According to legend, at the battle of Thermopylae, the Persians’ king, Xerxes, threatened to fire so many arrows at the Spartan soldiers blocking his invasion of Greece that the shafts would darken the sky. The Spartan Leonidas’ famous response? “Then we shall fight in the shade.” Today, as a growing number of our drones overshadow militants half a world away, it might be a good time to revisit this exchange between the two leaders at Thermopylae.
Leonidas’ reply wasn’t just bravado; it was contempt. Xerxes probably had no idea how weak his boast made him look. The Spartans were probably not armed with bows, just spears and short swords. The Spartans liked it that way; to fight at a distance was a sign of cowardice. Having been brought up in a strenuous militarist state, Spartan soldiers gladly risked their lives in battle in a way that most of us would find incomprehensible.
Plutarch’s records of what Spartan mothers said to their sons as they sent them off to battle indicate that one of the worst things a Spartan could do was throw a weapon to save his skin. “Come back with your shield—or on it,” some mothers would say. A son who dropped his shield or weapon was too cowardly to face his opponent, or so frightened of battle that he jettisoned his armor to lighten his load as he ran away. The mothers were saying, in effect, “If you don’t come back with your weapons, I’ll kill you myself, because I won’t have a living coward for a son.”
That may sound harsh or outdated—to send your son into hand-to-hand combat when technology existed that could kill his enemy at a distance—but perhaps the Spartan mothers were concerned not just with winning battles, but also with what kind of people their sons would become.
The fact that throughout history we have found certain killing technologies to be uncivilized is instructive. Pope Innocent II banned crossbows and slings in 1139. And some critics of the U.S. drone program still regard fighting at an anonymous distance as underhanded or illegitimate.
We are reminded of the French pilot Trouin in Graham Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American. Trouin didn’t mind strafing his enemies when they could fire back, but he despised being commanded to drop napalm bombs from a safe height, where small-arms fire could not reach him. “We are fighting all of your wars, but you leave us the guilt,” he complains. Others, far away, give the orders, and he must live with the consequences of having killed men who had no chance to fight back.
Today we take the effectiveness of drone strikes to be their legitimation. In our national mythology, we celebrate the Spartan virtues of our military, but at the same time we are becoming increasingly Persian. The ease of our lives makes it difficult to comprehend coming home on our shields. In John Brennan’s testimony during recent hearings to confirm him as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, we hear the echoing threats of Xerxes, suggesting that technological superiority can allow us to win wars without really fighting them.
Brennan suggested that drone strikes were used as “a last resort to save lives,” presumably soldiers’ lives and the lives of those who might be threatened someday by terrorists. Those lives are undoubtedly worth saving, but we also discern in his remarks a growing sentiment about the future of armed conflict: that we do not need to be invested in direct warfare, because now we have use of “targeted lethal force.” We no longer need to risk personal injury in actions of “last resort.” All we need are arrows—that is, drones.
Of course, Spartan-style cultures, in which people are willing to fight in the shadow of certain death, have their own problems. The Spartan mentality arises in cultures that are often decidedly undemocratic and anti-intellectual. They emphasize not just physical bravery but also self-abnegation and blind devotion to a cause. Often they are unflinchingly invested in conflict simply because they have to be, lacking or eschewing the technological devices that would shield them from harm.
In other words, these martial values arise in communities that embrace Islamic extremism.
And so we rush to fill the sky with modern-day arrows to destroy the modern-day Spartans.
But it is not that simple.
The Persians hoped that their weapons would bring enemies to their knees, but the promised attack only emboldened them. Xerxes’ superior forces eventually won that battle, but the legend of the Spartans’ stand at Thermopylae gave their compatriots both time and spirit, and the Persians were eventually defeated. Ironically, the weapons that Xerxes hoped would win the war with a minimum of casualties only served to strengthen his enemy’s resolve.
In the Brennan hearings, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, raised exactly that concern, quoting retired General Stanley McChrystal, who said recently: “The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who have never seen one or seen the effects of one.”
The use of certain kinds of weapons might just convince our enemies that we lack the courage of our convictions, or that our weapons are both symptom and disease of a culture willing to kill as long as we don’t have to see the fighting. Rather than dismiss that allegation, we should work to ensure that our enemies would be wrong to reach that conclusion.
If we are wise, we will be concerned with more than just winning today’s battle. Our soldiers’ lives are immeasurably precious, and we should not risk them without grave cause. But surely their souls, and the soul of our nation, are precious, too.
What happens to a soldier who is asked to kill more and more anonymously? What happens to a people who condone deadly hellfire from the sky, triggered 10,000 miles away, and then never know it has fallen? To a people unable to imagine that anyone could regard a cloud of incoming arrows as a pleasant shade to fight in? Or to a people for whom the expediency of drones and the avoidance of risk are sufficient to dismiss any ethical concerns they might engender?
