bruno cuconato claro - entry no. 6 (on Gregory / Grossman / Chamayou)

Derek Gregory introduces us to the contemporary debate about the drone wars. Sharing the belief in the preciseveness of drones, some argue over the legality of american action in Pakistan, Yemen, and even in Afghanistan. Others, mostly drawing in Grossman's landmark On Killing, say that drones take killing to a whole new level of unscrupulousness, further enhanced by the lack of accontability for civilian casualties and by the relatively low attention given by the media to the issue.

Gregory enters the debate to dispel innacuracies in the arguments of both sides, taking the discussion to a more nuanced perspective. Gregory repeatedly shows that even if drones may be technologicaly effective, being operated by humans makes them imprecise. The claim about the recklessness inculcated in operators by the distanced perspective offered by the drones is doubted with several personal testimonies, and also a case of PTSD.

Gregory's argument is that drones break the grossmanian logic of more development in weapon technology -> more distance -> less resistance to kill. While physical distance from operators to victims can be indeed enormous, Gregory cites Chamayou's concept of co-presence to show that operators, victims, and ground troops are not that far from each others. Video feeds are much more realistic than the visibility proportined by ground cameras in planes, and operators can, even if not perfectly, see the product of their deeds. Operators are bonded to ground troops through radio, military social networks, and constant accompaniment – drones can stay in the air for up to 18 hours. The former factor acts in the sense of reducing willingness to kill, while the latter creates a responsibility in the drone operators towards the safety of ground troops which lessens their resistance to kill.

Gregory is particularly interested in how these 'scopic' regimes techno-culturally mediate what drone operators see. The fact that operators are working in groups, in contact with superiors, peers, ground troops, and military lawyer, and the fact that all of those are immersed in a hunt for terrorists, makes their visualisation a collective visualisation, and one influenced by a narrative of terrorists hunting alike to the one explored by Taussig in the article we previously read. Thus, as Gregory shows, civilians are turned into combatants, and cilindrical objects into rifles. This kind of relation works on an individual level, but is reflected through all the military structure. Thus Gregory deems wrong to condemn exclusively the operators involved in a case of civilian casualty.

In his book, Grossman shows that to kill a person has to overcome a resistance that spawns from her empathy towards another human being. Gregory argues that the techno-cultural mediation of the 'scopic' regimes, joined to the military structure and narrative that bureaucratizes and that legitimates killings while dispersing responsibility, sided with the bond created by ground troops and drone operators, all contribute to an effective differentiation of the american forces “us” from their victims “them,” the “others,” thus reducing the resistance to kill of drone operators.