A guest post

One of the Philosophy 310 students asks the following question to you cadets. Lauren asks:

"After our a close examination of just war theory with the legalist paradigm, jus ad bellum, jus in bello, Westphalia, The Moral Warrior, the focus on why you serve the state, is killing ever justified, etc. etc., it seems that a considerable amount of moral reasoning plays into the military on both a legal and personal level. As a class we go through scenarios on how to defend our position and explain the greater good we’re trying to accomplish as military leaders to, say, a hippie. It all seems pretty rational and reasonable to me. But why is it, then, that a considerable amount of the cadet and pilot population seems to have no grasp of the morality of the issues at hand. You’ve seen it, maybe you even get wrapped up in it and join the fun. One of the more popular (outside of Captain Strawser’s 310) responses to “why do you want to be a pilot” is “so I can blow shit up” and I’ve heard on more than one occasion from peers things like “I can’t wait until I graduate and can go kill people”. I’m not exaggerating, this is a real quote. Most of the time these people can’t even attempt to justify what they’re saying but sometimes I get the ‘but they’re not people they’re terrorists’ responses. I’ve talked to fighter pilots on ops and here for career day and many of them brag about killing people on the ground and in the air and dropping bombs on large targets. In a Law class last year a retired fighter pilot guest speaker complained about LOAC to the class saying that the proportionality laws merely got in their way. The best example I can think of if you don’t believe me is the video clips. They show them in a-hall. It’s a fighter and bomber clip with the most hardcore, heavy metal background music demonstrating air power with endless buildings blowing up left and right or pilots taking out people running around on the ground. And what do we do? We get excited, pumped up and start clapping or even cheering. In basic training on the fourth of July they showed a clip of bombs going off in the desert with that ‘brought to you courtesy of the red white and blue’ country music hit. People cheered. It seems like fighter pilots and cadets never even think about someone being inside that other airplane or that building or that truck. At the Academy we are in large distanced from the weight of killing. Most cadets don’t take killing people seriously because they’re ‘terrorists’ or civilians in the close proximity of terrorists. Initially, I was disgusted with the military for being so eager to kill people and not even weighing the seriousness of dropping bombs on cities. It is too easy to think of blowing up a truck as being a video game with today’s technology. I wrestled the idea of my commitment to serving the state because I didn’t want to be on a team with people like that. I see it as being a feeding frenzy for blood thirsty wanna-be hard core soldiers because they get so excited about killing people. I might be missing the point here and these people are just excited about the greater good and helping their country. But please, tell me what you think is ging on here and explain why it’s so easy to miss the point."