A New Medal For A New Brand Of Warfare

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the Pentagon is creating a new medal to recognize an extraordinary achievement of servicemen outside of the combat zone via Remote Piloted Aircraft (RPA) or cyber warfare. The Distinguished Warfare Medal doesn’t require the recipient to have risked his or her life, setting it apart from all other combat awards.

Panetta’s announcement is steeped in controversy, most pressing of which would appear to be the so-called “order of precedence” of such a medal. At present, the Distinguished Warfare Medal ranks above both the Bronze Star for Valor and the Purple Heart, which are designated for battlefield conduct and battlefield injury, respectively. I’m inclined to agree with the nearly 6,000 and counting petitioners to lower the precedence of the new Distinguished Warfare Medal. Let’s hope that the weight of the Pentagon’s initiative isn’t lost on the injustice to Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipients that has angered veterans and their supporters; the new medal represents far more than a stirring of the ranks.

First, the servicemen in question should be given a bit more credit than they’ve received in response to the announcement. Drone pilots have the fate of hundreds of people’s lives in their hands, often including those of their inter-military colleagues on the ground. Much like a commander in a war room who makes difficult decisions away from the front, these pilots have weighty, life-and-death calls to make, regardless of whether their own lives are at risk. For many facets of modern warfare, that immediate risk has been subjugated by the accompanying modern technology – ironclad warships, armored tanks, undetectable aircraft, and the gamut of enhanced firepower (the sniper rifle comes to mind). Although not risk-free, all of these technological advancements limited the opportunity for extraordinary acts of valor in the face of present danger at the time of their introduction. Since the introduction of these advancements, they’ve been assimilated into the theater of battle and respected for their contributions, their operators appreciated for their efficiency. And so it follows that we should reward our new fleet of servicemen when they demonstrate excellence in carrying out the duty they have been assigned.

However, recognition for excelling in one’s duties is a far cry from valor or courage. Plato, by way of Socrates, offers a discussion in search of the vital meaning of courage in his work Laches, Or Courage. Suffice it to say, Plato fails to reach a conclusion beyond recognizing the importance of such dialogues debating the matter, but in it, Socrates makes a scathing counter-argument to Lache’s proposal conflating courage with enduring wisdom:

Take the case of one who endures in war, and is willing to fight, and wisely calculates and knows that others will help him, and that there will be fewer and inferior men against him than there are with him; and suppose that he has also advantages of position; would you say of such a one who endures with all this wisdom and preparation, that he, or some man in the opposing army who is in the opposite circumstances to these and yet endures and remains at his post, is the braver?

Of course, the U.S. Military isn’t in the business of giving medals to the enemy soldiers simply because they’re brave in the face of a far superior military, but valor and what that entails is what we should strive to define and reward.

Many of the great philosophers examined the morality of war in all of its complexity, but few presaged the quandaries presented by drone warfare and fewer still imagined the merit given to the pilots of RPAs. A more contemporary dialogue is presented by constituents of just war theory and all of its various interpretations. The theory’s ideas on jus in bello —  justified conduct in war (as opposed to jus ad bellum, justification for war) — would appear to align against the use of drones due to the indiscriminately skewed guidelines of protocol (i.e. labeling all casualties of strikes terrorists by association with the target, including American civilians), casting a shadow over the proposed valor of the remote operators.

Merits of piloting drones is debatable, but broader concerns are raised here. As noted by Pentagon officials, this moment marks the shift away from manned combat to drone and other cyber warfare. Such a commitment – the first new combat-related medal since the introduction of the Bronze Star in 1944 – signifies the pertinence of this field of the military in the eyes of the government. Much like subsidies to farmers, it’s a public announcement of priority. This mindset isn’t going away anytime soon if agenda stay on course.

The priority in this case is the value of American lives over any hitherto accepted moral code of warfare, including just war theory in all its guises. This mindset is sensible in the short-term – fewer U.S. soldiers in dangerous combat positions without any perceived loss of efficiency – but the lasting effects will be the future repercussions of that moral precedent, set by no less than the nation with the most comprehensive military. When drone technology and cyber warfare proliferate across the globe, the United States will have no authority to decry its use against itself, its allies, or any other nation.

Immanuel Kant was a major contributor of ideas to the Charter of the United Nations and the Geneva Convention, on which Just War Theory is partially based. He made an interesting comment on the valor of war in his Critique of Justice [1790]:

War itself, if it is carried on with order and with a sacred respect for the rights of citizens, has something sublime in it, and makes the disposition of the people who carry it on thus only the more sublime, the more numerous are the dangers to which they are exposed and in respect of which they behave with courage.

In this new form of warfare we’ve embarked on, those “more numerous dangers” are in fact less numerous (for our combatants, that is), negating the conclusion that those soldiers would behave more courageously in other respects. To keep the public sated by the forging of courageous men through warfare in Kant’s construction, it must be justified that remote pilots and the new breed of war technicians of the future are actually valorous, since exposure to danger is dwindling. The new medals do just that. A no-questions-asked signifier of valor. At its inception – right now – there is backlash; if the initiative is upheld long enough to elude the miniaturized cycles of today’s media, all will soon be forgotten. Who, then, would shame a decorated serviceman by questioning the merit of her medal? Subsequently, a new norm is solidified, leading the way to a future of distinguished military personnel, none of whom having placed a foot on a battlefield.