Wired for Robot/Game Warfare

Last week in Understanding Media Studies, Professor Asaro presented the use of robots in the home, media and in war. He explained how unmanned aerial vehicles are piloted by individuals up to 3,000 miles away and more and more of the technology is becoming armed. These network centric warfare tools are used for surveillance (global satellites) and how the use of 1st person shooter real time video games have generated strategy tactics through their convergence with military. Media is also used in the military for recruiting financial backing along with propaganda methods. The concern here is over the human (and lack there of) elements and legal justification of murder. Here is my short response on the issue (mostly a rant). Along with a few links to articles on the subject for more back ground information.

My dad used to always joke that video games were just preparing the nation's young for war, and damn it, he was right. The idea that these machines/robots are now manned by x-box controllers is not exactly shocking. Why spend hours training people with complicated controls and commands when a simple "game" can do it? I used to write abstracts for government and army studies regarding methods of making soldiers react in more machine like fashions and it seems that with the generation of "game warfare" that line is being destroyed.

People who play x-box become mindless in their actions (and by mindless I mean they're just reactionary beings...see it, shoot it) and by transferring that aspect into war more directly the military no longer has to spend as much money training individuals to think like a robot. Yes people are still controlling the robots into killing or surveillance but it's viewed with the same distance as a game...almost as unreal. The military creates all these mind-fucking games and methods for justifying and reconstituting war and the common civilian has no idea (I'm not saying I do anymore than others), I'm just saying we live in "ignorant bliss" or we just ignore it because we're know that it's going to happen whether we're aware or not.

Our public opinion is so skewed from propaganda that we're not even sure what we really know...and what we do know is only a tiny aspect of the whole anyway. We are already at a distance from the war, we never "fight" on our soil so in order to keep men and women "fighting" the war the military has to create a distance for them while in the mist of it all.

Efficiency and ethics in war are not synonymous. America generates the illusion of ethics in war by saying that through efficiency and "preciseness" of modern warfare that America is more ethical but what's ever morally correct about killing?

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