I’ve said for a very long time that the only moral form of warfare is War of Assassins, in which the only combatants and the only legitimate targets are the rulers, their henchmen, and their agents. We had a sort of watered-down version of this in the Cold War, where agents might assassinate each other, but they tried to avoid involving members of the general population wherever possible. Of course, the rulers also decided to agree that assassinating each other was somehow wrong, but it was perfectly moral and acceptable to blow up thousands or even millions of noncombatants who might not even agree with their government’s policies or their decision to go to war against another country. This looking-glass morality has led to the current US policy where it’s pretended to not be OK to send a covert operative to target some “Enemy of the State” with a single bullet, but totally OK to destroy his entire family with a drone-carried missile fired at some building he currently occupied (even if the event was a wedding or some other circumstance in which many of the victims of this morally-destitute strategy were women and children). Yes, the actual argument is that killing an enemy is wrong unless a lot of innocent people are exterminated along with him, and the majority of people who know about this policy see nothing morally suspect about it.
But recently, we’ve seen similar drone technology used in an unquestionably moral fashion; it’s a version of War of Assassins in which large military weapons are the targets:
For years, Russia has used its strategic bombers — which can also carry nuclear weapons — to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine from a huge distance. The Ukrainians had attacked these bombers on the ground with drones, but the Russians simply moved them farther away, well out of reach of anything the Ukrainians could launch from their own territory. So the Ukrainians…packed a bunch of drones — little plastic battery-powered quadcopters, not too different from a toy you would fly at the park — into trucks and [surreptitiously] sent the trucks all the way across Russia. When the[y] got close to the air force bases where the Russians had parked their bombers, the Ukrainian drones popped out of the trucks and started blowing up the bombers — and other planes — on the ground…It’s not clear how many Russian bombers the Ukrainians managed to take out, but everyone agrees it was a significant chunk of Russia’s bomber force. And these magnificent, enormously expensive, rare, highly prized machines of destruction were taken out [by] battery-powered toys…the world has changed, almost overnight. The American military is…built around a bunch of big, expensive, heavy “platforms” like aircraft carriers, jet planes, and tanks…that will be destroyed every time a cheap plastic battery-powered Chinese drone takes out an expensive piece of American hardware in a war over Taiwan, or the South China Sea, or Xi Jinping waking up in a bad mood — not including, of course, the lives of whatever Americans happen to be inside the hardware when it gets destroyed…military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out…
Good. The less power is concentrated, the better for everyone except tyrants and their parasites. The real ultimate promise of technology is universal decentralization, the complete opposite of the surveillance state and techlords’ LLM platforms. And the sooner we reach the day when the giants can no longer rely on their sheer size to dominate individuals and small groups, the better for humanity.
