Making war a game

Consider yourself in these two situations.
One — You’re sitting on your couch playing “Call of Duty.”
You are on a massive killing spree, say 10 or 20 people, when all of a sudden somebody comes out of nowhere and puts a knife in your back.
You are upset, and when you respawn, you blow him up with a grenade.
Two — Consider yourself on an actual battlefield. You are terrified.
Explosions are going off all around you.
You’ve just seen one of your comrades go down, and, though you try to help him, he dies in your arms.
Obviously, the second situation is far different from the first because it is tangible.
The loss experienced in war becomes so incredibly real that it is etched into your mind.
This emotional connection in war — the ability to recognize there are actual people involved rather than a series of faceless enemies — is one horrible thing about war.
The soldiers remember their time, and, though they do their duty for their country, they understand war has a price.
Citizens hear about the horrors of war and work to spread peace because they can empathize with the victims.
However, we are at risk of losing that by relying on drone strikes.
In the last 10 years, there have been 383 confirmed drone strikes on Pakistan. Thousands have been killed, including hundreds of civilians.
How many of those have been reported?
It is a noble goal to minimize American casualties, but we are destroying the relationship between the target and the person eliminating the target.
With relationships that exist solely through a computer screen, we begin to approach the nonchalance of killing prevalent in video games.
When we do not lose anything in war, what is there to make war horrible?
Let’s say there are no American deaths in a hypothetical war fought solely between our enemies and American drones.
What is there to stop us from going to war again and again and again?
Perhaps we will get to the point when the only losses we will experience are economic ones — the cost of building a drone and its missiles.
It indeed is hard to argue against the merits of drones when we are concerned with our people — our mothers, our brothers, our fathers — and our intense desire to not see them harmed.
But what we lose if we make war impersonal is far worse than any one life.
We lose the ability to see human life as valuable and sacred.
I do need to point out a crucial distinction, however, and perhaps this is where my personal limit is.
Terrorism cannot be fought like a normal war, for terrorists are not limited to any one country, and they fight without regard for human life.
That does not necessarily mean we should also fight without regard for human life, but the ethical and moral considerations are far different than in a traditional war.
That’s a topic for another column.

     allenjo@indiana.edu
                 @IAmJoshAllen