Collin Poirot - Entry No 6 (Gregory)

In his article “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War,” Derek Gregory offers a critical analysis of the increasing use of drones in US military operations. Gregory begins by analyzing the history of drone use, and traces the advent and deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to the end of the Second World War. Gregory argues that the first major use of UAVs in an overseas military operation was during the war in Vietnam, and indicates that ever since the drone’s debut, its use has been harshly criticized. Even as early as the Vietnam War, international critics have called for severe restrictions on the use of drones, and have argued that they have an overall counterproductive effect on conflicts. The logic behind this latter argument is that “while violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened population they seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often kills more civilians than militants” (189). This is a fairly standard phrasing of what is known as the ‘hearts and minds’ argument; the idea that counterinsurgency operations require the sympathy and support of the local civilian population, and that the military should thus refrain from unpopular tactics. This is the same logic behind bringing teddy bears and candy bars to Afghani children as an effort to win civilian support for US operations.

Gregory then shifts his focus away from the military-strategic arguments against drone use and begins to discuss the “scopic regime” of drone operations. This notion of the ‘scopic regime’ was originally proposed by Christian Metz as a way of distinguishing between the theatrical and cinematic modes of seeing and experiencing the world. Gregory defines a scopic regime as “a mode of visual apprehension that is culturally constructed and prescriptive, socially structured and shared” (190). In the context of drone operations, then, the scopic regime can be understood as the symbolic filter through which the material world is interpreted and experienced by the drone operating team. Material shapes and colors are mediated through the drone’s optic apparatus, displayed on a pixilated screen, and interpreted/experienced by the operating team according to the specific training that they have received. The image analysis experts within the drone team review abstract, highly distorted images on a screen, make judgments about what material reality the images depict, and act accordingly. The interpretative apparatus of the drone operators thus determines how they will experience the operation and how they will act (hence what the drone will do in the situation). One way of understanding this scopic regime is through Taussig’s concepts of the space of death and the culture of terror. The space of death in this case is the impossibility of certain knowledge – the operator can never know with complete certainty what the shapes and colors on the screen correspond to. The culture of terror that emerges here is the paranoid “strike first” mentality of the drone operators – if there is even a slight chance that the image might depict an insurgent, the operators become agitated, belligerent, and cruel.

Gregory argues that the military’s desire to make this interpretive apparatus as accurate as possible has lead it to dramatically expand the scope and intensity of it’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) network. The rapid increase in the amount of real-time monitoring and image capture technology deployed in droned regions has had the dual effect of creating illusions of intimacy and hypervisibility. The operators feel that they known more about and are closer to the ground operations than ever before (“eighteen inches from the battlefield”). Gregory spends the rest of the article problematizing and undermining this illusion of intimacy, and eventually concludes that the drone and the enhanced ISR that have accompanied its increased use have done nothing to increase the operators knowledge of, understanding of, or empathy towards the resident civilians, but has actually further reinforced the divide between Us (the US military) and Them (the local residents).

In order to understand why this might be, I think it is necessary to discuss the affective experience of warfare. There is a profound difference between the experience of a Pakistani or Yemeni civilian confronted with US soldiers versus that of the same civilian confronted with the mechanical, unfeeling gaze of the drone. The key here is to realize that there is an affective and sensory difference between the experience of a drone-countersurgency operation and that of a human-counterinsurgency operation. I would argue, and I think Gregory would agree, that the difference is one of empathic opportunity. If I am looking down the barrel of a gun at another human being, and I am looking right into that human’s face, then there is always a space for an empathic identification; there is always room for understanding. If, on the other hand, I am looking up into the sky at a heavily-armed steel monster, that is not only inhuman but invulnerable, unfeeling and unemotive, then I will experience the encounter in a way that does not allow for identification or empathy. Herein lies the crucial distinction between drone warfare and non-drone operations; an enemy with a human face can always inspire compassion and understanding. The encounter between the civilian and the drone operator, insofar as it is mediated by the optic lens and the scopic regime of the drone, forecloses and precludes any kind of empathic experience for either group involved.