The Modern War Institute at West Point published on their website an article by by two Army LT Colonels entitled, “Do racial biases shape Americans’ support for drone strikes? We asked them“.
They asked, “are US drone strikes racially biased? Does public support fall along a “color line” where Americans endorse drone strikes the most when they are used against darker-skinned people in non-Western countries?”
Seems odd that two Army officers are worrying about the color of skin of those that the military–that they are in–bombs.
Here’s a comment by “L.K.” to the article on the site:
This article is further proof that the Army has gone “woke,” for no particular reason other than following the empty political ideology of the moment.
Early on, we’re given “Missing from the conversation on race and drones is an assessment of if, or to what degree, the observable racial cues of targets’ skin color and location shape public support for US drone strikes. Studying this question is important.” Why is this important? If we dismiss “location,” as this article finally does, we can get to the heart of the matter. So then, we should ask why, other than the “woke” notion that everything should be judged by skin color, should it be important? We’re not told this, of course, because judgements based solely on skin color are an axiom of the “woke,” although no one seems to have had a think about whether that axiom has any validity.
So let’s do that. Let’s say that we’re “woke” and that skin color is the primary consideration for everything. Then what follows? What is good and what is bad? Will we then say that all skin colors are equally good? If so, our moral compass has no needle. Furthermore, we have no compass. The hand is just as empty as one’s head, because we’ve created the ultimate non sequitur: skin color is our guide for everything, but we’re completely unable to know if anything is better than anything else. Hence this ideology, taken at face value, is empty.
But “woke” isn’t nearly so benign. In practice, time and again, “woke” really means white is bad and “color” is good. (So “woke” = racist, QED.) Here, the huge curtain behind the stage were this article is presented says “whites are droning people of color,” and the article itself is stating that people should care about that more.
On the other hand, what if the American people aren’t as “woke” as they should be yet, and they’re considering other things about drone strikes? For example, what if Americans believe the national command authority should be using drones to eliminate the most serious threats to our safety or security, in some competent manner? What if they believe that drones can legitimately be used to protect our interests, in some more general sense? What if – horror of horrors – they have formed those beliefs without referring to a skin-color chart? Those possibilities aren’t seriously examined within this article.
Also, why not examine the “belief that US officials have a moral obligation to intervene abroad”? Say the Smiths are an armed group living on a remote mountain in a foreign country, and every month or two we use a drone to blow their new leader into hyena chow. The average non-“woke” American is wise enough to realize that the Smiths would make a VERY convincing argument, across all their region, that America is evil to do such things; regardless of the Smiths’ ideology or their actual level of threat to anyone. But would anyone in the DoD or the national command authority realize the effects of the Smiths’ experiences, as conveyed to others in their region? In such a case, what is our real “moral obligation”? What if our “moral obligation” transcends the Smiths’ skin color?
As with everything “woke,” this article is trivial, as there are more important things out in the world than the skin-color hand-wringing of the American left.
The end of fighting against an enemy if DEI causes military officers not only to fret about diversity within the ranks, but the diversity of its military targets?
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