“From a View to a Kill: Drones and late modern War” is an article
written by British geographer Derek Gregory. This text focuses on the using of
drones and how it is perceived by Western populations and academics. He starts
the article by saying that drones are usually considered to be a “clean” way of
making war, and argues that most commentators claim that their use “reduces
late modern war to a video game in which killing becomes casual”. Those
considerations lead Gregory to analyze three main points about drones. Firstly,
the relation the use of drones builds with the targets; secondly, how drones’
pilots are perceived and how they perceive their job themselves; thirdly, how
drones recalibrated the notion of warfare.
Drones were created to eliminate
specific targets with a “surgical precision”, limiting the number of military
casualties and the material cost of war for the country which is using them.
The main problem drones raise is the civilian casualties; this is the main
reason why drones are so unpopular, even in the Western world. These civilian
casualties are perceived as being far more numerous than eliminated targets;
thus, drones are perceived as completely counterproductive. Gregory quotes
Kilcullen and Exum, writing that violent extremists seem “less ominous than a
faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often kills more civilians than
militants” for the local population. Gregory uses the example of a disastrous
operation which took place on 21 February 2010 in the village of Khud in
Oruzgan province in central Afghanistan, which cost the life of 23 civilians
and wounded a dozen of others. He writes that the “time-space compression of
the kill-chain” is responsible of this kind of disasters. The actual distance
between the shooter and the target is so unreal, that when the pilot pulls the
trigger, the temporal precision is not accurate. This leads to think that the
“surgical precision” is not a reality; the main problem is that with this kind
of weapons, mistakes are always lethal for civilians. The fact that video
recordings of shootings are often put online make Western populations realize
the lethality of these weapons and how mistakes can cause human disasters that
are even more terrible than Taliban’s bombings.
Those risks are taken in
accountancy by pilots, although they are seen as considering their shootings to
be a part of a “video game”. Even if there is the space-time compression
between them and the target, Gregory shows that they are aware of the fact that
their job is not a video game, that they are trained to kill people. But other
questions are raised by pilots’ job. Actually, they are giving death, coming
from the sky, which makes some of them feeling like gods (‘Sometimes I felt
like a God hurling thunderbolts from afar’, one pilot admits). The pilot is the
hunter that chases a target to kill it. This kind of omnipotence feeling is a
serious psychological issue, because this new “visibility” brings up a new
vision of death, as brought anytime from the infinite sky. It totally changes the basic
considerations of war and peace, and that is the next point that Gregory
develops.
First of all, drones attacks are
considered by some people to be a “virtuous war” (Der Derian), at least far
more virtuous than regular wars, since they cause less casualties in military
forces. I think that it is considered “virtuous” because it happens far away
from Western countries, and we do not have so much information about the
consequences of those attacks; hence we consider it “not so terrible”, since
the media do not communicate much about civilian casualties. The second problem
is the differentiation between drone attacks and warfare. Actually the United
States are killing civilians in Pakistan without having declared war to this
country. This kind of counterinsurgency is difficult to apprehend towards
international Law. How can a country bomb another one without being at war with
it? Is it a right towards only some countries or all of them? This is one of
the main issues in Diplomacy currently; there is a hierarchy between countries.
One cannot argue with another if it is above a certain level of economic,
military, political power; but the others have nothing to say, unless they have
a powerful ally. Finally, this leads to Gregory’s conclusion about this subject.
The hierarchy between powerful and weak countries, added to the fact that two
powerful countries cannot engage war one against another, or it would be the
end of the world, led to a new kind of conflict that does not enter in the
usual acceptation “war”. I agree with Derek Gregory when he uses Frédéric
Gros’s theory. Gros wrote that drones mean the end of the “equality in the face
of death” (“l’échange de morts” in French), which means that war is not made
with armies and battles anymore. But I think that peace cannot be built by
drones. They are a way of making war, but to make peace you have to send
officers and negotiators. Actually, drones are only a way of disposing of
people you want to disappear, but it has no long-term diplomatic value at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment