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James Sitter
Adam Padgett
ENGL 102
10/19/2016
Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles: Murder or a Technological Advantage?
Inquiry: Are technological advances in Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) making the
decision to kill during war time easier than using traditional troop on troop combat tactics?
Proposed Thesis: I will argue that while the decision to start a war is not really changed by the
ability of using Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, the ability of the actual person pulling the
trigger is definitely made too easy while also expanding the possibility of error due to the fact
that people are much more trigger happy through a screen than in person due to their lack of
emotional or personal connection to the violent situation.
Introduction
As technology continues to be the focus on everything people in this world do, whether to make
jobs easier, production cheaper, entertainment better, or build advantage during war, a moral
question comes into play. There comes a point where the advancement and advantages of
technology either protects human life or makes the decision to kill another human during war too
easy to make.
Technology can do so much throughout the world when it comes to helping people, but like
everything else, war is also a business. War has been one of those constants throughout
humanities existence. Technology has also been a constant of war. However, when technological

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advancements in the past were made, they never compromised the main element of war. That
element is human life. Throughout wars in history, technology was used to protect humans as
much as possible or to harm them. Now that we have Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, the
human element has been almost entirely removed from war.
Is this not a good thing? Well the only real answer is a double-sided one. It is good that human
life is being much more preserved. However, the decision of war is where the real moral question
lies. The fact of the matter is, morally, it isnt any harder or easier to start a war with or without
human life involved on one side. Where it becomes morally differentiated is when you start
looking at the person asked to do the killing. As a soldier on the ground, it takes a lot more
strength and belief in what youre doing in order to kill someone. It isnt like you can push the
button and believe that its all a video game.

Coeckelbergh, Mark. Drones, information technology, and distance: mapping the moral
epistemology of remote fighting. Ethics Inf Technol. Vol. 15. 2013. pp. 87-98.
Coeckelbergh is interested in the idea of the moral distance of warfare caused by
advancements in technology. He talks a lot of his paper about how distance seems to take away
the emotional connection that two people could otherwise have just by looking at each other and
understanding the way their life normally goes about. As Coeckelbergh states, the implication of
this particular lack of knowledge seems to be that the pilots cannot respond in a sympathetic,
empathetic way towards the people on the ground, and therefore cannot exercise full moral
responsibility for their actions (89). While he acknowledges drone pilots and others involved
in the practice reflect on their own work (97), he also realizes that the reflection is after the

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damage is already done. The author also goes into detail about how human connections are made
by face to face contact. His evidence included psychological studies like On Killing (1995)
Grossman.
This paper relates to my paper because it speaks of the moral walls that can be built by screens
and how technology takes away the trigger mans ability to see the target as a human. The author
makes his paper credible by using interviews with drone pilots and other military personnel who
are considered the subject matter experts. He also adds credibility by referring to scientific and
literary idols like Aristotle, Heidegger, and Levinas when creating questions and answering them
in his argument.

Stahl, Roger. What the drone saw: the cultural optics of the unmanned war. Australian Journal
of International Affairs. Vol. 67, No. 5. Routledge. 2013. pp. 659-674.
Stahl uses this article to inform us of a different type of war that the drones are helping to evolve.
This type of war is perception and propaganda. Even though these tools have been used before,
Stahl argues that these weapons are not just tools of destruction, but also perception (661). He
goes on to briefly explain how drones are not used only for killing, but for a means to provide
people back home with a certain view, even stating that one must acknowledge that drone
footage is not simply a neutral artefact left over from a bureaucratic exercise (663). This relates
to my paper, because it attaches morals to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, showing that the
moral dilemma isnt just in whether drones should be able to kill, but should they be used at all?
The article is credible due to its variety of references used and the authors ability to provide other

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sources to back up his studies and argument. The author also provides many pictures to help
support his point of how we use drone footage to glorify the use of drones in war.

Romaniuk, Scott N. et al. Extraordinary Measures: Drone Warfare, Securitization, and the War
on Terror. Slovak Journal of Political Sciences. Vol. 15, No. 3. De Gruyter. 2015. pp.
221-245.
The authors of this article are saying throughout the article that the use of drone strikes is very
effective, however, it has other consequences. They also go on to suggest that drone strikes were
authorized through fear of personal attacks by saying an overarching securitization and the use
of the security label can warrant emergency action such as TK [targeted killing] as an
extraordinary use of force (223). As Romaniuk states in this article, another of the issues of a
drone strike is that it compromises the ability of the US and its allies in the WoT to gain
valuable intelligence information from the eliminated target (238). These are definitely points
that are useful in my paper as they explore more moral and ethical questions within the broader
argument of drone warfare. Other issues this article brings up is that current wars have brought
us to the point with the threat of terrorism that many people feel it safer and easier to use drones
to do the dirty work. This is a credible article because it includes information from several
other scholarly journals as well as other studies. While parts of this article will be useful to my
paper, I will want to steer away from the part that discuss specific administrations or wars. This
information is unhelpful unless brought up in the grander scheme of things.

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Goodwin, Laura et al. PTSD in the armed forces: What have we learned from the recent cohort
studies of Iraq/Afghanistan? Journal of Mental Health. Vol.22, No.5. Informa UK, Ltd.
2013. pp. 397-401.
Goodwin goes through this article to be able to show what the actual risks and effects of war can
be. Many people want to look at what makes drone strikes easier. Well this article covers the
actual cost of pulling the trigger in person which is important to my paper because of a very
important fact. People have these issues because taking a life should not be easy. In fact, she
states that her studies confirm that combat experience is temporally related to PTSD (400).
They have issues due to the stress of making these split decisions. The article also goes on to
explain that the majority of those who are deployed seem to be resilient (400). She also
explains how those who are being resilient may suffer from PTSD in the short term, but may
learn to deal with the issues after returning home. This is very important to my argument because
this article temporarily connects traumatic psychiatric disorders to stressful, war-time situations.
The article is credible due to the many different opinions of other national and international
psychiatric associations and prior research that was brought into and quoted throughout the
article.

Akbar, Mirza S. et al. Fire from the blue sky. The Sur File on Arms and Human Rights. Vol. 12,
No. 22. 2015. pp. 123-131.
The authors of this article write to show the civilian casualties of drone warfare. They summarize
how many civilians are killed due to drone strikes and how civilians feel when they live in fear
of these drone strikes. A main point of this article is to show that the people on the other side off

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this drone war are human beings that have many of the same thoughts we do. In fact, one of the
victims in drone strikes that was brought into the discussion was described as intelligent, had
memorized the Quran and was in the top ten percentile in his class at school (126). They also go
into the point that US drones strikes in Pakistan are illegal and indefensible (129). This is
important in my paper because one of the core components of war is that there are two sides
fighting. If one side cannot fight back and isnt afforded the opportunity to defend itself, then
what was war now becomes murder. Furthermore, if one side loses the humanity of the situation,
then the other side is reduced to nothing but a number. This source gets its reliability from
bringing in victims of attacks for interviews as well as presenting real events that happened and
the data received from those events from national security agencies.

Luppicini, Rocci et al. A technoethical review of commercial drone use in the context of
governance, ethics, and privacy. Technology in Society. Vol. 46. 2016. pp. 109-119.
Luppicini writes this article to explain the effects of drones and surveillance on privacy. The
purpose of this article is mainly to talk about the security and privacy of people in western
civilizations and how surveillance drones derived from military drones. This article very lightly
touches on the military side, but could be considered helpful because it talks about the privacy
rights provided by law, which also could pertain to civilians in countries that we are at war with.
In fact the author connects the two by stating [c]ommercial drones outcomes reflect the same
quality as those of military drones, but in terms of societal well-being (113). Just because they
are in that country doesnt mean we can violate their basic privacy rights. As the article states,
drones surveillance capability is becoming increasingly popular with law enforcement
agencies (115), which also includes military. That means that there should also be more

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regulations on not just the weapons aspect, but the surveillance aspect as well. This article helps
to back up my prior articles when it comes to surveillance and propaganda. It raises the question,
if there are issues with civilian privacy and drones exploiting those, should our military be able
to use drone footage as a propaganda? It seems like in both instances, the same rights are being
violated. The author gets credibility for this due to the studies brought in as well as citing other
studies previously done. Credibility is also earned by touching on well-known subject, like the
use of commercial drones, that the general public can relate to.