Science & Tech Quote by Richard Perle

Perle’s line doesn’t just advocate efficiency; it quietly redraws the moral map of warfare. Framed as a commonsense protection of troops, it smuggles in a larger claim: that the “operational commander” should be liberated from having to spend human lives on anything that can be automated. The syntax is telling. “Should have to” casts soldier-risk as an unnecessary burden on leadership, not a tragic consequence of political choice. It’s managerial language applied to mortality.

The subtext is a techno-optimist escalation: if machines can do it “as well,” then human presence becomes a kind of avoidable sentimentality. That phrase “as well” is doing heavy work. It assumes equivalence between human judgment and machine output in specific tasks, smoothing over what automation notoriously blurs in war: context, proportionality, and accountability. A remote sensor can detect; it can’t explain itself. An unmanned airplane can strike; it can’t be held to the same social and legal expectations as a person who sees what they did.

Context matters because Perle’s public life sits squarely in the post-Cold War, post-9/11 drift toward high-tech, low-visibility conflict: drones, ISR saturation, “force protection” as doctrine, and a politics that prefers clean optics to messy commitments. The appeal is obvious: fewer body bags, less domestic backlash, more operational tempo.

The risk is equally obvious: when war costs less in American blood, it can cost more in American restraint. Perle’s sentence sells humanitarian concern while lowering the friction that once forced leaders to justify violence at scale.