Here’s the way wars were fought 200 years ago (or at least, an ideal example reflecting the values of the era)…
The Royal Navy was much demoralized by its initial encounters with the tiny United States Navy in the opening months of the War of 1812. It was the greatest naval force in the world, and had been accustomed to dominating French and Spanish opponents for a generation. Yet in the first few single-ship encounters of the war, the Americans had taken four British frigates, and several smaller warships.
Captain Philip Broke of the 38-gun HMS Shannon, determined to restore the universe to its proper shape, was blockading Boston, and he knew that there was one frigate in the harbor ready for sea, the 38-gun USS Chesapeake. To even the odds, he sent his consort away to Halifax. Then, on June 1, 1813, he sent a note of challenge in to Captain James Lawrence of the Chesapeake, assuring him that if he brought his ship out to fight, it would be a fair contest:
As the Chesapeake appears now ready for sea, I request you will do me the favour to meet the Shannon with her, ship to ship, to try the fortune of our respective flags. The Shannon mounts twenty-four guns upon her broadside and one light boat-gun; 18 pounders upon her main deck, and 32-pounder carronades upon her quarter-deck and forecastle; and is manned with a complement of 300 men and boys, beside thirty seamen, boys, and passengers, who were taken out of recaptured vessels lately. I entreat you, sir, not to imagine that I am urged by mere personal vanity to the wish of meeting the Chesapeake, or that I depend only upon your personal ambition for your acceding to this invitation. We have both noble motives. You will feel it as a compliment if I say that the result of our meeting may be the most grateful service I can render to my country; and I doubt not that you, equally confident of success, will feel convinced that it is only by repeated triumphs in even combats that your little navy can now hope to console your country for the loss of that trade it can no longer protect. Favour me with a speedy reply. We are short of provisions and water, and cannot stay long here.
Lawrence brought Chesapeake out that very day (although, apparently not in response to the note), and followed Shannon out to a point where there was plenty of sea room for a battle. As they took their positions both ships passed up opportunities to fire upon their opponents without return fire, waiting until both were bringing their broadsides to bear.
After the first shot was fired, the battle lasted less than 15 minutes, but it was unusually bloody. Shannon raked Chesapeake‘s decks again and again with rapid and deadly accurate fire, quickly depopulating its quarterdeck. Lawrence was mortally wounded — his last command was “Don’t give up the ship!” But the British boarders, led by Broke, took the ship anyway, at great cost. Broke received a terrible head wound, which his surgeon believed he would not survive. Shannon‘s first lieutenant was killed, one of 228 men killed or wounded on the two ships, making it proportionally one of the bloodiest battles in the age of sail.
Lawrence died as his captured ship was being taken to Halifax, and the Royal Navy buried him there with full military honors.
Broke lived to receive a hero’s adulation, and would die in 1841 as a rear admiral. But his active-duty career was more or less at an end, as he never entirely recovered from the head wound.
To read about that time, Broke’s challenge (“We have both noble motives.”), the gallant and gentlemanly way in which the two captains brought their ships together, and the horrific murder they unhesitatingly unleashed upon one another in the name of honor and glory, is to read about a breed of men who seem alien today.
Anyway, I got to thinking about that this morning when I saw The Guardian raise the question, “Are unmanned military drones ethical in battle?”
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or ‘drones’, is one of the most controversial elements of modern warfare. The technology allows for the delivery of bombs and bullets with no risk whatever to the attacker. But does the use of drones create new ethical problems? Guardian columnist Seumas Milne and Peter Lee, a military expert at Portsmouth University, discuss the moral and political questions raised by drones
The headline when I got to the actual video debate was a bit more overwrought than the one in the Tweet that had led me there, to wit: “Is the use of unmanned military drones ethical or criminal?” As I said, overwrought.
Today, among most military commanders, any tactic or technology that allows you to strike the enemy with minimal (or no) risk to your own people is a boon to be embraced. And it most certainly is not “criminal.”
But it occurs to me that 200 years ago, the fictional Jack Aubrey (whom Patrick O’Brian placed aboard the real-life Shannon for that epic battle off Boston) would have described slaughtering the enemy without risk to one’s own life as “not quite the thing.”
We’ve changed since then. The question is, have we changed for the better or not? That’s a legitimate subject for debate. As I said above, the idea of pronouncing drones “criminal” is absurd. But we still might legitimately ask whether this is the way we want to fight, in the present and the future.
A few days back, we had a discussion of whether we are evolving into better people, with some of my liberal readers taking the optimistic view. As Kathryn put it, “Right triumphs sooner or later, if one is of a progressive bent. One works to make it sooner.”
I expressed my doubts. I believe every individual, whether born into the 18th or 21st centuries, has an equal chance to do good or evil, and just as big a challenge determining which is which. We may do so in dramatically different cultural contexts, but we face the same struggles.
I think Broke’s fair-minded way of killing presented its own challenges, as does our ability to kill with drones. And neither he, nor we, necessarily hold the moral high ground. I’ll admit that, throwback that I am, I prefer his way. But gentlemanly slaughter can also appall.
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Yeah, like on the fields of Flanders. Or at Antietam. Or any of 10,000 ancient battles. Slaughters in the name of pride…
Wars are for winning. There is no nobility in it; honor – in the moral sense – however has had and always should have a central place in our engagement in battle. That’s why Abu Ghraib was such a low point for America.
Chesapeake’s Captain entered into combat without the imagination necessary to win. Executing sound, but differentiating, strategy is the name of the game – in war or in business.
Lawrence also entered the fray with an unfamiliar, motley, undisciplined crew — some of whom had been on the verge of mutiny in recent days.
Broke met him with a hyper-efficient crew he had been forming for years. He had wasted not one minute of that time, and had trained them up to an extraordinary proficiency at gunnery.
Broke was ready; Lawrence was not.
To elaborate…
I didn’t make it to Mass yesterday (still nursing that cold), but my wife did, and she says our pastor had tossed out his prepared homily to give us one about the stunning ending of the Auburn-Alabama football game the night before.
For those of you who, like me, missed it, in the last second, Auburn’s Chris Davis intercepted a missed Alabama field goal attempt, in the end zone, and ran it back 109 yards to win the game.
Why was that relevant?
Well, the Gospel reading for the day was this one, about being prepared at all times:
Our pastor’s point was that Chris Davis was ready for something extremely unlikely, and he reacted perfectly under the circumstances. We should all go and do likewise.
The Shannon-Chesapeake battle was another illustration of the same principle. For years, Broke had painstakingly trained his crew, so that when his opportunity finally came, they were ready to quickly overcome a more populous crew and ship with a much-greater broadside weight. He didn’t just follow the book; he wrote his own book. He’d installed modern flintlocks on all his guns (but had slow match ready in case of a misfire), and had fitted them with innovative tangent sights, and had etched compass points into the deck next to each gun so his crews could orient themselves to fire even when they couldn’t see the enemy for the smoke.
And he had spent a significant chunk of his personal fortune on powder and shot so that the men could train constantly with real charges, firing at real targets, rather than limiting them to the ridiculously small ammunition supplies that the Admiralty allowed. Speaking of giving up a fortune, he and his crew had voluntarily burned most of the prizes they had captured on the American station, which meant giving up a great deal in prize money. They had done this to avoid weakening the crew by sending men away in prize crews — so that they would be ready when the Americans came out.
So, as I said, Broke was READY. Lawrence, though a fine and accomplished officer (he had dealt the Royal Navy one of its earlier humiliations by sinking HMS Peacock when he commanded USS Hornet), was not.
So the right thing to do would have been to stay in port and avoid the fight. If you have no strengths to play to at the time, don’t play at all.
Hindsight being 20-20, yes. If Lawrence hadn’t come out that day, Broke would likely have left the station within a day or so. He was nearly out of water and other provisions, and was getting a bit desperate for a fight, which is why he sent the written challenge in to Lawrence.
It would have been far less gallant, but wiser, for Chesapeake to have stayed in port a bit longer. The U.S. needed that frigate. The Royal Navy did not — it just needed a morale-booster, which is what that victory gave it.
By the way, that lurid headline that The Guardian used — “Is the use of unmanned military drones ethical or criminal?” — doesn’t reflect the actual content of the “debate” on the video.
Neither “debater” asserts anything remotely close to the idea that the use of drones is “criminal.” It’s actually a very pragmatic and sensible discussion. The headline writer was engaging in a fantasy that just happens to track closely with the newspaper’s editorial slant.
One thing these two Brits agree on, which may not surprise you: They both seem to believe those Yanks are bleedin’ nutters when it comes to use of drones, but the RAF uses them responsibly.
They didn’t use the word “criminal,” but what after all is the definition of “criminal”? Something that pertains to a crime, in other words, a violation of the law. The gentleman taking the “anti” drone position mentions the violation of international sovereignty, and in doing so, he is touching on recent reports from both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as well as agencies of the UN, that raise this question about whether certain aspects of the program violate international law. The US government has naturally pushed back on this issue and one can certainly debate this, but the question about the legality (or, conversely, the “criminality”) of the policy is hardly “absurd.”
This all becomes more interesting in light of Amazon’s new idea about “delivery by drone.” And Mr. Milne is right to remind us that we’re entering a whole new world where many other countries are going to start feeling free to send drones wherever they feel necessary to extinguish anything or anybody they perceive as a threat to their domestic security.
Phillip, do you think the tone of the headline matched the tone of the video discussion?
The headline misrepresented the content.
A bit. “Ethical or unethical?” would have been closer to the mark.
Phillip, consider this…
The reflexive framing of issues in such a manner that “criminal” is bandied about so casually does great harm to the cause of international law.
Consider this news from yesterday:
It is the first time the UN’s human rights office has so directly implicated Mr Assad…
When international law advocates talk about charging someone who is obviously involved in the deliberate massacre of civilians, then the very idea of “international law” gains credibility. As it does when someone like Ratko Mladić is charged.
But when the concept is so watered down as to throw the word “criminal” at policy decisions one doesn’t like — such as a liberal democracy, with due process, using surgical strikes (via any technology) to take out terrorists — then the idea of international law loses credibility.
So if one values the concept, and wants to see it advanced, one should want the word “criminal” to be sparingly used…
So if drones are unethical, what are smart bombs, missiles, rockets, artillery rounds, and mines?
If you want to bring back ethical, bring back the guy with the flamethrower. Enemies used to put bounties on those guy’s heads.
Warfare like all other things has changed and will continue to change as time marches on and humans come up with more efficient ways to engage in combat or whatever term one prefers to use. Drones are the latest war toy for those who wish to remain at arms length from the actual horrors of face to face combat using rifles, bayonets, and anything requiring up close and personal life and death struggles.
As the face of the enemy has changed significantly over the past 20 years, so has the method used by the military to deal with them. When we went into Vietnam, America tried to use conventional warfare weapons like tanks and other armored vehicles to combat an enemy who was skilled at hiding and camouflage instead of a marching army thrust into battle.
The weapons we know of and the ones we don’t know about are not the old tools of the trade but they are impersonal, remote, and the operators of the weapons are the adults who as children would used to sit and still do sit in front of a video game, operating the controls.
A former employee was stationed at one of the weapons testing facilities and he would share what he could without violating his top secret clearance agreement. According to the employee, some of the weapons that were being tested would scare the living hell out of a normal person. One in particular could literally turn a solid 50 ft cube reinforced concrete structure into a pile of rubble.
As for spying from the sky, my brother was a specialist who worked with the spy plane program and the technology at the time, approximately 30 years ago, is just now being introduced to the public.
If it can be conceived in thought, humans can convey the concept into reality if they choose to do so. All it takes is motive and opportunity and a willingness to create or construct anything capable of destroying human lives. Unfortunately, people of peace must face the reality of that fact and understand that the Hitlers of history still exist and some are more than willing to use whatever is at hand to achieve their less than honorable goals. If we fail to acknowledge that and fail to be prepared to defend or stand against the aggressors who are more than willing to use weapons capable of annihilating their real or perceived enemies, then we fail in our obligation to humanity.
If all weapons could be turned into “plowshares” and peaceful purposes, it would be the greatest gift possible to humanity but if there is anything that can be used for destructive purposes, you can count on someone taking advantage and using it.
I am neither a hawk or pacifist but after viewing the events of the past 70 years up close and personal, the one lesson I have learned is that there is not one thing that can be conceived humans are not capable of doing, good or evil. Trying to minimize the evil and enhance the good should be our goal in life whether it is something big or a small thing like an unexpected compliment to someone for doing a good job or dropping an extra dollar in the Salvation Army kettle.
Just a few thoughts to share.