The Ethics of Drone Warfare in "Eye in the Sky" Anonymous 8th Grade

Since the start of the 21st century, the paradigm of fighting a war has been turned completed on its head by a technology capable of obliterating anything at the flip of a switch by an operator thousands of miles away and by someone who has never been on the battlefield in a traditional, boots-on-the-ground sort of way. That technology: drone warfare. Whereas previous wars were fought by men on the ground with guns and tanks, wars can now be fought in cyberspace. Military operators, most of whom are thousands of miles away from a conflict zone, are able to fly unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones, for short) equipped with explosives of varying strengths into an area and destroy or kill their target without the loss of human life and sans the potential time implications for soldiers. Quick, easy, and painless - kind of like a video game in which there are no real stakes and very limited consequences. Those limited consequences and stakes, Director Gavin Hood argues, take the humanity out of fighting war. Gavin Hood’s overlooked but critically lauded 2016 Eye in the Sky, starring Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren (among many others), explores the ethics of drone warfare and the implications of relying on such a unique weapon to...