Preserving one’s own soldiers has become a quasi-absolute imperative excluding sacrifice.

Evidence

The concern to preserve one’s forces and avoid senseless losses is certainly in itself nothing new or specific. In the traditional military ethos, scorning death in no way implied not striving to preserve one’s life. What is new is that preserving the lives of one’s own soldiers is regarded as a quasi-absolute state imperative, which in the last analysis excludes any sacrifice at all. An army that exposes the lives of its troops is bad; one that preserves them at all costs is good. Exposure to risk is to be condemned; killing without danger is to be commended. Dying for one’s country was certainly a fine thing, but killing for it, given that it now offers us a dispensation from the heavy toll of our own death, is finer by far. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 357

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the inversion that gets to count as bravery what was once cowardice is the central moral renegotiation of drone warfare.

Related

• Drones’ necroethics embody a nationalism of self-preservation (similarity 0.85)
• Protecting national lives through drones increases their social precariousness. (similarity 0.84)
• The drone reconciles liberal security statehood with unrestricted waging of war. (similarity 0.82)
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good (similarity 0.82)
• The drone state aims to replace mobilized citizen bodies with mechanical agents. (similarity 0.82)
• Drone assassination reframes war as social defense through preventive security measures (similarity 0.82)
• Combat indifference to killing spread to accept civilian deaths by mistake (similarity 0.82)
• Drones create a crisis in military ethos by contradicting traditional warrior values. (similarity 0.81)
• Drone technology erodes the soldier’s defining scorn of death. (similarity 0.81)
• Protecting national lives in war increases those lives’ social precariousness (similarity 0.81)
• The redefinition of bravery as psychic risk is an invented military virtue (similarity 0.81)
• Armed drones reshape sovereignty over a state’s own subjects, not just enemies (similarity 0.81)
• Drones are morally justified by preventing one’s own casualties (similarity 0.81)
• Drones deactivate democratic war critique by removing citizens’ exposure to death. (similarity 0.80)
• Martial virtues of courage and sacrifice functioned ideologically to justify butchery. (similarity 0.80)