rumitoid

Sorry, I personally find it incomprehensible to sit in air-conditioning, Pepsi in hand and far from danger, and really k**l people as if a video game, even if they are suspected or actual terrorist on a watch list, then go home to watch some TV or gamble a bit. It is a sick Sci-fi novel. I am not alone in finding this action highly troubling and dehumanizing. Here are a few articles that speak to this practice:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/magazine/veterans-ptsd-drone-warrior-wounds.html
And here a teaser from another grim source: "In fact, 68% of members of the Air Force who committed suicide were never deployed." https://archinect.com/features/article/150094126/suburbicide

They call it "suburbicide," when comfy and thoroughly safe "pilots" of drones are sick to their soul over their sterile cleansing on screen of human life, that often has collateral damage (women and children non-combatants), and end their lives. It should be a perfect war where our soldiers are not threatened or in any danger. Get your joy stick and rat-a-tat the enemy or blow him to oblivion. But it seems that we are not made by God for such games.

Here are a few other articles to read, the first by drone pilots:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/life-as-a-drone-pilot-creech-air-force-base-nevada
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/can-drone-pilots-be-heroes/424830/

Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

I both agree and disagree...

It hardly seems valorous to engage in such warfare... let alone fair...

On the other hand... I do not believe warfare is valorous or fair...

rumitoid

What often caused many young men to enlist was mostly the thought of valor, especially in England. How might they have felt sitting at home with mum and raining sabres on their enemies?

Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

I would also make the statement that such cowardly attacks will inevitably lead to equally cowardly attacks of retribution...

Common_Sense_Matters

Suicide bomber drones?

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Dehumanization of one's enemy is one of the rules of war. Dehumanization of one's enemy is the driving force behind training men to k**l fellow human beings. Pick any war in history, stick with the more recent ones, they are well documented, and you will find dehumanization of the enemy in spades.

Lt Col David Grossman, US Army combat veteran and psychologist who is now director of a research group dedicated to studying and analyzing the psychological consequences of training men to k**l. His book, On K*****g: The Psychological Cost of Learning to K**l in War and Society, is an eye-opener.

Moreover, dehumanizing an enemy is sometimes a national passion, not just a military training doctrine, the entire population is involved. A perusal of the advertisements, articles and OpEds in American magazines published during the Second World War is a prime example of an entire nation, sans a few dissenters, dehumanizing our enemy.

In a 1941 issue of Life Magazine, Bristol-Myers placed an Ipana toothpaste ad. It was a cartoon--a caricature of a Japanese soldier with the face of a monkey, his head twisted sideways, his jaw broken, and his teeth flying out of his mouth. A huge muscular arm, sleeves rolled up, brandishing a clenched fist, is what did it.

Long range k*****g, where the shooter cannot see his target, is also rather ancient. Go back to the Hundred Years War, the English longbowmen often loosed their shower of arrows over ridge lines or trees, never knowing if they k**led anyone or not, never seeing him if they did.

Consider bomber pilots and crews, ground attack pilots, artillerymen, tank crews, navy gunners and missilemen, combat air controllers, any one whose job is to launch k*****g machines or ordnance without ever seeing who or what they are k*****g.

It is a fact that emotional and psychological problems arose with some WW2 combat pilots, and to a lesser extent, artillerymen and others. These men personalized the enemy, they did not dehumanize them.

The problem today is technology. War technology has advanced so far that it has dehumanized everyone involved. You will note that dehumanizing an enemy is a fundamental aspect of training in the combat arms, such training was never given to young air force video gamers. They probably don't even know who the hell our enemies really are, seems half the people in this country don't, and a good percentage of them seem to think America is the enemy.

rumitoid

Agreed.

rumitoid

You are so far off the scale about being wrong you could be a Cyborg. Utterly repulsive attitude, fully inhumane. Dehumanizing one's enemies is what psychopaths do. Dehumanizing is what makes genocide a just cause. Hitler did a campaign of dehumanizing the Jews. And you approve of this grotesque view? You are one very, very sick puppy. You demonize the Left, all your comments predicated on making them "other then," not really human or worse. In all my life it is difficult to find a more vile and disreputable vomit of indecency than what you said. You have no soul.

To k**l another human being without regret is insanity. Our capacity for compassion, forgiveness, and generosity, what truly makes us human, is not to be forsaken for the twisted and bizarre idea of an expediency of dehumanizing another being or culture to achieve some end. To even talk about dehumanizing people as if it was an option, is so terribly disturbing as to be cause for criminal charges.

Blade_Runner, please read the accounts of drone pilots I provided by cites. I feel fairly certain you will not because you such a h**er. Wish I am wrong.