Visiting Professor Shines Light on Myths of Unmanned Warfare

From Southern News:

Vampires and Call of Duty were all used as subject matter in a lecture on war drones, but the only myth was that drone operators suffer less than combat soldiers. 

Visiting philosophy professor Dr. Nolen Gertz, of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., addressed common misconceptions of drone operators in his lecture of, “The Myth of Unmanned Warfare: Drone Operators, Cyber Warriors, and Prosthetic Gods” Nov. 14 in Engelman C112. 

His lecture focused on how little people realize that although the drones are unmanned, those who operate the drones experience the operation more than a soldier on foot may experience it. Continued...

Find out more about the talk here.

Find out more about the book the talk is based on here.

Cyber War is Here

Will you answer Cyber Kitchener's call?

From Grace Wyler, "Britain's New Hacker Army Could Change the Face of Cyber War":

....as the McAfee report points out, the cyber cold war is already underway, and it will only escalate as more nations develop cyber capabilities. While Britain’s announcement may make online threats more likely in the short term, it will also provide the first test of whether offensive cyber capabilities can serve as a deterrent measure against future attacks. And if other countries follow Britain’s lead, it will bring cyber security policy out into the open, aligning public debate with the realities of modern war.

From Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., "'Cyberwar' is Over Hyped: It Ain't War Til Someone Dies":

Healey doesn’t think much of some of the ethical and strategic choices the US has made, either. “I’m so against things like Stuxnet [and] how aggressive the NSA has been,” he said at Brookings. “We’ve got glass infrastructure and we shouldn’t be throwing stones.” Indeed, Healey argued that the military has grown too dominant in cybersecurity policy, which has been “militarized” in large part because of over-hyped fears of cyberwar.

For several years now we have been hearing whispers of a coming "cyber war," and it appears that Britain has moved from whispers to shouting, having announced earlier this week the formation of a UK Cyber Command.  Certainly they are not the first to form such a unit, but as Wyler points out, there is something about the brazenness of their announcement that makes the UK's actions seemingly different from those of the US, China, and other cyber-armed countries.

Yet, as Freedberg Jr. puts it pithily, we are likely overly hasty in our proclamations, as "it ain't war til someone dies," and there certainly appears to be a big difference between what military software can do and what military hardware can do.

How then should we view this situation, as one of bellicose escalation or as one of empty posturing?

Perhaps William James can be of use here.  As James points out in his "The Moral Equivalent of War" essay from 1910,

It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the "peace"-interval.

Should we then think, contrary to those who see cyber "war" as a misnomer, that in fact the "preparation" is the cyberwar?  In other words, war and violence should not be thought of as defined and delimited by body counts as Thomas Rid and Steven Pinker would suggest, for the atmosphere surrounding warfare can itself be violent, as James is here suggesting, and as Frantz Fanon argued in his The Wretched of the Earth.  A cyber army need not ever take a life in order to have a violent impact on life, even if that impact were to only be imagined by the hysteria over cyberwar rather than felt by the declaration of a cyberwar.

The talk of cyberwar is leading us to less and less trust the internet as we each day become more and more dependent on the internet, creating a state of existential anxiety wherein our cyberurges are the cyberweapons of each of our personal cyberwars.  In other words, cyberwar is real and it is already here.

Is this what you want your children asking you one day?

The Philosophy of War and Exile

My forthcoming book The Philosophy of War and Exile: From the Humanity of War to the Inhumanity of Peace, will be published by Palgrave-MacMillan on September 5th, 2014 as part of their new Palgrave Studies in Ethics and Public Policy series, edited by Thom Brooks. 

It's currently available for preorder on Amazon.com.

The abstract:

The Philosophy of War and Exile argues that our current paradigms for thinking about the ethics of war—just war theory—and the suffering of war—PTSD theory—judge war without a proper understanding of war. By continuing the investigations of J. Glenn Gray into the meaning of how war is experienced by combatants we can find an alternative understanding of not only war, but of peace, culminating in a new theory of responsibility centered around embodiment and mortality rather than praise and blame. This conception of responsibility will in turn allow us to not only ask new questions about torture, unmanned warfare, and the treatment of veterans, but also to ask new questions about what it means for noncombatants to experience as home what combatants experience as exile.

The Table of Contents:

PART I: BECOMING RESPONSIBLE
1. The Lust for War vs. The Lust for Judgment
2. A World Without Responsibility
PART II: BEING IN EXILE, BEING AS EXILE
3. What's Wrong with (How We Think About) Torture? 
4. Drone Operators, Cyber Warriors, and Prosthetic Gods
5. Of the Many Who Returned and Yet Were Dead
Conclusion: Our Veterans, Ourselves

Until the book is released, you can check out the article by Dan Baum and book by J. Glenn Gray that first inspired my book, the image that best encapsulates it, and the poem that says everything I want to say, only better... 

To a Conscript of 1940

Sir Herbert Read

A soldier passed me in the freshly fallen snow,

His footsteps muffled, his face unearthly grey:

And my heart gave a sudden leap

As I gazed on a ghost of five-and-twenty years ago.

I shouted Halt! and my voice had the old accustom'd ring

And he obeyed it as it was obeyed

In the shrouded days when I too was one

Into the unknown. He turned towards me and I said:

'I am one of those who went before you

Five-and-twenty years ago: one of the many who never returned,

Of the many who returned and yet were dead.

We went where you are going, into the rain and the mud:

We fought as you will fight

With death and darkness and despair;

We gave what you will give-our brains and our blood.

We think we gave in vain. The world was not renewed.

There was hope in the homestead and anger in the streets,

But the old world was restored and we returned 

To the dreary field and workshop, and the immemorial feud

Of rich and poor. Our victory was our defeat.

Power was retained where power had been misused

And youth was left to sweep away

The ashes that the fires had strewn beneath our feet.

But one thing we learned: there is no glory in the dead

Until the soldier wears a badge of tarnish'd braid;

There are heroes who have heard the rally and have seen

The glitter of garland round their head.

Theirs is the hollow victory. They are deceived.

But you my brother and my ghost, if you can go

Knowing that there is no reward, no certain use

In all your sacrifice, then honour is reprieved.

To fight without hope is to fight with grace,

The self reconstructed, the false heart repaired.'

Then I turned with a smile, and he answered my salute

As he stood against the fretted hedge, which was like

white lace.