While this is inevitable, I wrote a blog post once upon a time about the trend this generates and why I'm worried about it. In principle, wars between armies a

While this is inevitable, I wrote a blog post once upon a time about the trend this generates and why I'm worried about it. In principle, wars between armies are proxy wars between nations/governments/etc. A long time ago (Sumeria maybe), soldiers started to fight soldiers, and civilians could get on with civilian life while fighting continued (farming, production, etc.). Now obviously that doesn't mean that no war has ever had civilian casualties, or that armies have never targeted civilian populations, but it made warfare a fairly symmetric endeavour. Rather than having your farmers hacking at each other with hoes until there are no farmers left, you can pit some of your strongest and best trained men against your enemy's strongest and best trained men, and accept the results of that to avoid total annihilation of your whole populace. But that only works because both sides have skin in the game, and people are dying on both sides. If we move to a model where a stronger power can fight a war remotely with no risk to real people, then the only way to take the war to the enemy will be to target civilians. Terrorism, asymmetrical warfare, etc. will be the only way to respond to drone strikes and the like. I don't know what the answer is, but it worries me.