Drone: Remote Control Warfare

by Hugh Gusterson

Overview

Drone warfare described from the perspectives of drone operators, victims of drone attacks, anti-drone activists, international law, military thinkers, and others.

 

"[A] thoughtful examination of the dilemmas this new weapon poses."
—Foreign Affairs

Drones are changing the conduct of war. Deployed at presidential discretion, they can be used in regular war zones or to kill people in such countries as Yemen and Somalia, where the United States is not officially at war. Advocates say that drones are more precise than conventional bombers, allowing warfare with minimal civilian deaths while keeping American pilots out of harm's way. Critics say that drones are cowardly and that they often kill innocent civilians while terrorizing entire villages on the ground. In this book, Hugh Gusterson explores the significance of drone warfare from multiple perspectives, drawing on accounts by drone operators, victims of drone attacks, anti-drone activists, human rights activists, international lawyers, journalists, military thinkers, and academic experts.

Gusterson examines the way drone warfare has created commuter warriors and redefined the space of the battlefield. He looks at the paradoxical mix of closeness and distance involved in remote killing: is it easier than killing someone on the physical battlefield if you have to watch onscreen? He suggests a new way of understanding the debate over civilian casualties of drone attacks. He maps “ethical slippage” over time in the Obama administration's targeting practices. And he contrasts Obama administration officials' legal justification of drone attacks with arguments by international lawyers and NGOs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262534413
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	09/15/2017
Series:	The MIT Press
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Hugh Gusterson is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Nuclear Rites and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 Drones 101 1

2 War Remixed 29

3 Remote Intimacy 59

4 Casualties 83

5 Arsenal of Democracy? 117

6 Conclusion: Peering over the Horizon 151

Notes 161

Index 195

What People are Saying About This

Michael Walzer

Hugh Gusterson's Drone is the most intelligent analysis of drone warfare currently available—and the most probing critique of how the United States is using drones in places like Pakistan and Yemen.

Sherry Turkle

Gusterson makes it clear why we don't speak clearly about drones. Only by muddying the waters can we bear to acknowledge what we have invented: a new and oddly intimate way station in the mechanization of death.

Matthew Evangelista

With his discerning anthropologist's eye, Hugh Gusterson has simultaneously produced both a wide-ranging and a focused study of the role of drones in current U.S. military policy. No relevant piece of evidence has escaped his attention, but he uses his sources economically to extract the most telling details. He concludes with a choice of dystopian (his word) and utopian (mine) drone futures that would convince me to bet—however reluctantly—on the former. Compellingly written throughout, Gusterson's book marks a major contribution to a crucial debate.

Endorsement

With his discerning anthropologist's eye, Hugh Gusterson has simultaneously produced both a wide-ranging and a focused study of the role of drones in current U.S. military policy. No relevant piece of evidence has escaped his attention, but he uses his sources economically to extract the most telling details. He concludes with a choice of dystopian (his word) and utopian (mine) drone futures that would convince me to bet—however reluctantly—on the former. Compellingly written throughout, Gusterson's book marks a major contribution to a crucial debate.

—Matthew Evangelista, coeditor of The American Way of Bombing: Changing Ethical and Legal Norms, from Flying Fortresses to Drones

From the Publisher

Gusterson makes it clear why we don't speak clearly about drones. Only by muddying the waters can we bear to acknowledge what we have invented: a new and oddly intimate way station in the mechanization of death.

—Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT; author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

Hugh Gusterson's Drone is the most intelligent analysis of drone warfare currently available—and the most probing critique of how the United States is using drones in places like Pakistan and Yemen.

—Michael Walzer, author of Just and Unjust Wars

With his discerning anthropologist's eye, Hugh Gusterson has simultaneously produced both a wide-ranging and a focused study of the role of drones in current U.S. military policy. No relevant piece of evidence has escaped his attention, but he uses his sources economically to extract the most telling details. He concludes with a choice of dystopian (his word) and utopian (mine) drone futures that would convince me to bet—however reluctantly—on the former. Compellingly written throughout, Gusterson's book marks a major contribution to a crucial debate.

—Matthew Evangelista, coeditor of The American Way of Bombing: Changing Ethical and Legal Norms, from Flying Fortresses to Drones

Editorial Reviews

Among a blizzard of new books probing drone warfare, Hugh Gusterson's slim volume is among the most careful, concise and insightful.... Even anyone who thinks they know all there is to know about drone warfare will profit from Gusterson's rich and penetrating study.—Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture—

[I]nsightful.

—Publishers Weekly—

In this excellent book, the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson argues that drones have fundamentally transformed the nature of war.

—Prospect Magazine—

[A] thoughtful examination of the dilemmas this new weapon poses.

—Foreign Affairs—

From the Publisher

Among a blizzard of new books probing drone warfare, Hugh Gusterson's slim volume is among the most careful, concise and insightful.... Even anyone who thinks they know all there is to know about drone warfare will profit from Gusterson's rich and penetrating study.

Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture

[A] thoughtful examination of the dilemmas this new weapon poses.

—Foreign Affairs

Reviews

[A] thoughtful examination of the dilemmas this new weapon poses.

Foreign Affairs

In this excellent book, the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson argues that drones have fundamentally transformed the nature of war.

Prospect Magazine

04/25/2016
Since the early 20th century, “advocates of air power have repeatedly prophesied the imminent obsolescence of ground forces,” yet they have always been wrong, writes Gusterson, professor of international affairs at George Washington University (People of the Bomb) in this short, astute, and disapproving examination of the latest failed attempt to rule from the sky. Gusterson acknowledges that drones are more accurate than crewed aircraft but adds that they kill plenty of bystanders. Moreover, modern armies are capable of shooting drones down, revealing them to be a continuation of 19th-century colonial warfare in which soldiers with superior weapons annihilated forces possessing far less sophisticated weaponry. Given the drone’s position in asymmetrical warfare, Gusterson makes an apt analogy with suicide bombers that some will find very unsettling: When people are killed by an unsuspected suicide bomber in their midst, this is considered a despicable, cowardly act. When people are killed by a drone safely piloted from 7,000 miles away, how is that to be received? Military leaders find drones irresistible because they seem to make military intervention cheap and easy, but they enable a “kind of permanent, low-level military action that threatens to erase the boundary between war and peace.” Gusterson’s insightful editorial shows less interest in drones’ effectiveness than their dismal effect on the ethics of war. (June)

Publishers Weekly