Christmas is coming up. What better way to celebrate the birth of our Savior the n war?

As more and more kids are getting their hands on the new Halo game or Cal l of Duty Expansion, we can be sure that Americas youth are safe and sound in the ir homes shooting Nazis, driving tanks, and killing aliens. It s just harmless f un, something to keep the kids from more dangerous activities. These games can h arbor kids competitive drives, much like sports. Each kid wants to be the first in the nation, and some game companies even post scores of the most successful p layers online. One can look at a list of the top scorer, each number representing another dead, lined up like the Vietnam Memorial. But there are no real deaths, no widows or mourners; the dead are just dots on the screen, computer-generated im ages that can amuse us for a short time then disappear. The Iraq war has started to look dangerously like that online score board. More and more Americans know little of who died in the war. All w are left with is a general number of the dead, the wounded, and the overall causalities; these numb ers have no meaning to us outside a game of Jeopardy. In short, people have stop ped concerning themselves with Americas wars, satisfied with their own jobs and l ives. Yet alongside this increasing disconnection are calls among the citizenry for the US to be more engaged in the war, to win and eliminate terrorism. We are j ust like the kids that cracked open his disks of Call of Duty; we have not troub led ourselves with the long list of dead, the score, but merely with the success t hat could benefit us The costs of war, far removed from the our everyday lives, have become no consequence to us. What happened? During the Vietnam War, Americans knew everything there was to kn ow about that war, even going as far as staging protests. Whether you hated or l oved our intervention, it bore a human cost; the war was known to all of us in t he faces of the victims that fought for us. Part of this can be attributed to th e draft, where each person had a personal incentive to avoid warfare because the y could be involved at any time. The major generator of this engagement, however , lay in the images produced by the war itself. In the publics imagination, Ameri can boys were risking their lives on the ground, a testament to the destructive impact that a war can have on a human life. The Vietnam Memorial was the culmina tion of this mourning, as we saw in each name a life and a face to attribute tha t life to. Along comes Iraq and Afghanistan, our first modern wars. Before the first boot ste pped on the ground, we were sure to bomb the villages our soldiers would be ente ring. Each troop corresponded with a drone, able to attack and kill without risk ing a human life. The victims that once drove the anti-war movement had disappea red, replaced by faceless machines. This doesnt mean that there arent people dying overseas. This means that the media no longer shows us the faces of the dead, w ith the focus on getting the best new military toy. It is no surprise that we ha ve no felt a need to protest war in the wake of the media narrative, a portrayal that paints two sides essentially playing Rock em-Sock em robots with our weapo ns. This is the main characteristic of modern war war where the human element ha s been usurped by role of the machine. I miss the old way of war. Generals like Napoleon or Washington had to use tacti cs to win their fights, allowing the greatest man to win. Now, victory in war go es in the hands of the person with the best guns, ships, and tanks. With the hum an element of war fading fast, the strategy of war will go with it. This is show n in the realm of space doctrine. Doctrine, the entire strategy that we use to d efine our military, is essential to doing anything with the army. In the realm o f space, seen increasingly as a new realm of war, technology is being developed before the US has even established base doctrine for space warfare. Continuing t his process will leave the US in a terrible position to fight, let alone be a su perpower. Warfare, therefore, has become impersonal, a machine replacing the role of the h

uman. The most friegtening part of this modern warfare is the way it affects our decision-making. In the eyes of the military, new forms of warfare like UAVs ha ve made it possible to engage in combat without the public backlash. People do not get angry over a lost drone or a broken plane; if there is no huma n element, there is nothing that can strike the costs of warfare home to the peo ple in the US. And with no perceived costs of warfare, there is no end in sight to the constant barrage of interventions. War is power, the ultimate ability of one group to dominate another. The military is not a governed body but a body de signed for the sole purpose of maximizing killing. If the military can engage in this kind of warfare without any possibility for backlash, there is no telling what kinds of consequences it would have for the world. In one of his documentaries, Michael Moore asks Congressmen their opinions on wa r, usually hearing a cry of support, then asks whether or not that person would want to send their children to war. Most of the Congressmen moderate their opini ons a little at the thought of someone they love dying in battle. What we need a re victims; faces of people that have felt the pain and the brunt of war, people who can attest to the costs. This doesnt mean we should throw out our machines. This just means that we should emphasize the real nature of our wars, the way w e fight on the ground. We should show our real troops in their prime, fighting a nd killing. We should know more than what is on the scoreboard, the long list of dead; we should know it all, that we may be a part of the military, for or agai nst it.