At a micro level, sure, you could argue that kill/no-kill decisions are being made by frontline enlisted soldiers, but the stress, the exhaustion, and being able to see your enemy downrange add a degree of humanization and discretion.
Wars are brutal. Some warring factions are incredibly brutal. But taking a human life can't be reduced to a `KILL? [Y/N]` decision made by some MAJ somewhere. Killing enemy soldiers is a last resort (formally, this is the concept of _military necessity_), and normalization of it as anything else is a mistake.
I also think it's a fallacy to compare this to the self-driving car trolley problem; the timeline of decisions, length of the decision chain, and ultimate goal of the decision-making process are _aggressively_ different.
My overarching points are, I guess:
War is a tragedy, obviously, but I don't think there's a way to avoid it right now. In absence of some way to stop war forever (hah), we can't trivialize taking human lives. It's not lost on me that this has been happening for a while at this point, and that it's getting worse. I still oppose it, and I think we all have a responsibility to be more critical of this regime of warfare.
I don't know how to counter the argument of "well, if we don't do it, _someone else_ will, eventually." This is some really fucked up, self-justifying inductive reasoning that can't easily be countered by calling out the moral bankruptcy of the premise. In the past, mutual disarmament treaties have been a down-the-line bandaid for this kind of thought process, but the nuclear rearmament we're seeing in the world right now shows it's not a panacea.
You could start by not inventing vague hypotheticals to argue against, and instead engaging with observable, measurable strategic and tactical reality?
War is studied. There are journals, papers and research on war fighting at all possible levels.
In the most recent action by Ukraine you can observe actual reality: what did they attack? Military equipment of the enemy. Why did they attack it? To degrade the enemy's ability to sustain and rotate their forces attacking them. What was it for? Well for one thing it will hopefully considerably reduce their ability to bomb civilian targets.
In this specific case, I agree that it was fine -- using drones with limited decision-making ability to strike targets like parked aircraft is okay, as long as there's an overwhelming likelihood of the drones not getting false positives from invalid targets.
My response was more aimed at the parent comment to my previous one, which seemed to paint delegating kill/no-kill decisions with a brush of "I don't know why this is such a big deal."
At a micro level, sure, you could argue that kill/no-kill decisions are being made by frontline enlisted soldiers, but the stress, the exhaustion, and being able to see your enemy downrange add a degree of humanization and discretion.
Wars are brutal. Some warring factions are incredibly brutal. But taking a human life can't be reduced to a `KILL? [Y/N]` decision made by some MAJ somewhere. Killing enemy soldiers is a last resort (formally, this is the concept of _military necessity_), and normalization of it as anything else is a mistake.
I also think it's a fallacy to compare this to the self-driving car trolley problem; the timeline of decisions, length of the decision chain, and ultimate goal of the decision-making process are _aggressively_ different.
My overarching points are, I guess:
War is a tragedy, obviously, but I don't think there's a way to avoid it right now. In absence of some way to stop war forever (hah), we can't trivialize taking human lives. It's not lost on me that this has been happening for a while at this point, and that it's getting worse. I still oppose it, and I think we all have a responsibility to be more critical of this regime of warfare.
I don't know how to counter the argument of "well, if we don't do it, _someone else_ will, eventually." This is some really fucked up, self-justifying inductive reasoning that can't easily be countered by calling out the moral bankruptcy of the premise. In the past, mutual disarmament treaties have been a down-the-line bandaid for this kind of thought process, but the nuclear rearmament we're seeing in the world right now shows it's not a panacea.