Hellfire from Paradise Ranch

On the Front Lines of Drone Warfare

Joseba Zulaika

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780520329744
• eBook ISBN: 9780520974326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Social Sciences

In this intimate and innovative work, terror expert Joseba Zulaika examines drone warfare as manhunting carried out via satellite. Using Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas as his center of study, he interviews drone operators as well as resisters to the war economy of the region to expose the layers of fantasy on which counterterrorism and its self-sustaining logic are grounded. 

Hellfire from Paradise Ranch exposes the terror and warfare of drone killings that dominate our modern military. It unveils the trauma drone operators experience, in part due to their visual intimacy with their victims, and explores the resistance to drone killings in the same apocalyptic Nevada desert where nuclear testing, pacifist militancy, and Shoshone tradition overlap.

Stunning and absorbing, Zulaika offers a richly detailed account of how we continue to manufacture, deconstruct, and perpetuate terror.

1

The Real

HOME OF THE HUNTERS

“Home of the Hunters”—the words inscribed atop Creech’s entrance gate. This is not a metaphor. Drone pilots and operators are literally hunters. Drones are hunter-killers, named after animals: “predator,” “hawk,” “raven,” “drone.” Former pilots’ memoirs refer to their killing of humans on the ground as hunting “rats,” “pigeons,” “chickens,” “mice.” The generic result is bugsplat. Killing another human being is the hardest act—unless it’s translated into a fantasy of hunting, and then it’s animals, not people, you are killing. At the sensory, conceptual, symbolic, and emotional levels, killing by drone turns into designated hunting, which doesn’t have to be hard. Hunting and killing prey can even be sport, can be fun. Hunting is the Lacanian real of what drone pilots do.

Lieutenant Colonel Matt J. Martin’s memoir, Predator, describes his years as a drone pilot at Creech. The idea of hunting echoes in almost every page of his narrative: “I was a patient, silent hunter;” “We were always hunting, day and night.”¹ Pilots’ main activity consisted of “watching from the sky like a bird of prey ready to strike.”² Martin uses the biblical bestiary to explain his frame of mind: “I sometimes pondered how Adam might have gone back to the Garden of Eden and whacked the serpent.”³ Drone pilot Martin said of his victims: “Insurgents were like having a house infested with rats; the more of them you killed, it seemed, the more they bred.” ⁴ Drone pilots are told in training, “The bastards never know what hits them.”⁵ Like hunters for whom the trepidation of their first kill is forever imprinted in their memory, Martin talks of “my first kill” when “I drew in a deep breath, felt sweat stinging my eyes, tasted the bile of excitement in my mouth.” ⁶ The military term for this hunting is going kinetic, and there is a “general eagerness in Nevada [at Creech] to ‘go kinetic.’ ” ⁷ Killing can be exciting. It’s just hunting.

Beginning with the general name drone, coined by two naval scientists in 1936 “after analyzing various names of insects and birds,” the metaphoric links between drones and the bestiary are consistently preserved:⁸ “Global Hawk,” “Raven,” “Wasp,” “Dragon Runner,” “Eagle Eye,” “Vampire Bat,” “SnakeBot,” “Big Dog,” “Centaur,” “Polibot” (shifting from the form of a snake into a spider), “RoboLobster,” “Polecat,” “Peregrine UAV Killer” (after the peregrine falcon), “Marsupial” robots (one robot carried inside another). “Predator” was the name for the hero of them all until 2016. The latest generation of drones are mostly “Reapers.” The Iraqis’ name for drones is “vultures.” ⁹

Grégoire Chamayou’s paradigm for drone warfare is manhunting. He argues that by eliminating all sense of reciprocity, by killing without any danger of the killer being killed as well, drone warfare “becomes absolutely unilateral. What could still claim to be combat is converted into a campaign of what is, quite simply, slaughter.”¹⁰ After 9/11 Bush declared that the new kind of warfare required “us to be on an international manhunt,” while Rumsfeld asked, “How do we organize the Department of Defense for manhunts?”¹¹ Researchers called for a “national manhunting agency,” “manhunting perfected and, most of all, made invisible.”¹² Hunter-killer drones are instruments of such manhunting, “so asymmetrical that it is more like hunting than war”—to the point that many in the Pentagon feared that such “preemptive manhunting” could turn into another Phoenix Program of torture and murder.¹³

A RADIO EXCHANGE

The declassified radio transcripts below between the sensor, the pilot, the MC (mission coordinator), the joint terminal attack controller (call sign “Jaguar 25,” or Jag25), and the safety observer of a drone operation can be taken as a sample of drone hunting. They are reenacted in the film National Bird, which Brandon Bryant and Cian Westmoreland screened for us in Las Vegas. The drone operators have just noticed three trucks driving on an Afghan country road. Here are extracts of the exchanges:

SENSOR:	Looks like people on the back of a pickup, one, two, three, at least five dudes so far. . . . That truck would make a beautiful target.
PILOT:	Yeah.
MC.	Screener said at least one child near SUV.
SENSOR:	Bullshit. Where? I don’t think they have kids out at this hour, I know they’re shady but come on.
	. . . .
MC:	They are reviewing.
PILOT:	Okay, review that shit. Why didn’t he say possible child, why are they so quick to call fucking kids but not to call a fucking rifle.
SENSOR:	I really doubt that “children” call, man. I really fucking hate that.
SENSOR:	Picked up a third vehicle on their train.
MC:	Guilty by association.
	. . . .
SENSOR:	They’re praying. They are praying. Praying? I mean, seriously, that’s what they do.
MC:	They’re going to do something nefarious.
	. . . .
MC:	Adolescent near the rear of the SUV.
SENSOR:	Well, teenagers can fight.
MC:	Pick up a weapon and you’re a combatant. It’s how that works.
PILOT:	. . . Be advised, all passengers are finishing up praying, and rallying up near all three vehicles at this time.
SENSOR:	Oh, sweet target. I’d try to go through the bed [people lying on a bed at the back of the truck], put it right center of the bed.
MC:	Oh, that’s perfect.
PILOT:	. . . Our screeners are currently calling.
PILOT:	Twenty-one MAMs [military-aged males], no females, and two possible children.
JAG25:	Roger. When we say children are we talking teenagers or toddlers?
SENSOR:	I would say about twelve, not toddlers. Something more towards adolescents or teens.
JAG25:	We’ll pass that along to the ground force commander. But like I said, twelve-thirteen years old with a weapon is just as dangerous.
SENSOR:	Oh, we agree. Yeah.
MC:	What’s the master plan, fellas?
PILOT:	I don’t know. Hope we get to shoot the truck with all the dudes in it.
SENSOR:	Yeah. . . . Sensor is in, the party begins!
PILOT:	Yeah. All right, so the plan is, man, uh, we’re going to watch this thing go down, the hells [Hellfire missiles] are going to take out as much as they can, and when they Winchester we can play cleanup.
SENSOR:	Hey MC.
MC:	Yes?
SENSOR:	Remember, kill chain!
MC:	Will do.
SENSOR:	Roger. And
	EXPLOSION
SENSOR:	Oh . . . And there it goes!
PILOT:	Our engagement.
SENSOR:	Stand by.
	. . . .
PILOT:	They took the first [truck] and, uh, the last out. They’re going to come back around.
SENSOR:	Looks like they’re surrendering. They’re not running.
SAFETY OBSERVER:	Dude, this is weird.
SENSOR:	They hit it. [Explosion of the third truck]. You . . . These guys are just . . .
PILOT:	Holy shit.
SENSOR:	I don’t know about this. This is weird.
PILOT:	The lady is carrying a kid, huh? Maybe.
MC:	No.
SENSOR:	Huh, yeah.
MC:	The baby, I think on the right. Yeah.
PILOT:	Since the engagement we have not been able to PID [identify] any weapons.^14

Twenty-three civilian members of a family, including two children, were killed in that attack, their scattered body parts collected and taken to their village amid sobbing and wailing. The film shows images of survivors in the hospital, their limbs amputated. Family members of the killed explain to the interviewers how they had stopped at a roadside rest area to pray. When they left they heard a plane they couldn’t see. The mother of her dead boy says there were two black helicopters and a white drone. When their first vehicle was hit, everyone panicked and the men told the women and children to get out of the truck so that the attackers could see they were civilians. But the bombing continued. One woman raised her child above her head to show they were not fighters. One man asks: How can’t these allegedly precision weapons distinguish women and children from combatants?

Hunting involves looking for a “beautiful target.” A truck filled with people, “military-aged males” is perfect for a strike. “They were always trying to kill people,” explains Heather, a former drone pilot, in the film. “All these officers, it looks good on their résumé if they kill more people.” But there are children. Toddlers or adolescents? “Oh, sweet target!” Praying? Call the kill chain. “The party begins!” The Creech pilot hits the first, then a second truck. A woman is showing her child to heaven. A third missile hits the third truck. No weapons. “This is weird.”

Some of these massacres were later claimed to be human errors. General Stanley McChrystal apologized to the country after the previously mentioned massacre. But massacres are built into the US policy of manhunting. Human r...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: Slaughterhouse-359
• 1. The Real: Home of the Hunters
• 2. Fantasy and the Art of Drone Assassination
• 3. Drone Wars Returning from the Future
• 4. Trauma: The Killer as Voyeur
• 5. Resistance: A Harsh and Dreadful Love
• Epilogue: Obama’s Troy: Kill Me a Son
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index