There’s a moment in Ghost Recon: Wildlands when Karen Bowman, the CIA handler who has been your direct superior throughout the entire Bolivian operation, patches through a call. Someone wants to speak with Nomad. And whoever this someone is, Bowman clearly respects him, because her voice carries a tone she doesn’t normally use, something between professional deference and genuine admiration. Then Sam Fisher comes on, and the mission preamble unfolds, and after you’ve been given coordinates for the mission (extra content), Nomad (the player) says something that I’ve been sitting with for some time. He reflects on everything Fisher has been through — the career, the losses, the decades of operating in the dark on behalf of a government that would deny his existence if it became convenient — and says, in effect, that he isn’t sure he could have done it. That he might not have had the guts. But that he would do all of it, everything, for the good of his country.
For the good of his country.
I keep returning to that phrase because it’s doing so much work in so few words, and most of it is invisible to the person saying it. Nomad doesn’t deliver this as a political statement; he delivers it as something closer to a personal confession, an admission of what he believes in, the thing that would hold him together if everything else fell apart. It’s idealistic in the purest sense, not exactly naive, but believing in something whose coherence depends on not looking at it too directly. Because nations are, when you do look at them directly, extraordinarily fragile constructs. Lines drawn on maps by people who are mostly dead now, identities assembled from selective histories and shared myths and the accumulated weight of a language, a cuisine and a flag that someone designed at some point and that generation after generation has agreed to treat as sacred. This isn’t cynical, it’s just what nations are. The loyalty they generate is real. The communities they hold together are real. The love people feel for their countries is real and sometimes very beautiful. But the thing being loved is, at its foundation, a story that a group of people decided to tell about themselves, and the willingness to kill and die for that story is one of the more extraordinary facts about human beings that I know of.
Which is not, by the way, a reason to dismiss Nomad’s loyalty. It’s a reason to look at it carefully, because what he’s actually saying (what Fisher’s career and Nomad’s career both represent) is that there is a class of violence which becomes acceptable, even admirable, when it’s performed under the right authorization. Fisher has spent decades killing people. So has Nomad. They’re operating in Bolivia without the knowledge or consent of the Bolivian government, supporting an armed insurgency, assassinating cartel leaders and corrupt military officials, and the game presents all of this as heroic and essentially uncomplicated, morally speaking, because the authorization is in place. The CIA sanctioned it. The American government, somewhere in its classified architecture, approved it. And that approval transforms the act; the same action performed without it would be terrorism, mercenary work, or simple murder depending on the scale. With it, it’s a special operation.
Let’s sit with that for a moment, because it’s the thread that, once pulled, unravels a lot.
Cole Walker is the villain of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. He’s a former Ghost (the same kind of operator as Nomad, trained by the same institution, shaped by the same logic of covert action in service of national interest) who has, by the time the game begins, gone rogue in a way that the game clearly wants you to understand as crossing a line. He’s established a private military operation on the island of Auroa, he’s deployed drone swarms against civilians, he’s built something that looks disturbingly like a small private state answerable to nobody but himself. He’s the enemy. And you’re going to kill him.
And yet, there’s a short film Ubisoft produced to promote Breakpoint called The Pledge, featuring Jon Bernthal as Walker, and if you watch it without having already committed to the game’s moral framing, the experience is not straightforward. The atmosphere is extraordinary — the dialogue, the weight Bernthal brings to it, the specific quality of Walker’s conviction, which is not the conviction of a man who has lost his mind but of a man who has thought very carefully about something and arrived at a conclusion that costs him something to hold. Walker’s argument, stated plainly: governments deploy soldiers to die for political objectives that are quietly abandoned the moment they become inconvenient. The institution of state-sanctioned military force is not, fundamentally, about protecting anyone, it’s about projecting power and managing geopolitical outcomes, and the soldiers are the instrument of this, and the instrument gets discarded when it’s no longer useful. His solution is, therefore, to remove the institution. To build something that operates on its own terms, accountable to a ‘coherent’ logic rather than to the political winds of whatever administration happens to be in power.
The thing is… He’s not wrong. About the diagnosis, that is. This is the uncomfortable part of it, and I think the game knows it too, which is why it works so hard to make Walker’s specific associations damning — his alliance with Trey Stone, the Sentinel CEO who is straightforwardly sociopathic, his use of The Strategist, a man whose methods involve a cruelty more than strategic, etc. Walker needed to build a coalition to execute his vision, and some of the people he built it with are genuinely monstrous, and those associations aren’t incidental — they’re the tell, the place where the project reveals what it actually requires to sustain itself. A vision of autonomous military force answerable to nobody will attract, among its adherents, people who want autonomous military force precisely because accountability would constrain what they’re willing to do. Walker’s ideal is coherent. Walker’s actual operation is not, because the ideal and the practice diverge the moment you have to populate it with human beings who have their own agendas.
But the diagnosis stands: States do deploy soldiers for objectives that have more to do with resource access and political influence than with any defensible moral purpose. The soldiers who die in those deployments are not told this, they’re told something about national security or freedom or protecting a way of life, because you cannot ask people to die for oil prices or for maintaining favorable conditions for extraction industries. The abstraction is necessary, and this abstraction, that is, a distance between the declared purpose and the operational reality, is something Walker has seen up close and can’t unsee, and his refusal to unsee it is, in its way, more honest than Nomad’s loyalty, which is sustained precisely by not looking too directly at what “the good of his country” actually means in practice.
Here is where I stand about Nomad and the Bodarks: The Bodarks are Russian special operations forces who appear in the Ghost Recon universe, sort of the Russian equivalent of the Ghosts, trained and deployed in the same tradition of covert action, operating in the same moral grey zone of missions the government will deny, killing people under the authorization of a flag that is not the American flag, however. From the American perspective they’re adversaries, potential enemies, people whose interests conflict with Nomad’s interests because their country’s interests conflict with America’s. From any perspective that doesn’t privilege American authorization over Russian authorization, they’re the same person. They do the same thing, believe in their country with the same sincerity (or close enough to it not to matter morally), carry out the same kinds of operations, make the same kinds of calculations about acceptable losses and operational necessity. The game can’t quite say this out loud because saying it out loud would make it difficult to maintain the basic narrative structure of heroes and adversaries. But it’s there if you look at the structure of the thing, and once you notice it, the moral framework starts to look less like ethics and more like geography.
See, the American media has a specific habit with this, and it’s worth mentioning this because it operates so consistently that most people who consume that media have absorbed it without noticing. The adversary’s violence is always legible as violence — we see what it costs, who it harms, what it destroys. The protagonist’s violence is absorbed into the flow of the game or the film or the series, technically present but phenomenologically absent, something you do rather than something that happens to people. When a Bodark kills a Ghost it’s a dramatic event, but when Nomad kills a Bodark, it’s just gameplay. The asymmetry is so built into the form that pointing it out can feel pedantic, like complaining that action movies have explosions… But it shapes what you think is happening and most importantly what feels like justice and what feels like crime. It shapes, over enough hours and enough media, something like an intuition about whose violence is legitimate and whose isn’t, and that intuition tracks almost perfectly with whose flag is on whose shoulder.
I’ve played both games and I kill Sentinel troops, cartel soldiers and corrupt military police with zero hesitation, in any way the mechanics allow, with a satisfaction that I mostly don’t examine. The mercenaries especially, since there’s something specifically unencumbered about killing them, as if the absence of national authorization on their side removes whatever residual moral weight the act might otherwise carry. Which is interesting, because what it reveals is that I’ve absorbed the logic I just described: authorization matters to me at the level of feeling even when I’m consciously skeptical of it at the level of thought. The game is doing something to my intuitions that I only notice when I stop and pay attention.
Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders
Tell her how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.
[…]
Come tell us how you slew
Those brave Arabs two by two
Like the Zulus they had spears and bows and arrows
How you bravely slew each one
With your sixteen pounder gun
And you frightened them poor natives to their marrow
The Black and Tans were a paramilitary force deployed by the British government in Ireland in 1920, recruited largely from demobilized World War I veterans, and they were by any reasonable measure a terror organization operating under state authorization. They burned towns, killed civilians, conducted reprisals that were collective punishments for actions taken by others, the oldest and most indiscriminate logic of counterinsurgency. The British government sanctioned all of this, which means it was legal — or at any rate, legal enough that nobody was prosecuted. The IRA, fighting the same conflict from the other side, used car bombs, assassinations and tactics that deliberately created civilian casualties. England has called them terrorists, and by the strict definition of terrorism (the use of violence against civilians to advance a political objective through fear) this is accurate. It’s also accurate about the Black and Tans. The difference is who survived to write the law.
The song doesn’t resolve this. That’s what makes it good. It calls out the British state’s violence directly and celebrates Irish resistance, and in the same breath makes clear that the resistance was operating with legitimate grievance against an illegitimate occupation. Was the IRA right? The goal of expelling a colonial power, establishing self-determination for a people who had been administered by a foreign government for centuries, was about as coherent and defensible as political goals get. The means produced dead civilians on market days. The ETA in the Basque Country operates along the same fault line: the goal of Basque self-determination is legitimate in any framework that takes seriously the idea that peoples have the right to determine their own political future. The bombings that killed people on the street are not legitimate in any framework I can apply with a straight face. And yet the state violence that preceded and surrounded and responded to these movements was also killing people, also terrorizing populations, also operating outside any meaningful accountability, but it was doing so with uniforms and legal cover.
I don’t know how to resolve this. I’m not sure it can be resolved. The distinction between terrorism and legitimate resistance seems to depend almost entirely on whether you accept the legitimacy of the existing order being resisted, and that acceptance is not a neutral position, it tends to track very closely with whether you benefit from that order or are harmed by it. The Irish Catholic in Belfast in 1920 did not experience the British state as a legitimate authority, but the British Home Secretary did. They were both looking at the same set of facts and arriving at opposite conclusions about what was permitted, and the violence on both sides flowed from those conclusions with a terrible consistency.
America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the targets being cities, not military installations, not weapons facilities, but cities, with civilian populations that had no meaningful military significance, chosen partly because they were intact enough to clearly demonstrate the bomb’s effects. The estimates of immediate deaths range from 100,000 to 200,000 people. The justification offered was that a land invasion of Japan would have cost more lives overall, American and Japanese, than the bombs did, which is, minimally, a consequentialist argument that treats the deaths it caused as acceptable because the deaths it prevented were greater in number. This argument might even be correct in its arithmetic, depending on which projections you believe and how you count. What it does not do, and what no version of it can do, is make the people who died in those cities anything other than people who were killed by the American government, deliberately, as an instrument of policy.
The United States won the war. It sat at the table that designed the postwar order. It was instrumental in creating the institutions — the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, the international legal frameworks around war crimes and crimes against humanity — that now define what constitutes legitimate versus illegitimate violence in armed conflict. This is not a coincidence… The rules of war are written by the people who win wars, and they’re written in ways that retrospectively legitimize what the victors did while prohibiting what would threaten them in the future. The bombing of cities is prohibited under international humanitarian law. It was prohibited after it had already been done, by the people who did it, to the people who might do it to them in retaliation. The law arrived as a historical artifact of the outcome rather than as a principled constraint on behavior.
None of this makes America uniquely evil; every state that has prosecuted war has done version of this. The specific example is instructive because it’s so clear: the most consequential act of deliberate mass killing of civilians in the modern era was conducted by a democracy that considers itself, and is widely considered, a fundamentally law-abiding actor on the world stage. And it was not prosecuted, nor sanctioned, not even seriously questioned in the mainstream for decades, because the people who might have questioned it lost. Legitimacy, again, flowing from outcome rather than from principle.
In 1965, in Rio de Janeiro, a group called Scuderie Le Cocq was founded by police officers who wanted to avenge the death of a detective killed by a criminal. It had, from its beginning, the explicit support of government officials in security agencies. It operated as an extrajudicial killing organization — targeting criminals, yes, but also anyone who could be placed in the category of criminal through the sufficiently elastic logic that tends to govern these operations in practice. It was meant to solve a problem: the problem of crime that the formal legal system seemed unable to contain. What it actually became, however, was a killing apparatus with state backing, operating outside any accountability structure, subject to no review of its targets or its methods, growing beyond its original purpose in the way that killing apparatuses reliably do when there’s no constraint on them.
In Colombia, during the worst periods of the cartel wars, the police and military would periodically conduct operations in poor urban neighborhoods that proceeded on a logic of probabilistic guilt — if you were a young man of a certain age in certain areas, the assumption was that you were likely to be involved in criminal activity, and the operational response was to treat you accordingly. This is not an exaggeration (human rights organizations documented it) and paramilitaries operating with varying degrees of state complicity did the same. The logic is coherent in its own terms: if the problem is a criminal ecosystem that has embedded itself in a civilian population, and you can’t distinguish the combatants from the non-combatants, then you expand the category of combatant until the problem becomes solvable. The people killed by this logic had not, as individuals, done anything that justified being killed. The logic that killed them didn’t require them to have.
I find that I can watch military operations in Wildlands with a comfortable detachment. The cartel leaders are clearly bad, the violence they’ve inflicted is shown with enough specificity that eliminating them feels like something more than mere action. But when I think about Scuderie Le Cocq or Colombia, I’m looking at what the logic of “eliminating the cartel” looks like when applied by real institutions in real places with real impunity, and it looks nothing like the game. It looks like lists of names that expand beyond their original purpose, like categories that start with genuine targets and end somewhere unrecognizable. It looks like the inevitable destination of any project of organized violence that removes accountability from the process, which is exactly Walker’s project described from the outside rather than the inside.
The satisfaction I feel eliminating Unidad forces or cartel leadership in the game is the same satisfaction, I think, that drives the actual creation of organizations like Scuderie Le Cocq. The sense that the formal system is inadequate, that the people causing harm are evading consequences, and ultimately that someone needs to step outside the rules and do what needs doing. The game packages this instinct cleanly, keeps it from reaching its actual conclusions, and hands me a FAL, a balaclava and the assurance that I’m on the right side. Real life doesn’t do that, real life has Scuderie Le Cocq.
Brazil abolished the monarchy and declared itself a republic in 1889. The emperor, Dom Pedro II, was exiled — not killed, although killing him had been under consideration, and there’s a version of the argument that says the symbolic clarity of regicide would have made something different possible, breaking more completely with what came before. The republic that arrived instead was administered by many of the same people who had administered the empire, serving many of the same interests, with many of the same structural relationships between landowners and the state and the people who worked the land preserved essentially intact. The military dictatorship that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985 ended not through revolution or rupture but through a managed transition — abertura, opening — negotiated between the military and the civilian politicians who would replace them, many of whom had accommodated or collaborated with the regime, all of whom operated within a political culture that the regime had shaped. The civilian democracy that followed did not prosecute the military’s torturers in any meaningful way. The Truth Commission that eventually documented what happened came decades later and produced documentation rather than accountability. The structural relationships that made the dictatorship possible, that is, the concentration of land and wealth, the impunity of elites, the specific uses to which state violence was put, were not addressed by the transition, which is why they’re still here.
I think about this when I think about Walker. His argument is that the institution is broken and needs to be replaced with something that operates on cleaner logic. What Brazilian political history suggests is that institutions don’t replace themselves, but rather absorb their successors, reproduce their own logic through the people who run them and the relationships between those people and the structures of wealth and power they serve. The republic that replaced the monarchy reproduced the monarchy’s essential architecture. The democracy that replaced the dictatorship reproduced the dictatorship’s essential impunity. The problem Walker is diagnosing isn’t the specific institution, it’s something that goes deeper than any institutional arrangement, something in how power organizes itself and protects itself and persists regardless of what you call it. And that problem is not going to be solved by removing the authorization layer from special operations forces and letting Cole Walker run things from Auroa. It’s going to do exactly what Scuderie Le Cocq did, which is expand, deform and naturally serve whatever interests are powerful enough to capture it, because that’s what unconstrained organized violence does.
None of which makes the existing institutions defensible, exactly. It just suggests that the choice isn’t between the broken institution and the clean alternative. The choice is between the broken institution and the other broken institution, and the relevant question is which one breaks in ways that preserve the possibility of something better rather than closing it off. Which is an unsatisfying answer to the question Walker is asking. It’s the only answer I have.
The game doesn’t make you feel the weight of killing. I said this earlier and I meant it as a neutral observation but I don’t think it is neutral at all. What I think of it, given the mechanics of both Wildlands and Breakpoint (e.g. the way enemy deaths register as completion rather than as events, the way the world resets between operations, the absence of any system that tracks or responds to the cumulative human cost of what you’re doing) produce a specific experience of violence as action without consequence. You do things. Things are done. The cartel’s grip on the region loosens. Nobody you care about registers the deaths in any way that asks you to care about them either. NPCs do talk to you about the bosses you defeat, but that’s all. This is, in one sense, just how games work — the medium has conventions and those conventions have been established for playability and enjoyment and they’re not obligated to model every dimension of what they’re representing. But I think it’s worth noticing that the conventions of the medium map very closely onto the conventions of how we talk about legitimate state violence in real life. Drone strikes are discussed in terms of operational outcomes. Sanctions are discussed in terms of geopolitical effects. The people who die, or suffer, or lose things they can’t recover, are background to the analysis rather than its subject, their deaths are registered as data points in a consequentialist calculation, and the calculation proceeds without them having to be fully present as people.
This is not an accident as it requires active work to keep them in the background. The work is the distancing language, the authorization structures, the institutional processes that transform a decision to kill people into a policy output. What the game replicates, perhaps inadvertently, is exactly this: a system for producing violence that maintains the producer’s moral comfort by keeping the produced deaths adequately abstract. I am very comfortable playing Wildlands, I am very comfortable eliminating cartel operations and watching the percentage of provincial control shift in the rebel’s favor and nothing, nothing at all, about the experience asks me to hold the people I’ve killed as fully real, and I really don’t, and this is probably the most honest thing I can say about what games do with violence, and maybe what we all do with violence that happens at sufficient distance and under sufficient authorization.
At some point in the twentieth century, a human-made object left the solar system. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, crossed the heliopause, and is now traveling through space that no human instrument has reached before. We did that. The species that is, still, in 2026, organizing its politics around tribal loyalties and ethnic grievances and the control of territory that has been contested for centuries, that is still solving collective problems with methods that differ from those of our ancestors primarily in their scale and efficiency. Our species also sent a golden record into interstellar space with greetings in fifty-five languages and music from Bach and Chuck Berry. While seemingly contradictory, both of these things are true simultaneously. The technological distance between now and any previous moment in human history is incomprehensible, but the sociological distance is much smaller than we would like to believe.
I don’t think war has ever been unambiguously moral. I’m not sure I think it’s ever been unambiguously worth it either, though I hold that view with less certainty — there are cases where the counterfactual is dark enough that the violence seems to have prevented something worse, and I can’t dismiss that. What I think is that the question “is war moral?” is slightly the wrong question, because it implies that war is one thing with one moral status, and war is in fact many things: the choice of leaders to commit resources to conflict, the institutional structures that process that choice into orders, the individual soldiers who execute those orders, the civilians who die in the executing, the postwar settlements that assign retrospective legitimacy to the outcome. Each of these involves different agents making different choices with different amounts of meaningful freedom, and treating all of it as a single moral object flattens something that needs to be kept complex.
What I keep returning to is something simpler, and less philosophical, and maybe more honest: that somewhere in the architecture of what we are, violence is still the method we reach for when other methods fail, and the methods we prefer (negotiation, law, diplomacy) are themselves built on and maintained by the threat of violence, which means we haven’t actually moved past it, we’ve just introduced more steps between the impulse and the act. Whether those steps represent genuine moral progress or just more sophisticated management of the same underlying thing, I genuinely don’t know.
Nomad would do it again. For his country. A country that is a story, maintained by people who believe in it, held together by the threat of force against those who don’t. I don’t think he’s wrong to love it. I don’t think the love makes what he does uncomplicated. I don’t think Walker’s clearer-eyed critique of the institution makes what Walker does better. I play both games, and in them I kill without hesitation, and I think about this sometimes when I’m driving through the Bolivian highlands listening to the radio, and I don’t arrive anywhere in particular, and the sun comes up over the altiplano, and there’s a cartel checkpoint around the next corner, and I slow down and start planning my approach…
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