A Theory of the Drone

"Chamayou is a French philosopher. I was a bit dismayed when his book came out because A Theory of the Drone would have been a very good working title for the book I was working on. And, as I started reading Chamayou’s book, I began to think that maybe I should just give up writing my own because so many of the ideas that I had initially started working with were in it. “The lack of reciprocal vulnerability makes Chamayou think of drone warfare as more like hunting” It’s a little bit of a slog for the non-theoretically-minded, but it is a very precisely and beautifully written book in which Chamayou asks some of the questions about whether warfare, when it is fought by drones, can even be called warfare. The lack of reciprocal vulnerability between the drone operator and the victim makes him think of drone warfare as being more like hunting. But I think he does exaggerate the omnipotent power of drones, he doesn’t seem to be aware of counter measures that people from Al-Qaeda and Taliban take to avoid drones, and he doesn’t make the distinction that is crucial in my own book between the use of drones in established war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq and the use of drones in Yemen or Somalia or tribal areas of Pakistan. So, in somewhere like Iraq and Afghanistan, drones are in the area alongside Apache helicopters and F16s and what have you. They’re in the mix, used both in surveillance occasionally, and in killing people but as part of a broader repertoire of killing machines. In a place like Yemen, a country with which the US is not officially at war at all, a drone may appear literally out of nowhere. People have no idea that they are in the sights of the drone until they hear the whishing noise of the missile coming right at them. I think there’s an important legal and moral distinction between those two settings in which drones are used. Chamayou says that drone warfare creates an absolute invulnerability for Americans, but that isn’t the case in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan, where many Americans have been killed. It is only the case in a place like Yemen or Somalia. Chamayou and I both point it out in different ways that the rhetoric of the Obama administration has blurred the line between warfare and police work. Especially in a place like Yemen, where a drone is used to kill insurgents on the ground, it is often the rhetoric of police work which is used to legitimate the strike more than the rhetoric of warfare. Or at least the two blur into one another, and this is one of the troubling aspects of drone warfare. The claim that the US makes is that it is identifying people on the ground who – in some sense that we the American people are not allowed to know – are plotting against us. And since it is not feasible to capture them on the other side of the world in Yemen, it is therefore OK to just go ahead and rub them out. Well, as well as blurring the distinction between warfare and police work, I think it is blurring the distinction between war and peace. In a place like Yemen or Somalia there could be long periods where there is no drone strike, and then suddenly there is a drone strike. There might be two or three in a week, and then several weeks with no strikes, and so on. So it is not clear if there is a state of peace or a state of war. Warfare is becoming indefinite. The Obama administration has insisted it doesn’t need any authorisation from Congress to undertake these strikes in Yemen, Somalia or Pakistan. The initial authorisation for these actions came immediately after 9/11 , which according to the Obama administration authorises them to attack targets in Yemen. I find that very improbable and so do many legal scholars. So it is blurring the distinctions between war and peace, war and policing, and it is creating an intermittent, endemic, very low-level asymmetric warfare. It is also in the nature of drones that they can very easily be shut down by countries with decent air forces. That means there are relatively few parts of the world in which drones can be used with impunity, and so drone warfare reinforces the distinction between parts of the world that are thought to be ‘normal’, where you could never use machinery like this, and those thought to be ‘lawless’, ‘ungovernable’ or ‘primitive’ parts of the world – in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, where the local population lacks the technical capability to shoot down drones. That reinforces the gap between the most abject corners of the world and the rest."