suggest that not only are drone strikes
ineffective but now "represent a threat toward the very objectives that it seeks to achieve"
(Romaniuk et al. 13). Not only did the money spent on military technology like drones
consistently increase until 2010 (The World Bank 2016) as shown in the top graph, but with the
increase in money spent, terrorists related attacks in places like Afghanistan steadily increased as
well (World Developmental Reports 2011), as shown in the bottom graph. Although the
government had spent more money on drones, presumably because it was a safer and easier
option to kill with, terrorists reacted and increased their attacks and numbers.

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Drones have enamored the United States population for decades now. So much so that
drones are being sold commercially for fun and entertainment. Drones are being used as
propaganda as well as throughout surveillance in the country and abroad. The laws of the United
States, as well as other organizations around the world like the Geneva Convention and the
United Nations, have laws that allow for people to have certain basic human rights. While
surveillance is important, that alone can infringe these rights. If surveillance infringes our most
basic rights as American citizens, how is loading a missile onto a drone and launching it at a
specific target not going against these same rights? It is so easy for people to look at rules and
laws and make exceptions to these rules and laws just to keep themselves safe or to get re-elected
to office. It is even easier to push past these rules and uses drones as propaganda. Stahl argues in
his article that these "weapons are not just tools of destruction, but also perception" (Stahl 661).
Using drones is effective. It is also a way to ensure that other human rights are not being
respected to the level that we respect our own. After a drone gets surveillance on a target, that
surveillance can be made into propaganda. This propaganda has been made into "not simply a
neutral artifact left over from a bureaucratic exercise" (Stahl 663) but as a means to create the

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illusion to people that it is a logical and easy decision to kill with a drone strike. It is effective,
there is no human life risk on your side, and the worst thing that could happen is you lose the
million dollars it cost for that drone. In this aspect, isnt the logical choice to send a drone instead
of troops? It is logical, but it also takes away from the value of the enemys human life.
One of the greatest arguments for the use of drones in targeted killing is that they
accomplish their job without causing too much collateral damage while also protecting our
troops from being in harm's way. This was a very popular point of view because it is always
thought to be positive when a country doesn't have to worry about losing its own people's lives.
Many people thought that other countries thought the same way we did. However, many
countries believe that using drones to do the "dirty work" makes it an easier decision than it
should be to kill other people.
Although drones offer a lot of safety for the side using them, drone use also presents a lot
of issues. Drones have made it too easy for people to sit down and kill someone that they dont
even know without having to factor in any real risks. Just having other lives on the line makes a
decision to kill a target or conduct a mission a lot more difficult. In those instances, you are
forced to think about the possible loss on your side. You are forced to be willing to put people in
a situation where they might knowingly get hurt or killed. The troops are forced to see the target
as what they are, human beings. They are forced to understand their way of life and to
meticulously plan out their every move in order to successfully accomplish their mission. By
doing this, politicians, lawmakers, and troops have to become more aware of what it means to
take a human life. They have to immerse themselves in the art of killing. They also have to
make the decision to sacrifice that piece of their humanity for a cause that they believe is right.
There can be no second-guessing as to whether or not this is the right decision being made.

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Drones have made it too easy to take another human life. They have made it easier to violate
other human beings basic rights. If drone use allows us to violate basic rights, like privacy, and
think that it's okay to do this, then why would someone think twice about pushing a button? To
them, it's no longer a human life. It's a target in a video game that requires little to no second
thought.

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Works Cited
Akbar, Mirza S. et al. Fire from the blue sky. The Sur File on Arms and Human Rights. Vol. 12,
No. 22. 2015. pp. 123-131.
Coeckelbergh, Mark. Drones, information technology, and distance: mapping the moral
epistemology of remote fighting. Ethics Inf Technol. Vol. 15. 2013. pp. 87-98.
Goodwin, Laura et al. PTSD in the armed forces: What have we learned from the recent cohort
studies of Iraq/Afghanistan? Journal of Mental Health. Vol.22, No.5. Informa UK, Ltd.
2013. pp. 397-401.
Grossman, D. On killing. II: The psychological cost of learning to kill. International Journal
of Emergency Mental Health, Vol. 3, No. 3. 2001. pp. 137144.
Kenya Bureau of Statistics. "World Development Report 2011." Data. The World Bank, 28 Apr.
2011. Web. 03 Nov. 2016.
Lauritzen, Paul. The Ethics of Interrogation: Professional Responsibility in an Age of Terror.
Washington, D.C.: Georgetown UP, 2013. Print.
"Military Expenditure (% of GDP)." Data. The World Bank, 2016. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.
Romaniuk, Scott N. et al. Extraordinary Measures: Drone Warfare, Securitization, and the War
on Terror. Slovak Journal of Political Sciences. Vol. 15, No. 3. De Gruyter. 2015. pp.
221-245.
Stahl, Roger. What the drone saw: the cultural optics of the unmanned war. Australian Journal
of International Affairs. Vol. 67, No. 5. Routledge. 2013. pp. 659-674.