Conclusion

Warfare remains horrific, but in the twenty-first century in the West, soci­eties have developed certain messages or myths to negotiate and facilitate its practice. The Global War on Terror has been a remarkable series of interwoven conflicts that have ostensibly transcended ghosts of past wars such as the Vietnam War and its constraining legacy of young men cut down in their prime and transported back home in body bags though the deliberate manipulation of stain-resistant myths.

Myths have played a very important part in this process of social delu­sion. The idea that the fighting has occurred within some framework of an antiseptic battlefield, in which regime forces have been separated her­metically from the populace, has been foundationally undermined by the disproportionate level of casualties amongst civilians and the sheer volume of bullets expended. The myth of precision killing has masked the return to favour of strategic bombing and air power in general, but the limita­tions of these technologies witnessed in the unhelpful failure of common GPS navigation aids in vehicles in Washington and London on a daily basis belies the veracity of these inflated claims in combat.

The use of armed drones to conduct illegal operations that infringe on the sovereign territory/airspace of nation states is not warfare per se but rather the twenty-first century equivalent of gunboat diplomacy that found favour with colonial powers in the nineteenth century in order to project global power to cower or subjugate less advanced nations/tribes with more powerful technology. Unfortunately, such is the mediating power of the ‘target killing’ myth that such parallels and lessons of unac­ceptable colonial/imperial practices of the past are lost in technology.

Notes

1. On Barthes’s myth concept, cf. also Bliesemann de Guevara, Chap. 2, and Müller and Sondermann, Chap. 13.

2. See also Millar, Chap. 9, on the mutually implicated myths of the demo­cratic control of the armed forces and militarism.

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