Drone

Hugh Gusterson came to the subject of armed drones by a long, indirect route. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, he had spent much of his earlier career doing ethnographic fieldwork inside American nuclear weapons laboratories at Livermore and among the physicists and engineers who designed warheads for the Cold War arsenal. Books such as Nuclear Rites and People of the Bomb established him as a rare kind of observer of the American national-security state: an outsider from a soft discipline granted access to the rituals, arguments, and self-understandings of the people who build the country’s deadliest machines. Drone, published by MIT Press in 2016 as part of the compact Essential Knowledge series, applies that same anthropological attention to a different and much newer weapon, at a moment when the United States had spent roughly a decade running a lethal drone campaign across Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan and the debate about that campaign had grown loud, entangled, and unresolved. Gusterson positions the book as a synthesis for a general reader — short enough to be read in an evening, dense enough to gather up the strands of a rapidly expanding scholarly and journalistic literature on remote warfare — and the result reads less like a manifesto than like a field guide written by a careful outsider.

The book’s central argument is that armed drones are not simply another weapon system to be slotted into an existing account of aerial warfare. They constitute, in Gusterson’s reading, a distinct configuration of technology, law, geography, and politics that reshapes the practice of killing and the relationship between a democratic state and the wars it fights. Drones collapse distance in one direction — a pilot at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada can watch, decide, and strike in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan within the span of a single commuter shift — while opening a new kind of distance in another, insulating the society that fights from any felt consequence of the fight. That asymmetry, Gusterson argues, is not incidental. It is what makes the drone politically useful and morally corrosive at once: a means of extending American violence across vast territories without requiring the mobilisation, casualties, or public deliberation that traditionally attended war. Around this central claim he arranges a set of subsidiary arguments: that the drone campaign has produced a novel legal geography, in which the battlefield is wherever the target is; that the categories used to identify targets have quietly slid from named individuals toward inferred patterns; that the psychological experience of the operators is more troubled than either supporters or critics initially assumed; and that the technology itself is proliferating far faster than the norms meant to constrain it.

The chapters walk the reader through this territory in a deliberate order. An opening section on history and technology traces the lineage of unmanned flight from the Kettering Bug through Israeli reconnaissance platforms in the 1970s and 1980s to the arming of the MQ-1 Predator after the September 11 attacks, and then to the more capable MQ-9 Reaper that came to define the American strike programme. A chapter on the operators takes the reader inside Creech and the network of ground control stations from which pilots and sensor operators fly missions eight hours at a time before driving home to dinner. A chapter on the targeted describes what it is to live under drones in the villages of North and South Waziristan and in the highlands of Yemen. A chapter on law and ethics maps the contested legal architecture — the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the reinterpretation of self-defence in a global counterterrorism context, the debates over whether an armed conflict without geographic limits is coherent at all — and lays out the philosophical positions of thinkers who defend drones as a more discriminating means of force and those who argue that discrimination in this sense is precisely the problem. A closing chapter turns from the American campaign to global proliferation, sketching the fast-growing arsenals of China, Israel, Iran, the United Kingdom, and others, and the coming diffusion of the technology to non-state groups. Each chapter is short, quotable, and threaded with references to a wider literature the reader might consult for depth.

The examples that fill these chapters are the concrete substance of the book. Gusterson leans heavily on the record accumulated by investigative journalists and NGOs by the mid-2010s. He works through the Bush administration’s first drone strike, in Yemen in November 2002, which killed the al-Qaeda operative Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi and, alongside him, a young American citizen named Kamal Derwish — an early instance of a category later formalised in the killing of the American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011. He returns repeatedly to the CIA’s covert campaign in Pakistan, escalated dramatically under Obama, and to the strikes and their aftermath that came to define the programme’s public reputation: the December 2009 Al-Majalah cruise-missile strike in Yemen that killed dozens of civilians including women and children; the March 2011 jirga strike in Datta Khel that killed more than forty people gathered to resolve a local mining dispute; the wedding convoy in Radaa in December 2013. He draws on the Stanford and NYU legal clinics’ Living Under Drones report to describe the chronic anxiety of communities in Waziristan who learned to fear blue skies because clear weather was ideal for drone operations, who kept children out of school because gatherings drew strikes, and who came to distrust funerals and rescues after the practice of “double-tap” strikes on first responders emerged. He describes the disposition matrix — the internal Obama administration process by which names were nominated, vetted, and approved for lethal targeting — and the shift toward “signature strikes” in which individuals were killed not because they had been identified as specific figures but because their pattern of movement, association, or behaviour matched a profile of militant activity. He is careful with numbers, citing the ranges offered by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the New America Foundation rather than picking a single figure, and he is honest about the uncertainty that surrounds every casualty count in a campaign conducted largely in secret over inaccessible terrain.

The chapter on operators is one of the book’s most anthropologically alert. Gusterson gathers reporting and early academic studies on the crews at Creech, Cannon, Holloman, and other bases, and describes a workforce that spends its days watching people through infrared cameras for hours or weeks at a time before, in some cases, killing them. He is sceptical of the tidy narratives that have grown up around this work in both directions — the video-game caricature that treats the operators as detached joystick pilots, and the sanctified narrative in which their moral injury is offered up as evidence of the humanity of the American way of war. What emerges instead is a workforce with elevated rates of stress and burnout, a strange domestic-industrial rhythm in which combat is followed immediately by the school run, and a persistent institutional problem of retention and recognition inside an Air Force whose culture still centres on manned aviation. He notes the pattern by which some operators, having watched a compound for weeks, come to feel they know the people they eventually strike, and the way this quasi-intimacy sits uneasily with the impersonality of the kill authorisation process.

On law and ethics Gusterson lays out the positions carefully. He walks through the argument, associated most prominently with the philosopher Bradley Strawser, that drones are morally preferable to alternative means because they enable more discriminate attacks and put fewer of one’s own soldiers at risk, and he sets against it the counter-arguments developed by writers such as Grégoire Chamayou, whose A Theory of the Drone he engages as the sharpest philosophical treatment of the subject. Where Strawser sees an ethical duty to use the more discriminating tool, Chamayou sees a weapon that dissolves the reciprocal structure on which the ethics of war has historically depended. Gusterson does not simply pick a side; he treats the disagreement as a genuine one and as a symptom of the deeper problem that the drone campaign has outrun the moral and legal categories inherited from the twentieth century. He examines the debate over whether the campaign is properly understood as an armed conflict, a counterterrorism operation, or something in between; the tension between the CIA’s covert role and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command under figures such as John Brennan and Stanley McChrystal; and the question of whether “imminent” threat has been redefined to the point of losing meaning. He is attentive to the domestic legal architecture too — Office of Legal Counsel memoranda, the Al-Aulaqi litigation, the slow trickle of official acknowledgement — and to the way that secrecy itself has shaped what can and cannot be argued in public.

The book’s reception was largely as its author intended. It has been read as a strong general introduction rather than a signature philosophical contribution, a book to hand to a student or a policymaker who wants an intelligent orientation before turning to Chamayou for the theory, Peter W. Singer’s earlier Wired for War for the technological sweep, Andrew Cockburn’s Kill Chain for a more polemical journalistic account, or Christian Enemark’s Armed Drones and the Ethics of War for a systematic just-war treatment. Reviewers noted Gusterson’s clarity, his willingness to represent positions he does not share, and his ethnographic feel for the human textures of the campaign. The main pushback came from readers who thought him too quick to attribute strategic incoherence to a programme whose defenders would insist that its record of degrading the operational leadership of al-Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and later of the Islamic State was in fact substantial. Others noted that the international-law chapter, while careful, could not settle questions that remain live and disputed. In the years since publication, the American programme itself has evolved through Obama’s late-term attempts at partial transparency, Trump’s loosening of the interagency rules that governed strikes, and the Biden administration’s renewed effort to tighten them — a moving policy landscape that the book cannot, of course, follow but that its analytical frame still helps to read.

Placed in the current field, Drone remains one of the more useful short books for a reader trying to understand how the United States came to conduct a lethal aerial campaign of continental scale from air-conditioned trailers in the American West. It pairs naturally with Chamayou for anyone who wants the philosophical stakes drawn more sharply, with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s ongoing casualty tracking for the empirical record, and with the growing literature on operator experience for the sociological texture. Its limits are the limits of its moment. Gusterson is writing about a campaign dominated by a small number of large, expensive, American platforms operated by a superpower against non-state groups in weakly governed territories. The drone landscape that has emerged since — the mass proliferation of cheap quadcopters and first-person-view racing drones repurposed as loitering munitions, the Turkish Bayraktar campaigns in Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and Ethiopia, the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 used at scale by Russia against Ukrainian cities, the Ukrainian and Russian innovation cycles that have made small unmanned systems the defining weapon of a European land war, the entry of increasingly capable autonomy into the targeting loop — is largely absent from the book, because most of it had not yet happened. Readers coming to it now should treat it as an authoritative account of the first drone era, the one built around the Predator and the Reaper and the covert CIA campaign, and turn elsewhere for the second one, in which the drone is no longer a scarce strategic asset but an item of mass consumption on the battlefield.

What is likely to age well is the book’s structural analysis. Gusterson’s argument that a weapon which decouples force from political accountability tends, over time, to enlarge the geography in which force is applied has proven durable, and the shift of the American strike programme across administrations has not disturbed it. His attention to the human beings inside the machine — operators, targeters, targeted, mourning families — is a corrective to accounts that treat drones as pure technology. What has dated fastest is the sense of the drone as a specifically American, specifically superpower instrument. The next generation of the same debate will have to be conducted in a world where any state, and many groups within states, can put explosives on a small aircraft and fly it into a target for a few hundred dollars. Read against that horizon, Gusterson’s book still does what it set out to do: it slows the reader down long enough to notice that a weapon which travels quietly and kills at a distance is never only a weapon, and that the political community which adopts it does not stay the same.