A few years ago, I overheard a conversation among some of my colleagues at the CIA, many of whom were military veterans. They were discussing drone operations on the Ukrainian frontlines, and the conversation turned to whether drone operators qualify as aces. Ace is a title that suggests courage, evoking the image of daring airmen of the world wars. Calling drone operators aces, my colleagues concluded, felt cheap; their kills were too remote, their position too safe. There was hardly honor in maneuvering a joystick far from the battlefield’s thrill and danger.
To many, this de-risking of warfare for the soldier is a feature, not a bug. Weapons are generally designed to achieve some combination of four objectives: maximum lethality per pound, fastest deployment, safest distance, and greatest precision. In assessing just-war criteria, the Church has paid a lot of attention to the first two, less to the latter two. Still, precision weaponry that widens the gap between soldier and enemy carries its own moral risks. Disembodied warfare is spiritually vacuous; it abstracts the horrors of war from the people who fight it and the society they’re fighting for. Valor and guilt don’t disappear, but deprived of the physicality of war, they are transfigured into something more synthetic. My colleagues thought that drone operators’ characters suffered because of their distance from killing. Their discomfort reveals a deeper truth: the way we conduct war today wounds those who fight it because they are kept from reckoning with the consequences of their actions.
