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Grégoire Chamayou’s "Drone Theory" seeks to understand how the drone, as lethal military technology, transforms modalities of war and the subject’s relationship to the state. The author finds that the drone’s matrix of weaponized surveillance gives rise to an increasingly autonomous state of sovereign violence from which subjective will is excluded. The monograph’s five sections, each divided into concise chapters ranging from a few to a dozen pages, neatly trace the drone through a series of revolutions in technology, psychology, ethics, law, and sovereign power.
Claiming that philosophy is increasingly a battlefield upon which the ethics of drone violence are being wrought, Chamayou attempts to enter the fracas via an openly polemical deconstruction of the technical and political functions of the drone as an apparatus of violence. The author’s mechanical, tactical, and ethical genealogies revolve around a dialectic of safe space, from which the drone inflicts violence, and dangerous space, in which a subject receives violence. This asymmetry eliminates what Chamayou identifies as fundamental notions of combat in which two adversaries, in facing one another, each face the possibility of death. Rather, the state (in this case, the U.S. state carrying out drone operations throughout the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia, amongst other areas) adopts a doctrine of “manhunting” based on a predator-prey relationship that transforms warfare into preemptive, unilateral “campaigns of extrajudiciary executions” (page 35).
The monograph proceeds to ask how virtue and bravery are redefined in order to justify warfare that is devoid of the possibility of reciprocal violence. In the case of the drone, the pilot who inflicts death is simultaneously immune from it, precipitating a shift in military ethics that deemphasizes self-sacrifice in favor of self-preservation (page 101). Chamayou outlines how military psychologists and media reports have stressed the “risks” to “mental health” (page 103) to which drone pilots are supposedly exposed in order to humanize the violence of drone warfare in what is, for Chamayou, a reformulation of military ethos that emphasizes psychic rather than physical engagements and traumas.
The author’s formulation of “necroethics” charts a new register in military morality based foremost on “vital self-preservation” (page 137). Here, a militarized philosophical tradition grimly touts the drone as the most ethical weapon yet invented because of its supposed capacity to save lives. It ostensibly does so by not exposing its operators to violence and by more precisely targeting those whom it does kill. Chamayou unpacks the sophisms employed to describe “drone targeted killing” as either “humane” or “precise,” arguing in part that, because drone warfare eliminates combat and thus the distinction between “combatant” and “noncombatant,” the military is able to report zero civilian casualties by registering all people within a specified kill zone as “suspected militants” (page 145). The author’s culminating argument contends that, in combat-less war, the subject of the state will no longer be asked to risk his or her life to protect it and thus the democratic imperative to limit war will be eliminated, leading to a perpetual state of internal and external violence. The monograph closes via an unwavering flight into a determined future in which autonomous drones supersede the human subject altogether.
Chamayou’s sharp prose dovetails with popular anecdotes and provocative quotes drawn from secondary source interviews with military personnel, including contracted psychologists and philosophers, as well as transcripts of some of the more egregious conversations of drone pilots carrying out their missions. The monograph provides pertinent reflections on and critiques of normative and highly mediated depictions of drone violence as humane as well as morally and legally just. As such, the monograph provides space for critical reflection regarding the politicized and mediated acrobats employed to justify drone warfare.
However, Chamayou’s neat prose gives itself to an all too neat critical engagement. For instance, the conversations between pilots discussing their victims, while appalling, cannot be abstracted from broader geographies of violence to be conceived of as unique to drone warfare. Indeed, Chamayou’s exclusive focus on the crew of six or seven drone pilots who remotely fly any one combat drone obscures the operation of over one-hundred-ninety personnel with whom any single crew is working at all times. It is remarkable that, within his multiple genealogies of the technical, political, and philosophical groundings of the drone, such details never appear. Rather than providing an analysis of the broader matrix of policy and violence within which the drone operates, Chamayou needlessly and selectively extracts the drone from the very setting in which it operates.
A number of Chamayou’s insights provide important contributions to understanding the type of violence inflicted by drone operations carried out by the U.S. in various countries and responsible for, at a very low estimate, over 3,000 deaths in Pakistan alone (page 13). But many of Chamayou’s arguments fail to support themselves. For instance, Chamayou claims that “…if the scope of armed violence has now become global, it is because the imperatives of hunting [i.e. “manhunting”] demand it” (page 52). Presented in isolation from other forms of violence and control, “manhunting” becomes for Chamayou the sole paradigm, and indeed cause, of contemporary forms of sovereign violence and killing. That sovereign violence has become global or pervasive is not a product of a specific measure or structure of violence (i.e. “the hunt”). Rather, specific forms of violence and killing become apparent within the dispersion of a sovereign and imperial power that has heterogeneous mechanisms which include intersections of transnational capital, “conventional” combat, forced migration, environmental degradation, and integrated surveillance apparatuses that encompass cyber monitoring and policing as well as biometric tracking.
Likewise, the contention that “necroethics,” with its foundational ethos of asymmetrical self-preservation, is unique to drone warfare, rather than coterminous with aerial bombing more broadly or any other iteration of asymmetrical violence, is tenuous. His ultimate contention that the drone alters the structure of sovereign power by eliminating the subject from democratic processes begs the question when armed force, deployed internally or externally, has been avoided for any protracted period of time due to citizen-electors’ persistence against it. Via his attempt to understand the drone as a novel, isolated, and exceptional weapon, Chamayou ultimately obscures connections between other weapons and forms of killing through which varied configurations of power unfold in continual undulations of violence.