Sterile Warfare Is Not As Sterile As You Think

We’re led to believe that drone missile technology makes war clean and safe, with fewer civilian casualties. Americans have bought this argument for they rarely question the impact that their drones are having in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. The only time a discussion came up about their use in the past couple of months was when David Petraeus cheated on his cow of a wife, though much more attention was given on the hypergamous mistress who won his heart.

The Spiegel recently ran an article about the effects of drone operation on the pilots…

Bryant remembers the first time he fired a missile, killing two men instantly. As Bryant looked on, he could see a third man in mortal agony. The man’s leg was missing and he was holding his hands over the stump as his warm blood flowed onto the ground — for two long minutes. He cried on his way home, says Bryant, and he called his mother.

“I felt disconnected from humanity for almost a week,” he says, sitting in his favorite coffee shop in Missoula, where the smell of cinnamon and butter wafts in the air. He spends a lot of time there, watching people and reading books by Nietzsche and Mark Twain, sometimes getting up to change seats. He can’t sit in one place for very long anymore, he says. It makes him nervous.

He looked to his girlfriend for emotional support, but that behavior was too beta for her, so she dumped him…

His girlfriend broke up with him recently. She had asked him about the burden he carries, so he told her about it. But it proved to be a hardship she could neither cope with nor share.

A female pilot learned to ignore her emotions and to just go for the kill…

“There was no time for feelings” when she was preparing for an attack, she says today. Of course, she says, she felt her heart beating faster and the adrenaline rushing through her body. But then she adhered strictly to the rules and focused on positioning the aircraft. “When the decision had been made, and they saw that this was an enemy, a hostile person, a legal target that was worthy of being destroyed, I had no problem with taking the shot.”

Many atrocities of the world have taken place from accepting the dehumanizing brainwashing that commanders use as justification for engaging against an “enemy.”

Today Meyer has two small children. She wants to show them “that mommy can get to work and do a good job.” She doesn’t want to be like the women in Afghanistan she watched — submissive and covered from head to toe. “The women there are no warriors,” she says. Meyer says that he current job as a trainer is very satisfying but that, one day, she would like to return to combat duty.

History has shown that advanced military technology does not remain solely in the hands of the elite powers. It’s just a matter of time until drones with low-yield missiles became accessible to rogue states and well-funded terrorists. Are drones the invention that brings destruction onto American soil where Japanese fire balloons failed? I believe this painful result is inevitable. Perhaps not on a grand scale of a 9/11 that takes many lives, but at some point there will be an attempt made to launch a weak drone attack that makes us experience a small fraction of what our sustained drone bombing campaigns inflict on Middle Eastern populations.

Don’t Miss: What It’s Like To Opt Out Of TSA’s Body Scanners