Burning Man [Graphic Military Injury Content]

This is a truly amazing story of technology and neuroscience teaming up with human grit.  I thought the “graphic military injury content” not nearly as grim as the author’s reflections on potential “battlefield applications”:

It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to imagine a near future in which combat patients could simultaneously distract themselves from their own pain while inflicting it on a virtual and remote enemy. A soldier could put his mind inside a drone instead of watching as a medic changed his bandages. In such a future of techno-utopian warfare, at least for those combatants equipped to fight outside the pain matrix, victory will indeed belong to those who have rid themselves of the inconvenience of being men and who, for all we know, may as well bleed snow.

(emphasis added.)
Reminds me of a SciFi series my son was reading some years ago where fierce battles are waged remotely from “safe” locations where the combatants lie on virtual reality couches ... can’t remember whether the combatants risked any personal injury (real, not virtual.)

Rich, I agree completely that it’s inspiring to read of this healing technological breakthrough but also terrifying to see virtual reality militarized.  Yet again another example of the unexpected (unconscious) consequences of playing God with human boundaries—it turns out that drone warfare generates huge levels of anxiety:

Of course this goes only for our side, but I believe that the really ultimate fantasy is we will have war which is somehow virtual and takes place nowhere. In the last bombardments of Iraq a few months ago, in daily reports Baghdad was depicted as just a normal city, as if the bombing is just a nightmare which happens during the night and somehow life goes on. It’s as if war becomes simply virtualized. What’s my point here? I will try to answer the question of why we fantasize about violence. This tendency to erase death itself from war should not seduce us into endorsing the standard notion that war is made less traumatic when no longer experienced by soldiers as an actual encounter with another human being to be killed but as an abstract activity in front of a screen. That’s the idea, that today war is virtualized, nobody even sees the bodies, it’s a kind of videogame. What I learned from talking with war psychologists in the States is that the result is not less guilt but more anxiety. Even in the Gulf War of 1991, I read that in a report, that of American soldiers who had psychological traumas after the war, the majority of them were not as you would expect the ones who actually killed the Iraqi soldiers. It’s even the obverse correlation, those who experienced the war as strictly virtual, they didn’t feel guilt but an unbearable anxiety. This can retroactively explain another paradox. Already in World War I a mysterious phenomenon occurred which is I think a kind of military counterpoint to false memory syndrome. Sixty to seventy percent of soldiers remember this mythical, “authentic” experience of warfare such as that hailed by Ernst Junger. I see you, my enemy and briefly our gazes meet, there’s an authentic real encounter with another flesh and blood being, then it’s always the same, I stick you with a bayonet and throw you over my shoulder. However, according to all data it’s maximum one half percent that actually had this experience of killing in face–to–face combat. Far from being the ultimate traumatic point that you try to erase, the need to have this face–to–face encounter rather has a pacifying aspect of getting rid of anxiety for us. What really causes anxiety is virtualized warfare. My point I hope is now clear. This opposition between modern, virtualized warfare and the need to have the brutal encounter with another soldier this opposition is ultimately the same as the opposition of Benigni’s father and Vinterberg’s father. In the same way that it’s not that unfortunately we have to kill real persons and then we imagine how nice it would be to play just keyboard wars, but that it’s the soldier playing war behind the screen who is full of anxiety and fantasizes about a face–to–face real encounter, which although it would make him guilty would give him a real guilt, but the true horror would be to have a father like Benigni. That’s unbearable, that’s suffocating. It’s Benigni’s son who then fantasizes about a secret, concealed but nonetheless violent rapist aspect. You say “My god, my father cannot just be this maternal, ersatz placebo, that would suffocate me. I need to imagine some horrifying secret behind him in order to survive family life.” This then is the deadlock of the superego.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-superego-and-the-act/

And of course—since the advent of the crossbow—a huge chunk of war became “virtualized.”

One could shoot an arrow and not see the results of the shot. Steadily, with the advance of technology, the effects of war became more and more “virtualized.” Guns meant killing could take place at an even greater distance. Cannons—even greater. Long-range sniper rifles—same.

And on and on it goes.  I don’t see drones as intrinsically much different, except their acts are far more precise than a cannonball.

While I’m confident that all killing is traumatic, I don’t think there’s any more level of trauma associated with drone warfare than plunging a battleaxe into somebody’s skull and trying to pull it back out again before you yourself have a battleaxe plunged into your own skull.  There’s a different quality of “stress” of course. But all killing is traumatic and stressful—it is supposed to be.