Unmanning

How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare

Katherine Chandler

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781978809741, 9781978809758
• eBook ISBN: 9781978809765
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: History

Unmanning studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone—including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness—are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to "man" and the paradoxes at their basis.

1

Drone

In the decade before World War II, the U.S. Navy launched a classified project known by the codename Drone. It took its inspiration from earlier attempts at unmanned aircraft that were discontinued by the military as failures. The project joined a multitude of prior, worldwide experiments in unmanned flight, which extended from aerostat flight in the eighteenth century and military experiments with air balloons in the nineteenth to aerial torpedoes built in World War I.

Project Drone, however, marks a discursive beginning in the history of pilotless aircraft: it is at this moment that the term drone begins to acquire the entangled layers of connotation that will lead to today’s Predator drones, used in the United States’s so-called war on terror. The Americans did not invent the secret name out of whole cloth; instead, they repurposed the term from a competing project begun earlier by the British. William Standley, the U.S. chief of naval operations, advocated for the experimental Drone project after attending the Second Naval Conference in London in 1935, where he witnessed anti-aircraft training with the Queen Bee, a remote-controlled plane meant to test ship defenses against aerial attack. In a memorandum he circulated to the navy on March 23, 1936, Standley wrote, “An urgent need in the fleet exists for radio-controlled aircraft for use as aerial targets.”1

Delmar Fahrney, the officer-in-charge of Project Drone, recounted the conversation that led to the codename in a history of pilotless planes and guided weapons he wrote more than two decades later. “It was brought out that the English had dubbed their project the ‘Queen Bee’ and following this phraseology, a number of insect names were reviewed. It was decided that the word DRONE best fitted the situation in which a released target plane found itself engaged; and the terminology was easy to handle. Without further ado the name was used in all discussions oral and written and the term persists to this day.”2 The final declaration, “the term persists to this day,” resonates beyond Fahrney’s intended reader in the late 1950s. Indeed, “to this day,” uses of the term drone proliferate and the insectoid analogy persists, describing military weapons, hobby planes used by enthusiasts, and an emerging commercial sector for surveillance, filming, and delivery. A difference inheres in the commonly understood purpose of the drone as offensive or, in its most benign form, watchful. “The situation” Fahrney describes posits the drone as a remote-controlled training target. While this use of the drone continues today, it has become less ascendant in the American mind. Neither Project Drone nor Queen Bee purported to be an offensive technology. Instead, the drone was proposed to simulate and study the conditions of a new field of battle: aerial combat. Project drone, in the interwar period, was an aircraft built to be shot down.

This chapter examines how the drone organizes a theater of war by suggesting that aerial offensive attack and defensive anti-aircraft response are a mechanical exchange. Theater of war is a concept that draws on Joseph Masco’s study of “American self-fashioning through technoscience and threat projection.”3 During the interwar years, air power and its theater of war take shape in public trials of aerial bombardment and secret experiments with drone aircraft. These dual aspects produce a scene of battling machines and political decision-making as technoscientific observation. Yet, analyses of air power in the 1920s and archival documents from the target drone trials demonstrate that these scenes are far from mechanical. Instead, they are messy, human, and above all formed through and by discourse. In the interwar period, the target drone is shaped by anthropomorphism, theories of air power, divisions within the U.S. Navy, and the military’s lack of prior experience with aerial war and simulated aerial bombardments. The theater of war created in anti-aircraft trainings was at once prescient of World War II, even as it utterly failed to prepare the U.S. Navy for air attack.

The memorandum in response to Standley that circulated in the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics highlights the drone’s role in creating a theater of war. It explains that a remote-controlled aerial target was necessary for the following reasons: “1. Definite data must be obtained as to the effectiveness of present and projected anti-aircraft equipment before any further marked improvement can be reasonably expected. 2. Training of personnel assigned to anti-aircraft activities must be carried out under conditions more closely simulating action conditions than exist at present if maximum proficiency is to be obtained.”4 The rationale for the target drone in the memorandum highlights how remote-controlled aircraft are conceived as both defining and mimicking air power. Even as a training target to be shot at (and without a camera onboard), the drone informs the navy’s emerging strategy of how to counter and participate in aerial bombardment. In this way, the program is not just about creating a target or a targeting system when the platform is later transformed into an assault weapon—rather, it performs aerial battle from its inception.

The blurred lines between simulation, defensive response, and offensive attack are not unique to air power. Samuel Weber notes that the term “target” contains this conflation in its etymology. Its earliest usage in the 1400s meant “shield,” which would have been used as a defensive technology in battle. Later, a target was used to practice archery, coming to primarily signify a point of aim in the middle of the eighteenth century. Weber draws out this implicit tension between defense and offense before turning to a Washington Post article describing the capture of Saddam Hussein and his advisers, “ ‘Target of Opportunity’ Seized.” He then ties the verb “to target” to a specific kind of knowledge: “The enemy would have to be identified and localized, named and depicted, in order to be made into an accessible target, susceptible to destruction.” This kind of knowledge is not new to warfare. Yet, as Weber notes, aerial combat brought the “mobility, indeterminate structure, and unpredictability” of targeting to the fore.5 While Weber points to Hussein’s capture and the war on terror as the historical watershed for this new kind of indeterminate knowledge, the interwar drone’s use as a target shows that these shifts unfolded decades before, in experimental efforts to build a remote-control plane in a theater built not only through identification and mobility but also through simulation.

The memorandum I quote above insists that the drone provide “definite data” in service of “maximum proficiency.” As its progress in the interwar period shows, it does no such thing: the data remains murky; the proficiency, weak. In the early drone trials, contradiction and indeterminacy plagued the relationship between the drone-as-target and the navy’s anti-aircraft targeting, while the “definite data” provided by the trials remained controversial and subject to interpretation within the naval hierarchy. The ambition to mimic “action conditions” via the target drone does not so much respond to those conditions as it imagines and creates an as-yet undefined context of aerial war. The drone—itself a patchy network of moving discursive parts drawn from human, machine, and media—thus shapes the context it is supposed to mimic, a theater of air war.

Inventing Air Power: From the Ostfriesland to Project Drone

In the 1930s, the destruction that would be wrought through aerial bombardment in World War II was not a foregone conclusion. Though the possibility of devastation from the air was widely imagined, military commanders had yet to reckon with the conditions of broad-scale aerial bombardment.6 In World War I, Roger Ehlers points out that “senior officers viewed bombers as extensions of field artillery rather than independent bombing platforms.”7 Airplanes primarily engaged in reconnaissance and tactical missions, using planes as spotters for artillery and troops on the ground. Aircraft flown by the U.S. Navy received little use in World War I and their significance at sea was debated. When the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics proposed that the remote-controlled drone could simulate aerial attacks on ships, what exactly this meant was not yet known; the bureau hoped that the target drone would not only inform anti-aircraft practices but also settle the question of whether battleships were vulnerable to aerial attack.

In the United States, William “Billy” Mitchell is credited with promoting the concept of air power. He served as deputy commander of Air Aviation during World War I, after which he advocated for an independent air force as assistant chief of the Army Air Service. During the summer of 1921, at Mitchell’s urging, a joint army–navy exercise known as “Plan B” was organized to simulate aerial attacks against ships. The results of the exercise were disputed and continue to be today. Among the best-known trials was a test bombing of a captured German battleship from World War I, the Ostfriesland, which was also a news media event. The goal was to mimic air-to-sea warfare by attacking the battleship with aerial bombers. Though the tests claimed to replicate conditions of war, this was an overstatement. The Ostfriesland was a static target and, unlike a battleship in war, could not perform any maneuvers. On July 20, army, navy, and marine corps aircraft ran the first wave of attacks, which were halted due to poor weather. Only smaller munitions were used, and unsurprisingly, the damage was not substantial. The following day, in another wave of attacks—this time with larger bombs—the Ostfriesland eventually sunk. Following this mixed show of aerial might, the demonstration bombings against the Ostfriesland failed to create a consensus within the military about air power.

Two articles in the New York Times suggest diverging interpretations of the Ostfriesland’s sinking in the media. After the first day, the Times ran the headline, “Bombs Fail to Sink the Ostfriesland,” reporting that “Fifty-two bombs, weighing 18,990 pounds, loaded with heavy charges of TNT were dropped, and of these thirteen bombs, weighing 4,470 pounds, fell on the deck of the Ostfriesland. Only four of the thirteen bombs making these direct hits exploded.”8 Far from suggesting the primacy of air power, the first part of the trial suggested its limitations. The following day, a new headline announced, “Sinking the Ostfriesland.” After the eventual destruction of the battleship, the article claimed, “Brig. Gen. William Mitchell’s dictum that ‘the air force will constitute the first line of defense of this country’ no longer seems fanciful.” The article went on to support Mitchell’s assertion, stating, “A nation unequipped to concentrate her whole air force over the water, if the decision lies there, can just as well leave her navies tied up to the wharves instead of sending them out to certain destruction against a hostile country equipped for this purpose.”9 In this case, air power is tested not only by the military but also as news of the experiments circulated publicly to organize the theater of war proposed by aerial bombardment. Reports from the bombing of the Ostfriesland position the trial as a test for the nation, extending the significance of the scene to the American public.

The trial bombing against the Ostfriesland was one of multiple tests that aimed to assess the air-to-sea war and occurred in the midst of an escalating antagonism between Mitchell and the navy. Earlier that year, Mitchell had testified to Congress about the vulnerability of ships to aerial attack, questioning plans to invest in a conventional navy. He advocated for the development of an Air Service, separate from the army and navy. In the aftermath, Mitchell was asked to resign by the chief of the Army Air Service, Charles Menoher. Mitchell did not retire, however. A new chief of the Army Air Service, Mason Patrick, sent Mitchell on an inspection tour of Europe in 1921–1922. Mitchell was eventually demoted and transferred to San Antonio, Texas, in 1925. That year, Mitchell was court-martialed for publicly accusing senior army and navy leaders of incompetence following the crash of the helium ship Shenandoah in September 1925, which killed fourteen crewmembers. Mitchell was charged with discrediting the military service and found guilty. He was suspended from active duty for five years and resigned from the military in 1926. While he never returned to the service, he continued to be a vocal advocate for air power until he died in 1936. His downfall and resignation indicate the precarity of air power as a concept in the interwar period and the extent to which air power’s success was not a foregone conclusion, but rather hotly contested even among the military elite. The tactics of aerial war, which Project Drone in the next decade was supposed to assess, were uncertain.

It is common to read the rise of air power in the twentieth century as part of a larger cultural trend toward dehumanization. Such an approach emphasizes the affective indifference of distant bombing, its speed, and its mechanization. Critics often link these transformations to the rise of technoscience within the military. Carl Schmitt, writing in the aftermath of World War II, posits air power as a new spatial order organized by technological domination. He writes, “Above and below . . . can be thought of only naively, from the perspective of an observer who, from the surface of land or sea, looks up and down, up and down, while bombers pass in the airspace overhead and execute their missions from the sky to the earth.”10 We can think of it “only naively,” as the disorientation created by aerial bombardment undoes the relationality between the two sides on the battlefield and instead creates a form of technological domination unaccountable to what is below. A vertical form of domination premised on targeting from above replaces a horizontal battlefield, extending the indiscriminate ability to attack to the land and flattening earlier distinctions between war on land and sea. Schmitt’s theory takes up the contested claim made by Mitchell in the interwar period as the basis of a new global order.

A further consequence of the disorientation of aerial war is that any attack is rendered justifiable. Schmitt explains that under vertical control the “victors consider their superiority in weaponry to be an indication of their justa causa . . . [and] the discriminatory concept of the enemy as criminal and the attendant implication of justa causa run parallel to the intensification of the means of destruction and the disorientation of theaters of war.”11 Schmitt thought the global order organized by air power, and thus untethered from the land below, would lead to the intensification of war. With the rise of air power, all limits that had been previously placed on war would be undone, resulting in a world order where might is right. The concept of the “just enemy” in particular would unravel, replaced by the enemy-as-criminal rather than as equal opponent.

Air power, for Schmitt, would be fueled by escalating technological superiority, which itself would be metonymically reinscribed as a more general political and civilizational superiority: we are above and you are below, says this logic, therefore we are superior—“above you,” as one would say in English. The enemy had already been redefined to include the colonial other as criminal prior to World War II; however, modern European conflicts retained the concept of the just enemy, now undone by aerial war in Schmitt’s view. Schmitt’s claims fail to account for the possibility that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: A “Different Lethality”
• 1. DRONE
• 2. American Kamikaze
• 3. Unmanning
• 4. Buffalo Hunter
• 5. Pioneer
• Conclusion: Nobody’s Perfect
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index