Invisible Pilots at the Center of a Storm

Recently, President Obama’s drone campaign in Libya has demonstrated open defiance, if not disregard, for moral and legal frameworks in international relations. Much has already been made of the United States’ War Powers Resolution, which asserts that this campaign should have ended on May 20, 2011 (1).  It did not. Obama maintains that these actions did not fall under the War Powers Resolution, because drones are not “war”; “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors (2).”  At first read this sounds a bit like the definition of “is.” Libyan ground forces cannot target the drones at the altitude they fly, nor could they kill the absent pilot. The administration’s defense made drones sound as harmless as gassing infants while they sleep.

Much can be made of the legal semantics that have made the “drive-by” an act of civil society. In fact much already has (3). Unfortunately, the law does not matter; it never really has. What does matter is how the abuse of the law and power as well as the assertions of violence change the police within this society of the spectacle (4).

A System of Objects, of Which Drones are Only a Part

Jean Baudrillard stated in explaining the psychological receptiveness of objects, that they “have a primordial function as vessels.” “They are a reflection of a whole view of the world according to which each being is a ‘vessel of inwardness.’” Therefore, as the house is “the symbolic equivalent of the human body” the drone becomes the equivalent to the soldier. Furthermore, this is the soldier not as a fully human subject, but an unidemensional object with a single purpose (5).

What this means, is that while a person may identify as a drone ‘pilot,’ that identification requires an individual to reduce their being to the sole aspect of killer. Furthermore, that individual is not even granted the human symmetry of ordinary combat violence. There is no engagement with an enemy other, merely an interface with an object they become.

Baudrillard characterized alienation as the “misadventure of the person” in which “the system of manipulated personalization is experienced by the vast majority of consumers as freedom (6).”  In this case, the manipulated personalization exists as a choice for anyone, regardless of physical capabilities or emotional ‘toughness’ to engage in the consumption of warfare. Furthermore, in a society that places value in violent service to ones country as a measure of self worth, we must ask what happens when “in the absence of any alternative it embodies itself in a personalized object (7)?” Especially in an object that reduces ones humanity to a tool: killer object. The answer is the abstraction of humanity. Baudrillard states that when the artificial world (techne) replaces the natural world as the effective organizer of reality, man and simulacrum switch places (8).  While it would be tough to argue that the artificial has completely organized reality, it would be impossible to say that it has not reorganized reality for the drone ‘pilots’, their victims, nor the political apparatus that employs (increasingly) their use (9, 10, 11).

The fact is that this formal achievement papers over an essential lack; our technological civilization tries to use the universal transitivity of form as a means of compensating for the disappearance of the symbolic relationship associated with the traditional gestural system of work, as a way of making up for the unreality, the symbolic void, of our power (12).

What drones have done, is to create a structure that pacifies the organic reality of war imposing an artificiality of peacefulness witnessed in the reduction of our national troops returning home in flag draped boxes. “Structure is always violent, and distressingly so. Even at the level of the object it threatens to compromise the individual’s relationship to society. To pacify reality, an appearance of peacefulness must be preserved (13).”  Of the manifold violence that drones produce, is the violence of apathy wrought upon domestic citizens and ‘pilots’ alike.

The Apathy Machine

[T]he national security state absolutely relies upon the forgetfulness and apathy of the American people (14).  The longer a war, or many wars continue, the more difficult it is to raise outrage within ourselves, let alone other people. Barbara Ehrenreich points out that the more democratic nations are increasingly unwilling to “risk large numbers of casualties.” However, drones afford these nations a way of harnessing apathy about the other, while avoiding the need to navigate national feelings about our own soldiers. “This would have been an almost unthinkable proposition a few decades ago, but technologies employed in Iraq and Afghanistan have steadily stripped away the human role in war. Drones, directed from sites up to 7,500 miles away in the western United States, are replacing manned aircraft (15).

This piecemeal replacement of humans by machines in the ‘theater’ of violence, allows for greater distancing of the perpetrator from his/her violence and facilitates wholesale lies to be openly expressed to an apathetic population, (16) not to mention increasing the state’s ability to conduct public (and what appear to now be seemingly routine) assassinations (17, 18, 19, 20, 21).  Was this the new transparency (22) we were promised by the Obama Whitehouse? Regardless, since these assassinations have turned on US citizens, this administration, and our law professor president, have engaged in blatantly unconstitutional activities (23) (see also the 6th and 14th amendment) in addition to their questionably illegal missions (24).  What’s even more troubling is the FAA’s consideration on relaxing restrictions for unmanned aircraft (25).

Alienation: the System Destroys the Idea of Human

Due to the extreme alienation from the relational aspects of war, while still allowing the state to perpetrate direct violence on whomever it chooses (foreign or domestic), drones combat is not war. Drones are the doorway to something far worse than that. They are proven to exist in a legal space outside traditional rules of engagement, and extract almost unprecedented apathy in regards to the US constitution within that legal lack. Furthermore, it is not just the US citizenry that becomes alienated from the visible effects of war, but also those in direct interface with the object itself. This abstraction is so complete, that even the ‘pilot’ is not even a soldier or warrior, but an object themselves: killer tool.

The Rise of Violence and Desperation

The violent future or drone combat is unfolding in many ways, only a few of which are yet to be realized. Between 2003 and 2008, the awesome asymmetry of violence wrought by drones has increased from “only a handful” to “more than 7,000” with future plans for “swarms of lethal “cyborg insects” that could potentially replace human infantry (26).”  Unfortunately, however, for -offensive realists, the unipolarity of the US dominance in drone combat is short lived with China and other countries ramping up production (27); “Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones (28).”  Military analysts suggest that while a drone attack on the US is far off, other countries are likely to follow the American example of drone domination creating exponential political and legal violence across the globe with untold ramifications (29).  However, if the past decade of asymmetrical warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan is any clue, we can expect tactics far more desperate than “roadside IEDs and suicide belted youths  (30).”  What can the world expect when the physics of robotic domination cannot be countered by homemade arsenals? Surrender is unlikely.

Hell: Alienation and Restructuring of Power

William Tecumseh Sherman is famous for the statement “War is Hell.” While Sherman most likely meant that war is suffering, painful, destructive and an unredemptive social act. Theologically, Hell is a state in the absence of grace. Grace is a redemptive relationship with the divine or Real of the lifeworld (if we remove the deity). Drones create a distancing of relationships in the ‘theater’ of combat by removing the humanity from the oppressors weapons. Furthermore, as the US military moves closer to “deploying an army of pilotless drones capable of collaborating with one another in order to hunt down, identify, and annihilate an enemy combatant all on their own” (31) combat is further alienated from the human, and any potentially redemptive relationship with the lifeworld. Drone combat is no longer social, and therefore it becomes removed from redemption.

It appears that Sherman spoke too soon: War is not Hell, it only leads to it; the real Hell is combat conducted through the alienation of humanity from self and other, or by drones. Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that, “in the end, [drones may] do us one strange favor: the may finally bring home to us that war is not a human possession, that it is not what we are and must be (32).”  Hopefully we can realize this in time to end perpetual drone combat.

In the essay Domination and Freedom, Georg Simmel stated:

“Nobody, in general, wishes that his influence completely determine the other individual. He rather wants this influence, this determination of the other, to act back upon him. Even the abstract will-to-dominate, therefore, is a case of interaction. This will draws its satisfaction from the fact that the acting or suffering of the other, his positive or negative condition, offers itself to the dominator as the product of his will (33).”

Simmel was essentially arguing that domination is a product of human relationship: “the desire for domination has some interest in the other person, who constitutes a value for it (34).”  What is perhaps most disturbing about the advent of, and dramatic increased investment in, drone combat is that it disrupts the human social relationship of domination! Or, simply, that just as drone combat is not warfare, it is also not domination. It is fundamentally different from domination. Furthermore, lacking the relational and social elements contained within domination, this new category of power is a more direct form of violent oppression.

In regards to violence and power, Hannah Arendt’s essay Communicative Power asserts that there has never been a government exclusively based on violence. That even totalitarianism, “whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis.” Furthermore, she asserts that this will remain the case until “the development of robot soldiers” which “would eliminate the human factor completely” could change this maxim.

Even the most despotic domination we know of, the rule of master over slaves, who always outnumbered him, did not rest on superior means of coercion as such, but on a superior organization of power – that is, on the organized solidarity of the masters (35).

What is troubling about Arendt’s analysis of power is that we have arrived at the age of robotic soldiers; and we are already making strides towards the elimination of the human element from combat. For Arendt, when this happened, it would “change the fundamental ascendancy of power over violence (36).”  Power has become subordinate to violence; this means we must rethink our philosophical conceptions of power.

Death of War and Other Nobel Prizes

Barrack Obama has successfully come like a thief in the night and altered the course of history. We have witnessed the transition of the CIA from an intelligence organization into a combat operation. We have seen the US government carry openly carry out public extrajudicial assassinations, both foreign and domestic. The fundamental relationship between power and violence has been radically changed. And, through stripping the social relationship and humanity from military combat he has (potentially) successfully ended war; thus finally earning his Nobel Prize (37).

Works Cited:

1. Blinov, Artur.  The week in foreign affairs: Drone warfare is not war, and Obama is not Nixon. June 20, 2011 http://bit.ly/sorw4F

2. Saletan, William. Koh Is My God Pilot. June 30, 2011 http://slate.me/udbQkN

3. Goldsmith, Jack. Problems with the Obama Administration’s War Powers Resolution Theory. Lawfare: Hard National Security Choices. http://bit.ly/m5Vszd

4. Debord, Gilles. Society of the Spectacle 64

5. Baudrillard, Jean. System of Objects 26-27

6. Baudrillard, Jean. System of Objects 165

7. Baudrillard, Jean. System of Objects 165

8. Baudrillard, Jean. System of Objects 60

9a. Sullivan, Andrew. Our Drone Future. September 2011 http://bit.ly/pOfEE4

9b. Addicted to Drones, Small Wars Journal http://bit.ly/oQWS8W

9c. Aerial Surveillance Push. Canberra Times. http://bit.ly/poTLB4

10. Addicted to Drones, Small Wars Journal

11. Aerial Surveillance Push. Canberra Times.

12. Baudrillard, Jean. System of Objects 56

13. Baudrillard, Jean.System of Objects 184-185

14. Glaser, John. Apathy Enables War, Will Help in Libya Occupation. July 11, 2011. http://bit.ly/uWc8eY

15. Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Fog of Robot War. http://bit.ly/rrkhhr

16. Lying about civilian death in drone combat. http://bit.ly/vBmMRn

17. White House Clarifies When Its OK for Obama to Kill Americans. http://bit.ly/p0TV42

18. CIA Drone Kills Al-Awlaki Second US Citizens in Yemen http://bit.ly/mWM4CS

19. The Extrajudicial Drone Murder of US Citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki. http://bit.ly/vwSuWS

20a. Anwar Al-Awlaki and Drone Strikes on US Citizens Due Process. http://slate.me/qvbDdZ

20b. Drone Assassinations Hurt the US More than they Help Us. http://bit.ly/p4NQEw

21. Small Wars Journal. http://bit.ly/oQWS8W

22a. As the Drone Flies. http://on.wsj.com/pNdKpI

22b. Transparency and Open Government. http://1.usa.gov/DVta

23. A Done Strike on the Constitution. http://bit.ly/ot5Nk1

24. Human Security Gateway. http://bit.ly/vqWRxs

25. Drone On: Will the FAA open UAS?, Scientific American. http://bit.ly/raLTUk

26. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fog of Robot War. http://bit.ly/rrkhhr

27. Small Wars Journal http://on.wsj.com/9gKB7d

28. Coming Soon: The Drone Arms Race. New York Times. http://nyti.ms/owgFux

29. Ibid. http://nyti.ms/owgFux

30. As the Drone Flies. Counterpunch. http://bit.ly/qTYqmt

31. The Rise of Killer Drones That Can Think For Themselves. Alternet. http://bit.ly/oRfcgI

32. Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Fog of Robot War.

33. Simmel, Georg. Domination and Freedom. In Power (ed. Steven Lukes). P203

34. Simmel, Georg. Domination and Freedom. In Power (ed. Steven Lukes). P203

35. Arendt, Hannah, Communicative Power. In Power (ed. Steven Lukes) 67-68

36. Arendt, Hannah, Communicative Power. In Power (ed. Steven Lukes) 67-68

37. “The Nobel Peace Prize 2009 – Press Release”. Nobelprize.org. 26 Oct 2011. http://bit.ly/qPReF3