New round, same crazy carousel. Escalation between Hezbollah and Israel. Again. Beirut and Galilee are bombed. Again. Iran attacks Israel and Israel retaliates, while Trump no longer knows where to turn to avoid being sucked into the quicksand of the Middle East. Again. Everyone committed to not missing a single spin of the carousel, in a desperate attempt to show that they are still alive and in command.
To understand something, one must invert one’s perspective. We must stop following the official statements, the diplomatic summits, and the animated strategic maps on television, and start listening to the background noises. More precisely: those metallic, thin, and seemingly insignificant hums that are actually one of the most powerful keys to understanding the world that is exploding around us. It is the sound of modern warfare: that of drones, fought thousands of miles away from air-conditioned operations rooms that resemble more an open space in Cupertino than the Eastern Front of 1944. A comfortable, orderly, almost natural war. Easy.
And to think that for thousands of years, killing your enemy has been a terribly difficult job. First of all physically. It required being so close to him that you could smell his blood, sweat, and fear. You had to look him in the eye as he died.
Not coincidentally, every civilization has been forced to invent a psychological arsenal to make this bearable: rituals, drugs, military liturgy, codes of honor, heroic epics, afterlife paradises, and gigantic collective narratives. All to convince human beings to do the most unnatural thing there is: to massacre other human beings. The ancient problem of war has always been the annoying tendency of our species to suffer in the face of the suffering of others. A manufacturing defect that has not yet been fully corrected.
Fortunately, technology has worked diligently to solve this “problem.” First the rifle, which allowed you to kill without getting covered in the enemy’s blood. Then the artillery, incredibly convenient for tearing others to pieces without even seeing their faces. Even better, the bombers, perfect for leveling entire cities from the air, without even hearing their screams. But the drone represents the final step: it is not only the body that is removed from war, but the entire perception of it. It transforms war into an interface. Into a multiplayer electronic game.
Here are the new warriors: seventeen-year-olds in sports shirts, energy drinks in hand, Spotify playlists in their headphones. They look at a screen. They move a joystick. They fly FPV drones that fly like crazy wasps. They look for the target, they find it.
Game over. They have just fought from their room, like in a video game, with the only difference that here the objectives do not regenerate in the next game. The Ukrainian and Russian armies openly recruit gamers and teenagers who grew up with simulators and competitive games. “If they have experience with PlayStation, it is a huge advantage.” Trained for years in virtual worlds without even realizing it. And so the war ceases to appear as an extraordinary and monstrous event, and becomes manageable, familiar, everyday. No blood on the body. No mud on the boots.
The 4.0 warrior returns home in the evening, orders sushi and turns on Netflix. This is a strategy that not only changes the nature of combat: it also changes the perception of it. After all, what can a small drone do? It is too light, too insignificant to change the course of history. And that is exactly how the escalation increases: swarm after swarm, micro-attack after micro-attack, until what is easy becomes irreversible. There are those who object, rightly, that things are not so simple, that even drone pilots suffer from post-traumatic stress. True. But technology is already finding the solution: the first autonomous drones guided by artificial intelligence are coming, capable of choosing their own target and striking without human intervention.
The traumatized executioner disappears. The massacre remains. This is the fundamental feature of the “lightness” of modern wars: it works only in one direction. If the one who strikes lives the conflict as an increasingly mediated, distant and sterilized experience, the one who suffers it continues to experience it in the flesh, just as always. It is enough to listen to the stories of Ukrainian, Russian, Gazan, Israeli or Lebanese civilians. That hum enters dreams and transforms the sky into a permanent threat. Low-cost, immediate and easily reproducible, the drone is the perfect mirror of our era. And like every weapon before it, it is managing to give us the illusion that violence can become sustainable, that it can be practiced without consequences, at least for those who exercise it.
But it is only an illusion. For those who experience it from the other side, war remains as real, as brutal, and as tragic as it has always been.