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Whatsapp Tom Cruise as Maverick in 1986's Top Gun

Like military technology, action films have come a long way since the Cold War. Tiger Webb explores how our notions of heroism are changing in the age of drone warfare—and who, or what, could be the ‘hero’ of the future.

Here’s a thought experiment. Remember the film Top Gun?

Tom Cruise plays a trainee naval aviator at the height of Cold War American machismo. Some key words: big hair, Kenny Loggins, volleyball.

It’s not exactly what you’d call a subtle. Cruise’s character—nicknamed, pointedly, ‘Maverick’—gradually learns the power of teamwork while flying at an elite training facility. The Pentagon, in an internal memo, once referred to the film as a ‘two hour recruiting commercial’.

Technology has always shaped our ideal of the warrior.

At the end of the movie, after shooting down geographically-unspecified-but-presumably-Russian aggressors, Maverick is hailed as a hero on the front page of every newspaper in the English-speaking world.

Which leads me to the thought experiment: what if the naval aviators of Top Gun were drone pilots? Are they still heroes? And, on a related note: where is the concept of the hero going?

‘So, first of all we have to talk about what a hero is,’ says Jeremy Frimer, associate professor of psychology and the head of the University of Winnipeg’s Moral Psychology Lab. For Frimer, heroes are essentially those who defend what he calls the ‘sacred values’ of a particular group.

Sacred values, he says, ‘are the defining core values which are just non-negotiable.’ Examples could be things like defending the environment, say, or protecting the institution of marriage. These values, Frimer finds, tend to be unique to a group and change over time to reflect its current objective or goals.

In Top Gun, Maverick reflects fairly conventional late 20th-century morals: adulation of military and governance, rugged individualism. Today, films like Citizen Four showcase the opposite. According to Frimer, its eponymous hero Edward Snowden represents ‘freedom from oppression from the government and also this selflessness, this altruism’.

Funnily enough, Cruise is an interesting case study in how attitudes to idols change. Cruise was one of the first movie stars to be torn down in the public arena of the internet age—he’s now as well known for his couch-based acrobatics and embrace of Scientology as he is for his blockbuster films. That gives rise to another question: Is it simply too hard to formulate heroes in an age of social media, when we have instantaneous access to so much information about our idols?

Frimer pauses. ‘When we get to moral issues, things we feel really strongly about, we don’t act as detectives.’

Really, he says, we act more akin to lawyers, looking for information to back our point, actively excluding information that doesn’t fit. ‘So if I’m right about this, then really the question is: Are moralistic groups going to be in increasing conflict with one another? If they are, we’re going to see more heroes, even with all the available information on them.’ The tribal nature of modern social networks would seem to prove him right.

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Whatsapp A US Air Force MQ-1 Predator drone (unmanned aerial vehicle) flies over the California desert on January 7, 2012.

This has ramifications, not just for Top Gun’s inevitable sequel, but also for politicians such as the US president. ‘We see Barack Obama’s fall from grace,’ says Frimer. ‘Think about that red and blue poster from 2008. He was a deity, and now we see him as this flawed, complex president who tried to do some great things.’

It’s fitting that Obama’s administration has been more involved with drone strikes than any of its predecessors; any potential update of the Top Gun mythos will have to grapple with the changing concept of the war hero.

‘Technology has always shaped our ideal of the warrior,’ says Peter Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Wired for War: the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.

‘Robotics is a technology we think of as from the realm of fiction. But now, they are a real part of war and a growing part of war.’

According to Singer, 87 countries currently have a military robotics program—most of them focusing on aerial drones. A good quarter of those programs involve weaponised unmanned vehicles. The US military alone uses around 8,000 unmanned aerial systems. Most are quite small—handheld drones able to fly once thrown—but a sizeable number are larger unmanned Predator and Reaper drones, which are remotely operated by Air Force personnel.

They’re not just in the air, either: the army utilises another 12,000 unmanned ground systems in roles that were once filled by human beings, from bomb disposal and guard duty to advance scouting and medical evacuations.

‘Consider Goliath,’ begins one excellent essay on drone warfare in The Atlantic. According to the Biblical account, that same Philistine was slain by the hero David, who possessed both the theological advantage of God and the technological advantage, via the sling, of range.

Throughout history, changes in the technology of war have tended to be incremental, rather than disruptive. Accordingly, our concept of the war hero has changed in slow steps.

‘War has always been an effort of both causing risk to others but also exposing yourself to risk—that’s the mutuality of it,’ says Singer.

Robotics and drones are unprecedented precisely because they represent an exponential change to our pre-existing idea of the war hero, which is dependent on the idea of personal risk and sacrifice. After all, even bomber pilots in WWII had to contend with anti-aircraft fire.

While it might at first seem ridiculous to imagine Tom Cruise as a drone pilot during the Cold War, historically speaking, it could have happened. The technology itself isn’t in any way new.

Fire ships were used by the English and Spanish navies for centuries. The first unmanned aerial bombing occurred in 1859, when 200 Austrian balloons attacked Venice. Robotics companies were spruiking many of the capabilities of modern drones in the 1980s.

Widespread military uptake of unmanned technologies wasn’t held back by reliability or efficacy issues, but rather an image problem—they were viewed by military brass as expensive, superfluous toys.

In 2013, then-Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta announced a new decoration for soldiers in the US military—the Distinguished Warfare Medal. It was the first new combat medal to be introduced since WWII, and aimed to recognise ‘extraordinary achievements that directly impact on combat operations, but do not involve acts of valour or physical risks that combat entails’.

Only, people didn’t much see the valour. Then-CEO of Concerned Veterans of America, Pete Hegseth, was not only concerned, but ropable: ‘Heroism is something that requires risk,’ he told Fox News.

It was simply ‘different’, he said, for soldiers on the ground to be compared to those he saw as fighting ‘from a comfy chair with a controller’.

The future hero Listen to Future Tense to find out more about what the heroes of the future could be like.

Plans to introduce the Distinguished Warfare Medal were shelved in the end, ostensibly for its position in the order of precedence—if introduced, it would have ranked on par with medals like the Purple Heart, which requires a soldier to be wounded in combat. Drone operators, so the line went, don’t expose themselves to that kind of risk.

Except, in some ways, they do; research from the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Centre shows that drone operators tend to return from tours of duty with similar levels of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorders to combat pilots.

It took a few tours of duty before the drone operators themselves began to speak out.

When they’re nascent—first being deployed, away from civilian life—advances in military technology are usually greeted as representing the end of an idealised heroism. In the last few years, something has begun to shift—a recalibration, perhaps, in the accepted idea of the war hero as necessarily being exposed to physical risk or suffering.

‘The capability often arrives in a technical sense before you get full adaptation,’ says Peter Singer. It’s not just internal defence culture that needs to adapt, either; there are businesses looking to protect themselves from disruption and legislative issues to finesse.

Representations of heroes will have to change, too. We haven’t yet seen very many cultural works that reflect the drone-as-hero. It could just be too soon: Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, two of the most iconic Vietnam War movies, were made years after that conflict ceased. Singer disagrees: ‘Invariably, it’s during the heat of war where a lot of these hurdles get leaped over.’

Something to keep in mind, I guess, as we ride into the danger zone.

Exploring new ideas, new approaches, new technologies—the edge of change. Future Tense analyses the social, cultural and economic fault lines arising from rapid transformation.



