Length: Between 250-300 words
Completeness: Answer all aspects of the question
Evidence: Bring in specific evidence from class materials
The article for this week by Gusterson encourages us to think about “military humanism.” What is this concept? Drone technology allows for distant, impersonal military strikes. What are some of the logistical and moral questions associated with drone warfare?
Current Anthropology Volume 60, Supplement 19, February 2019 S77 Drone Warfare in Waziristan and the New Military Humanism by Hugh Gusterson Hugh at Ge G St pape publi q 201 US drone warfare in Waziristan has been legitimated through a discourse of military humanism that claims very low rates of civilian casualties and a concern to spare the lives of the innocent. In practice, in concert with the Pakistani government’s counterinsurgency campaign and the tactics of the Taliban, drone strikes in Waziristan have killed sub- stantial numbers of civilians and, in a manner reminiscent of the effects of death squads in Central and Latin America, have torn apartWaziri civil society while creating a culture of terror. “Drone essentialism” (a false conviction that drones are inevitably used in a way that minimizes suffering) has concealed a process of “ethical slippage” through which drone operators relaxed their operational practices. This process of slippage enabled drones to become terror weapons even as they functioned at the level of discourse as alibis—signifiers of discriminate force. One task of anthropological analy- sis is to prize open the contradictions inherent in this situation. We see war as a surgical scalpel and not a bloodstained sword. In so doing, we mis-describe ourselves as we mis-describe the instruments of death. (Ignatieff 2000:214–215) How is it possible to wage an aerial terror campaign against a foreign territory with sufficient intensity to cause considerable civilian casualties and shred its social fabric, all the while claim- ing that one has acted with great restraint and humanitarian concern? This is what the United States has done in the so-called tribal areas of Pakistan. US leaders and national security officials have defended drone warfare by arguing that it represents a kinder, gentler way of fighting insurgents in the Middle East and Africa, and a mode of war better aligned with international law, than the alterna- tives. (In fact, they have presented it asmuch as a kind of instant law enforcement, meting out execution to guilty “terrorists,” as amodality of warfare.) GeorgeW. Bush’s CIA director,Michael Hayden (2016), described drone warfare as “the most targeted and effective application of firepower in the history of armed conflict,” and called the drone “an exquisite weapon when you want to be both effective and moral” (Shane 2015:75). John Brennan (2012), Obama’s CIA director, said, “by targeting an individual terrorist or small numbers of terrorists with ordnance that can be adapted to avoid harming others in the immediate vicinity, it is hard to imagine a tool that can better minimize risk to civilians than remotely piloted aircraft.” In a similar vein, Harold Koh (2010), legal advisor to the State Department dur- Gusterson is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs orge Washington University (Hortense Amsterdam House, 2110 reet NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA [guster@gwu.edu]). This r was submitted 17 XI 17, accepted 18 IX 18, and electronically shed 16 I 19. 9 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights re This content downloaded from 128.19 All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms a ing theObamaAdministration, said, “because drone technology is highly precise, if properly controlled, it could be more lawful and more consistent with human rights and humanitarian law than the alternatives.” Such statements by Hayden, Brennan, and Koh are classic examples of American “military humanism”—a broadly liberal discursive formation within which war is represented as an unfortunate obligation thrust upon the exceptional nation, the United States, by a dysfunctional world which the United States has a salvationist responsibility tomend, albeit by force of arms. The best known exponent of the term “military humanism” is Noam Chomsky (1999), who critiqued the United States for waging war in Kosovo in 1998 in the name of democracy and international order while acting outside international law and without a United Nations mandate. Chomsky portrays official US claims of concern for human rights and civilian casualties as a cynical smokescreen that hides a ruthless appetite for geo- strategic advantage and access tomarkets andmaterials.1 Here I use anthropology to theorize and critique military humanism in a less polemical way as an elaborate, compelling, flawed, and contradictory discourse that, like all hegemonic discourses, legit- imates acts of violence and oppression while seeming compel- ling to many of its speakers. Within the American discourse of military humanism, the United States is represented as patient and forbearing and, when driven to violence, always seeking its most enlightened and compassionate mode of execution. In keeping with the prevalence of cost-benefit analysis in Ameri- can public discourse, military humanism is often figured in a mathematical idiom, fusing the tropes ofmoralism and rational choice (Erickson et al. 2015). Thus technical arguments about 1. For a different, more anthropological, critique of military humanism that focuses on the construction of familial community, see Jauregui (2015). served. 0011-3204/2019/60S19-0008$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/701022 3.164.203 on May 30, 2020 15:58:48 PM nd Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 4. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23 /remarks-president-national-defense-university (Obama 2013). S78 Current Anthropology Volume 60, Supplement 19, February 2019 civilian casualties, claims of precision targeting, and counter- factual narratives about casualties in hypothetical alternative scenarios play an important role in American public discourses about military intervention, with new technologies often pre- sented as magically salvationist actors in the drama. The pre- eminent example is the conventional American defense of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which the use of the atomic bomb is said to have ended a brutal war and avoided the bloodletting of an otherwise inevitable US land invasion of Japan. According to this argument, the destruction of two cities at a cost of at least 200,000 civilians dead was a moral act because it saved more lives, Japanese as well as Americans, in the long run (Gusterson 1997).2 Drone Warfare Claims about the technomorality of dronewarfare are premised on particular technological capabilities of the Predator and Reaper drones. Unlike directly piloted aircraft, Predator and Reaper drones can circle for as long as 40 hours, relaying video footage of the terrain below to a network of control stations in the Middle East, in Europe, and in the United States, along with details of cell phone calls on the ground.3 Drones’ ability to linger for extended periods of time while relaying detailed in- formation to a distributed network of analysts allows drones to systematically track suspected insurgents even as analysts and military lawyers evaluate the evidence that the suspects are indeed insurgents who are fair targets for attack. If they are deemed appropriate targets, a drone’s extended endurance in the air allows drone operators to defer a strike until there are no—or at least only a few—civilians nearby and to consult with military lawyers who can decide whether likely civilian casualties would be deemed “proportionate,” and therefore ac- ceptable, within the frame of the laws of war. Drone operators can also use special software (Bugsplat) to calculate the prob- able damage radius (and thus the likelihood of civilian “col- lateral damage”) depending on the ordnance selected and the placement of the missile. GPS technology along with lasing of the target enables the drone operators to guide a missile quite precisely. Indeed it is claimed that the Reaper drone, which carries a more diverse array of ordnance than the Predator, can destroy one room in a house while leaving the rest of the house standing, killing an insurgent while sparing the other occupants of the house (Coll 2014; Elish 2017; Martin and Sasser 2010; Whittle 2014; Williams 2013). In his memoir drone operator Matt Martin (Martin and Sasser 2010:53) describes one drone strike thus: I began preparations for a shot by scrutinizing the target from all angles in order to choose the best approach to minimize 2. See Stimson (1947) for the classic statement of this argument. 3. Although 40 hours is the record, missions are typically closer to 24 hours (https://fas.org/irp/program/collect/predator.htm; Defense News 2015). This content downloaded from 128.19 All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms a collateral damage. I calculated that if I dropped one right down themiddle of the yard on top of the Ford, the brick wall would buffer the explosion and leave adjacent houses rela- tively undamaged. Nobody else should be hurt, which was an integral element of our rules of engagement. I doubted whether B-17 and B-29 pilots and bombardiers of World War II agonized over dropping bombs over Dresden or Berlin as much as I did over taking out one measly perp in a car. At one point CIA director John Brennan claimed that, over the preceding year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop” (Shane 2011:A1). Two years later, in a speech at National Defense University, President Obama claimed that, for a drone strike to go for- ward, “there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.”4 In fact, it is difficult to say with precision howmany civilians have been killed in drone strikes (and in counterinsurgency warfare in general). As law professor Christiane Wilke (2017: 1139–1140) argues, the “considerable disagreement about the number of casualties, especially their status as civilian or non- civilian, might suggest that the line between civilians and com- batants is not as clear as supporters of new technologies that allegedly reduce ‘collateral damage’ and civilian casualties would like to suggest.”5 Anthropologist Madiha Tahir (2016:14) points out, writing about Waziristan, “video and photography of the aftermath of a drone strike is rare. The security forces and the opposition fighters don’t allow it, but it’s also rare because, ironically, the social space of the Tribal Areas has been so worked over by spies and informants collecting and surveil- ling that recording (of whatever kind) has become something of a suspect act. Why are you documenting? For whom?” US commentators often reject reports from journalists or human rights activists in the target country as exaggerated, but official US assessments (done largely by the drone operators them- selves) have their own liabilities: drone operators may not know how many civilians lie inside collapsed buildings and, in a war where insurgents do not wear uniforms, they have used a flawed methodology that “counts all military-aged males in a strike zone as combatants . . . unless there is explicit intelli- gence posthumously proving them innocent” (Becker and Shane 2012:11). But as sociologist TylerWall (2016:1128) points out, “military-aged men in the FATA region, not unlike Black men in the United States, are deemed suspicious and frequently killed for simply belonging to a ‘suspect’ population.”6 5. See Rappert (2012) on deeper epistemic difficulties in estimating casualties in war. 6. Eventually, conceding that claims of no, or very low, civilian casu- alties lacked credibility, the Obama Administration released an official estimate in 2016 that drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya had killed between 64 and 116 civilians, though this was widely seen as 3.164.203 on May