I am going to try to keep this short, because the function to split the page is not available in this browser …what browser, you ask? Safari for IPad, I’ll tell you.
I’ve decided to make this my first IPad post in part because I was itching to try it, but also because it seemed fitting for it’s subject matter…a talk that Peter W. Singer gave at ISA-West in Los Angeles on September 25 on his book,Wired for War. So I thought I would write about Wired for War wirelessly. Funny, right? Maybe I should keep my day job. Maybe.
Ok, my thought about this talk and the book is relatively straight-forward, but perhaps still important. Singer started his talk with a commander’s letter “home” to a “dead” robot’s company, thanking the manufacturer for sparing the military the need to write a letter “home” to a soldier’s mother …as if a mother’s grief was the true tragedy of a soldier’s death. Elsewhere in the talk, Singer noted that many people who oppose the use of robotics in the US military or criticize it from an enemy or victim perspective attack the masculinity of its users. They argue that the use of robots is cowardly, and that ‘real men’ face and fight their enemies.
Singer’s analysis, of course, did not highlight the gendered dimensions of these discourses. Still, as important work in this field like Lauren Wilcox’s has demonstrated, this is not the first time that gender discourses have been key to debates about the use of new technologies in war. While, in Singer’s terms, whether ‘we’ are ‘wired’ for war or not seems to matter, being ‘equipped’ at whatever technological level seems include meeting standards of masculinity.
The idea of 'facing one's enemy like a man' went out the window as soon as we started using weapons that could kill from longer than line of sight. It's nice to have the noble warrior myth but it's meant progressively less and less since the invention of long range artillery, bomber aircraft and cruise missiles.
Actually, the salience of it might have gone down among Americans, and maybe even among “our” “allies,” but research is increasingly showing that it hasn't disappeared elsewhere in the world, and that its possible that what we've taken for its disappearance in the US military might be it morphing elsewhere. For example, American discussions of weapons “we” consider inherently heinous (like “dirty” bombs) are often talked about in terms of a “tough but tender” masculinity which “stands strong” but has no need for “unnecessary pain after impotence.”Â