Once upon a time, American military might was symbolized by the heavy boots of the Marine Corps, stomping ashore to reestablish order in unruly parts of the world. Today, increasingly, it is symbolized by unmanned drone aircraft, controlled from thousands of miles away, dropping bombs on accused terrorists. And to judge by the Obama Administration’s new defense plan, released earlier this month, this shift will be strongly reinforced in the years to come. The plan aims to cut troops, ships and planes while concentrating our military energies more than ever on drones, spy technology, cyber warfare, jammers, and special operations forces.

With its explicit embrace of advanced technology over traditional methods of combat, the strategy seems designed to provoke the increasingly vocal critics who doubt the morality, effectiveness, and political implications of “remote control warfare.” Notre Dame law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell, making the inevitable comparison to video games, has argued that “to accept killing far from the situation of battlefields where there is an understanding of necessity is really ethically troubling.” The Economist, hardly a bastion of radicalism, has similarly asked: “if war can be waged by one side without any risk to the life and limb of its combatants, has a vital form of restraint been removed?” And just last week in The New York Times, Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution called unmanned systems “a technology that removes the last political barriers to war”—and thereby undermines democracy—because it allows politicians to take aggressive military action without having to face the electoral consequences of young Americans coming home in coffins.

Singer and the other critics tend to present this new frontier of warfare as something largely novel—a sinister science fiction fantasy come to life, and one that has the power to radically change the political dynamics of warfare. But if our current technology is new, the desire to take out one’s enemies from a safe distance is anything but. There is nothing new about military leaders exploiting technology for this purpose. And, for that matter, there is nothing new about criticizing such technology as potentially immoral or dishonorable. In fact, both remote control warfare, and the queasy feelings it arouses in many observers, are best seen as parts of a classic, and very old history. Drone technology certainly opens up a new, and in some ways extreme chapter. But it far from certain that the arc of the story points in the dangerous directions feared by the critics.

IT IS A COMMONPLACE that, from the very beginnings of warfare, combatants have sought technological advantages that allow them to kill their enemies with minimum risk to themselves. And for a very long time, these advances have provoked criticism. We don’t know if anyone excoriated the inventor of the bow and arrow as a dishonorable coward who refused to risk death in a hand to hand fight. But we certainly have evidence of the scorn some late medieval critics reserved for the crossbow—a weapon that supposedly allowed poorly skilled archers to kill honorable knights from safe cover. Under medieval codes of chivalry, the most honorable conflicts were those where the combatants fought as equals, relying on individual strength and skill to prevail, rather than superior weapons or numbers. Not surprisingly, then, when the first gunpowder weapons appeared, critics unloosed a torrent of chivalric outrage. As late as the early sixteenth century, the Italian poet Ariosto was still raging at this “wicked and terrible discovery” which had “destroyed martial glory, left the profession of arms without honor, and reduced valor and virtue to nought.”

Needless to say, the technological innovations have continued nonetheless—and so have the criticisms, although in modern times they increasingly condemned the innovations as immoral, rather than dishonorable. One extraordinary moment of confrontation came in the French Revolution, whose radical leaders believed that free citizens, dedicated to their patrie, would prove far more valiant soldiers than the “slaves” drafted unwillingly into enemy armies. Indeed, some of them put so much more faith in patriotic motivation than in scientifically-engineered weaponry that they urged the French military to return to the arms and tactics of the ancient Greeks: trading muskets for pikes, and having the navy abandon cannon in favor of boarding parties.