by Nick Mottern, April 30, 2025
All weapons stimulate feelings of power in the user, power to kill or overwhelm another human or group of humans. At the same time, a person using a weapon against another person knows that there is a substantial risk of consequences, of being wounded or killed.
Over the centuries, therefore, humans have developed longer and longer-range weapons and aerial weapons that reduce consequences to the user. Nuclear weapons have the appeal of exterminating an opposing “enemy” but the potential consequences are terrifying to the user.
The weaponized drone appears to solve the problem of consequences, allowing killing an opponent from thousands of miles away, without risking harm to one’s own forces, making the weaponized drone a uniquely powerful weapon. For military commanders, the psychological pressure is to expand attacks, to kill more of the so-called enemy.
This power is magnified by the drones’ capability of transmitting images of the targeted person or people that can increase the feeling of superiority in commanders into one of godliness, giving them the power, through AI biometric processing to identify their human target, to follow all the activities of that person or persons and then, like a mythic god, to terrorize or to kill humans and to destroy material targets, at will. All without consequences.
What could go wrong?
Military use of all weapons is to win wars. One, generally accepted, definition of “winning” a war is capturing and/or controlling land and other material resources, like oil and minerals, denying the enemy the capacity to resist and thereby controlling the politics and resources of the vanquished.
While weaponized drones have been spoken of as game-changers in warfare, their use has been largely an abysmal failure in winning wars, as evidenced in Afghanistan, Yemen and Ukraine. This failure is, in part, in my opinion, precisely because of the god psychology that they generate.
First, being able to identify and follow a person or a group of people, for assassination or wholesale attack, does not mean that one understands anything about their intentions, the politics of the area in which they live or the level of their sense of determination, individually or as a community. Nor does it mean that the attacking commander can perceive whether the drone attacks are discouraging or increasing levels of resistance.
Second, commanders and political leaders using drones, will have an overblown sense of superiority and security in their physical and professional lives that impel them to continue assassination and war because they can kill opponents without taking into account other critical determining factors that will inevitably decide the war, such as the morale of their opponents, the ground force size of their opponents and external support for the opposition. The ability to kill opponents may win some battles, but it does not mean winning a war or a peace.
“Rise and Kill First”, is fascinating, 631-page book by Ronen Bergman, published in 2018, documenting Israel’s assassination campaign against individuals seen as threats by Israel’s leaders. In the book’s prologue, Bergman reports: “Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world.” These assassinations by agents and drones, numbered over 1,000, at the time of the book’s publication.
And, Bergman notes “The United States has taken the intelligence and assassination techniques developed in Israel as a model…the technology of the pilotless aircraft, or drones, that now serve the Americans and their allies were all in large part developed in Israel.”
In the epilogue to the book, Bergman reports that within Israel’s military and intelligence corps, after decades of successful killings of enemies, by agents and drones, essentially without consequences, there was a disturbing recognition that because of these so-called tactical successes in killing had postponed or prevented the Israeli leadership perceiving and achieving a strategic victory, a long-term political compromise and peace with the Palestinian people.
“Because of the phenomenal successes of Israel’s covert operations at this stage in its history the majority of its leaders have elevated and sanctified the tactical method of combating terror and existential threats at the expense of true vision, statesmanship, and genuine desire to reach a political solution that is necessary for peace to be obtained.”
But, supposing the leadership of the United States, or Israel, define “winning” a war as not controlling real estate or populations but rather using military action as a permanent means of bludgeoning political and economic concessions from less military powerful nations. National foreign policy then is directed not toward peace but creating and managing a continuous, relentless waves of intentional confrontations and attacks leading to advantageous deals for the business interests of the U.S. and its allies.
From this perspective, the Iraq war for instance, was a victory, because it opened up the Iraq oil fields to plundering by various oil companies and increased profits for military contractors and their investors.
This is where drone warfare, robotic warfare becomes even more useful. Citizens of the U.S. have found that, because sons and daughters are replaced on the battlefield with drones, instruments of terror, distant wars are more acceptable. This highly deceptive drone lullaby has, in my opinion, enabled the permanent war policy of the United States which is now revealing itself to be around the world to be genocidal, when deemed necessary by the technologically and financial powerful.
Drones give military and political perpetrators of war a false sense of power and can give their followers a false sense of safety. Drones are not just another weapon, they are more and more central to U.S. corporate global political and economic goals in the coming years.
And to what degree does acceptance and even embrace of drone killing by the public bring with it an unconscious passivity in the face of genocide, an acceptance of governmental lawlessness overseas, however much governmental lawlessness is offensive at home.
Part of the danger is that we come to see ourselves as drones, subject only to guidance, including AI guidance.
Concluding the epilogue to the remarkably insightful book, “A Theory of the Drone”, Gregoire Chamayou, the author, quotes a passage from a article appearing in a 1973 edition of Science for the People magazine:
“Technology is not invincible. That is a myth which leads to passivity. It is common among scientific workers and represents a kind of technical/intellectual chauvinism. The power for social change lies with the large, oppressed segments of society, and it is with them that we must join.”
But, what if even the oppressed segments of society are also mesmerized, diverted and comforted by advancing AI technology, epitomized by drones that target and kill “the enemy” for us, our own personal gods?
In his 1951 novel, “Player Piano”, Kurt Vonnegut, observed:
“The Sovereignty of the United States resides in the people, not in the machines, and it’s the people’s to take back, if they so wish. The machines,” said Paul, “have exceeded the personal sovereignty willingly surrendered to them by the American people for the good government. Machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
I ask myself, to what degree have I, have we, ruled by fear and fearful of accountability, become drones, choosing to project the suffering of “others” only as images on the screens of our minds, only at a distance, whether of just a few feet or thousands of miles?
So, we must be concerned not only about the damage of killer drone operations to those who control drones, we have to be concerned with the damage being done to societies as the death and terror of drone killing bleed inevitably into the spiritual world in which we all live.
Of course, political and financial elites around the world are attracted to surveillance to killer drones to control their own people as well as to conquer their “enemies”. So, when we oppose killer drones, born and used as a weapon of enforcing colonial relationships, we are on an international mission of mass liberation.
- TOD pg. 63 64. Can one maintain domination of the evaluated areas by means other than territorial control? The illusion of domination of…. The kill box inevitably means extermination of civilians within the kill zone civilian enemies and reoccupation by friendly civilians. This happening in Gaza, unique because of its small size and containment of the civilians. The tricky part is for killers and spreading of conflict…..pg 55
- 3. MAY LIKE NOT TO SEND U.S. TROOPS, BUT THEN WHO DECIDES WHO IS THE ENEMY. IS IT THE FEW PEOPLE WHO CONTROL HIGH TECH DRONE KILLING TECHNOLOGY, LESS EXPENSIVE THAN MANNED WEAPONS, NOT REQUIRING MILITARY PERSONNEL WHO HAVE SOULS. GAZA PROVES NO NEED TO HAVE A CONGRESS APPROVAL, A WAR THAT CHANGES THE WORLD BY ASSASSINATION. TOD PG. 56-58
- CARE NOT ABOUT THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS WILL BE DEPRIVED OF THEIR RIGHTS.
- SPREADS WAR.
- Israeli generals had “later grasped the limits of force” and wanted to compromise with the Palestinian people.
- Rise and Kill First, by Ronen Bergman – 2018
