Introduction
This article argues that to be morally acceptable, in addition to adhering to existing legal and ethical frameworks, war should hurt. Specifically, that it should hurt those who conduct it. The article uses the example of drone strikes and considers the various ethical lenses through which this form of violence has been addressed. ‘Drone strikes’ is the name given to missiles being released from remotely piloted aerial vehicles (more commonly called ‘drones’), which I introduce in the subsequent section. This way of conducting war has raised questions about whether the physical distance between the crews and targeted populations results in emotional or moral distancing in a way which challenges what we think of as acceptable behaviour in war.Footnote 1 This is because the individuals who crew drones are not situated within the airframe, but are often thousands of miles away from way the drone is being used to conduct strikes (e.g. crews based in Nevada (US) conducting drone strikes in Pakistan).Footnote 2 Scholarship to date has focused primarily on compliance with international law, application of just war principles (particularly, under jus in bello, the principles of proportionality, discrimination, and military necessity), and the threshold for the use of force in international affairs.Footnote 3 Underpinning these perspectives, I contend, is a primary motivating question about whether killing from a distance and (almost) without risk of physical harm renders the drone crews’ actions inherently unethical. To unpick these concerns and address them more fully, I foreground a feminist ethics of care. To do so, I engage with examples from interview data I have collected from former British and American drone crews, as well as published data collected by other scholars and journalists from currently serving and former British and American drone crews.Footnote 4 This enables me to consider how the ethical framing I set out here might usefully be applied to the lived experiences of those involved in drone operations, and particularly, drone strikes.
A feminist ethics of care enables a stronger engagement with the messiness and complexity of making moral judgements about harm, hurt, and death in warfare. Jus in bello ethics, and related commitments in international humanitarian law and the laws of armed conflict, are undoubtedly important for mitigating the horrors and violences of war. However, they do not provide the necessary vocabulary and way of ‘staying with the trouble’ of ethical decision-making in contemporary, technologically advanced warfare.Footnote 5 These limitations, I suggest, prevent us from understanding the lived experiences of warfare and fully articulating ethical judgements relating to those experiences.
The ‘hurt’ I discuss in this article is akin to the idea of an appropriate affective response to killing, perhaps articulated as dis-ease, of unease or disquiet (and I unpack this further later). This hurt does not preclude a sense of satisfaction or professional pride at a job well done, at an enemy eliminated or a threat neutralised (to use military language). It is a sense of gravity and profoundness which should temper any jubilation. Essentially, life should never be taken flippantly or lightly. Even at a strategic level, deaths have a profound impact on military progress and decision-making, else they should not be permitted as militarily necessary. At a personal level, the eradication of even a single individual disrupts complex webs of relationships, kinship, of economic, social, and cultural ways of being in the world. To kill ethically, I argue, those who undertake that killing must be conscious of, and feel, this gravity, context, and reality.
This paper does not argue that service personnel have not previously ‘cared’ about themselves and others in warfare. Instead, what I aim to do in this paper is to render that caring explicit, to naturalise it in the context of combat and in so doing consider more fully the moral and psychological implications. To make the argument that to be ethical war should hurt those who conduct it, the article proceeds in the following manner: Firstly, I introduce drones and their use in warfare. I then move on to articulating the existing jus in bello debates relating to morality in drone warfare – with particular reference to the ethical action of those engaged in conducting lethal strikes. Through the lens of ‘killing-from-a-distance’, I discuss the arguments made to explain why the extreme asymmetry of drone warfare/strikes makes us feel ethically uncomfortable under the heading of jus in bello and interbelligerent risk. Thirdly, I explain the way the addition of a feminist ethics of care is essential to thinking about how and why these strikes may be ethical or unethical. Finally, I argue that to fully apply an ethics of care to drone warfare we need to understand why killing, even when ethical, should ‘hurt’ the military personnel who do it.
I pause a moment here to reflect on my positionality as a researcher in making these ethical claims. I am conscious that it may appear disingenuous or even offensive for an individual who has never engaged in warfare to comment or commend a particular affect to those conducting it. To argue that service personnel should be hurt by their experiences feels (and perhaps is) contentious. However, I want to clearly state that my argument is not that those individuals should be forever traumatised by their experiences of killing or that they should experience moral injury which disrupts their sense of self and mars their life. Rather, the aim is to do two things: firstly, to explain why ideas of killing at a distance, of the much-contested ‘playstation mentality’ among drone crews, and conversations about the revolting language of civilian casualties as ‘bug splats’ are morally problematic and feel so alien to our ideas about how war can and should be conducted.Footnote 6 And secondly, to provide a language, beyond that of trauma and the evisceration of the self, with which to understand how and why killing is and should be hard to do, even in war. Even when conducted from an extreme distance and even when it constitutes right action.
Drone warfare
Drones are unmanned aircraft – there is no pilot or crew on board the aircraft. Rather drones are piloted ‘remotely’ from a distance.Footnote 7 Not all drones are armed (indeed the majority are not) and not all of them are as large as the eponymous Predator/Reaper drones. However, it remains these armed varieties which create the greatest sense of ethical dis-ease. Similarly, not all armed drones are used for the kinds of targeted killing campaigns which the US – sometimes under the auspices of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), sometimes via the Air Force – engaged in as part of the Global War on Terror.Footnote 8 Targeted killing brings with it its own specific set of ethical dilemmas, but the argument made here applies equally to those campaigns as to the less-contentious use of drones as close air support. It applies to the use of armed drones by the US and also to other states.
The use of drones for lethal strikes has become one of the most discussed forms of contemporary warfare. Since the first US drone strike against al-Qaeda targets in Yemen in 2002, the idea of being able to kill enemies without having service personnel in the same area has captured the imaginations of military planners, of protest groups, of the media and the zeitgeist of the general public.Footnote 9 There are significant questions regarding whether this kind of operation actually constitutes a form of warfare, an act of war, or some other kind of extra-judicial violenceFootnote 10 In addition to the US, numerous other states have sought to develop or purchase their own drones (both armed and unarmed). Advocacy group Drone Wars UK currently estimates that 48 countries have ‘medium-altitude-long-endurance’ armed drones (the category which Predator/Reaper fall into).Footnote 11 Similarly, the New America Foundation estimates that ‘over three-dozen’ states have armed drones and that ‘more than 10’ countries have conducted drone strikes, listing ‘the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates’.Footnote 12 In addition, the use of drones by non-state groups has significantly increased and concern about different ways of using drones (suicide drones, swarms, autonomous) has swelled.Footnote 13
In many instances, the move to situate crews outside of the airframe, particularly in relation to the US use of drones for targeted killing campaigns, has been viewed as morally contentious.Footnote 14 The level of derision levelled at the operating crews in both scholarly and journalistic accounts indicates some of the strong feeling which drone strikes elicit.Footnote 15 Contemptuous references to ‘cubicle warriors’, ‘armchair killers’, ‘button pushers’, and so on sit alongside cartoon images unfavourably comparing drone crews/pilots to ‘Top Gun’ pilots.Footnote 16 There are gendered issues relating to who can be heroic and our cultural expectations of what a warrior looks like, which I have previously unpacked, but there is a discomfort which is reflecting another argument.Footnote 17 In Jeangène Vilmer’s argument, the French reluctance to purchase and use armed drones resulted from thinking which ‘continue[s] to emphasize contact with the enemy’ and ‘risk reciprocity’ – ideas this paper returns to in the section on interbelligerent risk.Footnote 18 Similarly, Renic notes that drone warfare takes us to a place of ‘radical asymmetry’, where that lack of risk represents something ethically problematic.Footnote 19 This too is reflected in the French articulation that ‘It is the sacrifice of one’s own life that makes the obligation to kill morally bearable,’ meaning that many ‘considered that it was illegitimate for drone pilots to kill precisely because … they do not put their own lives at risk’.Footnote 20
Feminist investigations into drone warfare have also observed the way the apparent lack of physical risk has been connected with a questioning of the masculine status of drone crews.Footnote 21 This masculine status is one which is conferred on the majority of those within the armed forces as these institutions have both empirically comprised of a majority of male bodies and have been associated with ideals of ‘manhood’.Footnote 22 However, the distancing and lack of risk inherent in drone operations has resulted in what Cara Daggett refers to an ‘unusual moment of vertigo’ in how we understand the gendering of militaries and war violence.Footnote 23 I want to make use of this ‘moment of vertigo’ to suggest that in the case of drone crews, and more widely across the armed forces, there is an opportunity here to rethink the tried-and-tested frameworks which have traditionally organised ethical decision-making, specifically through a feminist ethics of care.
In this article, I argue for the foregrounding of a nexus point between Renic and Jeangène Vilmer’s concerns about the lack of inter-belligerent risk together with Anderson’s concerns about drone warfare making recourse to war ‘too easy’.Footnote 24 In addition, I want to go beyond the excellent work done by scholars such as Emery and Crawford, who focus on civilian casualties to argue that all forms of killing (whether civilian or combatant) should ‘hurt’ the individual doing the killing.Footnote 25 To do so, it is first necessary to briefly outline the ethical frameworks which govern lethal force and drone warfare.
Jus in bello in drone warfare
There are laws, norms, and guidelines which aim to reduce the worst excesses of warfare – the laws of armed conflict and the principles of just war (for example). International Humanitarian Law seeks to limit the number and scale of instances of violence in war – under the umbrellas of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Of these two, this article focuses on the latter, which has greater connection to the argument being made.Footnote 26 The primary elements of jus in bello which pertain to drone warfare are discrimination, proportionality, and military necessity. The first two of these are more widely discussed, but it is perhaps the third which provides more interesting insights into the novelty of drone use. Discrimination refers to the requirement that military personnel distinguish between enemy combatants and civilians – they must try to discriminate between those two categories. Of course, this was more straightforward when militaries met on set battlefields and wore easily distinguishable uniforms (particularly where these were brightly coloured). This becomes more difficult to do when your enemy seeks to leverage the civilian population as a place to hide (as in insurgency) or where the civilian/combatant distinction is hard to make – for example, where civilians participate in hostilities, or where the ‘enemy’ is informal or lacks the formal organisational structure of, for example, a national military. Discriminating between those who may be legitimately killed as part of the conflict and those who may not be deliberately targeted (e.g. civilians) requires good knowledge of the context of the conflict, good intelligence, and ideally the capacity to take time to distinguish between those individuals who may be targeted and those who may not.
There is some contention that drones may enable more discriminate targeting and therefore represent a more ethical means of applying airpower. The long loitering times of many armed drones have enabled the crews to collect extensive visual (and other forms of) intelligence before making decisions about whether they should be engaging in a lethal strike and if so where/when offers the greatest possibility of avoiding civilian casualties. Similarly, the lack of physical threat to drone crews arguably should make them less likely to be indiscriminate – they are not under threat of their own death or injury and therefore should not be panicked into hasty decision-making which might have indiscriminate results.Footnote 27
Moving on from discrimination, the principle of proportionality requires that the decision to take life, to launch a lethal strike, be proportional to the threat posed by the target. The higher the risk the target poses to strategic aims (and/or national security) the more possible it is to claim that a decision to take that/those life/lives is proportional. In theory, arguments need to be considered as to whether an alternative non-lethal method might achieve the same or similar strategic/security gains – e.g. prosecution or non-lethal force.Footnote 28 Further considerations include whether the threat posed by a small number of individuals is significant enough to warrant the deaths of civilians in the vicinity. This then raises complex questions of precisely how many civilian deaths may be viewed as unfortunate but necessary to curtail that threat? How do we know what threat is posed? And who gets to make these assessments? These are all complex ethical assessments and judgments which must be made by military leadership and ultimately by those individuals tasked with undertaking lethal action. Again, there are suggestions that drone strikes may be more proportional than other methods of targeting and therefore, again, be considered a more ethical option. The argument follows that the loitering times enable the collection of ‘better’ intelligence which can be used to inform this decision-making, and that the missiles deployed via armed drones can target small areas – killing dangerous individuals without harming others, although this claim is strongly contested.Footnote 29
This then connects with the final requirement of military necessity, which ‘forbid[s] the use of power unnecessary to attain the military goal … [or methods] that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering’.Footnote 30 Therefore, the use of lethal force must be considered the minimum level of force required to achieve reasonable military aims. Making these decisions is ethically complex and is made more complicated where military aims are vague or diffuse. For example, in the declaration of war against ‘terror’, which drone strikes have been a core component of, there is a lack of precision, a potentially limitless scope, and the possibility of misuse.Footnote 31 Therefore, in this context ‘[t]he use of the word “war” in reference to … terrorism itself, rather than against a designated enemy, is essentially metaphorical’, in ways which render discussions about military necessity unnecessarily complicated.Footnote 32
Jus in bello and interbelligerent risk
In addition to working within the parameters of discrimination, proportionality, and military necessity, military leadership also has a responsibility to take care of its own service personnel. Particularly within democratic states, there is a limit to the extent to which the electorate will tolerate ‘their men and women’ being used as ‘cannon fodder’ or a seemingly endless return of body bags without significant strategic progress. However, the risk of injury or death at the hands of another combatant is, in part, what makes war war. It has important implications because the legality and morality of the use of force in warfare are built on the assumption of mutual risk to (a) the combatants and (b) the belligerents as parties.Footnote 33 The legal permission to kill your opponent in war without risk of prosecution for murder is predicated on the risk that if you fail to kill your opponent you will be killed yourself. What drone warfare does, in relation to this peculiarity of combatant status, is create a highly asymmetrical risk relationship between the operating crew and the targeted individuals.Footnote 34 It is true that it has been centuries since war comprised pitched battles between semi-matched opponents (indeed the aim in war has always been to create asymmetry in your favour).Footnote 35 But with the increasing reliance on distancing technology in war, and particularly the use of drones, we have moved from a point of a measure of asymmetry to something which has to be considered ‘radical asymmetry’, and which Renic (amongst others) argues is an ethical concern.Footnote 36 As Enemark notes,
When the spectacle of drone operators killing without experiencing physical risk has caused observers to feel confusion and unease, one common response has been to highlight the numerous other participants in drone violence who do face danger.Footnote 37
This is pertinent because it demonstrates the extent to which the risk of injury and death in drone warfare has not been eradicated but rather has been shifted away from one set of combatants and potentially onto civilians.Footnote 38 This shift of risk draws our attention to the multiplicity of actors involved (either by choice or accident) in all conflicts. What a feminist ethics of care does, as the subsequent section explains, is foreground the multiplicity of actors and the webs of relationships which need to be considered in order to make better ethical decisions.
Feminist ethics of care
What useful purchase can a feminist ethics of care have in relation to the conduct of war? To the conduct of lethal drone strikes? For, as Clark and Enemark note, ‘it would be implausible indeed to claim that violence can be dealt with “simply by caring”’.Footnote 39 To answer these questions, this section introduces the concept of care as a useful if uncomfortable concept and its place in feminist ethics. The history of this thinking can be traced to Carol Gilligan’s seminal work, which argued that women had a ‘different’ kind of moral development from men, one which privileged ‘care’ over ‘justice’.Footnote 40 The mainstream focus on ‘justice’ in ethical thinking was, Gilligan argued, one which reified abstraction and impartiality. This was different from the ‘female’ care ethics, which foregrounded the way ethics related to the specifics of particular relationships and contexts. Robinson, for example, argued that care ethics was necessary because previous frameworks ‘abstract[ed] away much of what makes human beings human’ and therefore impeded appropriate ethical thinking.Footnote 41
Further, because of the association between justice and men and caring and women, caring has been subordinated to justice because the hierarchical dualism between masculine and feminine is skewed in favour of the masculine.Footnote 42 This, in part, springs from the early idealised understandings of care which, focused on the mother–child relationship, ‘conjure[d] up images of sentimental caring’ that feel profoundly out of step with an argument about warfare.Footnote 43 Whilst its beginnings emerge from a reified understanding of men as masculine and women as feminine and care as an inherently feminine attribute, scholarship in care ethics has expanded beyond this limiting start point.Footnote 44 Therefore, this article builds on the argument made by Clark and Enemark that ‘a care-oriented approach to moral reasoning … should now be equally open to women and men’, although I would add that it was always already equally open to all genders.Footnote 45 Understanding how and why an ethics of care is important for everyone rests in part on understanding the messiness and complexity of care both as a concept and as a form of action.
Care is a ‘loaded concept’, one which comes with a set of expectations and preconceived ideas around the closeness between the individuals involved.Footnote 46 Care is not necessarily warm and fuzzy, and it ‘does not imply deference to feelings of pity or altruism’.Footnote 47 Rather, ‘Care ethics is concerned with everything we do to maintain and repair ourselves and our worlds as well as reasonably possible,’ which means that it can be ‘difficult, situated, [and] complex’ and may be ‘an act of citizenship that embraces the personal and the political’.Footnote 48 Both Robinson and FitzGerald refer to care ethics as a form of agonal or agonistic ethics – that is something which requires ‘agonising over’, careful thought and difficult decision-making.Footnote 49 Care ethics, therefore, rather than providing a simplistic roadmap of ‘if X do Y’, requires that users engage with the complexity in decision-making. Whilst this might be difficult in snap ‘life or death’ decisions, in the context of drone warfare and the comparative physical safety, this complexity is worth engaging with to avoid civilian casualties or unjust killing leading to moral injury or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Whilst subsequent work has moved away from the biological essentialism of some of the foundations, there remains a commitment to care ethics as a different morality (or different articulation of morality) based on a ‘relational ontology’.Footnote 50 A relational ontology is necessary because ‘interdependence … characterises the human condition’ in that we only exist through our relationships with others.Footnote 51 Therefore, we cannot understand either individual subjectivity or the morality of (in)actions without foregrounding interdependence/relationality, as FitzGerald notes ‘The relational social ontology inherent in ethics of care is not simply saying we “have” relations …. Rather, the relational claim at the heart of ethics refers to our very being.’Footnote 52 This claim is significant not only to our understanding of ethical action in warfare, but also in terms of understanding how and why moral injury occurs and why this ethical language might help us to understand and avoid this kind of trauma.
The relationality of an ethics of care draws attention to the notion of ‘response-ability’.Footnote 53 The aim of ‘response-ability’ is to consider the appropriate response which a particular actor is capable of making within a particular set of relations: ‘a practice of ongoing collective knowing and doing, where the duty to respond to harms is inherently joined with the question of differentiated ability’.Footnote 54 This differentiation of ability acknowledges the complexity of context within warfare, the role of ranks, of socio-economic difference, of the particularities of rules of engagement, contexts, conflicts, political pressures, etc. This is not to provide a means of excusing bad behaviour or inaction (where it is ethically necessary) but rather to foreground the need for nuance and sensitivity within conflict situations and the on-goingness of any and all ethical judgements that go beyond what Laura Sjoberg articulates as the ‘indeterminate laundry list’ of many interpretations of jus in bello. Footnote 55 Through an ethics of care, there is a responsibility, to ‘stick with the tension, to consider carefully the different versions of care at stake … and to be open to the possibility that one’s vision of “good” care may need to be revised in light of the needs and ways of life of the other’.Footnote 56
It might initially appear that care ethics would necessarily be pacifist and antithetical to the argument that any violence might be considered ethical. And therefore, it might appear that applying an ethics of care to warfare (whether drone mediated or otherwise) could only yield a prohibition against the use of violence in all forms. However, whilst care ethicists are sceptical about the potential for violence to ever be the morally correct response, they acknowledge that there are moments when this may be the case.Footnote 57 Indeed, Fitzgerald argues that ‘care ethics, while highly critical of violence, does not inherently assert that violence is always and necessarily unjustifiable’.Footnote 58 Rather, it is necessary to consider what violence might accomplish, rather than to focus on who might conduct it and how.Footnote 59 Therefore, right action can only be truly judged (im)moral in the specific context in which it should/not occur: ‘all ethical dilemmas and moral quandaries must be examined critically in the context in which they emerge. This includes issues related to violence’.Footnote 60 In the context of war, where jus ad bellum requirements are applied, a ‘focus on violence’ provides a means through which to assess where care and ‘building a more caring world may enact or even require violence’.Footnote 61
To understand how this might be, it is necessary to view ‘care’ beyond the bounds of where we normally expect to find it – in domestic relations, in the home, in relation to children, animals, or the elderly. In particular, in this context, ‘“care” should be distinguished from “personal service”’.Footnote 62 For example, we can ‘take care’ in a professional sense – do our work with care and attention; or we can be ‘care-ful’ in our interactions with human and non-human others. Puig de la Bellacasa argues that there are ‘three dimensions of care – labor/work, affect/affections, [and] ethics/politics’ which sit in-relation to each other but not always equally.Footnote 63 What this triumvirate vision captures is the multiple modes through which ‘care’ operates. Care is affective – we feel it, it does not only feel good or bad or easy or hard; it might feel good but hard or bad but easy at the same time. Care is also not just affective – there are choices inherent in care – these are both political and normative. Who or what we choose or do care about contains moral and ethical multitudes. This raises questions about what we feel we ought to care for, what we feel we have to care for, when and how can choosing not to care be an appropriate ethical choice? (and so on). The final component of the triumvirate is: care as labour/work – This comprises discussions of what the work of care looks like: What are its limits? Who gets to/has to care or not care and at what cost – financially, physically, emotionally, etc. Feminist theorising on and around care has, in particular, unsettled ideas of care as a site of ‘moralistic feel-good attitude’ to highlight its ‘ambivalent terrains’, and agonal nature, which is useful for its application to drone warfare.Footnote 64
Feminist ethics of care and drone warfare
Whilst some authors have foregrounded the potentially ‘posthuman’ nature of drone warfare, I want to refocus back onto the humans who are currently much involved and entangled with these technologies.Footnote 65 There are, despite concerns to the contrary, currently many individuals involved with lethal drone operations – in the case of US and UK Reaper operations, for example, the number of individuals involved with a single strike (from getting the airframe off the ground, providing the intelligence, making the decisions, to releasing the missile, etc.) is in the tens.Footnote 66 Whilst the use of armed drones in conflicts such as Ukraine is somewhat different given the smaller size of the majority of their airframes, there are still individuals tasked with piloting and targeting with those drones. Reflecting on these involved individuals, a tension emerges in our understanding of the teams engaged in drone-mediated conflict – the reports and interview data say different things. The problematic articulation of ‘PlayStation mentality’ – of the dehumanisation of the enemy, of killing becoming ‘normal’ and/or ‘easy’, or even gamified – is one which sits profoundly at odds with the ethical thinking proposed in this article. Initially associated with US operations,Footnote 67 this perspective was subsequently derided as reductivist and sensationalist.Footnote 68 However, recent reporting suggests that in some contexts this perspective on taking life is not only common but actively incentivised.Footnote 69 Alternatively, interview data and testimony exist which suggest crews have both experienced significant emotional distress as a result of their experiences of killing.Footnote 70 However, there are many who have neither found it easy nor become completely traumatised – but rather have quietly acknowledged the seriousness of their actions and inactions, tried to make better decisions for future operations, and learned to take the connection between themselves and their targets seriously.Footnote 71
Through a feminist ethics of care in relation to drone warfare, I foreground ontological relationality, particularity (attention to the specific context and conditions of the situation), and response-ability (the differentiated capacity for ethical action within the webs of relationships). Understanding care as a relational ontology helps to explain how and why this ethics is important for drone warfare for two primary reasons: firstly, war is empirically relational, and secondly, the ethics of war is therefore also inherently relational.Footnote 72 War is empirically relational because it requires one side to be pitted against another (no matter how unequal the stance), it requires an enemy Other. Service personnel’s understanding of themselves, their roles, and their actions depends upon (could not exist without) that relationship.Footnote 73 Those interdependencies make war war. Therefore, the condition of drone warfare is a condition of relationality between those involved. Those engaged in warfare, including in drone warfare, are always already acting in relation to others. Secondly, because war is empirically relational, the ethical framework which underpins judgements about what can and should be done in war should also foreground relationality. To take relationality seriously, from an ethical perspective, requires that we consider the multiplicity of ‘relations’ in war and our ‘response-ability’ within those relations. As a relational activity, I argue that a feminist ethics of care provides an important lens and vocabulary for describing and making ethical decisions within drone warfare. Further, as the following section illustrates, I argue that as part of engaging with a feminist ethics of care in drone warfare, lethal action should hurt those engaged in it.
In war, life-or-death decisions are often decisions over value, necessity, context, and strategy and are often in tension. A feminist ethics of care provides the ethical language to enable us to consider how decisions are both unique and part of a wider story, an understanding that war is ‘located in flesh-and-blood, situated, complex histories’.Footnote 74 For example, Jake reflects on his experiences of crewing Reaper ‘Can I kill? Can I choose who lives and dies? Can I sit back and do nothing while watching jihadists commit murder?’Footnote 75 Response-ability in this context does not necessarily mean not undertaking lethal actions, does not necessarily mean that killing is inherently unethical. Rather this concept invites those engaged in warfare, particularly those with the luxury of not being at (much) physical risk of injury/death themselves, to consider the full ethical ramifications of their actions – to consider the deaths of individuals as the rupture of entangled lifeways beyond the eradication of a threat or the meeting of a tactical or strategic aim. In so doing, this reduces the likelihood that individuals will act without sufficient care or thought and suffer moral injury as a result. Returning to Jake again, he considers the scenario in which there are two legitimate targets walking down a road, but with the drone capabilities he can only hit one – how can he possibly decide which to target? ‘Say they are both twenty-something years old … what right do I have to decide whether one of you is going to live for another sixty years, have children and grandchildren and which one of you is going to have your life ended right now? Do I have the right to make that decision?’ He took the time to consider this and the other complexities of his situation through discussions with psychologists and chaplains and came back ready to use lethal force. He processes his experiences and his reactions to conducting strikes and notes, ‘to not be fully aware of the lives that I’ve taken, or the lives that I have changed, [would make] me slightly disgusted with myself’.Footnote 76 Jake demonstrates that he cares about his mission, his professionalism, the people he is engaging with as enemies and their families – he finds a way to negotiate that without being traumatised and in a way which honours the seriousness of his actions. However, in process of doing so, he is, necessarily, hurt by his actions – but, I argue, this is morally necessary.
Why should war ‘hurt’?
What does a feminist ethics of care give us beyond an articulation of relationality, particularity and response-ability of belligerents in the context of war? And what does it mean to claim, from the perspective of an ethics of care, that war should hurt? To address these questions, it is necessary to consider some of the ways that war may ‘hurt’ service personnel and how these are similar to or different from what I discuss here. As noted in the earlier sections, drone warfare with operating crews situated at long distances from the battlefield is often contentious because those crews are at very little risk of physical injury.Footnote 77 There is the possibility of physical injury in those crews who are operating the take-off/landing elements of the drone activities in bases closer to the area of conflict, and because of the shift patterns that crews work there are several instances of crew members being physically injured travelling to or from work when they fall asleep whilst driving.Footnote 78 These are, however, distinct from the types of physical risk which are generally expected in war.
More recently, scholarship has homed in on the potential for combatants/service personnel to experience psychological harm. Where articulated this harm broadly falls into two categories: PTSD and moral injury. PTSD refers to a medical diagnosis whereby the individual experiences a high level of psychological distress following a particularly traumatic experience, where the level of distress is considered disordered and requiring medical attention/intervention.Footnote 79 Given the nature of service personnel’s roles in war, it is not surprising that there is a wide body of evidence of higher levels of PTSD diagnoses within veterans and currently serving military personnel than the general public.Footnote 80 The World Health Organisation’s ‘International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) 11th Edition’ definition of PTSD includes not just ‘threatening’ experiences but also ‘a horrific event or series of events’, with resultant effect of causing ‘fear or horror’.Footnote 81 Individuals, under this definition, have the capacity to be traumatised by experiences which are not directly threatening their physical well-being. They may, for example, be traumatised by the things that they witness – and this is where PTSD as a diagnosis becomes available to drone crews.Footnote 82
Outside of the medical diagnosis of PTSD, psychological harm may be articulated through the concept of moral injury. This concept addresses the harm caused to individual service personnel through carrying out activities which go against their own strongly held moral views, something ‘radically discrepant with a person’s beliefs about right and wrong’.Footnote 83 The betrayal of an individual’s internal moral compass can cause extensive psychological disconnection and struggle. Acampora et al. identify three subtypes of moral injury: ‘being the agent of violence (doing harm), witnessing violence (observing harms committed by others), or experiencing betrayal (experiencing non-violent harm)’.Footnote 84 Alternatively, Dobos delineates two different types: moral trauma, which is ‘the arousal of the moral emotions to such an extent that they become debilitating’, and moral degradation, which ‘involves a corrosion of the moral emotions’, such that there ‘is no “proper affect”’ (something this paper returns to).Footnote 85 In their critique of ‘the standard model of moral injury’, Acampora et al. argue that this model has inadequately attended to the way ‘moral experiences are rooted in relationships’.Footnote 86 Without taking this into account, they claim it is not possible for the model to ‘account for how specifically moral beliefs are entwined … and how that results in global impairments’.Footnote 87 Further, and supporting the importance of an ethics of care, they claim that attention to the relational element of moral injury is necessary in order to ‘account for why some circumstances lead to injuries and only among some people’.Footnote 88 However, in all these instances, the disturbance is different from that caused by PTSD, and thus moral injury should be understood as, ‘not a psychological but a soul disorder’.Footnote 89
Both PTSD and moral injury refer to significant harms which can result from the experiences of engaging in conflict, including drone strikes. However, this is different from the ‘hurt’ to which I refer in this article. I have briefly outlined ‘hurt’ above as ‘dis-ease’ or ‘dis-quiet’, as a sense of gravity in the context of taking a life. I want to now unpack this idea a little further to substantiate why war should hurt the individuals who conduct it. The limited literature on ‘hurt’, which differentiates it, as I wish to, from ‘harm’, implies that the former is less painful than the latter. For example, Gaston-Johansson found that semantic correlates for ‘hurt’ were ‘pricking, pinching, stinging, sore …’ as compared to correlates for ‘pain’, which included ‘dreadful, killing, torturing, suffocating’.Footnote 90 Similarly, in the context of returning to work discussions, ‘hurt’ is ‘pain experienced during recovery’ and ‘does not necessarily impede recovery and can even improve it’.Footnote 91 In this context, ‘hurt’ can indicate the pain involved in rehabilitation work, and therefore whilst uncomfortable the effect is not detrimental to the overall health of the individual involved.
Whilst we have some relatively straightforward articulations of physical hurt, studies on emotional hurt tend to focus on ‘hurt feelings’.Footnote 92 In this context, ‘hurt’ refers to feelings of social rejection, which is not akin to what I am arguing and therefore less useful to the conceptualisation here. Instead, I draw from Dobos’ argument that ‘Most of us would agree that it is perfectly appropriate for a war criminal to experience emotional anguish’ as this represents a recognition of the individual’s moral failings and the pain caused by their actions.Footnote 93 However, Dobos goes on to question whether ‘soldiers who conduct themselves ethically’ should feel similarly: ‘If a combatant is participating in a just war and only killing legitimate military targets, would it still be appropriate for him/her to experience emotional distress?’Footnote 94 To which I would reply a qualified ‘yes’.
My argument is that killing someone, even legitimately under conditions of war, is a profoundly grave act. The seriousness of the act is one which is expressed through the psychological difficulty of doing it.Footnote 95 In addition to being psychologically difficult, Dobos and others argue (and I concur) that killing should produce a particular affect/emotion and should be expressed/experienced through ‘at least a frisson of horror’ or sense of ‘sorrow’.Footnote 96 And therefore ‘failing to experience any emotional distress … is a sign of morally defective character’ (2020, p. 15).Footnote 97 I consequently find it profoundly problematic to read contemporary interview data from the ongoing Russian–Ukraine conflict where the crews claim ‘I killed the Russian and felt nothing’ because it represents a complete lack of understanding of the gravity of what it means to take a life – even when it is allowable in the context of conflict.Footnote 98 This is because, as Luft contends, ‘Morality research … shows that our feelings about our actions indicate to us that they are morally significant; when we do not react emotionally to an action, it is morally irrelevant.’Footnote 99 Therefore, the seriousness of killing demands that we be affected by the experience in some way and express it through emotion. Therefore, an emotional experience is appropriate in the context of killing and might be considered eustress rather than distress.Footnote 100 To paraphrase Sanneke Brouwers, ‘hurt’ as I am using the term here, is ‘not an injury that can be treated or cured … because it is a healthy response that signals a person’s awareness of their moral obligations’.Footnote 101 A lack of emotional affect, the sensation of numbness, or of going into ‘zombie mode’ when dealing out death to others is ethically problematic – not only in terms of what constitutes ethical action in war but also in terms of the negative impact on the individuals’ sense of self and well-being.Footnote 102
Nuttall summarises the connection between ‘hurt’ and ‘caring’ noting
Old English has a verb, carian, meaning ‘to have sorrow, feel concern, be anxious.’ Even at an early stage, such preoccupations could be both sorrowful yet also useful. To care in early English meant not only to lament or to grieve but also to be watchful, attentive, concerned… paying close attention to someone else’s wellbeing.Footnote 103
Nuttall’s articulation is analogous to what I want to do here by connecting care ethics and the concept of hurt as an ethical requirement. This provides us with a means of understanding how persons who are physically distanced, who face little threat of personal injury, and who, even when acting in line with their moral code, may find themselves hurt by their experience of conducting lethal strikes.Footnote 104 In so doing, I do not argue that all service personnel should be deeply traumatised by their experiences, or that civilian society does not owe those individuals the relevant care on return.Footnote 105 Nor does it mean that those service personnel should not feel pride at their actions (where ethically undertaken) or that they have in some way engaged in harmful/wrongful activity. What arguing for the necessity of ‘hurt’ in warfare does, through a feminist ethics of care, is engage with the way the conduct of warfare is inherently problematic, troubling, and violent. Even right action can hurt, and I argue, should hurt. We want those serving within our armed forces to act in ways that are as ethical as possible and bring neither the individual nor the nation state into disrepute. That neither causes unnecessary suffering nor exacerbates existing conflict. The complexities of negotiating this ethical terrain for individual service personnel necessarily go beyond those useful, if incomplete, assessments of proportionality, discrimination, and military necessity. Therefore, using a feminist ethics of care to understand the ‘hurt’ of conducting war provides a useful moral framework and language. The concept of the ethical value of care, and of care hurting, can counter some of the ‘psycho-social mechanisms or moral disengagement and indifference – such as euphemistic language, objectification, diffuse responsibilization’ which apparently enable ethically questionable drone strikes.Footnote 106 They counter it both in its occurrence by encouraging the crews to ‘care’ and counter its popularity in media representations of drone crews which fail to engage with the complexity or range of ethical and emotional experiences.
If killing others does not ‘hurt’ those who kill, we risk moving to a place which supports the dehumanisation of the enemy, and this has profound ethical implications for our conduct of war.Footnote 107 Whilst it has long been assumed that dehumanisation of the enemy in conflict enables both just and unjust violence, Luft critiques this perspective.Footnote 108 The dehumanisation emerges ‘as a consequence of violence rather than its cause’ in a way which allows violence to be ongoing and more morally questionable. Morally questionable in the sense of both enabling immoral action and invoking greater individual trauma to the perpetrator, such that ‘killers stop perceiving themselves as human’.Footnote 109 Therefore, the potential lack of hurt is one which is both ethically problematic and which potentially damages servicemen and -women. An ethics of care reduces this likelihood by encouraging a deeper emotional engagement than Malešević’s ‘professional distance with a degree of empathy for individuals’ who are the targets.Footnote 110 The drone crews who are part of a just conflict and following the rules of engagement, the laws of armed conflict, should even then take care to consider the humanity of those they kill in part as a means to maintain their own emotional/spiritual well-being and sense of humanity. This is why a care ethics is integral to understanding why ‘war should hurt’.
Even though military leadership should aim to prevent as many as possible of those under their command from being harmed, killing should not be easy.Footnote 111 Part of ‘not being easy’ means acknowledging and engaging with the fact that killing is, and should be, uncomfortable, it should ‘hurt’. Further, an ethics of care provides a means of articulating why this hurt should be viewed as a necessary hurt. It is necessary because it signifies the complexities of caring in contemporary drone war. If you care about doing the job well, about meeting the mission requirements, about supporting troops below, about the individuals who surround the targeted individual, about the trauma they experience seeing the death/injury of those they know/love, about the lives of those under surveillance – then conducting lethal strikes will necessarily cause some degree of psychological hurt. It should not be ‘too easy’ for individuals to kill others – either for states to make the decision to engage in conflict or for the individuals themselves tasked with releasing missiles.Footnote 112 The idea of something being ‘too easy’ speaks to a carelessness, a flippancy, which an ethics of care and a necessity of hurt counters. Additionally, by developing a framework and language for articulating the particular nature of the ‘hurt’ of conducting war, we perhaps provide the tools for avoiding greater suffering as a result of taking part in armed combat, although this requires future development (PTSD, depression, substance abuse, and other mood disorders are prevalent within veterans’ groups).Footnote 113 Further research might assess the extent to which the ethics of care vocabulary may also provide a therapeutic modality for engaging with those whose experiences have tipped them into diagnostic categories and require additional support.Footnote 114
An ethics of care and the necessity of hurt provide a better way of describing the complexities of engaging in conflict and the ethical landscape of drone warfare. Therefore, understanding warfare requires sitting with that trouble, those problems, that uncertainty, rather than the flattening of martial experience into good/bad boxes to be parcelled away into the unconscious. This language is important for those of us who have researched drone crews and who have struggled to navigate the complexity of engaging with the militaries in question critically (and without slipping into apologism) whilst acknowledging the professionalism and thoughtfulness of many of those individuals who we engaged with. It provides a counterpoint to the sensational narratives of some journalistic accounts.Footnote 115 This is not to doubt their veracity or accuracy, but rather provides the necessary (as I see it) counterpoint to arguments that sweep between ‘all drone crews think they are squashing ants’/‘think it’s a computer game’ and ‘all drone crews have PTSD and hate their jobs’.Footnote 116
Conclusion
The idea that ‘war should hurt’ taken through the lens of an ethics of care makes two important interventions: firstly, it more accurately describes the complexity of engaging in contemporary warfare and is therefore empirically useful. Secondly, it provides the ethical language which enables us to articulate something outside of debilitating trauma about how lethal strikes should not be ‘too easy’ to undertake. War is empirically relational – it is always necessarily a contest between two or more parties and a struggle for primacy within that relationship. A feminist ethics of care brings to the fore a different way of confronting this relationality – that in destroying part of the relationship through killing in war we are also destroying a part of ourselves and this hurts. This change in the relationship between the individual killing and the individual who is killed is painful: ‘The responsibility of the heavy weight of destroying the other [in part because they also represent yourself] is (and should be) difficult to bear … regardless of the “distance” between the self-other.’Footnote 117 In focusing also on the importance of the particularity of the context, a feminist ethics of care is able to bring nuance and subtlety to ethical decision-making in conflict. Similarly, the idea of ‘response-ability’ delineates the different abilities of different parties within a conflict and therefore the degree to which they can and should be held responsible for right action and addressing wrongful action.
A feminist ethics of care supports the argument that ‘war should hurt’ those engaged in it because it requires that those engaged in lethal action consider the multiple relationships within which their ‘target’ or ‘enemy’ is made and how their actions will impact on those relationships in complex ways. Attending to the full human-ness of the enemy in this way ensures a sense of gravity at the taking of life, a clear step away from language around ‘squashing ants’ and cards marked up with ‘numbers of kills’.Footnote 118 Service personnel should not be traumatised but rather take seriously and acknowledge the hurt that will come from doing their job well, even when ethical, legal, and strategically necessary.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all of those who have contributed to the thinking and shaping of this article, which began life under the supervision of Christian Enemark as part of the DRONETHICS project. I thank Rhiannon Neilsen, David Norman, and Jonna Nyman for various clarifications and supporting conversations. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for thought-provoking feedback, which supported many improvements. Any errors remain my own.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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