There seems to be a majority here who would say that a suicide bomber doesn't logically qualify as a coward.

Why then are these attacks generally referred to as cowardly? Might it be that the reference is toward the planners, those who order the attack but keep themselves removed from danger and death?

How do we then view the commanding officers of the Raptor 'pilots'?

The idea that the notion of cowardness is a bygone relic of a different age is interesting. Possibly it went when chivalry was lost to modern warfare. Might we say that in StG's world chivalry would be a stupid luxury? Little chance of returning a dropped sword, or mercy to a brave enemy because they had earned it.

Perhaps the change is more recent than that. I remember when to kick a person after he was down was certainly frowned upon. Now it seems almost obligatory in a fight and often boasted about.

Back to the Raptor pilots, there seems to be some agreement that their actions could not be regarded as brave, but are they acting cowardly? I am going to admit this was my first thought. I was probably looking for a reasoned argument why I shouldn’t think this way. I know an answer might well be that I am cowardly for thinking that combatants of an ally must needlessly place themselves in harms way to fulfil an outmoded notion of a combat ethic. But I cannot shake a very real sense of disquiet about this form of warfare and if an enemy were to claim this as a cowardly form of fighting I would, at this stage, have to wholeheartedly agree.

Dear csteele,

Whether you're behind a desk in Washington
giving orders, or a pilot causing human
carnage at the press of a button - you're
somehow distant - from the end result of the
consequences of your actions. You don't
actually get the full impact of what you're
doing unless you're there "on the ground,"
so to speak - or amongst the action.

I wonder how the pilots would have felt -
who pressed the buttons to drop the atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - were they
to actually go down on the ground and see for themsleves
the results of what they had done. Would they feel
that they were heroes?

Just a thought.

csteele ~ Yeah whatever, infer what you will about me but get back to me and your chivalry when someone's trying to kill your family. War isn't romantic, neither is killing, it's about shooting someone in the face, it's about dismembering bodies with high explosives, it's about beating someone's skull in with your helmet who's trying to gouge out your eyes with their thumbs.

The best time to attack?, yeah when they can't kill you on the way in. It's war, it's simple. Kill, or die, and do it the most efficient way possible. It's not MY world, it's the real world. Check it out some time.

...and while we're at it, if you're gonna call UAV pilots cowards, call what they fly by the right name. The Raptor is the F-22.

...it's a manned aircraft.

In my first comment I gave my opinion on your 'cowardly act' theory. It hasn't changed.

Hey chill StG, perhaps I should have used the words ‘the world you describe’, it wasn’t any inference about yourself since I had actually assumed you were over-hyping the cynicism to make a point which read quite well. That may not have been the case but I still take the point about there being no such thing as a cowardly attack. I also like RobP’s point “being cowardly is the state of mind of the person carrying out the action in question. So, unless you are that person or know him/her well, you can't legitimately make a judgement”.

And you are perfectly correct I had used the term Raptors instead of Reapers, apologies to Raptor pilots.

However a little reality check of my own. The Taliban are not trying to kill my family, nor might I surmise yours. Nor are they trying to kill the families of the Reaper pilots. The Taliban are also not trying to kill me, you, or the Reaper pilots, nor are they trying to gouge our eyes out.

But Taliban families are dying in this conflict as ‘collateral damage’.

The Taliban do though want the Western forces out of their country.

We are entering a different realm with this technology. Foxy noted that there are always those well away from the action giving orders but there has been till now at least some of the attacking country’s citizens are putting their lives at risk to complete an action.

This however seems like a total disconnect which it virtually (so to speak) is. Is acceptable to fight conflicts in this manner? We have rules of war and some things are not permitted, my feeling is that we should consider that the use of unmanned, armed and lethal drones should probably be included.

Furthermore from my reading there appear to have been trials of autonomous robotic fighting weaponry in IRAQ. This is what the future holds, it may well be the time to have the discussion on what is acceptable now before we get much further down the track.

csteele,
I definately see where you're coming from, and it almost invariably depends on which side of the fence you sit upon.
My view on soldiers being killed in N.I. is that following a decade of "peace" and seemingly stable govt steered by both sides of the political spectrum the soldiers should have had little to fear. A full on invasion of the barracks would have been brave, a drive by shooting of unsuspecting targets ( I think the delivery men were injured too) much less so.

The other scenarios depicted are at least on a war footing. It wasn't so a few weeks ago in N.I.

Rojo,

I accept the point you have made about the Northern Ireland situation when you say that given the political climate in that country the unsuspecting nature of the attack might be regarded as cowardly. If the same incident had of occurred at the height of the troubles then I think you are saying you would have had seen it as less so.

Though I'm not sure that "a full on invasion of the barracks" might have negated that if it was also unexpected.

I think we are still judging an element of potential danger to the attacker as being important. The less suspecting the victim the more effective the attack and therefore the less risk to the attacker.

I also acknowledge the point about it depending which side of the fence you are sitting on. I remember a discussion with relatives prior to the invasion of Iraq of ‘human shields’, westerners who had gone to that country to stand at infrastructure sites like water treatment plants, bridges, factories etc. These were assumed to be targets of a pre-emptive nature to be taken out to hamper even in a small way the Iraqi armed forces. In fact the whole justification for the war hinged on the notion of a pre-emptive strike.

I posed the question how might the blowing up of the Sydney Harbour Bridge by an Iraqi team be regarded, note this was after Australia had agreed to be part of the ‘coalition of the willing‘. The overwhelming response was that it would be a ’cowardly terrorist attack’.

It would seem that except for Foxy’s more crime orientated examples the notion of a ‘cowardly attack’ in times of conflict may be far less self evident than the media and our leaders would have us believe.