1. VANGUARD UNIVERSITY
TAKING THE SOUL OUT OF WAR: THE PROCESS OF DEHUMANIZATION
PAPER SUBMITTED TO
DR. JOHN WILSON
U.S. MILITARY HISTORY
NOVEMBER 25, 2014
BY
ISAAC SWANSON

2. 1
While war has always seen a change of pace in regards to the evolution of technology, it has only
been a very recent phenomenon in which warfare has been fully immersed in total war. This is
to say that war now seems to take even bystanders along for the ride in the inclusion of tanks,
bombings, machine gun fire, chemical warfare, and an assortment of other deadly tools humanity
has developed over the years. If anything, the 21st century has multiplied the level of ferocity
total war has. Thus, its introduction onto the global stage back in World War One seems like
child’s play by today’s standards of war. In accompanying total warfare, future weapons of war
are being made like stealth technology making air fighters invisible. Nuclear bombs are also
being developed in such a tiny capacity that they can easily fit into as small of an object as a
laptop. Even robots are being made to replace humans. These future weapons, combined with
many others that are being produced today, continue to push the technological envelope and the
way in which war is made and fought. Yet, even as technology continues to improve in regards
to weapons of war, the human being is slowly, but surely, being removed from the whole of
warfare. In eons past, war was conducted in a very visceral way where combatants would square
off against each other like a pair of gladiators on the battlefield. Swords drawn, shields at the
ready, and knowing full well that any one mistake would spell doom, these warriors of the past
experienced a very personal side of war in which their enemies would tangibly die at their own,
blood covered, hands. In today’s world, at the push of a button from some military base in Las
Vegas, a computer operator with control of a missile can effectively kill a soldier thousands of
miles across the world with near surgical like precision in the dusty sands of the Middle East.
Increasingly, war has led to the disengagement of the ancient gladiatorial war conditions of old
and replaced them with computers, robots, and machines that replace the role of humans. This is
to say that in combination with technology, war has taken out the human element of warfare and

3. 2
essentially dehumanized the whole process. People on the battlefield have become a number on
the screen of a computer. Whether the eventual disengagement of humans altogether from
warfare will come to be a good or bad thing is still to be determined.
This paper will explore the effects of dehumanization in combination with the evolution
of technology, personal war stories from soldiers, and through society at large. In exploring
these different factors of dehumanization through a war lens, one will come to find that with the
continuing evolution and growth of war technology in all aspects, the human element is slowly
eroding from the warfare equation to a point where the individual is becoming, largely,
insignificant due to the continuing technological arms race; thus, the traditional solider becomes
obsolete in relation to all of the new-age 21st century weapons. In the slow disengagement of
humans in war, warfare is coming into a new era in which it will have to redefine itself with its
primary actors being replaced with machines instead of people.
The Revolving Door of Technology
In order to understand the slow disengagement of people in war, a very brief overview of
technology as it stood in the past, as it stands today, and how it will look like in the future is
needed. The tools of war in which people use may change, but the intent always remains the
same, to complete the objective with maximum efficiency. As technology has evolved however,
the effective tool of the sword has transformed into the machine gun, thus, distancing the person
using the weapon from the actual killing aspect. No longer is it necessary to have to be so
personally involved with the action of killing. With technology one can simply, with the press of
a button, call in an airstrike of epic proportions and watch a field of soldiers die in front of him
without so much as a sweat. In terms of warfare, civilization has entered into the realm of

4. 3
fantasy that would have been alien to the traditional soldiers of bygone eras. Karl Marlantes, a
U.S. Vietnam soldier, even remarked that he “used to fantasize about a laser beam so fine you
could slice an airplane’s wing off with no more than a hairline cut-or a man’s head with no blood
at all.”1 Future weapons of warfare make possible the “avoidance of darkness”2 as Marlantes
calls it thus distancing the person from the actual killing and dehumanizing the whole of war
through a revolving door of technology.
Face-lifting the Gun
Of the most obvious weapons to talk about which is most familiar with the modern day
person is the gun. The gun, having come in various different forms such as the Colt .45, M1
Garand, and sub-machine guns like the M1A1 Thompson, are finally reaching its ceiling. This
would seem very strange to most as the gun, in recent human history associated with warfare, has
been the most common tool of death armies have used for the past three hundred odd years or so.
In describing the standard fare gun when compared to the increasingly complex weapons of war,
George and Meridith Friedman remark that “it is a line-of-sight weapon in a world of indirect
fire. It fires a slow, dumb projectile in a world of brilliant, hypervelocity projectiles. The rifle-
bearing infantryman is governed by the same principles that governed the spear hurler and the
bowman-first see the target, then try to get your hands to direct the projectile towards it.”3 In
describing the shortcomings of the gun, it becomes obvious to the gun romantic that it needs a
serious facelift of sorts. As if answering the call, Max Boot, an advisor of the Department of
Defense, notes the development of “electronic guns that are capable of spitting out a million
rounds a minute. They might permit a soldier to stop an incoming rocket-propelled grenade with
1 Marlantes, Karl, What it is Like to Go to War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011), 72.
2 Ibid.
3 Friedman, George and Meredith, The Future of War: Power, Technology, and American World Dominance in the
Twenty-First Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 386.

5. 4
a solid wall of lead.”4 In further describing the future of guns in warfare, Boot goes on to talk
about the replacement of the M-16 known as the XM29. In talking about this particular gun,
Boot contends that “it will have another barrel that can fire 20mm high-explosive airburst
projectiles to a range of half-a-mile. These mini grenades will come with embedded microchips
that will control when they explode, allowing them to kill enemy fighters who might be lying flat
on the ground or hiding behind a berm.”5 The gun has, essentially, become more than just an
extension of one’s body in the art of killing; it is beginning to become a war weapon of
fantastical proportions. The cherry on top of all of this is the development of the ray gun. While
not thought even remotely possible as one would only place such a machine in the confines of
the latest sci-fi TV show, it is becoming more and more of a reality. In describing the sci-fi
lover’s dream, Boot notes that “the Long-Range Acoustic Device is a forty-five pound, dish
shaped antenna that can emit earsplitting noise of up to 150 decibels. This weapon is designed to
be non-lethal, but it could easily kill at higher intensity levels: sonic waves above 150 decibels
can inflict internal injuries.”6 In one flip of a switch, a soldier can effectively set his gun from
“stun” to “kill” and eliminate the enemy with the head throb of a lifetime! All manners of
tongue in cheek aside, the ferocity and creativity in which the future of guns are being developed
are truly shocking. What seems to be even more eye-opening is the strongly held belief that guns
are starting to become obsolete to many military experts in the field. The future of guns hangs
perilously close to the pile of trash found at the bottom of the technological cliff.
4 Boot, Max, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History (New York: Gotham Books, 2006),
421.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid, 446.

6. 5
Death with so Much as a Pinhead
Chemical warfare, as first introduced in World War One, had the potential and capability
to annihilate an entire army with the simple spread of deadly toxins. While chemical warfare has
been the most vehemently detested by most major world countries as being too inhumane, the
development of these deadly weapons of war still have to be noted as they were planned to be
used in the major wars in which America has been involved. Used in frequent abundance with
the various trenches that scattered the fields, chemical agents came in all kinds of flavors: “first
chlorine, then phosgene, then mustard, ‘the king of poison gases’; first released from cylinders,
then packed into artillery shells, then lobbed by mortars that dropped a forty-pound drum of gas
into the enemy’s trench.”7 One can only imagine the terror in the enemy’s face as, not a machine
gun, but an artillery shell containing mustard gas descended onto the trench. The after effects, as
duly noted by scientists, are grueling to say the least. In dealing with mustard gas specifically,
the eyes are blinded, the burns severe, and the victim constantly feels as if he is gasping for
breath. As Coffey notes, “worse yet was in the works as both sides planned to use long-range
bombers to spray gas on enemy cities in 1919, had the war not ended with the November 1918
armistice.”8 With the coming of World War II and the Cold War following shortly after,
America’s Chemical Corps looked to gain the edge over all enemies in fear they would fall
behind. Although technically illegal in national law, America went about developing the deadly
nerve gas agent. Of the most deadly of the nerve gas agents developed was the VX. Once used,
“a drop the size of a pinhead placed on the human skin would cause death. VX was not only
more deadly than sarin, it was persistent-once an area was sprayed, it stayed poisoned for
7 Coffey, Patrick, American Aresenal: A Century of Waging War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 145.
8 Ibid.

7. 6
weeks.”9 To combine with the already lethal VX, the army also had to develop a way of
unleashing the agent onto an enemy in case it needed to be used. To do this, “it [America]
engineered the M-55 rocket, which weighed fifty-five pounds, carried five quarts of sarin or VX,
and had a range of six miles.”10 Having never used the nerve gas agent due to its unprecedented
potential in death-dealing, the U.S. military decided to derail the project altogether and do away
with the material. In noting just one instance of its capacity for death, “in 1968, six thousand
sheep were killed near Dugway Proving Ground in Utah in an accident involving field tests of
VX. The army denied everything at first, but later admitted that half a million pounds of nerve
agents had been sprayed over the area over several years.”11
The Rise of the Machines
In this new fantastical future warfare that is slowly being created as each day passes, a
new element in the whole equation becomes rather apparent: robots. As if taking its cues
directly from a sci-fi story, indeed, robots seem to be the wave of the future in that they
completely replace the human and do the “dirty work” thus appeasing military families by not
having their soldiers sent to die. In comparing the traditional solider in this new face of future
warfare, George and Merdith Friedman sum it up by saying:
The individual solider is the hardest thing to find on the battlefield; he is the smallest unit of
warfare, and his intelligence makes him naturally stealthy. But, in general, he is also relatively
harmless. Ever since the invention of artillery and the tank, the amount of firepower the individual
infantryman could wield was limited. Even the machine gun, powerful as it was, could not fire an
explosive shell and therefore was inherently inferior to larger explosive rounds.12
9 Coffey, Patrick, American Aresenal: A Century of Waging War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 164.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid, 165.
12 Friedman, George and Meredith, The Future of War: Power, Technology, and American World Dominance in the
Twenty-First Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 377.

8. 7
Thus, in summation, the future of the solider also looks bleak as he becomes insignificant to the
whole process of war. In order to combat this ineffectiveness, replacements will be needed in the
form of cold-hearted killing machines, robots. Of the various robot projects currently being
developed by the Army, perhaps none outshines the death dealing capacity these machines have
than the Gladiator. “About the size of a golf cart, the vehicle was controlled by a soldier
wielding a Playstation game controller, but software plug-ins will allow it to be upgraded to
semiautonomous and then fully autonomous modes. Fully loaded, it costs $400,000 and carries a
machine gun with six-hundred rounds of ammunition, antitank rockets, and non-lethal
weapons.”13 The anti-videogame observer might wryly note that gamers gain years of training in
preparation for real life simulation of the Gladiator! In yet another robotic device named after
the Roman God of War, “the MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System) carries a
more powerful machine gun, 40mm grenade launchers, and, for nonlethal settings, a green laser
‘dazzler,’ tear gas, and a loudspeaker to warn any insurgents that resistance in futile.”14 In this
new era of warfare, robots not only become a helpful tool in scouting, recon, and on the field
assistance, they become the modern day soldier standing at the ready with the push of a button
from a gaming controller. This strange and fantastical experience is not too far off in the future
either. An expert on robots, Robert Finkelstein, warns the reader to not simply laugh off robotic
warfare as being too far-fetched. In a cautionary tone, Finkelstein explains that “many may want
to ‘think that the technology is so far in the future that we’ll all be dead. But to think that way is
to be brain dead now.”15 What Finkelstein is essentially saying is for the modern day person to
prepare themselves for the future of robotic warfare; to laugh it away is to ignorantly fall under
13 Singer, P.W., Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin
Books, 2009), 111.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid, 427.

9. 8
the preconception that human soldiers will continue to rule the fields of war. For the first time in
the history of warfare, traditional soldiers of old will be replaced with steel-cladded robots of the
future waging wars for their respective countries.
The Ghost in the Machine
Of perhaps the next most important future weapon to note in this increasingly
nightmarish vision of warfare is the use of bombs and missiles. Evolving from the now archaic
model of canons and TNT, bombs and missiles have graduated to the scale of complete nuclear
annihilation of the entire world through nuclear warheads placed at strategic places across the
world. While the whole of the countries across the globe have seen the folly in designing these
world ending weapons by trying to dismantle them, the possibility of a crazed megalomaniacal
leader getting hold of one of these warheads is very real. Aside from nuclear warheads alone,
there are other combinations of missiles and bombs that can also prove to be deadly. While
bombing now has become more strategic in its approach, its early incarnations were nothing
even remotely close to precise; one might call them random. In recalling the B-29 bombings on
Tokyo during WWII, the U.S. tried to assure the public at large that the Tokyo civilians had
“‘died peacefully and without evidence of a struggle.’”16 This, of course, being a huge lie as the
“fire sucked up the available oxygen, so there was none left to breathe; smoke choked, carbon
monoxide poisoned, flames incinerated, superheated air roasted, falling debris crushed, water
boiled or drowned, and crowds trampled.”17 The very origin of bombings and missiles were
designed with a very effective and cruel spirit in mind; to make an effective point against an
enemy army by attacking their civilian population. The greatest effect of distancing oneself from
16 Coffey, Patrick, American Aresenal: A Century of Waging War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 108.
17 Ibid.

10. 9
the actual killing can be seen here when one imagines flying thousands of feet above the enemy,
dropping a bomb, and watching the fireworks ensue below upon designated kill targets. Jason
Armagost aptly describes his experience as a U.S. air pilot in Iraq: “In the lingo of combat
aviators, these bombs will ‘prosecute’ targets. Rarely— unless talking about Saddam or his
sons—is killing mentioned. We are distanced. We make ‘inputs’ into a network of flying
computers. I manage the ghost in the machine.”18 This morbid reflection of what actual life is
like inside the cockpit of a bomber flying thousands of feet above the air paints a scary picture
of, not only the realities of war, but the psychological damage it does to pilots charged with
dropping the bomb. The person is successfully removed from the whole of the operation in
being assigned the most minuscule of tasks: flying over the enemy, pressing a button, and flying
off. Later, Jason Armagost makes another thought provoking reflection of the whole situation:
What of the gazing nomad? Does he carry books with him in his travels, or does the weight come
at too high a cost? Would he fight an enemy with a sword, the curved scimitar of a mounted
warrior? Yes? He would have to watch his adversary breathe his last, watch his eyes glaze, feel his
death rattle on the tip of his blade, knowing that he must protect his family, his tribe, his very life.
Rubbernecking up, would he recognize me as a man in this black machine six miles above the
desert? Would he think me a bat-winged demon?19
Being a part of the ghost machine as Armagost so aptly describes, the soldier becomes just
another cog in the death dealing machine of destruction. No longer is the need for the tangible
and physical realities of the act of killing required, instead, it is replaced with feelings of
confusion and insignificance as machines do all of the dirty work. In the wake of this
realization, even more new weapons in the forms of bombs and missiles are being developed in
unmanned aerial vehicles and smart bombs. Respectively, these two new weapons of war are
changing the rules of the game as smart bombs can strike with near surgical like precision on any
target marked from a computer millions of miles away. In recalling his encounters with these
18 Anderson,Donald, ed., When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers' Accounts from the Civil War to Iraq (Iowa:
University of Iowa Press, 2008), 205.
19 Ibid, 215.

11. 10
new weapons of war, “one Iraqi general said, ‘during the Iran war, my tank was my friend
because I could sleep in it and know I was safe…During the war my tank became my
enemy…[N]one of my troops would get near a tank at night because they kept blowing up.’”20
Describing the very real destruction these smart bombs are capable in dealing, Coffey remarks
that “although only 8 percent of the bombs dropped were smart bombs, they did 75 percent of the
damage.”21
Squeezing the solider out of the war
One of the most important aspects of war has always been that of the soldier. The
soldier, unlike any other, has seen the caprices and ugliness of war. He knows the terror of war
and the fear and anger it develops inside one’s heart. Yet, with the advent of technology and the
robotic warrior poised to replace the traditional solider of eons past, how does the soldier relate
with this new technology? In more ways than one, the solider often finds himself in a state of
confusion and mixed emotions as the laws of war continually ask the soldier to distance himself
from the killing altogether. Thus, the soldier becomes lost in the cross sections of the weapons
of war and the tangible feeling of inflicting death upon an actual living soul. The very system of
war essentially becomes a cold scientific engine as enemies are increasingly identified as
numbers rather than living beings.
What War is Imagined to be
Philip Caputo, an ex-army lieutenant serving in the fields of Vietnam, aptly portrays and
captures the intensity and feelings involved in war with his book A Rumor of War. War, as can
often be conveyed to the minds of young men, is often seen as something grand. It provides the
20 Coffey, Patrick, American Aresenal: A Century of Waging War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 273.
21 Ibid.

12. 11
set piece upon which to do heroic deeds, it’s a way to contribute to society, it instills courage,
virtue, justice, and bravery. This, unfortunately, is the lie many young new soldiers entering into
a war tell themselves to justify their reasoning as to why they enlist. Thus, the spectacular and
grand spectacle that war was imagined to be turns into the grim reality of what war actually is.
In actuality, war is far greater than that of imagination; it is the embodiment of agonizing pain,
heartbreak, utter depression, and the threshold through which no man can pass, death. In
thinking of what war was, Caputo fell under the impression that his experience in war would
play out like some sort of movie with him playing the lead role. “Already I saw myself charging
up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in Sand of Iwo Jima, and then coming home a
sustained warrior with medals on my chest.”22 Yet another soldier, Major Curt Munson,
involved in a tour in Vietnam recalls the visions of grandeur had about war during the time from
personal experience.
Joining the Marine Corp was essentially a minor act of rebellion, but was influenced by Leon
Uris’s book Battle Cry, which depicted them as men of honor and greatness. I knew I had
committed myself to a tour in Vietnam, although at that point, if someone had asked me, I would
not have known much about the issues involved. Most of my exposure to the war came from the
John Wayne film The Green Berets, with its one dimensional and jingoistic view of the war, and
Walter Cronkite. Going to school in Arkansas, I wasn’t really aware of the antiwar factions. My
thinking about going to war was that it was something I wanted to do, as part of my generation, as
part of history, and as a part of growing up. As I say that, it seems amazingly naive to me, but
there it is.23
Herein lays the amazingly cruel deception of war perpetuated by war propaganda and society
itself. As a way of enticing the young soldier to join the “good guys,” war dresses itself in the
most alluring way possible so as to make it appear like a grand adventure. Society further
perpetuates this lie with its glorification of violence and all manners of weaponry. With
22 Caputo, Philip, A Rumor of War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1977), 6.
23 Li, Xiaobing, and McMahon,Robert, Voices from the Vietnam War : Stories from American, Asian, and Russian
Veterans (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 112.

13. 12
enticements of traveling to places unknown and foreign, fighting the good fight, and battling for
a good cause, the unnerving realities of war begin to set in.
The Effects of Labeling Enemies
Dehumanization goes far beyond that of weapons and what war is imagined to be, it also
plays into the labels and tags placed on enemies. In just the first day of training alone, Caputo
experienced the slow and grinding process of dehumanization as administered through his drill
sergeants. Recalling his experiences, “we were shouted at, kicked, humiliated, and harassed
constantly. We were no longer called by our names, but called ‘shitbird,’ ‘scumbag,’ or
‘numbnuts,’ by the DIs.”24 Major Curt Munson also seems to have experienced the same
feelings while in boot camp. Now given a dehumanizing term to associate himself with, Munson
was asked to associate the enemy in the same way. In full effect, “assimilating us to the idea that
we were going to kill people was a big part of the training in boot camp. Even more than John
Wayne, it tended to dehumanize the enemy, to portray them as fodder, just somebody we needed
to go and kill. You must get people’s minds right about that and it is one area in which the
Marine Corps did a pretty good job.”25 The Army is brilliant in this way in that the enemy is
immediately classified as a dirty jap, a yellow insurgent, or an insect of some kind thus making
the enemy vastly easier to kill. While completely dehumanizing in the way this methodology is
honed in, the effect is truly devastating as soldiers execute the “dirty jap” with no fear or
hesitation; it’s almost as if they were just stomping some insignificant bug. This, of course,
leaves no room for any empathy in killing the enemy. Marlantes describes this devastating effect
in its full wonder when he says “this disassociation of one’s enemy from humanity is a kind of
24 Caputo, Philip, A Rumor of War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1977), 8.
25 Li, Xiaobing, and McMahon,Robert, Voices from the Vietnam War : Stories from American, Asian, and Russian
Veterans (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 113.

14. 13
pseudospeciation. You make a false species out of the other human and therefore make it easier
to kill him. The touchdown feeling combined with dissociating the enemy was in full effect.”26
The Solider in Conjunction with Technology
With the system and methodology of dehumanization in terms of war now put in
perspective, one can now look at the effects technology had on these soldiers. The mindset of
these soldiers is abundantly clear; they go into the war imagining it to be a grand adventure and
become steeped in dehumanizing terminology to make it easier in killing enemies. With this
mindset in store, these young soldiers, often at the tender age of twenty something, are now
given a pistol, grenades, and machine guns and told to go kill whatever dissociating term they
were taught. Once more, Munson aptly describes the surreal experience of suddenly being
handed control over military airstrikes at the age of nineteen! Noting his experience, Munson
recalls that “we had the ability to bring an enormous amount of firepower to bear on a target. I
remember standing on a hilltop and watching a B-52 strike that was within my range of vision
and observing the shock waves blast through the jungle…. At my level, though, as an FO I
could call in close air strikes, artillery missions, and my own mortars. I had a wide variety of
weapons at my disposal. For a nineteen-year-old that was a pretty heady experience.”27
Increasingly, the evolution of technology is making it that much easier to distance oneself
from the whole of the war and call in airstrikes of epic proportions on an enemy. Acting as if
one were a God, it would seem as if any nineteen year old with a uniform on and the right know
how could call in death from above and watch all of the “crispy critters” burn through use of
crippling bombs. More than just a heady experience as Munson describes, the feeling must have
26 Marlantes, Karl, What it is Like to Go to War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011), 40.
27 Li, Xiaobing, and McMahon,Robert, Voices from the Vietnam War : Stories from American, Asian, and Russian
Veterans (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 117.

15. 14
been surreal beyond imagination and only added to the dehumanizing depth that was drilled in at
training camp. In describing technology in conjunction with war, Marlantes describes the
combination of the two as truly destructive in nature and spirit: “what’s scary is that it is far
easier to take the path of transcendence through destruction than to take the path of
transcendence through creation. And the destructive path gets easier as technology improves,
while positive creating, whether spiritual, artistic, or commercial, is just as hard as it ever was.”28
What is even scarier is the thought that with the continual improvement of technology as the
years go by, that these destructive impulses found in individuals will be able to be more easily
accessed as one uses his gaming controller to unleash havoc from above. The ever continuing
cycle of war and violence seems to trudge on with the exception of the person becoming more
irrelevant in place of the spectacle of events technology brings to the forefront. Perhaps the most
gut-wrenching of all is when Caputo recalls “watching the people run out of their burning
homes” after a napalm bombing run on a village in Vietnam. Caputo remembers vividly not
feeling “anything at all.”29 Such are the effects of technology when combined with the very
visceral experience of war; dehumanization at its peak of glory.
Aftereffects of Dehumanization
Worse than the dehumanizing terms associated with war and the effects technology has
on the human spirit is the overall psyche and mental framework of soldiers coming out of a war.
In a very profound and real way, these soldiers have seen what the face of death looks like.
Thus, their mental framework becomes radically changed as they have now tapped into their
inner desires for brutality, violence, dehumanization, and war. In describing the crossroads upon
which the soldier finds himself, Marlantes notes that “the ethical warrior must avoid getting
28 Marlantes, Karl, What it is Like to Go to War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011), 63.
29 Caputo, Philip, A Rumor of War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1977), 285.

16. 15
crushed between falling in love with the power and thrill of destruction and death dealing and
falling into numbness to the horror. Numbness is learned in our society from an early age. The
numbness protects us. We want it.”30 Vivid images of the famous euphemisms of the 70’s
Woodstock era immediately come to mind. Timothy Leary, with his famous call to “turn on,
tune in, and drop out” encourages drugs to be passed by the handful completely numbing the
individual from any sense of reality whatsoever; in so doing, they become only aware of their
personal transcendent experience. Marlantes is right in his assertion of the perpetuation of
numbness in that many youth today not only fuel this desire with drugs, but with music,
videogames, TV, and a wide assortment of other media related items. This perpetuation of
numbness continues to shatter the realities of life and encourages the victim to escape it any
chance they get. The vicious cycle of nature is brutal in other matters of the human ethos as
well. As Caputo recalls, “a callous began to grow around our hearts, a kind of emotional flak
jacket that blunted the blows and stings of pity.”31 One can only imagine the great use of this
newfound callous in that it hardens the heart of soldiers to a point where they feel no empathy,
pity, and regard to the enemy. Thus, the damning effects of warfare are held in all of its brutal
reality in regards to the dehumanization of war through terminology, technology, and mental
mindset.
Ever since war was brought about, its primary actors and participants were always
people. People always waged war, people always fought, and people always were viscerally
engaged with every aspect of war making. Yet, increasingly, as the 21st century continues to
trudge forward, the human embodiment of the soldier is becoming irrelevant, thereby,
dehumanizing the whole aspect of war. In its slow and eventual march in the replacement of
30 Marlantes, Karl, What it is Like to Go to War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011), 61.
31 Caputo, Philip, A Rumor of War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1977), 96.

17. 16
humans altogether, this reflection of war by John Keegan, as quoted in Thirteen Soldiers: A
Personal History of Americans at War, is becoming more alien by the day:
What battles have in common is human: the behaviors of men struggling to reconcile their instinct
for self-preservation, their sense of honor and the achievement of some aimover which other men
are ready to kill them. The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear and usually of
courage; always of leadership, usually of obedience; always of compulsion, sometimes
insubordination; always of anxiety, sometimes of elation or catharsis; always of uncertainty and
doubt, misinformation and misapprehension, usually also of faith and sometimes of vision; always
of violence, sometimes also of cruelty, self-sacrifice, compassion; above all, it is always a study of
solidarity.32
The whole ethos and spirit of war has to be reassessed then as its primary participants
become replaced with robots, machines, and death dealing devices of the future in which
no human is necessary. In summing up what the new face of war will look like in the
future, P.W. Singer eerily concludes that “in making war less human, we may also be
making it less humane.”33
32 McCain, John and Salter, Mark, Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2014), 1.
33 Singer, P.W., Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin
Books, 2009), 433.

18. 17
Works Cited
Alexander, John B, Future War: Non-lethal Weapons in Twenty-First-Century Warfare
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 1999).
Anderson, Donald, ed., When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers' Accounts from the Civil
War to Iraq (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2008).
Boot, Max, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History (New
York: Gotham Books, 2006).
Caputo, Philip, A Rumor of War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1977).
Coffey, Patrick, American Aresenal: A Century of Waging War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
Friedman, George and Meredith, The Future of War: Power, Technology, and American
World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Klinkowitz, Jerome, Pacific Skies: American Flyers in World War II (Missouri:
University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
Li, Xiaobing, and McMahon, Robert, Voices from the Vietnam War : Stories from
American, Asian, and Russian Veterans (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2010).
Marlantes, Karl, What it is Like to Go to War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011).
McCain, John and Salter, Mark, Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at
War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

19. 18
Samuel, Wolfgang W. E., War of Our Childhood: Memories of World War II (Missouri:
University Press of Mississippi, 2002).
Singer, P.W., Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
(New York: Penguin Books, 2009).