Adrian R. Lewis
Since 9/11 and the Bush Administration’s declaration of the Global War on Terrorism, the employment of drone technologies, or unmanned aerial vehicles, in counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism, military, and surveillance operations has expanded enormously. Drones have become an ever-expanding weapon and surveillance system employed by the armed forces, intelligence agencies, police and security forces, private military firms, and terrorist organizations. These technologies have not been without controversy, primarily because of the indiscriminate way in which they kill and how they violate sovereignty and privacy. During the recent American evacuation of Afghanistan (25-27 April 2022), for example, an American drone strike wiped out an entire Afghan family, including women and seven children.[1] Since 9/11, American drone strikes have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians, arguably violating the sovereignty of many countries in the process. Because of the expanded use and controversial nature of these weapon systems, the study of this relatively new form of warfare has increased enormously. Remote Warfare is another contribution to this growing body of literature.
Let me say up front what this book is not. Remote Warfare is not a study of the development and evolution of drone technology. It is not a study of the operational and tactical doctrine used to employ these systems or airpower in general. It is not a study of the controversial decision-making processes used to employ lethal, remote force, and it is not a study on the future uses and expanding roles of remote warfare. Those seeking a deeper understanding of the conduct of remote warfare should consider other works.
Remote Warfare is the product of a special issue of The Journal of War and Culture Studies. It consists of twelve chapters divided into three sections: Visions, Intimacies, and Reconfigurations. Rebecca A. Adelman, Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, and David Kieran, associate professor of history at Washington & Jefferson College edited this study.
The larger objective of Adelman and Kieran is “analyzing the multifaceted ways that Americans make sense of their nation’s war and asking what is at stake, culturally and politically in that sense-making.”[2] They identify two realities of remote warfare, “The first is that it is central to modern state-sponsored violence…The second is that the promise and peril of these violent tools preoccupy politicians, policy makers, defense intellectuals, activists, and purveyors of popular culture.”[3] In contrast to other works, they explain “how various actors have interpreted and responded to the centrality of violence delivered from a distance to modern warfare.”[4] Adelman and Kieran posed the following questions: “What are the cultural preconditions for remote warfare? How does living with remote warfare transform the culture that employs it? How might cultural production capture or obscure the experience of remote warfare by their consumption of its artifacts? To what extent can cultural production offset, impede, or resist the violence of remote warfare?”[5] The essays that follow seek to answer these questions.
The contributors to this volume form a diverse group of scholars from multiple disciplines, including, Journalism, English, Religious Studies, and American Studies; multiple cultures/states including, Germany, Pakistan, Canada, and the United States; and multiple levels of achievement/seniority, including graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, assistant, associate, and full professors.
The first section “Vision,” “explores various ways of anticipating, imagining, and conceptualizing remote warfare.”[6] The second section, “Intimacies,” “charts the sometimes unexpected relationships and connections engendered by remote warfare, a degree of interactivity belied by the term itself. Confronting, and undermining, common critical presumptions about the distancing effects of remote warfare, chapters in this section instead consider the forms of proximity it creates.”[7] The third section, “Reconfigurations,” “build[s] from this inventory [the previous section] to develop analyses that contradict determinist frameworks for understanding remote warfare, offering instead reconfigurations that chart forms of resistance, protests, and creativity that arise in its interstices. These analyses attend directly to the suffering that remote warfare causes but seeks to foreground the myriad ways that people who live under the violence engage with and survive it.”[8] All the essays in this volume make valuable contributions. But, given space limitations, this review addresses one essay from each section.
Chapter 1, “An Entirely New Method of Conducting War at a Distance,” by Michael Zeitlin, is the foundational chapter for the entire book. Zeitlin explains the origins of the visions of remote warfare, from the development of the airplane, through the Great War, through the first airpower theorists, Giulio Douhet and William (Billy) Mitchell, the fathers of modern air war doctrine, to World War II, and the post-war period, the Cold War, the creation of Armageddon. The vision of winning war from the air, the vision of airpower decisively destroying enemy forces from afar, the vision of the destruction of enemy cities from the air, the vision of war without significant casualties for friendly forces, without the trauma that is the norm in war, has had a profound and continuous effect on Western civilization. The U.S. and its allies have expended enormous resources trying to make this vision a reality. However, humanity has not cooperated, and airpower, remote warfare, has never produced the decisive results airpower enthusiasts have predicted. Still, the vision remains a potent force in Western thinking about the conduct of war. Zeitlin concluded: “One hundred years ago, Douhet and Mitchell predicted that aerial warfare would erase the distinction between civilians and combatants entirely. They continue to be right as drone warfare expands in the twenty-first century.”[9]
Chapter 5, “Of Games and Drone: Mediating Traumatic Affect in the Age of Remote Warfare,” by Michael Richardson, analyzes the relationship between video gamers and drone operators, seeking to unravel the idea that drone war is video game war.[10] Richardson’s work is part of a larger body of studies on the psychological trauma experienced by drone operators, who do not physically go in harm’s way. Richardson writes, “While the extent of post-traumatic stress disorder among drone pilots and sensor operators remains contested, there is little doubt that such roles are not without significant psychological, social, and familial costs.”[11] He seeks to “address the processes of mediation within intimately distant acts of killing, their entanglement with video games, and the ways in which traumatic affects generate, circulate, and manifest in gaming responses to drone warfare. It asks how gaming as a genre might uncover the more complex forces at work in the relationship between gaming and drone warfare.”[12] Richardson briefly outlines the conduct of drone operations. He then examines the video games Killbox and Unmanned. He concludes that, “The forceful presence of the language, motifs, and tropes of gaming does damage because it elides, or makes difficult to describe the all too traumatic affectivity of drone warfare.”[13] The two most difficult tasks a nation can ask of its men and women who serve in uniform are, first, to risk their lives, to enter the battlefield; and second, to take life, to kill another human being. While drone operators do not physically enter the battlefield, they do kill people. And killing causes trauma (for most of humanity). It is surprising and disappointing that such a discussion is necessary.
A U.S. Air Force MQ-9 during a training mission. (Paul Ridgeway/U.S. Air Force/Wikimedia)
Chapter 9, “Necrospace, Media, and Remote War: Ethnographic Notes from Lebanon and Pakistan, 2006-2008,” by Syed Irfan Ashraf and Kristin Shamas, is the most original, significant, and non-Western essay. The authors examine remote warfare from the perspective of the victims. They explore the relationship between the killed and killer in the media, blogs and legacy news organizations. They advance an analytical method that employs the concept of “necropolitics” and “necrospaces,” the former being that which “ seeks absolute power over who is allowed to live in this world and who can be ‘justifiably’ killed.”[14] The authors develop two case studies, aerial bombardment with cluster munitions in Lebanon (2006-8) carried out by Israel, and drone warfare in Pakistan (2008) carried out by the U.S. They observe that, “remote warfare was imposed to maintain an imperial regime over which human bodies can be continually killed with impunity.”[15] They further note that, “Western legacy news represented Shi’a-controlled southern Lebanon and southern Beirut as spaces in which the inhabitants could be justifiably killed.”[16] They conclude that, “through such mediatization of conflict, necrospatialization (re) produces imperial notions and policies of geographically based human disposability.”[17] In essence, it is easier for Western power to kill—and kill excessively—people who are not Western, people who occupy these distant geographical spaces, people who are not ethnically or racially white Europeans. And it is easier for the legacy news organizations to portray this killing as justifiable and reasonable when the people killed are not white Europeans. Watching the American media portray the war in Ukraine and remembering its coverage of the war in Syria reinforces the significance of this essay. The authors make an important point. In Western culture/states, some lives are more valuable than others are.
This book is worth reading. Some of the essays are excellent. However, for those seeking a broader understanding of the conduct of drone warfare, I would recommend some foundational reading on the development and evolution of airpower theory and doctrine before delving into the development and employment of drone technology since 9/11.
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