The Latest Thing in Plausible Deniabilty

The WaPo has a piece on a new product being cretaed ahead of the next so-called Just War.  The latest conscience-clearing gadget developed for the Pentagon is an unmanned, computer-directed drone that selects targets and executes judgment upon them by means of cameras and special programming.

In developing his argument for the legitimacy of Christian participation in acts of violence, St. Augustine asserted that a Christian who undertook such actions had to engage in some serious “soul work” so as not to succumb to the temptations of vengeance or excessive use of force. Instead, the Christian had to make war AND love by keeping the improvement of civil society and the restoration of the evil-doer firmly fixed in the mind so as not to fall into sin amid the helter-skelter of combat.  This has always struck advocates of nonviolence like myself as an impossible task, however high-minded it may sound.    Fortunately, however, in the future, such soul work will be rendered unnecessary, since the computer can simply and efficiently do the dirty deed apart from any admixture of sinful flesh.  If mistakes are made at such times, we can simply chalk them up to programming errors, a line or two of corrupted code.