Science & Tech Quote by Michael Ignatieff

Ignatieff is sketching a future where war stops looking like war, and that is the danger. By naming "computer technicians" and "high-altitude specialists", he shifts the battlefield from mud and bodies to screens and sensors, from direct exposure to mediated distance. Add "lawyers" and the picture turns even sharper: violence not only engineered but procedurally authorized, wrapped in memos, rules of engagement, and post-hoc justifications. The intent is less sci-fi prediction than a warning about moral and political anesthesia.

The subtext is accountability. When killing is done by people whose professional identity is technical or legal, responsibility diffuses. A strike becomes an output, a compliance exercise, a "targeting decision" rather than an act with human consequences. That diffusion also changes democratic oversight. Citizens can rally against an invasion; they struggle to visualize a cyber operation, a drone campaign, or an intelligence fusion cell making life-and-death calls at altitude. If the public can't picture it, they can't contest it.

Context matters: Ignatieff came of age in the post-Cold War moment, then watched liberal democracies stumble through Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the post-9/11 security state. Precision warfare was sold as cleaner, law-governed, controllable. His line punctures that sales pitch. Abstraction doesn't eliminate fog; it thickens it. The more "surgical" war becomes, the easier it is to expand quietly, to normalize permanently, and to lose the political brakes that come from visible sacrifice and unmistakable costs.