At "Eye to Eye, Drone to Drone: The (De)Personalization of Warfare" last Friday, six experts addressed the implications of new remotely-controlled tools for waging war in the 21st Century.
Panelist Admiral Ami Ayalon, former commander in the Israeli Navy and co-founder of The People's Voice, an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative, was presented the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award during the event. Avalon started off in the Israeli Navy with just an AK-47 and a knife, he said, but by the end of his career he'd learned to operate far more sophisticated technology.
"I was launching missiles over the horizon … killing people I never saw," he said.
The panel was moderated by Ellie Caple, a junior and a member of the EPIIC Colloquium.
Ronald Arkin, regents' professor and director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology, discussed how unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as drones, allow countries to fight remotely. He contrasted the advantages of drones — precise strikes, more time to make decisions and political tolerance — with disadvantages — lack of transparency, exhausted operators and poorly designed interfaces.
"This is the future of the military," he said. "The really old school. Braveheart encounters are few and far between."
Lt. General Dirk Jameson, the former deputy commander-in-chief and former chief of staff of U.S. Strategic Command felt similarly.
"The chain of command is failsafe [when using drones]," Jameson said. "Mistakes can be made, but they should be very rare, if ever."
Ayalon, however, disagreed with Arkin and Jameson about the role of drones in the future of warfare.
"I think that the role of technology is diminishing," he said. "The only technology that I think is relevant is the media."
Ayalon believes that modern war has little to do with physical conflict.
"Victory will be achieved by the one that controls the narrative, and technology will have nothing to do with it," he said. "The war that we're fighting is a war of ideas."
Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, agreed that new technology was not significant to modern warfare but for different reasons from the ones Ayalon listed. Through her work in Sudan and Rwanda, Sirkin said she witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of older weaponry like landmines and AK47s.
"Thousands of villages in Darfur have been destroyed in a pretty low-tech way," she said. "Indeed there is a face to face, eye to eye … warfare that has gone on in Afghanistan."
The panel's discussant, Wendell Wallach, chair of the Working Research Group in Technology and Ethics at Yale University, said it is certain that other nations will eventually catch up with United States' sophisticated drone technology.
"Right now, we're the only country in the world using drones in any significant way," Wallach said. "We have a strategic advantage. That's not going to last. Once the technology has been developed, it's not that hard to backward-engineer it."
