What if soldiers were all replaced by robots? We’d have no one to mourn, except the civilian victims of war. We’d have no need for Memorial Day. Even so, such a world would be our worst nightmare.
A lynchpin of success for many of the non-violence movements in the world has come through the moral agency of soldiers, and their unwillingness to fight. From England’s Glorious Revolution, to the fall of the USSR, war and violence in many cases failed because those required to carry it out relented to a bigger social or political reality.
If industrial violence is automatized, then the man who presses the buttons will be significantly empowered against one of humanity’s great means to non-violent power: conscience. I wish every engineer working in every sequestered little workshop building the Terminator or some version of it would be educated to this reality. The nightmare of a world with robotic armies is second in its terrifying nature only to a world which has suffered the damage of nuclear war.
I don’t agree with the moral choices of soldiers, but I deeply respect the fact that these are people who for the most part are making what in their minds are principled moral choices. Compared to the alternative, where no soldier’s life is ever at risk, this is something to be applauded. These are men and women who are willing to die to preserve the place of moral choice in war – even if they don’t realize it, even if I don’t agree with their choices.
