Ender’s Game, Call of Duty, and Nuclear Submarines: The Potential for and Dangers of Youth Remote Participation in Combat
An Exploration of the Phenomenon of Youth Remote Participation in Conflict Through the Lens of the book 'Ender's Game'
The following is an essay I wrote for a Cultural Anthropology course I took at Duke University in 2020. This essay required the use of several specific science-fiction sources to support an overarching argument.
Ender’s Game, Call of Duty, and Nuclear Submarines: The Potential for and Dangers of Youth Remote Participation in Combat
For most of human history, participation in that most deadliest of competitions, battle, has largely been exclusively reserved for adult males. This is of course a complicated phenomena fueled in no small part by things like the patriarchal tendencies of many of the societies of the world; however, one other important factor restricted the ability of others to fight in combat: combat is and has been a grueling and extremely physically and mentally strenuous undertaking. The average adult male was physically better able than the average adult female or child to cope with the demands of war, including carrying hundreds of pounds of equipment, torturous foot marches and the very demands of battle itself. But warfare is ever changing and evolving, and the threshold for participation in combat is no longer one’s ability to physically cope with the demands of warfare. Now it is possible to unleash devastation of an incredible magnitude upon enemies thousands of miles away with little more than the movement of a joystick and push of a button. As technology has improved, so too has the human ability to physically distance themselves from battle, which means more people can participate in warfare than just physically able adult males present on the physical battlefield. While this trend can be a blessing by keeping the men and women protecting our nation physically out of harm's way, it carries with it a hidden dark side. While a child may have been unable to hold a hundred pound shield and sword, they can hold a video game controller, such those used to operate popular gaming systems or U.S. Navy nuclear submarines. I argue that the high level of technological capability that today’s children have, coupled with the increasing incorporation of simplistic technology used to control complicated, distanced weapons systems utilized in warfare could potentially enable more and more children to participate in combat. The potential consequences of this are grave; combat, even remotely, can have devastating effects on the psyches of grown men and women, let alone children. By examining this phenomena through the lens of the book Ender’s Game, we get a glimpse into the possible rationale behind this change, what form it may take, and the future implications of it. I will utilize certain passages and happenings in Ender’s Game to introduce two preconditions for children to participate in remote warfare, which are as follows:
The technology used to control and operate military weapons systems, vehicles, and other such platforms must be simplistic enough that a child could theoretically operate it.
Children must have proficiency with aforementioned technology, normally through regular usage of it for other uses.
I will then elaborate on these conditions and demonstrate how these conditions can and are taking place in our world today. Finally, I will speak to the potential human rights implications of this issue on both the children involved and society writ large by examining both current scholarly literature and speculative fiction pieces on the subject.
The climax of Ender’s Game begins when Ender participates in a series of what he believes are simulated battles run on a powerful simulator that allows him to control spacecraft like those in the actual human fleet. However, these battles are revealed to not be simulators but are in fact actual conflicts that Ender himself had been controlling:
“Ender, for the past few months you have been the battle commander of our fleets. This was the Third Invasion. There were no games, the battles were real, and the only enemy you fought was the buggers.”
How could Ender so easily control an entire spacefleet without knowing that he was actually doing exactly that? Quite easily it turned out; the control he used to remotely participate in epic, real space battles was the exact same as the game he played for fun. The narrator describes Ender’s first experience of the simulator as such: “for pleasure, there was the simulator, the most perfect videogame he had ever played”. While it may sound absurd for military operations to be carried out via a video-game like system of control able to be used by a mere child, current militaries today are pursuing a similar track. For years now the U.S. military has been utilizing increasingly simplistic controls for various types of weapons systems, vehicles, and other such platforms. The logic behind this transition is quite simplistic; why pay for expensive and complicated control systems when a cheaper and more simplistic version is available? For example, the U.S. Navy discovered that a forty-dollar, commercially available Xbox 360 controller can fulfill the same role as a $38,000 handgrip and imaging control panel used to operate the periscopes on nuclear submarines and has accordingly begun to phase out the latter. In addition to cost, these controllers can be replaced much easier (“I can go to any video game store and procure an Xbox controller anywhere in the world, so it makes a very easy replacement,” Senior Chief Mark Eichenlaub told The Virginian-Pilot”) and have the additional benefit of reducing “[t]raining time...to minutes, compared to the hours it took to learn the helicopter-style joystick”. Other U.S. military branches have begun to adopt video-game like controls for numerous other technologies including but not limited to: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as reconnaissance drones, explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) robots, laser weapons systems designed to destroy drones and small boats, and even unmanned ground assault robots armed with 7.62 caliber machine guns. Unfortunately, militaries are not the only entities partaking in this movement; sub-state militant groups, such as terrorist organizations, are also utilizing these tactics, albeit on a smaller scale. For example, ISIS commanders have used commercially available drones with cameras to help coordinate their attacks and “[s]tarting in 2016, ISIS employed Jerry-rigged drones to drop small bombs or crash into coalition forces in Iraq and Syria”. This evidence demonstrates that my first precondition (The technology used to control and operate military weapons systems, vehicles, and other such platforms must be simplistic enough that a child could theoretically operate it) is already present in our world today. Video-game style controls such as the ones described above are normally simplistic enough that with little training, a child could theoretically learn to operate them. As my next point will show, children already are learning to operate them.
Ender begins his military training as a mere child and trains at a ‘school’ with dozens of other children, none older than their early teens. It is natural then that a core part of their indoctrination into the military comes in the form of video games. The book describes that trainees could go to a game room, where they had access to all manner of video games; the games there were “what [the trainees] lived for”. The games they played helped them learn critical skills and develop a familiarity with technologies and tactics that would be employed to command real troops later on. While this may seem like fantasy, the video games of today are not far off. For example, the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare video game allows for a breathtaking amount of realism in both technical and tactical operations. Having served in the military, I was personally shocked at the attention to detail contained within the game, although this makes sense, considering that the game makers hired former Navy SEALs, a war correspondent, and regional and cultural experts to consult on the game design. This realism extends further than one might think; using a simple controller such as an Xbox or PlayStation controller, players can drive vehicles, operate reconnaissance drones, and even call in airstrikes. There is even a part in the game where the player, working with a Middle Eastern rebel faction, pilots simple drones strapped with C4 explosives to assault an enemy airbase. All of this takes place in a game that grossed over $1 billion in sell-through worldwide and was the top-selling premium game of 2019, played by adults and children alike. While it may seem like harmless fun to add these additional levels of realism to a game played by children, the consequences appear more dire when combined with the aforementioned simplicity of certain military technologies. Remote drones like the ones ISIS uses to drop grenades on unsuspecting soldiers and civilians are commonly used by children and adults alike for leisure. Xbox controllers like the ones used in Navy nuclear submarines are also commonly used to play video games on the popular Xbox gaming platform.
To better understand the potential effects on children, we can draw from a few sources. The first is of course, Ender’s Game. Soon after Ender begins participating in what he believes to be simulated battles, he begins to suffer serious physical and mental degradation due to the pace and stress of these exercises:
He began to have pains in his stomach...soon he didn’t have an appetite for anything at all...one day in practice...the room went black and he woke up on the floor with his face bloody where he had hit the controls...for three days he was very ill...He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care.
Before Ender even knew that the battles were real, the pace and intensity of military operations had begun to destroy him. And after he learns the truth of what he had been doing, he spends the rest of the book deeply depressed and trying to atone for what he has done. This scenario may be more realistic than it first appears. The effects of combat on the human psyche are well known, but less known is that remote combat, such as that experienced by U.S. drone pilots, results in a comparable level of PTSD when compared to active combat troops. I argue that it is not an enormous leap to assume this trend would hold true and likely be more serious if applied to children participants in remote combat. The infliction of this psychological trauma on children would quite obviously be a serious human rights issue, in addition to the fact that the fourth Geneva Convention outlaws the use of children in warfare. Having established some of the potential human rights implications of forcing children to participate in remote warfare, we are free to turn towards the effects on society itself.
Due to the relative newness of remote warfare, we must turn to science fiction to speculate as to the effects remote child-soldiers may have upon a society. Ursula Le Guin in her renowned short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas imagines a world in which the happiness of all depends on the torment of one individual, a child. Most in the society accept that the child must suffer for them to be happy, but some do not; instead of rejoining society after learning of the child, they “leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back”. The moral reprehensibility of forcing children to bear undeserved trauma for the sake of the society, whether remotely or not, could very well tear a society apart, as Le Guin hints at. An alternative viewpoint extrapolated from Octavia Butler’s short story Bloodchild takes an even darker turn; in Bloodchild, a boy must bear the parasitic, worm-like offspring of an alien race, which drives him to threaten suicide in a vain attempt to refuse to participate. Eventually, he acquiesces and has the eggs implanted. The reader learns that many humans must bear this fate in exchange for safety, as the aliens offered them safe haven from other humans who “would have killed or enslaved them”. This story is riddled with other examples of varying levels of malcontent from other humans at their fate of being essentially incubators for the aliens. The burden borne by the main character (a young boy) impacts all other members of his family but is ultimately deemed necessary. This cannot ever be allowed to happen with regards to remote child-soldiers; if ever their suffering such a fate was deemed necessary for the overall good, the battle has already been lost.
In summary, the two conditions I argue allow for the existence of remote child participation in combat, that the technology used to control and operate military weapons systems, vehicles, and other such platforms must be simplistic enough that a child could theoretically operate it and that children must have proficiency with the aforementioned technology, appear to have been already met in our society. However, due to the inherent human rights risks that would be associated with the rise of such a phenomena, this can never be allowed to take place. As Ender’s Game provides a framework for my preconditions, so too does it provide this work with its conclusion: in the end of the book, after Ender has grown up, he is exploring an area with a young boy to determine if it is suitable for colonization. Upon telling the boy that he cannot follow him into a potentially dangerous situation, the boy responds: “Come on! You’re Ender Wiggin. Don’t tell me what eleven-year-old kids can do!”. The boy’s sentiment is correct; children are capable of accomplishing amazing things, but remote participation in combat is something that they should be protected from at all costs.
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