[Technically, drone technology has been around for quite a long
time, going back to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth century. It is only in the last two decades when drones have
been weaponized with guns, bombs, and missiles.]
[[link removed]]

KILLING IN THE NAME OF PRECISION – THE TECHNOSCIENTIFIC ORIGINS OF
DRONE WARFARE  
[[link removed]]


 

Hamid Ekbia
March 27, 2023
Science for the People
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Technically, drone technology has been around for quite a long
time, going back to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth century. It is only in the last two decades when drones have
been weaponized with guns, bombs, and missiles. _

, Sophia Zhao

 

_Take up the White Man’s burden_
_The savage wars of peace.
               __—_ Rudyard Kipling

The use of armed drones has, for the last few years, expanded in
military operations by a growing number of countries, putting them
squarely at the center of military strategy and policing. A strategy
that was developed and perfected early on by Israel and the United
States has now spread throughout the globe, with a growing number of
countries developing or obtaining drones for foreign and domestic
operations. According to reports, more than seventy countries around
the globe have developed drone capacity of some sort.

Broadly speaking, the term “drone” can be applied to any airborne
vehicle that is remotely operated without a human pilot onboard.
Drones, as such, belong to the broader category of technologies called
“autonomous vehicles” that are developed for terrestrial or marine
navigation as well. Such technologies can be potentially used for
non-militaristic purposes such as environmental research, rescue
operations, or entertainment. Our focus in this essay is on drones
that are used for military or policing operations. The history of such
drones can be traced back to different origins, but this essay seeks
to highlight the technoscientific origins of drone warfare in
cybernetics.

Technically, drone technology has been around for quite a long time,
going back to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
century, when the very first unmanned airplanes were used as decoys
for aerial combat. On May 6, 1896, Samuel Langley, secretary of the
Smithsonian, launched a steam-powered drone dubbed
the_ Aerodrome _over the Potomac River near Washington, D.C.
Although the military application of Aerodrome is not clear, the US
Army paid $50,000 for the project in 1898, two years after the early
successful attempt.1
[[link removed]] In
World War I, drones were used as decoys, and in World War II for
training of anti-aircraft personnel. Their use was extended to
reconnaissance during the Cold War, and to intelligence and
surveillance during the Gulf War. It is only in the last two decades
when drones have been weaponized with guns, bombs, and missiles.

The US military currently operates a broad range of drones, from nano-
and micro- through small tactical and medium-sized all the way to
large surveillance and combat drones. The price tag for these drones
ranges from $6 thousand to $180 million.2
[[link removed]] According
to forecasts, by 2029 global spending on military drones will reach
$98 billion, with half of it going to large drones.3
[[link removed]] Not
only does this escalation of drone warfare bring about a set of
socio-psychological, political, legal, and moral issues that have been
extensively noted by commentators,4
[[link removed]] but
it is also changing the face of war in ways that seem to lower the
threshold for lethal and destructive operations in urban and civilian
areas. The most recent example of this is the war in Ukraine, where
NATO has supplied the Ukrainian forces with, among other weapons,
“kamikaze drones” to be used against the Russian army.5
[[link removed]] The
Russians, in turn, have started to use Iranian-made drones that have
inflicted great damage to urban infrastructures.6
[[link removed]]

The Geopolitics of Drone Warfare

The appeal of drones to military strategists derives from their
greater scope, range, and endurance, as well as their alleged
targeting precision. But the other source of appeal is the safety that
they provide for remote “pilots,” who engage in combat operations
from thousands of miles away. For the first time in the history of
war, drones allow the location of their operators to be determined
solely based on safety, security, and convenience. Mindful of this
unique feature set, military leaders use drones to perform 3D
(“dull, dirty, and dangerous”) missions, that is, long-haul
flights, reconnaissance operations that require hours and hours of
hovering over an area, or combat situations that incur high risk to
pilot life. In sum, the idea is that the combination of remote fight
and remote flight enables militaries to inflict harm on their enemy
without putting their own personnel at risk:7
[[link removed]] an
asymmetrical war that has given rise to a necro-ethics that allows
those with access to technology to decide who can live and who can
die.8
[[link removed]]

In 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, only a few drones flew
over the region, mostly in support roles for the ground troops. Today,
the US military operates thousands of drones ranging in size from very
tiny to small airliners. The most common among these are Predators and
Reapers that fly over Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia round
the clock, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week (Figure 1).
Accordingly, the total number of flight hours by drones underwent a
ten-fold increase in the years between 1999 and 2009, from almost
20,000 hours to 200,000 hours, and this pace only increased
afterwards. In particular, the focus on drones as a key component of
counter-insurgency operations by the Obama Administration marked a
strategic shift, which was put into high relief by the appointment in
2015 of Ashton Carter, the former head of drone acquisitions at the
Department of Defense, as the Secretary of Defense.

Figure 1. Predator and Reaper Drones. Photos from Wikimedia Commons.

There was, to be sure, an element of political calculation in the
strategic shift toward drone warfare as a mixture of “soft power and
hard power”—that is, of diplomacy and military power, of waging
war against a growing insurgency without putting “American lives”
in danger. For the Democratic Party, which is often portrayed as
“weak” on defense and security in US electoral politics, such a
mixture could be expected to provide a desirable “‘tradeoff’
between liberty and security.”9
[[link removed]]

A Prehistory of Drone Warfare

That political element was also in play a century earlier during the
aerial bombings of the 1920s. Seeking to reduce the military budget in
the aftermath of World War I, the Lloyd George government of the UK
found an ingenious solution in the idea, put forth by Winston
Churchill—the secretary of state for air at the time—of an air
force integrated into the “imperial police.” It was such that on
January 21, 1920, a contingent of six planes were dispatched to bomb
the “mad Mullah,” Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, who had led a
religious-nationalist insurgency in the Horn of Africa since 1899,
describing himself as a _mujahid_ or “holy warrior.” In this
way, aviation turned into a _strategic_ weapon of policing in the
colonies, justified by the notion of a civilizing justice that divided
the globe into two parts: the “civilized” and the “barbaric.”
US President Theodore Roosevelt gave voice to this divide in, of all
places, his Nobel Prize speech: “There are, of course, states so
backward that a civilized community ought not to enter into an
arbitration treaty with them”—a racist representation of the world
that “brought peace to white people and bombs to the colonized.”10
[[link removed]]

In a quest for the geopolitical origins of drone warfare, we can go
even further back, as the philosopher Grégoire Chamayou has done,
finding parallels that connect ancient and modern practices of
manhunt, all the way from the hunting of slaves by Romans through the
chasing of Indigenous Americans and Black people by European colonists
to the surveillance and persecution of foreigners and refugees in our
times. The common thread that runs through these practices is to
legitimize the treatment of those outside the law as “bipedal
cattle” that can be subjected to all manner of exclusion,
oppression, and extinction.11
[[link removed]] What
separates modern practices of manhunt from those of the earlier eras,
however, is the use of modern technology brought about by the
“Cybernetic Revolution.” It is this distinctive feature that
shapes the focus of the present essay, which seeks to show how a
seemingly innocuous intellectual project has devolved into a set of
ideas and practices that are the polar opposite of its proclaimed
intents. A brief exploration of the technoscientific origins of drone
warfare unravels some key aspects of the conceptual, moral, and
political economies of modern science and technology.

Cybernetics: Control, Feedback, and Prediction

In an ironic twist of history, aerial bombing, which had been
established as the strategy of choice for dealing with colonies after
World War I, emerged as a decisive element in determining the fate of
Europe itself during World War II. The onslaught of Nazi bombers that
killed hundreds of civilians in London and other major cities in the
UK in 1940 turned the destruction of enemy airplanes into a vital
demand of the war. It was in response to this demand that the American
mathematician and physicist Norbert Wiener conceived of a calculating
device called “antiaircraft (AA) predictor”—a device that would
later become the model for a new science known as “cybernetics”
after the war. Cybernetics, in the hands of Wiener, was masterfully
crafted as a universal science that would not only explain the
workings of minds, machines, and matter equally well, but would also
provide a philosophical lens for thinking about human affairs—a
“Manichean science [that] made an angel of control and a devil of
disorder.”12
[[link removed]] Weaponized
drones, I contend, instantiate both aspects of cybernetics in a
faithful manner.

Scientifically, the theoretical foundations of cybernetics were built
on technical notions of control, feedback, and servomechanism (a
device that uses the errors of a system to correct its
action)—notions that were equally applied to living organisms as
well as “life-imitating automata” with three general features,
which Wiener described as follows:

[T]hey are machines to perform some definite task or tasks, and
therefore must possess effector organs (analogous to arms and legs in
human beings). . . they must be _en rapport _with the outer world by
sense, such as photoelectric cells and thermometers, which not only
tell them what the existing circumstances are, but enable them to
record the performance or nonperformance of their own task . . . and
central decision organs which determine what the machine is to do next
on the basis of information fed back to it, which it stores by means
analogous to the memory of a living organism.13
[[link removed]]

Modern drones—with their “Advanced Precision-Kill Weapons Systems
(APKWS),” “Laser-Guided Hellfire Missiles,” “Joint Direct
Attack Munition Guided Bombs,” “1,500 pounds of test ordnance,”
and “Small Dia Bombs”;14
[[link removed]] with
their infrared sensors, sophisticated cameras, and zoom-in recorders
that capture the carnage in real time; and with their command centers
safely located in the Nevada desert six thousand miles away from
targeted areas—fit the bill quite accurately, possessing sensors,
decision organs, and effectors that tell them what the existing
circumstances are, what the appropriate next action is, and whether
they have performed their task accordingly—except, of course, when
operations go awry, killing children, civilians, innocent passersby,
or international aid workers in dozens.15
[[link removed]]

Philosophically, too, modern drones conveniently map onto the vision
of the world and of the enemy woven into cybernetics. Wiener portrayed
this enemy in two archetypes who call for different tactics of combat:
one as “a contrary force opposed to order,” and the other as
“the very absence of order itself.”16
[[link removed]] He
describes these two types of enemies as follows:

The Manichaean devil is an opponent like any other opponent, who is
determined on victory and will use any trick of craftiness or
dissimulation to obtain this victory. In particular, he will keep his
policy of confusion secret, and if we show any signs of beginning to
discover his policy, he will change it in order to keep us in the
dark. On the other hand, the Augustinian devil, which is not a power
in itself, but the measure of our own weakness, may require our full
resources to uncover, but when we have uncovered it, we have in a
certain sense exorcised it, and it will not alter its policy on a
matter already decided with the mere intention of confounding us
further.17
[[link removed]]

What type of enemy was the target of aerial combat in World War II?
Addressing this question head-on, Gallison18
[[link removed]] identifies
not two but three Enemy Others: the racialized nonhuman enemy,
embodied in the Japanese soldiers who “were often thought of as
lice, ants, or vermin to be eradicated”; the invisible and anonymous
enemy whose humanity, viewed from thirty thousand feet above a German
city, “was compromised not by being subhuman, vicious, abnormal, or
primitive but by occupying physical and moral distance”; and, lastly
but more enduringly, the mechanized enemy “generated in the
laboratory-based science wars . . . as a cold-blooded, machinelike
opponent.”

“Every single being in Gaza, whether walking on foot, riding a
bicycle, steering _tok-tok_, or driving a car, is a threat to Israel
now. We’re all guilty until proven otherwise.”

And what type of enemy, we might ask, is the target of current drone
warfare? The answer, it would seem, is _all of the above and much
more_. Listening to the language and rhetoric of contemporary pundits
and politicians, we are, on the one hand, dealing with “terrorists
who would rather go on killing the innocent than accept the rise of
liberty in the heart of the Middle East,”19
[[link removed]] with
“a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of
innocent men, women, and children,”20
[[link removed]] and
with an enemy who “died like a dog, [who] died like a coward.”21
[[link removed]] It
is hard not to notice the affinities between these descriptions and
the three types of Enemy Others described by Gallison as,
respectively, nonhuman, remote, and cold-blooded opponents. On the
other hand, we witness an increasing willingness on the part of the US
government to openly call for the demise of their enemies—whether it
is a US-born citizen living abroad, all “men of military age” who
are suspected of affiliation with terrorist organizations, or the
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi who was wished “captured or killed
soon” by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.22
[[link removed]]

These attitudes closely echo a decades-long practice implemented by
the Israeli government in Gaza and other occupied territories of
terrorizing populations who are “unable to sleep due to the
ever-present whir of a drone,” not to speak of “a young street
vendor who sold sweets, chocolates, and crisps to children and who
“became, in the eyes of the drone operator, a valid target, a danger
to Israel.”23
[[link removed]] Examples
like this lead this Gaza resident to conclude, “Every single being
in Gaza, whether walking on foot, riding a bicycle,
steering _tok-tok_, or driving a car, is a threat to Israel now.
We’re all guilty until proven otherwise.”24
[[link removed]]

The “disposition matrix,” or “kill list,” created by current
cybernetic systems with “predictive analytic” capabilities seems
to have not only made the alleged enemy remotely identifiable, it has
also lowered the bar for who and what constitutes an enemy.25
[[link removed]] In
addition to the nonhuman, anonymous, and mechanized Enemy Other, the
matrix now envelopes the insurgent, the silenced, and the legally
disenfranchised Other. Rather than saving lives, therefore, it has
moved the clock back to a new kind of “total war.”

Science: Theory, Morality, and Economy

What does this brief historical survey tell us about the conceptual,
moral, and political economy of science? First, at a conceptual level,
the original formulation of cybernetics as a science of “control”
goes a long way in explaining the devolution of a techno-scientific
concept into social practice. Once you formulate a framework that
purports to understand everything—machines, animals, and humans—in
a one-shot theory, then it is not too hard to get to a totalizing
situation where all those entities collapse together in the name of
conceptual economy. The road from theoretical hubris to practical
peril is hazy, and it is often lined with good intentions. Cybernetics
might well be a case where the parsimony principle of Occam’s
Razor—that a theory with fewer parameters should be preferred among
competing theories—doesn’t work, cutting both ways, so to speak.
This is not meant to suggest a linear causality between cybernetic
thinking and the rise of drone warfare. For the notion of control
predates cybernetics, being ingrained in modern thinking in a
deep-seated fashion. What the cybernetic revolution did, however, was
to take this modern concept and turn it into the holy grail of
science, with Wiener going so far as characterizing our times as the
age of information and control.

Similarly, the moral economy of cybernetics—the underlying moral
principles that guide its activities26
[[link removed]]—speaks
to a perspective that is heavily invested in a Manichean view of the
world and especially of human beings. The case of cybernetics shows
how seemingly innocuous, and sometimes even well-intended, ideas
developed in the name of science lead to oppressive techniques—a
fact that Norbert Wiener himself came to realize in later stages of
his career.27
[[link removed]] This
is not the first time in the modern history of science where an
inquiry that was conducted in the name of intellectual curiosity or
initiated with a benevolent cause in mind ended up inflicting harm on
human societies. From the atomic bomb to behaviorist psychology, and
from chemistry to space exploration, modern science and technology
presents us with many such examples, turning scientific triumph into
tragedy.28
[[link removed]] Cybernetics
provides yet another such example, where the laudable goal of reducing
the casualties of Nazi bombings turned into the opposite in the form
of militaristic technologies such as drones. Wiener himself came to
realize the danger of this slippery slope from control to enslavement,
fearing that scientists might lose “control” over the uses of
science. In this light, the point of our earlier comparison between
drone warfare and other forms of aerial bombing is not to privilege
the latter over the former; they both constitute violent methods of
combat, counterinsurgency, and population control. The point is to
shed light on a moral foundation that turned science into an ally of
destruction and oppression.

Figure 2: US Military Spending. Source:
macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget

Lastly, drone warfare can tell us a great deal about the political
economy of modern technoscience. If drones cannot save lives, as they
are often claimed to do, perhaps they can save money—if we listen to
some official narratives, that is. Economic figures, however, provide
a different story. The Congressional Budget Office, for instance,
reports that “UAS [Unmanned Aerial Systems] had both lower
acquisition costs and recurring costs per flying hour,” but adds
immediately that “They have also been destroyed at a considerably
higher rate than manned systems.”29
[[link removed]] Comparing
the Air Force’s unmanned RQ-4 and the Navy’s manned P-8, the
report adds, “On average, each RQ-4’s acquisition cost would be
amortized over fewer flying hours than the acquisition cost of each
P-8 would be; that difference would more than offset the lower
acquisition costs of the RQ-4s.” In layperson’s language, the UAS
are more costly in the long run if we take their average lifetime into
account. In even simpler language, they are destroyed at a higher
rate, _wasting_ taxpayer money at a faster rate than piloted systems
(not to speak of the potential environmental damage, which would
become a major issue if the current trend were to continue). This
might only partly explain the rise in the US military budget in recent
years after a temporary dip in mid-2010s—that is, a 14 percent
increase in military spending in 2022 compared to 2017, which seems to
be also reversing a recent declining trend in the ratio of military
budget to overall GDP.30
[[link removed]] The
bigger point, however, is that economic cost seems to pale in
comparison to the political power that it engenders. Drone warfare
instantiates the geopolitical aspect of military spending in a vivid
manner, because weaponized drones, like other modern weaponry, are not
only economically expensive, they also emanate power through their
deadly presence.

In summary, the strategists and proponents of drone warfare promised a
kind of war that would leave the 3D—“dull, dirty, and
dangerous”—aspects of combat to machines. Instead, they have
brought us to a point where despair, destruction, and disorder have
emerged as the most tangible outcomes. Warnings that observers issued
early on about the potential disorder brought about by drone warfare
have sadly materialized in a matter of a few years.31
[[link removed]] The
birds that were unleashed early on into the skies in places such as
Afghanistan, Gaza, Pakistan, and Yemen, have come back to roost in
unexpected places such as Ukraine and Taiwan—all in the name of
precision!

—

Notes

* Stephen L. McFarland, _A Concise History of the U.S. Air Force_
[[link removed]] (Washington,
D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program,
1997), [link removed].
* Angelo Young, “Every Combat Drone in Use by the US Military,”
November 1, 2022,
[link removed]…
[[link removed]].
* Jon Harper, “$98 Billion Expected for Military Drone
Market,” _National Defense Magazine_, January 6,
2020, [link removed].
* Katherine Chandler, _Unmanning: How Humans, Machines, and Media
Perform Drone Warfare _(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2020); Thomas Hippler, _Governing from the Skies: A Global History of
Aerial Bombing_, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2017);
Achille Mbembe, _Necropolitics _(Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2019); Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, eds., _Life in the Age of Drone
Warfare_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
* Young, “Every Combat Drone.” 
* Kylie Atwood, “Russia to Build Attack Drones for Ukraine War
with the Help of Iran, Intelligence Assessment Says,” _CNN_,
November 21, 2022,
[link removed]…
[[link removed]].
* Aki Peritz and Eric Rosebach, _Find, Fix, Finish: Inside the
Counterterrorism Campaigns that Killed bin Laden and Devastated Al
Qaeda_ (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).
* Grégoire Chamayou, _A Theory of the Drone _(New York: The New
Press, 2015).
* Daniel Klaidman, _Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and The Soul
of the Obama Presidency _(Boston: Mariner Books, 2012).
* Hippler, _Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial
Bombing,_ 54.
* Grégoire Chamayou, _Manhunts: A Philosophical
History_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
* Peter Gallison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and
the Cybernetic Vision,” _Critical Inquiry_ 21, no. 1 (1994):
228–66.
* Norbert Wiener, _The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and
Society_ (London: Free Association Books, 1950/1989).
* Bill Yenne, _Birds of Prey: Predators, Reapers and America’s
Newest UAVs in Combat _(North Branch, MN: Specialty Press, 2010),
Appendix A.
* CNN, “US Military Admits it Killed 10 Civilians and Targeted
Wrong Vehicle in Kabul Airstrike,” _CNN_, September 17, 2021,
[link removed]-…
[[link removed]].
* Wiener, _The Human Use of Human Beings_, 34.
* Wiener, _The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society_,
35.
* Gallison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 231.
* The White House, “Remarks by the President on the Capture of
Saddam Hussein,” December 14,
2003, [link removed].
* The White House, “Osama Bin Laden Dead,” May 2, 2011,
[link removed]…
[[link removed]].
* The White House, “Statement from the President on the Death of
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” October 27, 2019,
[link removed]…
[[link removed]].
* Shirin Sadeghi, “Hillary Clinton Wants Gaddafi
Killed,” _Huffington Post_, October 19, 2011,
[link removed].
* Atef Abu Saif, _The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary_ (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2017), 15–16.
* Saif, _The Drone Eats with Me._
* _Ian Cobain, “Obama’s Secret Kill List: the Disposition
Matrix,” Guardian_, July 14, 2013,
[link removed]…
[[link removed]].
* _E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the
Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present _50 (1970): 76–136.
* _Gallison, “The Ontology of the Enemy.”_
* _Clifford D. Conner, The Tragedy of American Science_ (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2020); Hamid Ekbia, “American Science: Triumph or
Tragedy?” _Science for the People _23, no. 3 (Winter 2020):
70–72.
* _Congressional Budget Office, Usage Patterns and Costs of
Unmanned Aerial Systems_,
2021, [link removed].
* _Kyle Bernal, “US Military Budget: How Much Does the US Spend on
Defense?” GovConWire_, June 1,
2022, [link removed];
see also figure 2.
* _Hamid Ekbia, “Technologies of (Dis)Order: Drones, Conflict, and
Culture,” lecture, Internationales Forschungszentrum
Kulturwissenschaften, March 14,
2016, [link removed];
Hamid Ekbia, “Schöne Neue-Drohnenwelt: Interview with Der
Standard_,” March 28,
2016, [link removed].

_HAMID R. EKBIA is Professor and Director of Autonomous Systems
Policy Institute at Syracuse University, where he is affiliated with
the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the School
of Information Studies. He is interested in how AI and computing
mediate the social, economic, and cultural aspects of modern life._

_SCIENCE FOR THE PEOPLE (SftP), the most important radical science
movement in US history, arose in 1969 out of the anti-war movement and
lasted until 1989. With a Marxist analysis and non-hierarchical
governing structure, SftP tackled, among many issues: militarization
of scientific research, corporate control of research agenda,
political implications of sociobiology and other scientific theories,
environmental consequences of energy policy, inequalities in health
care, etc. Its members opposed racism, sexism, and classism in science
and above all sought to mobilize people working in scientific fields
to become active in agitating for science, technology, and medicine
that would serve social needs._

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[[link removed]] Thank you!
In solidarity,
Science for the People_

* warfare
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* Drones
[[link removed]]
* History
[[link removed]]
* Morality and War
[[link removed]]
* military industrial complex
[[link removed]]
* military budget
[[link removed]]

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