Drones Over Moscow and the Poverty of Martial Glory

A thousand drones in a single night is a new spectacle of war, but the old logic beneath it is drearily familiar. Ukrainian forces, we are told, launched more than 1,000 drones across Russia, hundreds aimed at Moscow while parliamentary elections proceeded. Many were destroyed; some were not. An oil refinery was damaged, as were logistics facilities that sustain the Russian war. A residential building near the capital was struck; a woman of forty‑four was killed in her own home. Elsewhere a Russian drone destroyed a car in the Ukrainian countryside and four passengers perished. The weapons grow lighter and more numerous; the weight of calamity on the innocent remains the same.

When I wrote in The Wealth of Nations of the sovereign’s duties, I placed defence first, for without security no other industry can be carried on. A state so attacked as Ukraine is may surely employ every art of war to disable the enemy’s force. To strike oil and logistics is to strike the sinews of that force. Yet the impartial spectator, whose judgment I sought to describe in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, cannot rest content with this military description. He sees not only fuel depots and “war machines,” but also stairwells, bedroom windows, and the sudden widowhood that follows from an errant charge or a misdirected device.

The benefits of such an attack are concentrated and visible. Generals can point to damaged refinery units, to disrupted transport, to the “billions of dollars” no longer available to maintain the adversary’s army. The costs are diffuse, quiet, and unwilling. They fall upon shopkeepers whose deliveries stall, workers whose wages depend on refineries now aflame, and families who discover, not in public reports but in the ruins of their street, that a residential building lay somewhere along the intended line of flight. Every policy, and war is but policy by violent means, must be traced through the price system to those unseen payers who never appear in the communiqués.

Nor is the economic mischief bounded by the territories of the combatants. In my day I observed that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market: whatever narrows that market diminishes the power of each workman’s skill. When oil facilities are destroyed and shipping lanes threatened by drones over the Black Sea, it is not only soldiers who feel the effect, but weavers far distant whose yarn is dearer, and labourers whose bread rises in price when fuel does. The natural progress of opulence depends upon peace, cheap carriage, and secure expectation; it cannot be long maintained where refineries explode and elections are held under air‑raid alarms.

The strict rules of justice, in my moral writings, turn chiefly upon the security of life, property, and personal dignity. They are negative rules; they tell us what we must not do if society is to hang together at all. To attack a residential building, whether by intention or by a heedless indifference to probable consequence, is to violate that sacred security. The impartial spectator cannot but condemn the direct killing of civilians as blameworthy, however plausible the chain of command that led to it. The same judgment falls upon the drone that destroyed a car in the Ukrainian countryside. The plea of necessity in war is often urged; but necessity is the favourite phrase of those who prefer their own convenience to other people’s rights.

Self‑interest, when confined within the bounds of justice, can, as I argued, coordinate multitudes more surely than the wisest director. In war, however, men’s interest is loosed from those bounds. Political leaders calculate the gains of one more audacious strike; contractors of arms and fuel discover that every prolongation of hostilities is a continuation of their best market. One need not suppose monstrous wickedness. It is enough to observe that those who profit from continued conflict will always find reasons of state to applaud it, and that their counsels, like those of merchants petitioning for protection, ought to be received with the most suspicious attention.

Beneath these calculations lies a more intimate deception. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I described the poor man’s son, bewitched by visions of splendor, who labours all his life for a greatness that brings him little peace. Nations, too, are poor men’s sons. They overrate the glory of striking the enemy’s capital on the very days of its elections; they imagine that to show voters a burning refinery is to secure honour and safety. Meanwhile it is the labouring poor on both sides who lose their cars on a country road or their sleep in a city flat, and whose true wealth—the quiet enjoyment of life and of modest possessions—is scattered by devices they never chose. War flatters the pride of rulers, but it taxes most cruelly the patience of those who only wished to live and trade.

If there is any invisible hand at work in this theatre, it is one that reminds us, by the rising cost of every loaf and the mournful count of every civilian dead, that justice and peace are not ornaments of prosperity but its foundation. Defensive force is a sad necessity in this world; aggressive display, and the careless risking of innocent lives, are not. Humane policy does not expect men suddenly to become angels; it works with their actual motives, seeking armistice where it can, restraint where it must, and, above all, the swiftest possible return from the commerce of destruction to the only commerce that enriches—the higgling and bargaining of free people over peaceful goods. A state that prizes that transition less than the thrill of distant explosions has mistaken noise for greatness.