Unmanning the Front Lines

It comes on every now and then during the commercial break for Family Guy; they clearly know their recruiting pool. It’s a Navy recruiting commercial. A small recon boat is putzing along the sea, a sailor sticking out from a hatch on the top, throwing a reconnaissance drone, which sails off into the distance, sending back useful data to the command center, with which, I suppose, decisions will be made. Keith David, who you may recognize as the voice of Goliath from Gargoyles, comes over the action and declares that they’re “working every day to unman the front lines.”

This commercial, and the attitude which made it, bothers me quite profoundly. Perhaps my analysis is wrong, but if it stands, there’s quite a problem here. Briefly put: if the front lines are unmanned, the only things left to attack are the civilians. Now, this may sound callous of me, but isn’t the point of soldiers, in the final analysis, to be the ones to die so the civilians don’t have to? To protect us?

To me, the automation of war does much to protect soldiers but little to practically protect civilians. It encourages belligerents to seek unconventional methods and unconventional targets, because when you can’t break a country’s ability to make war, you can certainly sap its will to do so. When you can’t attack the troops encamped on the border — because they aren’t there — you bomb the cities. When there are no legitimate military targets, no soldiers to kill, you kill the people who haven’t signed up to fight, who aren’t armed, who aren’t protected.

It turns war into a video game, where you strike remotely the most valuable targets — and what’s more efficient? To seek out the enemy bunker, hidden deep in the mountains, or to just bomb the nearest major city?