It’s an intriguing concept. In an earlier column (“Proxy Wars”), I’ve considered the fact that designated fighters, not the populace as a whole, should fight all wars. Since the beginning of recorded time, our proxies have been studly young men (and perhaps some women, if legends of the Amazons are to be believed). In E. M. Remarque’s classic All Quiet on the Western Front, I noted, the soldiers discuss the possibility of other sorts of proxies: the old men, or the generals. I suggested we could do it through a dogfight: our dogs fight their dogs to decide the fate of nations. Will robots be our next proxie.

Dr. Thomas is apparently suggesting they can. But presumably the other side wants robots too to reduce their own fatalities. Our robots could fight their robots. But what if we meet an enemy that refuses to play by the rules, and uses real soldiers to outthink our robots? (Remember: the 9-11 bombers, sure to lose against a hoard of Marines, hit on the fiendishly clever notion of using an airplane as a bomb.) Guerilla forces never play by the rules. Certainly the ordered ranks of British redcoats who marched so proudly across open spaces during the American colonial rebellion felt that the hardscrabble colonials hiding behind rocks and between the trees weren’t quite playing the game either.

Or perhaps we could use robots as stand-ins merely to reduce the number of human fatalities, one (wo)man on the ridge driving on remote-controlled troops with a switch like Napoleon on a horse inspiring the live troops in days of yore.  Still, some problems present themselves. What if you pressed “go” and they marched off a cliff?

I don’t mean to be flip here; perhaps it’ll work. Still, it’s “futuristic” because it makes us think of video games, of summer movies, of visions of a world that somehow never quite comes to be. War without people?  War without alpha-male studs (and perhaps now women)? Does not compute. Even though I’m not a Luddite stick-in-the-mud, I’d say there’s something off-kilter about this notion.  It seems to deny the feeling professional military types have that it is a profession, what some call the profession of arms. It’s something people do. Not robots.

But it makes us think: what is war? Some people say war is a failure of imagination: we can’t figure out a better way to resolve our differences. If so, we’ve been failing for many millennia. Some people think war is the way we get out our collective aggressive impulses, a kind of steam valve for bad things.

And some think it’s a given of the fact that men are men. Men, they hold, like to break things -- “blow [expletive] up,” as a student of mine said when I asked him what his summer plans were. Another student, a prior-enlisted diver and SEAL candidate, addressed the same subject one day in class: he thought guys were simply destructive. “Remember when you were a kid and got your hands on a can? What did you want to do with it? Crush it, of course.” It’s the age-old conflict, according to these people: women are born to create, men to destroy.

I acknowledge this theory, but can’t accept it. It’s just too bleak if true. It takes so long to build something up -- a city, a human life -- and so little time to destroy it. Surely even those drunk on testosterone can see this isn’t a good decision, no matter how good it makes them feel. Yet I do accept that war is an intensely human activity, which is why I am skeptical of futuristic visions of wars fought by robots.

Here’s my explanation for war: for many people and most men, coloring inside the lines of society is just too boring. Like Huck Finn, they resist being “civilized” and want to “light out for the territories.” In an earlier column discussing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (“Heart of Haditha”) I suggested that some of the lure of war in far-away places is precisely that you get to do things outside your own world that you’d never be allowed to do inside, things that the people back home actually shouldn’t ever hear about. It makes you feel you get to break the rules. The problem is, if you break the rules too badly and the people back home do hear about it, there’s hell to pay. Coloring outside the lines is one thing. Scribbling all over the page is another.

The vision of a war fought largely, or perhaps some day exclusively, by robots seems to contravene the very dreams that, I think, impelled a lot of warriors-to-be into uniform to begin with. Sure, service to country -- that’s undoubtedly a real motivator, and it’s certainly the first thing you’re supposed to say when a reporter sticks a microphone in your face. But the reality is, you get to maybe, if you’re very lucky, go into combat. So what if everyone tells you its hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of utter chaos? If all the great battle literature talks about how unspeakably horrible it is, how unromantic, how painful and dirty? Hey, it’s one of the great challenges of being a man (person?) -- whatever it is, you’ve got to find out for yourself.

For many men, especially men, their days in the military were days when things seemed clearer, when they were young, when it seemed they had a common goal, and when they were allowed to color outside society’s lines. If and when robots fight wars, what will fulfill this function?