Center for a New American Security

Running through much common misunderstanding of drones, autonomous weapons ,and modern warfare is a romantic fetish of the "natural" and a demonization of the machine and those who use it. Dan Trombly and I have talked about it from the perspective of drones, cyberwarfare, and other technological subjects.

But for Memorial Day weekend I won't just touch on how such romantic ideology distorts crucial military/security topics. I also want to talk about how the quest for the authentic (and anti-technological) also denies the very humanity of those who fight wars---or prevent them---with the aid of high technology and technoscientific rationality. The fetish of the "natural" and the romantic loathing of machines, science, and bureaucracy implicit in these critiques must be dismantled. Only then can we extend our appreciation to both those who both died (and continue) to die for us inside machines of war and those who took on the immense psychological burden of being a "Wizard of Armageddon."

The best place to start is with one of the most prominent sources of the modern hatred of the "machine"--Hannah Arendt and the so-called "Banality of Evil." Everyone is familiar with Arendt's idea of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as glorified accountant, a bureaucrat of death.

A new movie on Arendt is out in theaters. It chronicles her journey to cover the trial of Eichmann, an adventure that would cultiminate in her controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt contributed much to the way the nature of violence is conceptualized. But much of what was wrong and profoundly damaging to our understanding. As the linked article notes, Arendt completely misread Eichmann. Far from being Satan's VP keeping a steady hand on Excel-charting, payroll, and accounts payable, Eichmann believed firmly in the genocidal Nazi ideology.

This "banal" man uttered the phrases "I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals" and "I worked relentlessly to kindle the fire ....I was not just a recipient of orders. Had I been that, I would have been an imbecile. I was an idealist." These were not the statements of a Dilbert-esque boss sleepwalking through horror. Eichmann saw no inherent conflict between rational-scientific means of genocide and a romantic, quasi-occult ideology. Arendt could neither detect nor understand Eichmann's complex alliance of blood-and-soil pseudoreligion and bureaucratic-technical implementation.

To call Eichmannn in Jerusalem a misreading perhaps is, as Ron Rosenbaum argues, to greatly underscore its malicious distortions in an ironically Arendtian manner. He dubs the phrase "banality of evil" a "sophisticated form of denial" that comes very close to a "(pseudo-) intellectual version of Holocaust denial."  But this book did not deny the crime, rather it "[denied] the full criminality of the perpetrators." The psychological complexity of an Eichmann and the way Nazi ideology shaped the very gears of the bureaucratic machine he ran was totally foreign to Arendt.

So why have I started with Memorial Day and sidestepped into an arcane discussion of Holocaust historiography? Arendt tapped into a wave of humanistic sentiment that prefigured her journalism, and she popularized the  fantasy of the ice-cold bureaucratic murderer. As wrong as she was, she crafted a compelling narrative of a sociotechnical system that diminished the humanity of the men who operated it and killed millions. Arendt became an inspiration to the postwar revolt against Cold War center-liberal politics and technical rationality, as the article noted:

The postwar generation of young Germans took Arendt’s book as inspiration to rebel against their parents, who may not have personally killed Jews during the war but knew what was going on and did nothing. In America, protesters invoked the “banality of evil” to rail against the outwardly decent family men who dropped bombs on North Vietnam or sat in nuclear-missile silos, ready to push the button — seeing them as the cold war’s version of Arendt’s “desk murderers.”

Articles like Carol Cohn's "Sex and Death in the Rational World of the Defense Intellectual" bemoaned a world in which "technostrategic" elites "calmly discuss nuclear war... without any sense of horror, urgency, or moral outrage." Paul N. Edward's The Closed World conjured up a hermetic world of hyper-rational, inhuman Spocks sitting on top of a stack of supercomputers. Robots from 2001's HAL to the hunter-killer drones that chase Tom Cruise in Oblivion are cold and inherently threatening to humans. The use of Asimov's fictional rules of robotics (and particularly the citing of a rule that forbids a robot from harming a human even to protect humans) in anti-robot polemics is a testament in and of itself to Western culture's fear of the machine. ¹

Arendt tapped into a historical mythology that had already begun with World War I: the idea that industrial machines made war inhuman and the bureaucratic structures that controlled men stripped them of their humanity. As with any popular myth, it cannot be categorically dismissed. But World War I's history (as well as the diaries of the men who fought it) is at variance with the cynicism embedded within anti-war poems like "Dulce et Decorum est." Machines did not make for World War I's slaughter---the fact that commanders needed bloody practice to use them properly did. New technologies like indirect fire, wireless communications, tanks, and aircraft eventually helped break the deadlock.

But the sheer scale of the slaughter and the "shock of the new," as Christopher Coker argues, prompted an cultural effort by humanists to elevate the fragile human over the machine. This was after all, a time of great cultural upheaval and a sense that Western civilization was on the skids. Such a Rage Against the Machines necessarily fetishizes human authenticity and denies the benfits of technology. It implicitly posits that passions and culture is what produces humanity, and the "technostrategic" elite's lack of "horror, urgency, or moral outrage" has robbed them of their very essence.

The embedded hypothesis of such philosophy is that greater humanity--embodied in risk, emotion, and "old-fashioned" soldiery--reduces atrocity.  But in what universe does does a 19-year old rifleman who took to war directly from high school prom, who has just seen his friend lose his limbs a week before in a IED attack, somehow become an a priori better choice than a Air Force officer sitting in a Creech Air Force Base trailer? The great error in the prizing of passions and culture over the machine lies in the idea that passion points inherently in the "right" direction. In other words, Carol Cohn identifies "moral urgency" with her own left-feminist political positions.

There were plenty of men who could have had their fingers on the red button who had a different "moral urgency" than Carol Cohn. The romantic John F. Kennedy and his cadre of intellectuals were willing to "pay any price" and "bear any burden" to fight Communism in Southeast Asia. 50,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese paid the "price" and bore the "burden." Barry Goldwater thought that "extremism in the defense of liberty" was no vice and accordingly suggested using tactical nuclear weapons to break the Indochinese deadlock. And this is without bringing up the frenzy of killing by machete in many post-90s conflicts and the European religious wars they resemble.

The business of war is serious. it requires compassion, certainly. But it also requires a deductive mindset that is willing to "think the unthinkable" in order to prevent far greater horrors. Emotion in war is highly complex and binning the world of violence into either those with "moral urgency" and Spocks is analytically useless. Finally, outsiders often mistake coping mechanisms for inhumanity. Anyone familiar with the medical and emergency services community's black humor would instantly relate to the casual banter of the Army pilots recorded in the "Collateral Murder" WikiLeaks video. In the eyes of those who have never conversed with veterans, read war literature, or experienced highly stressful life and death situations, such banter was proof of their inhumanity.

Cohn is not unique. Humanist intellectuals commonly project their own morals and definitions of humanity as if they are unimpeachable truths. Teju Cole expresses disbelief that President Obama could read the same books he does and yet still make drone kill lists. But aesthetic taste does not translate into shared policy preference. Hence Cole's cognitive dissonance that a center-liberal American president like Obama could read Whitman and not agree with a left-leaning Nigerian novelist that drones are "ominous, discomfiting, illegal, and immoral."

Cole could drag his cursor over to the blog of conservative film critic Sonny Bunch, who may share many aesthetic opinions with his liberal counterparts but nonetheless writes for the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon. Why? Well, it might just be that Bunch could have some strong beliefs about politics and policy that diverge from that of a Teju Cole! Perhaps a President that spoke on the campaign trail about going after militants in Pakistan might also have similarly divergent preferences?

Placing the human and the machine in opposition also renders us unable to understand of some of the most significant political, cultural, and social trends of the 20th century. The same hippies who denounced the Pentagon's "closed world" went on to found the personal computing revolution. Without the power of modern communications, the extension of humanitarian empathy to Rwandans and Bosnians would have been substantially more difficult. And it sadly leads us to ignore those who fought and suffered in high-tech machines just as much as the infantry.

The image of the "Greatest Generation" in part is a creation of Steven Spielberg's bloody opening scene in Saving Private Ryan. But the biggest mass-culture representation of the aviator is Top Gun's cocky, vainglorious Tom Cruise. The men pushing ashore into the teeth of the German guns at Normandy are more clearly identified as the pulse of the nation. But US Navy Lt. "Maverick" is on the highway to the dangerzone, jumping off the track and shoving into overdrive. The titular US Army Pvt. Ryan is serenaded by the majestic strings of John Williams. In contrast, "Maverick" lives in a glorified MTV music video, his muse a scraggly pop star in a white lounge suit. Ryan is the cultural embodiment of the American soldier, whereas Maverick is just a military Ricky Bobby. 

"Earn this," a dying Ryan gasps at the film's close, daring the audience to live up to his sacrifice. "You can ride my tail anytime!" Maverick's oiled-up, volleyball-playing comrade exclaims after they return from a combat mission. No wonder Quentin Tarantino was able to so hilariously parody Top Gun's campy undertones.

Where's the beef, you might ask? Don't the flyboys have it easy? You might be tempted to quote T.H Fehrenbach the billionth time about "young men in the mud." But be prepared to recite your "chair force" jokes in front of a Army Air Corps pilot's Arlington burial plot. Or, better yet, wax lyrical about Fehrenbach and the "chair force" in front of a living Navy or Air Force pilot tortured in the Hanoi Hilton. As Samuel Jackson would say, I DOUBLE DOG DARE YOU! ² At one point in the Combined Bomber Offensive, you were better off slugging it out with the Japanese in the Pacific than flying over a flak and fighter-interceptor festooned "Fortress Europe."

The cruelest irony about Top Gun is that the actual Fighter Weapons School (FWS) was founded because naval aviators were taking unacceptable losses in the Surface-to-Air Missle (SAM) and interceptor-filled skies of Vietnam. Maverick was driven so hard precisely because his comrades were being blown out of the sky due to faulty Beyond Visual Range (BVR) tactics. Just as the Army Air Corps helped enable Ryan's Normandy invasion, the larger post-70s airpower revolution paved the way for the ground pounder to succeed at minimal cost in Desert Storm. If Rommel had cursed enemy airpower in World War II, Saddam's generals watched in disbelief as industrial-age formations and Baghdad's infrastructure was rolled up in a furious hail of precision-guided bombs.

Maverick is a figure with just as much humanity as Ryan. He may be sensorially rather than physically oriented into the fight. But he's in it all the same. Maverick, like many humans, reached such great heights because he saw the machine as a potential ally, not a evil HAL or Terminator. This weekend I will be thinking of the fallen aviators from the killing fields of WW1 Europe to the lost crew of Extortion17. They deserve your thought and sympathy too.

And let's have a moment of appreciation too for much-maligned Cold War nuclear strategists like Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, Andrew Marshall, and the Wohlsetters. Literary intellectuals like Carol Cohn scoffed at them and searched for ways to psychoanalyze and discredit them with every discredited Freudian metaphor in her playbook. But unlike Cohn, the Kahns and Brodies on both sides of the Iron Curtain held the fate of humanity in their hands. It wasn't easy. To think the "unthinkable," one must overcome one of the deepest psychological barriers known to strategy.

According to the field of psychology called Terror Management Theory, humans face a basic (and severe) psychological struggle in both grasping their own mortality and still managing to live productive lives. Kahn and Brodie looked into the abyss, visualizing a set of mushroom clouds that would likely not only end their own lives, but annihilate everything and everyone they cared about. So the Dr. Strangeloves, unlike movie directors who mocked them, paced the halls of power, using scientific and rational knowledge to either avert Armageddon or think about how we could pick up the pieces afterwards.

Perhaps the most obscene thing about the 1960s protestors' charge that a Brodie or Marshall = Eichmann is their inability to grasp the basic difference between a sociotechnical system structured by a hateful, genocidal ideology and one structured by men who sought to prevent nuclear annihilation. Were nuclear strategists' coping mechanisms and mannerisms socially inappropriate? Sure. But so are those of most doctors, medics, and homicide detectives. Were their ideas sometimes dangerously unworkable? Definitely. But they definitely did not deserve the abuse that the Kubricks of the world gave them.

This Memorial Day Weekend, let's cast aside the anti-technological bias of artists and philosophers and extend our appreciation to the aviator in all branches of the military. Let's cast aside stereotypes of Cold War Strangeloves and celebrate the American and Soviet strategists who refused to sugarcoat the truth and assumed the mortal burden of playing a deadly game that would decide humanity's fate. And let's even celebrate the drone pilots who have kept Americans on the ground safe and disrupted terrorist plots against the United States and Europe. They took on a burden too.

To do so does not imply any larger acceptance of the numerous and disturbing flaws of both the Cold War and the Global War on Terror. It does not mean placing the aviator above the infantry. It is to recognize a common humanity pulsing within the machine as it streaks over a future warzone. It also means respecting the awesome burden and contribution of very intelligent men at the helm of a Single Integrated Operational Plan.

And finally, it means ceasing the obsessive effort to dehumanize the men and women who fly drones, to stop asking moronic questions like "what do drone operators feel when they shut off the drone technology at the end of their days?"

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1. The ironic thing about using the three laws of robotics is that they were modified in practice, creating ethical quandries of their own. This aspect of Asimov's literature is glossed over by anti-robot campaigners.

2. Expletives removed, of course.

W. N. Hodgson on Memorial Day. Paul Fussell would have approved.

By all the glories of the day
  And the cool evening's benison,
By that last sunset touch that lay
  Upon the hills where day was done,
By beauty lavisghly outpoured
  And blessings carelessly received,
By all the days that I have lived
  Make me a solider, Lord.
By all of man's hopes and fears,
  And all the wonders poets sing,
The laughter of unclouded years,
  And every sad and lovely thing;
By the romantic ages stored
  With high endeavor that was his,
By all his mad catastrophes
  Make me a man, O Lord.
I, that on my familiar hill
  Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of Thy sunsets spill
  Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,
Ere the sun swings his noonday sword
  Must say goodbye to all of this;--
By all delights that I shall miss,
  Help me to die, O Lord.

Before Action (1916)

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Laurence Binyon (1914)

I can't be sure, of course, but I would guess my readership is pretty near the last group of U.S. readers on the internet who need to be reminded of this day and what it means. For our readers outside the United States, today is Memorial Day -- a day when we remember those who have fallen on the field of battle. Again, I suspect my readers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc. are more likely to know men and women who have fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan than the average reader browsing espn.go.com to check out news from the NBA playoffs this morning.

Many thanks to all of our readers who have served the allied nations in combat, and especial thanks to those who have sacrificed in blood.

This morning, a few articles of note caught my eye. The first was this article on civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should we accord them the same honor we extend to servicemen?

But don't expect President Obama to remember or thank the contractor personnel who died supporting our troops or diplomatic missions. Instead, expect to see contractor personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be portrayed as expendable profiteers, adventure seekers or marginalized members of society who are not entitled to the same respect or value given to members of the military.

While I agree that contractors are often subjected to cartoonish stereotypes like the ones mentioned above, I respectfully disagree on the question of whether or not they should be accorded the same respect given to our fallen servicemen. Contractors are active not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but all over the world in environments where the U.S. military is not present. They often work for large, transnational corporations which negotiate contracts to provide certain services and then reimburse their workers with financial incentives in league with the difficulty and danger of those services. While contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan may be great patriots (and are often veterans themselves), they find themselves conducting operations there and elsewhere working for for-profit corperations. That's a lot different than a kid in 2-22nd Infantry on patrol in Paktia Province or wherever. So, sorry -- circumstances matter. And while the U.S. military cannot do its job without the support -- especially the logistical and engineering support -- provided by expeditionary contractors like KBR and Bechtel, those individual contractors should not be honored in the same way we honor our nation's fallen soldiers and sailors.

Second, Paul Farnan has a nice apology (in the classical sense of the word) for General David McKiernan:

Over the past year, I have seen our focus in Afghanistan shift from kinetic military operations to one of engaging the population, building the capacity of the Afghan government, and ensuring that the military's top priority is the training and mentoring of the Afghan army and police. Integrated strategic planning with the United Nations and the Afghan government is now the rule rather than the exception, as it was when McKiernan arrived last June. The general has traveled around the country and has held countless forums, known as shuras, with Afghans in various localities. He has engaged local and provincial leaders one on one to hear their concerns and ensure that they understood the intentions of the international coalition. All of our Special Forces operations combined cannot win the support of the Afghan people the way these shuras do. [AM: And to whom is that remark directed toward?] ...

This struggle is not about killing insurgents. We have killed more insurgents than we can count over the past seven years and have moved no closer to victory by doing so. This struggle is about the Afghan population. Afghans must believe that their government will provide them greater security and opportunity for prosperity than the insurgency will. We are not naive; we know that military operations must continue and that some people must be killed -- but under McKiernan a more holistic approach to winning the peace has been our focus.

This is great, if it is true, and I have no reason not to believe Mr. Farnan. As my readership has heard me say on this blog and on various mainstream media, a perception had grown that McKiernan did not "get" counterinsurgency warfare. This may be unfair. And again, as I said on NPR and the Rachel Maddow Show and elsewhere, it appears as if General McKiernan was not so much a bad general -- he actually seems to have been quite competent -- as just not the right guy for the specific job. Or maybe not the guy that Secretary Gates and General Petraeus felt would either win the war as fast as they needed to see progress toward that end or with whom they did not feel as comfortable working as with General McChrystal. I don't know. But I do know this: as excited as I was and am to see a real sense of urgency about Afghanistan, and as excited I was to see a certain ruthlessness in President Obama, Secretary Gates, and General Petraeus, I also have a tinge of sadness: General McKiernan was hard done by, and I think the U.S. Army officer corps and most commenters recognize that unless he was guilty of some kind of insubordination we do not know about, then his relief could have been handled in classier way by all parties.

Memorial Day is for most Americans a long weekend in which, but for the occasional story on World War II and the liberation of France, there is little thought of what it is we ought be memorializing or why.

For me, it has become a somber, annual reminder of friends and familiars lost too young--of others still recovering from wounds that will serve as a reminder of wars which they are not afforded the luxury to forget. I think of Lenny Cowherd, who wrote his West Point history thesis on the Muslim Brotherhood, the first contemporary I knew well to die in Iraq--the first one who's death could not be undone by resetting MILES gear. Lenny was extended due to our inability to anticipate the Shiite uprising in Najaf. He left behind a young bride to whom he had been married less than a year.

I remember Andy Stern, a Marine forced to endure Army training who really believed that an Abrams could swim because the US Marine Corps told him it was so.

I think of another who sits today in a hospital with the question unanswered as to whether he will awake from his IED-induced coma. Another will never fully recover from shrapnel wounds that left him bodily a skinny caricature of his former self.

These, you see, are my wars and my compatriots' wars (and many of AM's readers' wars). But they are not America's wars. Listening to NPR this morning on my day off, reading through the newspapers, looking at the most emailed and read articles in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NY Times, and LA Times, I feel increasingly that service in Afghanistan and Iraq is little regarded and little understood.

What is it that defines these wars for the American people?

Once, service was seen as gallant and bravery lauded. Even in Vietnam, that most hated of wars, 242 were awarded the Medal of Honor. Today's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have resulted in fewer of the nation's highest award for valor in seven years (4 awards) then did a single month in Haiti in 1915 (6 awards including the famous Smedley Butler). And while only 18% of Medals of Honor have been awarded posthumously, none have been awarded to a living US warrior in any theater of the "Global War on Terror." So bravery does not define the war for most Americans--we, the Armed Forces, have taken that one out of the equation.

In the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, national mobilization resulted in a nation at war in which war was defined by family in harm's way and a nation committed to victory. In response to 9/11, America was asked to pay less in taxes and continue to go to the movies and spend as much as possible in order to keep the economy going. The cost of the war was literally passed on to our children and their children so that we could continue life uninterrupted.

War for most Americans, although not for Iraqis and Afghans, remains a spectator sport to which they can feel little emotional attachment. Fewer than one half of one percent of Americans have seen service in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even if we include the broadest reckoning of their friends and loved ones in the equation, 95% or more of all Americans remain profoundly untouched by these wars--even as their long-term security and way of life remains intimately tied to the outcomes.

For most Americans I am growing increasingly to believe, service is defined through the prism of recent reports on PTSD and the failures to provide adequate health care to our wounded warriors at Walter Reed and elsewhere. In a society that has not served, veterans have become a class of victims--a yellow ribbon magnet on your car reminds of the perils of service just as a pink ribbon reminds of the peril of breast cancer and a red ribbon of AIDS.

Of course, service is a choice, not a disease, a choice increasingly required of a citizenry separated by a wall of indifference from the real threat posed by the international takfiri movement.

This Memorial Day, in addition to remembering fallen comrades, I'll hope for a time when the nation again believes its security worth fighting for, its wars worth winning, and its warriors brave.