By Trent Serwetz, The Gothic Guardian (Duke University)

This is the third part of an ACE Forum on the use of drones in US military action.

In ancient times, warriors fought within meters of their opposition, feeling the sweat and blood of their human enemies. In the modern age, rifles, bombs, and artillery increasingly distanced the human from his/her target, moving the soldier farther and farther away from the gaze of the dead. Today, hundreds can be killed with the push of a button and the deployment of an unmanned orbital missile.

The ever-growing distance between the killer and the killed is not rendered exclusively as physical distance. It is a distance from the human on the other side which some warn will give drone controllers a “Playstation” mentality. But the inhumanity of drone killings goes beyond empathic distance as well. Where did drones come from? They are a response to the economic concerns of waging modern warfare; drones are to expensive air force pilots what the assembly line is to hand-made industry. Mass produced death. What are the consequences of drone strikes? “Collateral damage,” as human lives are now being called. War is no longer about man and his target, the object of his murderous intent. In this day and age, other humans who happen to be near the target are rendered insignificant, regardless of their (non)combative status. At every level, drones are emblematic of the subjugation of the human to the demands of the economic and the political. Crucially, human deaths are not the telos of these new technologies, they are mere logistical side constraints.

Figured through this anti-humanist rhetoric, we cannot help but understand drone killings as one tactic deployed in the context of the strategic oppression of the global South. The relationship of Western “modernity” to the ethnic other has always been one of violence. Superior mechanization characterizes the American relation to alterity. New technologies concretize new methods of establishing US global hegemony, figured in the post-colonial context not as (intrusive) terretorialization but as (defensive) deterrence. The atom bomb over Hiroshima: don’t mess with America, or accept the gruesome consequences. What, as Mark asks, is the effect of such characteristic subjugation on our perception abroad? How can other nations not see us as the bully in the sandbox with the biggest stick, when the lives of non-citizens and even some US natives are seen as collateral?

Significantly, our own political foundation is undermined by the deployment of drone strikes. One guilty target is terminated at the expense of those civilians nearby. With no opportunity to demonstrate his/her innocence in a court of law. And at the expense of innocent human lives, if necessary. Isn’t that fundamentally the sacrifice of the one for the many, the preeminence of the group over the individual? Doesn’t the voluntary use of drone weaponry contradict the liberal rhetoric of individual rights and “innocent until proven guilty?” When we locate accountability for wartime murder in the possession of an unmanned craft, don’t we reify the collectivist ideology we seek to oppose? Doesn’t killing Pakistanis through a computer screen in Nevada impart a certain expendability to human life in the same way that crashing a plane into a building does?

This is not to demolish the specific political and social context in which drone warfare has emerged. Mark reminds us that the battle against terrorism is a kind of arms race in which the side that outguns the other will win. The legality is questionable to me, since assassination is illegal under US law, but for the time being drone strikes seem legal enough. Even if we have located a legal loophole in which to fit drone strikes, I am dubious that it is in the interest of due process for this power to reside not only with the armed forces but also with the CIA. One can justifiably fear a future in which unaccountable government bureaucracies launch surgical strikes when there is insufficient evidence to take formal military action. Regrettably, that future is now.

Thus, the object of my post is not to downplay the practical concerns facing the US military today, as Urja discusses. Rather, I want to question, as Mark does, “the attitude we have in our discourse and our military operations towards drones and the deaths they cause, the way we count them.” I do not, however, see these as mere concerns affecting the use of drone weaponry.

I think drone weaponry has serious implications for the way we imagine ourselves as political subjects, the value we assign to human life, and our understanding of the relationship of the US to the international community. As things now stand, drones are a site for unprecedented mechanization of the human (as controller, as incidental victim, as the object of military force) and thus the unprecedented dehumanization of the US citizen and ethnic other alike. We should be skeptical of the sacrificial rhetoric of drone advocates in the government, as this rhetoric is simultaneously a locus of anti-Americanism. It is not a matter of logistics: we can (and will) refine drone weaponry to an exquisite science. That doesn’t change the fact that drones represent humans using robots to kill other humans, and whoever is trampled in the process be damned.

Military drones are undoubtedly here to stay, regardless of whether they can be redeemed as a method of relationality between the US and the global South. Reconciling drone weaponry with the demands of liberalism and due process, as daunting a task as it is, is only half the battle. The issue is not to imagine a way to exterminate people in a more sanitary, efficient way. Significantly, we need to rethink our military objectives, what the cost of those objectives are, and what importance human life is going to have as we become increasingly decentered from the technological world. Only with concurrent ideological upheaval will drones ever be an acceptable way for one human to impose his/her will on another.