In 2013, the Pentagon created a new medal for “cyberwarriors” and drone pilots who were particularly successful at killing foreigners with remotely-operated weapons. As Stars and Stripes reported at the time, the medals were to be awarded to government employees (i.e., members of the military) “who make a difference on the battlefield but do their work far away from the combat zone.”
The proposal for the new medal met immediate resistance. Opposition arose, in part, from the fact that the medal ranked higher than the Bronze Star, which is awarded for heroic achievement in a combat zone. Actual combat veterans questioned why soldiers “fighting” from a comfortable office chair far from any battlefield should receive such highly-ranked medals. Opposition also came from the general public which recognized the absurdity of awarding combat medals to people who are not in any danger and sacrifice nothing as they rain down bombs on weddings in southwest Asia.
The medal was subsequently withdrawn later that year.
The reality of drone warfare, waged by safe-and-sound soldiers far from danger, does raise an important point about modern warfare. It helps illustrate how wealthy regimes can afford to replace soldiers with expensive technology, and instead invest in weaponry that requires less and less personnel be present on the front lines. This will become all the more apparent as drones and robotic soldiers become more central to military operations.
The US military, of course, has been going down this road for decades. The over-the-horizon (OTH) military strategy, now employed for more than twenty-five years, further expands US military operations while minimizing the battlefield exposure of human military personnel.
When the US regime employs, say, Tomahawk missiles to threaten some foreign regime, or bomb schoolgirls in the name of spreading freedom, there is little need for American personnel to go anywhere near the intended targets. This is all the more true when the US regime is fighting countries that are much poorer than then US. Over the past 35 years, the US has been careful to only directly attack those regimes that have no ability to project military power beyond short distances. This allows the US to use its own technological superiority to inflict death and destruction from far away. Even when the US enters into foreign airspace, it does so at altitudes that render US personnel generally out of reach of the very limited anti-aircraft capabilities of the enemy.
The degree to which wealthy regimes have managed to substitute technology for frontline manpower has accelerated, and, as drone warfare has shown, it is now possible in some cases to remove one’s own military personnel from the battlefield entirely.
Long gone are the days of simply throwing large numbers of troops at the enemy’s fortifications, as was common into the twentieth century. Even in those cases, military technology still mattered, and confronting the enemy with superior tech has always offered an advantage. Yet, the wealthiest countries—like the United States—now have access to military technology that creates a huge asymmetry between rich and poor regimes. Consequently, wealthy regimes are able to conduct military operations with minimal human cost, while poor countries, on the other hand, endure the overwhelming majority of human casualties in conflicts with rich countries.
This was already apparent in the Vietnam war. Even in defeat, the Americans suffered far fewer losses than the Vietnamese, thanks to superiority in air power and other forms of technological superiority. Americans could project more “bang for the buck—to use Robert McNamara’s phrase—in place of added personnel. The Americans suffered approximately 58,300 military deaths—and virtually no civilian deaths—while the North Vietnamese endured at least 700,000 military deaths.
Thanks to this technological asymmetry, combat deaths for Americans are relatively rare, and the Americans can occupy another country for decades while enduring “only” several thousand battle death. In the 20-year US-Afghanistan war, for example, 2,330 Americans were killed on contrast to more than 80,000 deaths among the Taliban and its allies.
This technological superiority is all very expensive, to say the least, and it’s made possible by the American taxpayers. It’s the taxpayers who supply the American military with the tools and weapons and technology that create such an enormous symmetry between the warmaking capabilities of most foreign regimes, and that of the US regime.
From the perspective of American military personnel, this is extremely beneficial. Even with the US’s countless non-defensive and illegal wars, American combat casualties are extremely low by historical standards.
American politicians love to put 20-year old American men in harm’s way in the service of Israeli war criminals, and to launch forever wars in the name of “global democracy” or some other pie-in-the-sky fantasy. But, thanks to the taxpayer-funded technological advantage, few Americans find themselves in actual combat zones or near the killing fields where Americans rain down death on foreign civilians.
For this, American troops and their families can thank American industrialization, American free enterprise, and the American taxpayer. The taxpayer, of course, pays for all the tech, all the medical treatment, and all the weaponry that sets Americans above the military capabilities of other states. It is also thanks to all this taxpayer wealth, moreover, that we rarely hear about a military draft anymore. Conscription is unpopular, so the regime has looked to ways to minimize the need for large numbers of combat troops. The regime replaces troops with dollars.
The military—being part of the state—produces no wealth of its own, of course. The military relies fully on the regime’s ability to tax, inflate, and otherwise redistribute the wealth of the taxpayers to government agencies and personnel. Moreover, without the labor, productivity, and investment provided by the taxpayers, there would be no nation to protect in the first place. There would be only huts and grinding poverty, with an equally poor military to offer “protection.”
Unfortunately, all this taxpayer productivity helps the ruling class as well. In recent decades, it has become increasingly apparent that significant numbers of military casualties would trigger more opposition to the regime’s wars. The US regime is able to get away with so many wars in recent decades thanks to the fact that the general public does not fear Iwojima-level casualty lists after each military engagement. American casualties are now rare enough that few Americans even bother to notice when the US launches a new military campaign against some far-away “enemy.” Unfortunately, it could be that, in a way, the military’s ability to substitute tech for personnel helps the regime get around the political blowback that comes with high casualty levels. It is possible that without these taxpayer-funded advantages, the regime would be forced by political resistance to engage in fewer wars altogether.
On the other hand, it is possible that even without these technological advantages, the regime would still double down on war and simply resort to propaganda, false flags, and outright censorship as a means of manufacturing consent. It’s impossible to know for sure.
But it is difficult to deny that, thanks to hard working American taxpayers, savers, and entrepreneurs, the experiences of American military personnel are increasingly defined by jobs like “drone pilot” that are nothing like the cannon-fodder positions of old. Perhaps it is just a matter of time until the military is routinely handing out medals for programming military robots and sending in drones to fight battles thousands of miles away.
