Thursday, July 16, 2009

Laparoscopic Lobotomic War Fetishes

Via Global Guerrillas we learn the USAF will train more drone, sorry, "unmanned aerial system" operators this year than those old school pilots who actually leave the ground with their aircraft. As an article in the Christian Science Monitor points out, this new breed of Nintendo player Top Gun flies combat missions over Pakistan Afghanistan without leaving the couch Las Vegas.

As it scrambles to meet an exploding appetite for real-time video surveillance of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force is undergoing a seismic cultural shift, adapting to the needs of warfare today while pondering what it might look like tomorrow.

Bob, who asked that his full name not be used because of the sensitivity of his job, has for now turned in his G-suit to be a desk jockey with a joystick. His days are spent, not pulling Gs, but inside an air-conditioned trailer an hour from the Las Vegas strip.

From here, he flies a remote-controlled airplane over Afghanistan or Iraq to produce video feeds of those wars a world away. The images are fed immediately to troops on the ground to track the enemy, spot someone planting a roadside bomb, or monitor other insurgent activity.

Unfortunately, unlike some successes in medicine, the results of this new form of surgical warfare suggest it has more in common with certain methods of lobotomy than anything strategically beneficial or just fucking humane.

I mean, I think if I were a denizen of Pakistan or Afghanistan who learned their family was slaughtered in the worst way imaginable because some kid on the other side of the planet who probably never left the CONUS thought they looked funny on TV, I'd go utterly insane. Stop for a minute and just try to imagine (if you can!), the chasm between a village or hard scrabble field in a remote part of Asia and the air-conditioned video-game trailer outside the zoo of Western vices and weirdness that is Las Vegas. The contrast between people inhabiting these spaces could not be greater. Young Americans, virtually all of whom I would guess have never set foot in an Afghan or Pakistani village or field, nor experienced anything comparable to the lives of the people they watch on TV screens; instead growing up with all the toys and joys of life in the US. Young Americans commanding life and death over people on video camera.

On the other hand, Pakistani or Afghan residents going about their lives, while being watched from above by for movement or actions that would appear suspcious enough to these young Americans to warrant their summary execution. How do you function knowing that carrying a shovel down the road or meeting up with your friends could randomly cost you your life?

This is Foucault's disciplining panopticon gone beyond measure.

There is no control, no interrogation about where the use of these drones might lead. The first ones were unarmed surveillance organs. Then of course, like everything else the military industrial complex does, it figured out how to arm them and then found means of using them. The CIA assinated terrorist leaders in their cars with them. Fairish enough. Blowing up a car on a road in Yemen suggests a long and careful intelligence operation before the tool was used.

But today things are different. Versions now patrol the US side of the Canadian border outside of the three dozen the US acknowledges are in service supporting their global adventuring. Almost twice that by next year they say. They're training kids to use them and make decisions about dropping bombs not through careful intelligence gathering about location and people, but through intrepretting a video image of a place their feet have not tread, beamed across half a planet. No doubt of course we'll get gallons of bafflegab about how highly trained and professional these "pilots" are, but the fact will remain they'll still be making errors in a highly trained and professional manor. Errors that will then get discounted from the calculus used to determine the viability of such a wonderful new weapon system that does not "risk [operators'] lives".

Expanding on Marx, anthropologist Alf Hornborg calls this blind adoption, development, and diffusion of technology "machine fetishism" and declares it ubiquitous in modern society. Our solutions to problems tend to the technical and technological. We'll invent a gadget to solve the problem of aerial reconnaissance and casualties for troops in theatre by using remote control planes equipped with missiles and video cameras. Or we'll create problems for our gadgets to solve (this is at the core of the military-industrial complext, I think). Oh look, they work (never mind the occassional wedding massacres), so we'll blanket the world with them. And we'll make them stealth so no territory will be beyond our reach and no state air force can defend against them. People will obey because we can now kill them at will with our buzzing insects. Fear and obey or die.

A terrifying combination is this mix of a universal surveillence and machine fetishism, particularly those who happen to be innocent members of populations which happen to run afoul of the great gaoler's whims.

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