[motley_fool]

This is an overly simplistic and dangerous view of warfare. Increasingly, warfare is not about soldiers being sent to fight each other in some empty battlefield.

The pattern of U.S. wars since WWII has been expeditionary warfare where the U.S. sends its troops to fight with irregular forces, among civilians of other countries.

No war is clean, but this is a particularly evil setup, because the worst that American non-combatants experience is the return of their dead or wounded troops. On the other hand, the host country feels the full horror of war.

So, frankly, I don't care nearly as much about the volunteers who are sent to risk their lives as the civilian non-volunteers who are necessarily and inevitably harmed.

This is not a U.S. specific thing. It's just that as citizens of the top military power, Americans are spared the full horrors of war, yet have the ability to visit those horrors on others.

There is a reason why Europeans are not nearly as accepting of warfare.

[astine]

The reason Europeans are not as accepting of warfare is because they screwed themselves over twice with it. War is always the last resort of negotiation. When nations become too belligerent or stubborn conflict will always follow. Europe forgot this lesson twice in as many generations and suffered the consequences.

There are only two ways to prevent conflict: 1. be reasonable in all of your negotiations and 2. make sure you are always ready for a conflict.

If you fail to do the first, others may see no choice but to fight you. If you fail to do the second, they may not see any downside to it. This boils down to one principle, you must always back every one of your demands, even the reasonable one which you have a right to, with sufficient force.

In short, there is nothing wrong with using machines to do our fighting for us. There is something wrong with killing civilians and unnecessarily invading foreign countries; but there is nothing wrong with using better weapons to do the same job.

[motley_fool]

> There is something wrong with killing civilians and unnecessarily invading foreign countries; but there is nothing wrong with using better weapons to do the same job.

You're assuming that these two issues are independent. I'm proposing that handing our rulers robot warriors will result in harder-to-expose killing of civilians and more unnecessary invasions.

Of course, if all the killer robots were working for me, I would deploy them wisely and reduce civilians deaths.