Drone: Remote Control Warfare by Hugh Gusterson (MIT Press, £18.95)
In this excellent book, the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson argues that drones have fundamentally transformed the nature of war. Their use blurs traditional distinctions between combatant and civilian, conflict and peace, homefront and war zone. They also change the very meaning of the battlefield. No longer a defined piece of territory, it is now a globally-distributed network of machines and humans. A drone lifts off from a secret Afghan airbase, flown by a pilot sitting in an air-conditioned trailer outside Las Vegas, fed real-time intelligence by analysts in Europe or Africa, with operational orders beamed live from a general in Washington, to kill a suspected terrorist in Pakistan with a hellfire missile: this is “bugsplat,” in the macabre new lexicon of death.
Drone pilots are a new breed of “warrior,” scrambling conventional ideas of combat, honour and bravery. Unlike regular military pilots (or others who kill from great distances) drone crews often develop a form of “remote intimacy” with their prey. Sitting thousands of miles away they can watch their targets for prolonged periods through high-resolution cameras, before witnessing in close-up the moment of annihilation. Unsurprisingly, many of them report severe psychological problems. Yet despite the extraordinary power of this technology, Gusterson argues that drone war is often deeply counterproductive. While limiting American casualties, it kills countless civilians for little military gain. Drone is a brilliant and disturbing account of the global reach of American power and the profound limits of technological mastery.
