Fighting a 'Just War' in the Age of Drones

As drones enter more military conflict zones, Hollywood is exploring the inherent moral conflicts of remote warfare, from 2014's Good Kill to this year's Amazon Video series, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan.

But how is the military itself approaching the issue? It turns out there's a whole new field of philosophy emerging to help warfighters deal with today's tech-driven battlescapes. To learn more, we tracked down Dr. Jesse Kirkpatrick, assistant director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University and a fellow at DC think tank New America. He's working with Coming Home, an effort to engage veterans in dialogue about the moral, spiritual, and psychological effect of war.

The Coming Home dialogues are an initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, who gave us three years of funding to engage veterans in dialogue about the moral, spiritual, and psychological effect of war. We do this by using humanities-based texts which discuss these dimensions of service members' experience in conflict. I co-direct this project in partnership with Dr. Edward Barrett of the US Naval Academy. If any of PCMag's readers are veterans, we invite them to apply to join our next cohort.