Hannah Berwian - Entry no. 5 (Gregory)

For when Alexander the Great had asked the pirate what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What do you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor”

-       - --------St Augustine, City of God

The definition of a terrorist is probably one of the great mysteries of contemporary social sciences. What and who is considered to be virtuous, just, or legitimate? Who is deemed to be a terrorist, an unlawful combatant or a civilian – who is killed and who is left to live?   In his article “From a view to kill: Drones and late-modern war”, Derek Gregory puts the conventional praise and critique of drone technology as a means to “virtuous war” against terrorists into question. Instead, he depicts how different forms of techno-cultural mediation create a particular blend of intimacy and disassociation, of proximity and distance that can have deadly implications for anyone on the ground. Underlying his article is the fundamental question of how do people come to kill, particularly in a scenario that sees pilot and target separated by thousands of miles.

Gregory starts off by depicting the two entangled sides of the debate. On the one hand advocates see in drone technology the potential of a “virtuous war”. Putting this in the context of the just war debate, it is essential to realize that people that refer to drone technology as enabling “virtuous war” presuppose the rightness and the legitimacy of the war itself, the just cause for war. “Virtuous” merely refers to the means to meet the jus in bello criterion of proportionality and discrimination between combatants and civilians. Claiming the virtuousness of war does not only assume that these are fulfilled and the conduct of the war is just but, what is more, it assumes a high moral standard. Drones are seen to reach this standard through their surgical precision and avoidance of civil casualties.

On the other hand, the killing from a distance is criticized for its extra-judicial character and for diminishing the moral resistance to killing. According to these critiques it reduces killing of people to the operation mechanisms of a video game. As Gregory stresses, the most apparent difference to video games is the bureaucratization of the process of killing. The resulting chain of killing includes 185 people who are involved with one predator, the hierarchical handing down of military orders, the rules of engagement and counsel of the judge advocate. A large part of the legal recourse is necessary to make up for another difference to video games: the inability to discriminate between combatants and civilians. Importantly, this pseudo-juridical process doesn’t change anything about the extra-juridical character of selective assassination. The legitimacy/justness of pronouncing a death sentence without appeal is again presupposed while the judge is merely meant to mitigate its effects on the civilian population according to proportionality. This often fails, which leads us to Gregory’s main point, that is the ways in which roles and behavior of the involved staff that is distributed in various places around the world, are not only influenced but constructed through the specific scopic regime, “a mode of visual apprehension that is culturally constructed and prescriptive, socially structured and shared”.  For Gregory, it is this scopic regime, rather than any individual or state actor that is crucial in the construction of spaces of war and peace, spaces of death and life. 

He emphasizes that the new kind of visibility that ISR produces is highly selective. For example, the space-time compression embodied in chat rooms and lengthy radio contact create a sense of intimacy and identification between drone crew in Nevada and grounds troops in Afghanistan that in turn reduce resistance to killing. Entrenched in the social context of the military, of a choice between friend and enemy, between kill and not to kill, the crew becomes more likely to actively construct the interpretation of the IRS data into circumstances that invite engagement. As I’ve been taught in my second year lecture on terrorism, terrorists are always others; the terrorist is inevitably constructed as the other. Yet, Gregory demonstrates how through the subjectivity of techno-cultural mediation, the other is inevitably constructed as a terrorist. Only “eighteen inches from the battlefield”, UVA pilots show themselves aware of the real lethal implications for their target but less aware of how the object of the target is actively constructed as an enemy.

Gregory describes how these occasionally disastrous consequences in terms of avoidable civilian casualties are equally subject to a selective public visibility. They are mitigated through certain discursive techniques, such as the lack of a view from the “other’s” side. This lack of view from below enforced by the scopic regime is what Gregory finds generally most problematic about drone technology. The issue whether modern war still deserves to be properly called “war” given the extreme asymmetries, stripped of the “equality in the face of death” is not distinctive to drone strikes, may not even apply to them. Instead Gregory bemoans that the view from above as well as the view from below are always ‘ours’.

How can this military optic be deconstructed? From Gregory’s blog two hints stood out to me that depict the intersection of peace and war through its penetration of everyday-live. On the one hand, consider the daily habit of the drone pilot. Commuting between his ordinary family life and the killing of people thousands of miles away threatens to render the latter as ordinary as the former but results in schizophrenic existence between two worlds, between war and peace.

On the other hand, there is the view from below, especially from a region on which the US has never official declared war: the fata region in Pakistan. The field report called “Living Under Drones” from the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School is one of the few examples that provides a voice to the terrified population. It depicts the “considerable and under-accounted for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury”, the culture of terror generated by the constant threat of a drone attack. This challenge to the dominant narrative of precision-strikes displays what Pakistani civilians share with the person behind the screen, the perpetrator of their terror. As former pilot Matt Martin put it: “we are just permanently between war and peace”.