War Without Footsteps

Well now, dear readers—today I bring you something a touch off the beaten path. I’d been deep in the bones of a forthcoming book of essays when a strange thing happened: a piece arrived, unbidden, that took even me by surprise. Not in its reflection—we all carry thoughts on every matter under the sun, that’s half of what it means to be human—but in the force behind it. The thing that stirred it into being. The deeper root.

This isn’t, and never was, meant for an archery magazine. Or perhaps, in a roundabout way, it is. It doesn’t speak of technique or tournaments, yet it breathes in the same air—the ancient instinct that drives us to strike from afar. The cold logic of distance. At Agincourt, the English bowman didn’t see the whites of the French knight’s eyes. Often he didn’t see his target at all. He loosed an arrow, one of many, and it flew where it would. The bond between the killer and the fallen—already frayed at Kadesh, and long before—was quietly, deliberately severed.

So in that light, perhaps this reflection does belong here. Perhaps it speaks to something older than archery, yet shaped by it all the same.

There’s a battlefield now, though you’d never see the churn of boots or the press of blood into loam. No echo of shouted orders or clatter of spent casings. Just a hush—an eerie, static hush—where silence flickers like a held breath. The violence here is spectral. A flicker—brief as breath—stirs across the screen. Imagine this: a war fought not in trenches but in pixels, where harm flicks into being and just as quickly blinks away. Where what dies leaves no stain, only a number that changes, a line of code revised before it cools. No graves. No soil disturbed. Just ghosts playing at soldiers in a theatre of code. Not a field of mud and iron, but a room, cool and dark, somewhere in a desert in Nevada or a quiet base in upstate New York. A room bathed in the eternal twilight of technology, the only light coming from the twin altars of a console, their cool glow painting a man’s face in shades of amber and teal. This is the new soldier, the new warrior-priest of our age. He doesn’t straddle a horse—no wind in his coat or dust on his boots. Instead, he leans back into a chair built for posture, not battle. The light from the screen bathes his hands, calm and colourless, as they hover over plastic—keys, clicks, calibrated control. No steel drawn, no blade honed. His realm isn’t sky and soil, but split screens and silent feeds—a twin-paned vision of a world built from numbers. On one screen, a map, a schematic of a place he will never visit, where blinking lights pulse with threat or significance. On the other, the God’s-eye view, the live feed from the belly of the beast that circles miles above a foreign earth. This is the new front line, a place of humming servers and climate control, a war fought by men who will drive home for dinner. And you have to ask, in the old way we have in Ireland,  cad é an scéal? What is the story here? For it is a story of a profound and terrible distance, a chasm opened between the hand that acts and the flesh that suffers.

The world on that screen is a masterpiece of abstraction, a geometrification of looking. A village in Waziristan or a dusty road in Somalia is rendered as a clean, topographical grid. People are not people; they are heat signatures, shimmering white against a grey background, pixels in a stream of real-time imagery. They are data points, their lives reduced to patterns of movement, their humanity filtered out by the very technology that makes them so intimately visible. The operator, you see, is not a killer in the old sense. He is a manager of information, an analyst of behaviour. He is tasked with a terrible patience, a voyeuristic intimacy that is the unique paradox of this new warfare. For days, for weeks, he might watch a single compound. He studies the quiet pulse of lives he’ll never touch. Watches a father chase laughter through his children’s limbs, share a cup with old friends, settle beside his wife beneath the open sky—just two shadows stitched close under a blanket lit faintly by the heat they lend each other. A distant intimacy, seen through a lens that softens nothing. He comes to know this target, this collection of pixels, with a closeness that is unnerving. He might feel, as one pilot confessed, that he knew the man he was hunting as well as he knew his own wife. This is the seduction of the drone’s eye: it offers a feeling of omniscience, of a knowledge so complete it feels like understanding.  

And then, the order comes. With a click of a mouse, a decision is executed. A Hellfire missile is released. It does not roar. Its engine flares briefly—just a blink of fire—then vanishes into hush. After that, it drifts, noiseless as a falling leaf, though shaped by colder intentions. From above, the sky remains innocent, cloudless, undisturbed. Below, there’s no warning hum, no mechanical growl—just, perhaps, a fleeting tremor of air, too fast to hear, as it slips past the barrier of sound. A hush that arrives too late. On the screen, a light blinks. A flash. And the pixels that were a man, a family, a life, are erased. The operator is trained to keep watching, to perform the Battle Damage Assessment, to zoom in on the aftermath. He sees the bloom of heat, the scatter of what was once a vehicle or a room. He might switch the view from infrared to daylight and see the crater, the debris, the dark stains on the ground. He sees what the official reports will call a successful strike.  

But what of the world beneath that silent, circling eye? What of the reality that is not translated into data? There, on the ground, there is no clean flash of light. There is a concussion, a blast wave of compressed air that moves through the body, rupturing the hollow organs, the lungs, the eardrums. There is the deafening boom, the “loudest noise I had ever heard in my life,” as one survivor of a bombing put it, followed by a strange, sucking whoosh as the vacuum left by the explosion pulls the world back in. There is the shrapnel—not just metal from the missile, but a storm of secondary projectiles, pieces of the earth, of the building, of the car, of other bodies, that tear through flesh. The air, thick with pulverized concrete, with resin, with metal, with sugar, becomes a fine, combustible dust that can hang like a shroud before igniting in a secondary explosion, a rolling wave of fire far more destructive than the first. And the smell. It is the smell that haunts the accounts of survivors. The sharp, electrical smell of ozone and nitrogen oxides from the blast itself. First comes the scorched tang—fuel, char, the unmistakable scent of bodies unmade. Later, it shifts. A sweeter rot seeps in, thick and clinging, draped over broken stone and twisted metal. It doesn’t lift for days. Some men reach for the bottle, not for numbness, but because it’s the only way to breathe. This is the battlefield with no blood, you see. The blood is all on the other side of the screen. The operator is shielded from the scream, the heat, the stench, the touch of it all. His console is a phenomenological filter, a machine for turning the visceral horror of death into a clean, manageable, two-dimensional event. The ethical distance is not just a matter of miles; it is a carefully engineered severing of the senses, a dismemberment of reality itself.  

And what of the man in the chair? He is safe, so he is. His body’s never at risk—no bullet seeks him, no blade draws near. But something quieter, deeper, begins to slip. Not the rhythm of his lungs, but the burden of being—the quiet weight of selfhood—begins to slip. It’s not the pulse that stumbles, but the fine, fraying thread that holds meaning to that steady thrum. This is the unseen edge of the paradox, the quieter peril that doesn’t draw blood but loosens the knot of self. The technology that distances him physically brings him psychologically closer than any soldier has ever been to the consequence of his actions, and then rips him away again. He is caught in a state of “psychological whiplash”. One moment, he is a god in a machine, delivering death from the heavens. The next, his shift is over, and he is driving his Ford Focus through suburban streets, stopping for milk, wondering what to have for dinner, sitting at a table with his own children, who look so much like the pixels he has just extinguished. He lives, as one pilot said, in “parallel universes”. This constant, jarring transition between the sanitized kill-box and the mundane world of home erodes the boundaries between them. It is a perfect recipe not for the old PTSD of the shell-shocked soldier who feared for his own life, but for a newer, stranger wound: moral injury. It is the trauma of perpetration, the wound that comes from violating one’s own deepest sense of right and wrong. The operators suffer from it in droves. They report high levels of guilt, anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbance. They are haunted by the faces on the screen, by the “fun-sized terrorists” they were told the children were. They carry the weight not just of action, but of nearness—made to watch, up close, the breath they were told to extinguish. In a strange, terrible way, they become the first to grieve. But their sorrow is a hush no one dares name, a wound treated as fault rather than ache.

And so we return to that unmoving centre—the hush that lingers after the world comes undone. What becomes of the fallen when no arms gather them in, when no mouth shapes their name into the quiet?

Across every stretch of earth ever called home, death has never simply meant absence. It’s a crossing, a turning from breath to memory. But to pass without ritual is to drift untethered. Mourning isn’t only the sorrow of those left behind—it’s the work of honouring the life that flickered and went out. It’s the touch that cleanses, the voice that names, the circle that closes in to speak what mattered. Through it, the living knit their frayed edges back together, and the dead are not forgotten scraps, but travellers seen off with care. The Olo Ngaju of Borneo believe a soul cannot enter the homeland of the dead until the living have completed their ritual duties; until then, it wanders, a restless and potentially vengeful spirit. This new warfare is a direct assault on this fundamental human necessity. The bodies of the victims are often dismembered, incinerated, impossible to identify. Even the old, sacred gesture of coming together to grieve—of marking a passing with shared presence—has become perilous. In some places, the funeral is no longer safe ground but bait. The second strike, timed to follow the first by mere minutes, falls not on the fighters but on those who run toward the wreckage: the ones who dig with bare hands, who cry out names, who gather pieces of what once was kin. It’s not just a tactic. It’s a desecration dressed as strategy. It is a policy that weaponizes grief itself. It turns the sacred act of mourning into a mortal risk. And so, the rituals are abandoned. The communities are terrorized into silence. The dead are left unburied, uncounted, unwept. They are rendered ghosts twice over: first by the remote, disembodied nature of their killing, and second by the denial of the rituals that would grant them peace. They are left to wander in that unwitnessed country, and is it any wonder that they find their way back across the ocean, to haunt the dreams of the men who watch the screens? The unmourned dead on the ground become the moral injury of the operator in his chair. It is a reciprocal haunting, a shared spiritual void created by a technology that promises a war without consequence, and delivers only a war without resolution.  

There has always been a drive in warfare to increase the distance between the killer and the killed. It began long ago—perhaps with the first one who chose a stone over bare knuckles. The arc of a thrown spear, the whirl of a slingstone, the bow drawn tight and loosed toward a figure too far to touch—each gesture stretched the gap between killer and killed. Each was a quiet leap forward in the age-old drift away from closeness. The cannon that shattered stone walls from beyond sight, the bomber that turned whole neighbourhoods to ash from the cold height of the stratosphere—different tools, same intention. These are entries in a ledger written in steel and smoke, chronicling our urge to wage war at arm’s length, to spare the hand that strikes while still exacting the wound. But the drone is not just another chapter. It is a new volume entirely. It represents a qualitative leap in dissociation, not just a quantitative one. The bomber pilot over Dresden saw flashes and smoke; he did not see the faces of the people in the firestorm. The artilleryman saw a grid reference; he did not watch his target’s family for a week. The drone collapses distance and intimacy into a single, paradoxical experience, creating a form of violence that is at once deeply personal and utterly detached. It erodes the old virtues of the warrior—courage, sacrifice, shared risk—and replaces them with the skills of a video gamer: attention to detail, good hand-eye coordination, the ability to multitask under pressure. It challenges the very foundations of the laws of war, the great tradition of  jus in bello that rests on principles like reciprocity and the possibility of surrender, concepts that are meaningless in the one-sided space of the drone’s gaze.  

And where does this road lead? We can see the horizon, and it is terrifying. The logical endpoint of this trajectory of removing the human from the act of war is the Lethal Autonomous Weapons System, the LAWS, the so-called “killer robot”. If the drone removes the soldier’s body from the battlefield, the autonomous weapon removes his mind. It outsources the final human act—the judgment, the decision to kill—to an algorithm. This is the final moral abdication. A machine that decides who lives and who dies based on a pre-identified “signature” of behaviour crosses a fundamental line. It creates a world where violence is not just remote, but arbitrary and unaccountable. It is the ultimate battlefield with no blood, because there is no human left to be culpable, no soul left to bear the moral weight of the act.

But we are not there yet. For the moment, a human hand still lingers at the helm, or so they assure us. He lingers in a room grown cold, the air thick with hush, shadows drawn deep into the seams. Light brushes his face—not warmth, but a pale shimmer, like the echo of a fire long dead, more reminiscent of recollection than flame.A silent chamber of ghosts and gleam. He is the breath inside the circuitry, the watcher whose presence keeps the illusion of control intact. A silent sentinel to a conflict scrubbed clean of sound and blood—made distant, made tidy, made unseen. And in this, perhaps, lies the only sliver of hope. To tell the story, to bear witness ourselves, is to refuse the abstraction. It is to insist on the reality of the dust and the blood and the smell. It is to perform a kind of mourning for those who were given none. We, who have been blessed with a love of language, a tradition of remembering, have a duty to resist the silence. We must count the dead. We must say their names. We must imagine their lives, not as pixels, but as flesh and blood. We must close the distance that this technology has created, not with weapons, but with empathy. For if we do not, we are all complicit in the creation of a world where the dead are unmourned, and the living are left to be haunted by the blinking lights of a battle that is forever unresolved.