Unmanned: Brave New Films’ screen intervention into America’s drone wars (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review: Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare
Antipode, 2022
This essay is a contribution to an Antipode review symposium on Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare, a text that traces the history of UAV technology and the failure, incoherence, contradiction and contingency that have always haunted its operation. More than anything, Chandler's novel reading of the history of drone technology disrupts any claim of novelty in the contemporary deployment of these aerial platforms in the war on terror, and suggests that rather than affording some unique military capability, the principle contribution of the drone to U.S.-backed counterinsurgency is a kind of epistemic violence, allowing for a continuous denial of the human error and decisionmaking responsible for the violence it unleashes.
Game Changer? On the Epistemology, Ontology, and Politics of Drones
Die Redaktion des Behemoth hat zum Oktober 2015 gewechselt. Wir danken der bisherigen Redakteurin Alexandra Hees, die als Promovendin ans Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung in Köln gewechselt ist, für ihr Engagement in den letzten zwei Jahren. Sie hat den Wechsel der Zeitschrift nach Freiburg maßgeblich gestaltet. Neuer Redakteur ist Leon Wolff. Wir freuen uns auf die Zusammenarbeit.
Contemporary warfare has been significantly transformed by the promotion and implementation of unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) into global military operations. Networked remote sensory vision and the drones’ capability to carry deadly missiles entail and facilitate increasingly individualised, racialised, and necropolitical military practices conceptualised as ‘surgical strikes’ or ‘targeted killings’, all in the name of ‘counterinsurgency’. In the absence of publicly accessible documentations of ‘drone vision’, images of drones themselves constitute what is arguably one of the most contested iconographies of the present. The ethical and legal problems engendered by the virtualisation of violence and the panoptical fantasies of persistent vision and continuous threat interfere with the commercial interests and the publicised ideas of ‘clean’ warfare of the military-industrial-media complex. Drones have become a fetishised icon of warfare running out of human measure and control and are henceforth challenged by activist strategies highlighting the blind spots and victims of their deployment.
Public "traces" of drone strikes are reshaping what it means to witness warfare
LSE USAPP - American Politics and Policy, 2017
Invited piece for LSE US Centre's 'American Politics and Policy' blog. Discusses the first drone strikes under the Trump administration in January 2017, and how secrecy around the Yemen drone programme framed the meaning and significance of sparse details and uneventful imagery left in the wake of these strikes. Goes on to note the role of Twitter feeds of drone attacks in perpetuating certain public ideas of what cannot be confirmed or known for certain about this violence. Finally, suggests that these hints and images reshape the debate around how war is understood, and legitimised, through news media.
Antipode Book Forum, 2022
“Bald Eagle Wins Duel with Drone.” In summer 2020 a bald eagle attacked a drone operated by Michigan state’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE), tearing off the propeller and causing the device’s plummet 162 feet through the air into Lake Michigan (Lewis 2020). An environmental analyst and drone pilot had been using a DJI Phantom 4 – one of the most popular mass-produced, ready-to-fly drones sold in huge numbers around the world – to map shoreline erosion and collect other data helpful to communities that face rising water levels. The agency’s humorous news release about the loss of the $950 drone suggested the eagle was provoked by hunger, territoriality, or “bad spelling” – referring to the agency’s acronym “EGLE” – and was subsequently shared online several hundred thousand times within a few days (MI Environment 2020; Moore 2020). Various large raptors have been documented attacking drones. In fact, the penchant of eagles to attack drones has been appropriated in the developing field of drone defence, with several military and police programmes training eagles to dispatch with drones. The Dutch national police were the first to use birds of prey as a counter-drone measure in the “Guard From Above” programme, followed by the French military. A UK programme sought to employ raptors to guard prisons from contraband-carrying drones. A US Air Force-funded study by Oxford zoology researchers has considered ways that peregrine falcons’ approach to intercepting their targets – similar to the guidance system used by visually directed missiles – could help down rogue drones (Bachman 2017; Darack 2017; France24 2017; Moore 2020). The ultimately short-lived Dutch attack eagle squadron created a media sensation, propelling a genre of online videos of birds attacking drones.2 Amidst this celebratory mediatised standoff of animals versus drones also came harrowing news of an anti-drone golden eagle diving at and clawing the back of a five-year-old girl at a picnic by the Saint-Antoine chapel in the Pyrénées during the Spring school holidays. Forcing an official apology from the French air force, the attack error was attributed to the eagle confusing the girl with a drone because she was wearing white. I start with this vignette to introduce Kate Chandler’s Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare because it complicates assumptions about technological dominance. The slippages and antagonisms between eagle/EGLE, animal/eagle-astechnical system, drone-target/girl, and targeted attack/deterrence underscore Chandler’s outstanding study of the error-prone, limited, and often strikingly ridiculous course of technological systems that tie machine autonomy to national protection – or, in the case of EGLE, humanitarian oriented territorialised care that encroached on actual eagle turf and succumbed to a watery grave. Chandler’s book Unmanning focuses on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems – “drones” – as a key window onto the technologically-driven global political systems of the 20th and 21st centuries. The volume stands alone in the mounting literature on drones for illuminating the recurrent failures of drone systems yet ongoing political project of unmanning, and for dramatising the way drones in practice have diverged from the drone in ideology and theory within a much longer history of contingencies than contemporary debates on drone warfare allow.
Ground the Drones: Direct Action and Media Activism
2020
“Ground the Drones: Direct Action and Media Activism.” In Athina Karatzogianni, Ioanna Ferra & Michael Schandorf (Eds.), Protest Technologies and Media Revolutions: The Longue Durée. Bingley: Emerald Publishing (2020): 127-139.
Present American policy proclaims the compatibility of drone usage with the traditional Rules of Engagement and the Laws of War. Largely absent in this is an examination of how enemy combatants are being defined on both sides of drone activity: not just the targets and operators but also the relevance of drone technology proliferation. This work engages the void to reveal inconsistent and contradictory ethical standards in American drone policy, based largely on an assumed continued technical preeminence that is by no means guaranteed. The argument is not a humanitarian lament against hegemony: it is a realist argument addressing how ethical inconsistencies in defining American technological warfare compromise the 'leadership high ground' for the United States in a manner that carries fairly significant national security blowback potential.
PhD thesis: The Cruel Drone -- Imagining Drone Warfare in Art, Culture and Politics
The Cruel Drone: Imagining Drone Warfare in Art, Culture, and Politics, 2019
The dissertation investigates how military UAV’s (unmanned aerial vehicles), or so-called drones, are represented within the aesthetic field as a “drone imaginary,” reflecting radical changes in the history of warfare. Using the imaginary as a conceptual framework, the drone is analyzed as a cultural construct fueled with ideological and political imagination, including, above all, promises of liberation from the burdens and vulnerabilities of human lives and bodies in war. The main goal of the dissertation is to critically analyze how the drone imaginary builds on a fantasy of the perfect weapon which is, essentially, cruel. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s thoughts and ideas, my claim is therefore that the social and cultural imagination of drone warfare follows a logic of cruel optimism. This means that the object for these desires, the drone, becomes an obstacle for its own flourishing by actively impeding the goal it promises to fulfill. In other words, my aim is to show how the popular attachment to drones is formed by fantasies and imaginations that are “cruel” in so far as they compromise themselves and obstruct their aims through a negative feedback loop, which constantly negates the promises these very same machines seem able to deliver on regarding a higher and safer mode of warfare. Each of the chapters in the dissertation contains examples that demonstrate how these fantasies and promises in turn prove to be flawed or imperfect. Using the realm of aesthetics as prism, the analyses expose the darker side of this drone imagination focusing on its inherent cracks and frailties that altogether undermine the legitimacy as well as soundness of the fantasy of the drone as a new wonder-weapon. For instance, the analyses show how figurations of drone automation is uncannily non-human; how drone invincibility also entail trauma; how dreams of total vision become blurred by immensity; and how the myth of surgical precision ends up as carnage. Thus, each chapter specifically examines one of these drone figurations in order to show how they are con-figured into the larger drone imaginary. Based on strategies of close-reading in combination with a cross-disciplinary conceptual approach, the dissertation offers new insights to the rapidly growing field of academic drone research. While this field has, however, so far mostly focused on the political, juridical, and ethical aspects of drone warfare and less on imaginary, literary, and aesthetic constructions and configurations vibrating beneath these debates, the dissertation contributes with an alternative cultural drone imaginary.