Tine Molendijk (1987) studied cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and became interested in the armed forces during that time, partly through friendships with military personnel. The armed forces are an organisation with a monopoly on the use of force. The decisions made by its personnel can have fatal consequences. What does it mean to be human in a military operation? As an associate professor at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy (NLDA), she tries to find answers to that question. Since the end of 2025, she has also been professor by special appointment of Moral Dilemmas of Multilateral Military Operations at the Department of Political Science.
For many people, the armed forces are a black box, she explains. As a result, people quickly resort to caricatures: soldiers are heroes, villains or pitiful victims. Or to simple dichotomies: AI and technology make the work cleaner, risk-free and more precise, says one camp. Autonomous weapon systems are 'killer robots' and 'killer drones', according to the other. It's not that simple, according to Molendijk. 'I see it as one of my tasks to open that black box and bring nuance to the debate.
Don't drones turn war into a kind of video game?
'That idea does indeed prevail. People have an image of so-called 'first-person-view' (FPV) drones, where someone wearing VR glasses controls a drone from a (small) distance from the war zone. At first glance, that seems cold and distant. But at the same time, it is actually intimate and close. In an average firefight in Afghanistan, all you saw were flames in the mountains, not exactly who you were killing. But with these goggles, you can follow your target until you are practically standing next to them, kill them and then see the impact of your action up close. That is a completely different experience of warfare. That is why it is so important to investigate how the operators who work with this technology experience it.
In her thesis (2019), Molendijk analysed how soldiers returning from missions often struggle with 'moral injuries' – feelings of guilt, shame and anger – due to morally difficult decisions made during their mission.
