Robert Klose of Orono is a U.S. Navy veteran and the author of “Trigger Warning.”

During the horrific Battle of Fredericksburg (1862), Robert E. Lee is believed to have said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” The words were prescient but now seem outdated, if not quaint.

The current Washington regime — I’m reluctant to dignify it by calling it an “administration” — has come to the point of batting around the idea of war as if it were a video game or an athletic event. Venezuela, Greenland, the Panama Canal Zone, Canada and now Iran.

Donald Trump has placed all of these in his bellicose sights because, as he said, he’s the president and can do anything he wants (i.e., the Constitution be damned).

The issue, of course, is that war has become easy. For the most part, it no longer involves looking into the enemy’s eyes or engaging in hand-to-hand combat. It has become antiseptic and two-dimensional, followed on a computer screen.

Consider the recent bombings of small craft off the Venezuelan coast. This was accomplished from great distances, at the push of a button. The person who launched the projectiles never heard the explosions, much less the screams of the targeted men. It’s so clean that one can comfort oneself with the illusion that, again like a video game, it wasn’t real.

This emotional detachment even permits the killing of survivors. In other words, since it’s
done from a distance, how can war be terrible?

Let’s take this to the next level of military antisepsis. Think of a drone operator safely ensconced in some climate-controlled operations center in the United States, directing his weapon at a target on the other side of the world. The trigger is pulled, people are vaporized, and then the technician, after the day’s work, goes home to pizza, adoring children and watching football on the tube.

The only thing more obscene than this is the suggestion that these technicians, like soldiers on the battlefield, should be given medals, even though their lives were never at risk. Military operations have become so cybernetic that they are becoming divorced from any sense of compunction associated with one’s actions.

Technology has closed the gap between the push-button order and the human response to the point where the actor with the weapon not only has little to no time to consider the consequences of his actions, but no sense of any obligation to those who survive his efforts. This was exemplified by those unarmed Venezuelan survivors we killed as they clung to the remains of their boat.

In a more sober time — perhaps the period of U.S. history, the 1950s, that Trump and his minions idealize — the murder of survivors would have been anathema. But such gestures of humanity have reportedly given way to a merciless dictum of our “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth: Kill them all.

War has become too easy, too slick, too automatic, too repetitive and yes, too distant. This war business is something that happens “out there,” while daily life in the republic continues unabated, unaffected in a land where less than 1% of the population is serving in the military.

I can only think of one of the running themes of George Orwell’s “1984,” where the totalitarian entity of Oceania is engaged in a perpetual state of background conflict with Eastasia and Eurasia. Orwell knew that if war is always present, the population will grow not only inured to it but will come to think of it as essential to its survival. It will not be able to imagine life without it.

In other words, the ancient Greek poet Pindar got it exactly right when he said, “War is sweet to those who have no experience of it.” It’s an odd and self-defeating fetish for Mr. Trump, who continues to salivate after a Nobel Peace Prize while waging a war of choice in the Middle East.