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The Real
HOME OF THE HUNTERS
âHome of the Huntersââthe words inscribed atop Creechâs entrance gate. This is not a metaphor. Drone pilots and operators are literally hunters. Drones are hunter-killers, named after animals: âpredator,â âhawk,â âraven,â âdrone.â Former pilotsâ memoirs refer to their killing of humans on the ground as hunting ârats,â âpigeons,â âchickens,â âmice.â The generic result is bugsplat. Killing another human being is the hardest actâunless itâs translated into a fantasy of hunting, and then itâs animals, not people, you are killing. At the sensory, conceptual, symbolic, and emotional levels, killing by drone turns into designated hunting, which doesnât 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. Martinâs memoir, Predator, describes his years as a drone pilot at Creech. The idea of hunting echoes in almost every page of his narrative: âI was a patient, silent hunter;â âWe were always hunting, day and night.â1 Pilotsâ main activity consisted of âwatching from the sky like a bird of prey ready to strike.â2 Martin uses the biblical bestiary to explain his frame of mind: âI sometimes pondered how Adam might have gone back to the Garden of Eden and whacked the serpent.â3 Drone pilot Martin said of his victims: âInsurgents were like having a house infested with rats; the more of them you killed, it seemed, the more they bred.â 4 Drone pilots are told in training, âThe bastards never know what hits them.â5 Like hunters for whom the trepidation of their first kill is forever imprinted in their memory, Martin talks of âmy first killâ when âI drew in a deep breath, felt sweat stinging my eyes, tasted the bile of excitement in my mouth.â 6 The military term for this hunting is going kinetic, and there is a âgeneral eagerness in Nevada [at Creech] to âgo kinetic.â â 7 Killing can be exciting. Itâs just hunting.
Beginning with the general name drone, coined by two naval scientists in 1936 âafter analyzing various names of insects and birds,â the metaphoric links between drones and the bestiary are consistently preserved:8 âGlobal Hawk,â âRaven,â âWasp,â âDragon Runner,â âEagle Eye,â âVampire Bat,â âSnakeBot,â âBig Dog,â âCentaur,â âPolibotâ (shifting from the form of a snake into a spider), âRoboLobster,â âPolecat,â âPeregrine UAV Killerâ (after the peregrine falcon), âMarsupialâ robots (one robot carried inside another). âPredatorâ was the name for the hero of them all until 2016. The latest generation of drones are mostly âReapers.â The Iraqisâ name for drones is âvultures.â 9
GrĂ©goire Chamayouâs 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 âbecomes absolutely unilateral. What could still claim to be combat is converted into a campaign of what is, quite simply, slaughter.â10 After 9/11 Bush declared that the new kind of warfare required âus to be on an international manhunt,â while Rumsfeld asked, âHow do we organize the Department of Defense for manhunts?â11 Researchers called for a ânational manhunting agency,â âmanhunting perfected and, most of all, made invisible.â12 Hunter-killer drones are instruments of such manhunting, âso asymmetrical that it is more like hunting than warââto the point that many in the Pentagon feared that such âpreemptive manhuntingâ 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 âJaguar 25,â 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 donât think they have kids out at this hour, I know theyâre shady but come on. |
| . . . . |
MC: | They are reviewing. |
PILOT: | Okay, review that shit. Why didnât 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 âchildrenâ call, man. I really fucking hate that. |
SENSOR: | Picked up a third vehicle on their train. |
MC: | Guilty by association. |
| . . . . |
SENSOR: | Theyâre praying. They are praying. Praying? I mean, seriously, thatâs what they do. |
MC: | Theyâre going to do something nefarious. |
| . . . . |
MC: | Adolescent near the rear of the SUV. |
SENSOR: | Well, teenagers can fight. |
MC: | Pick up a weapon and youâre a combatant. Itâs 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. Iâd 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, thatâs 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: | Weâll 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: | Whatâs the master plan, fellas? |
PILOT: | I donât 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, weâre 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. Theyâre going to come back around. |
SENSOR: | Looks like theyâre surrendering. Theyâre 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 donât 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 couldnât 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 canât these allegedly precision weapons distinguish women and children from combatants?
Hunting involves looking for a âbeautiful target.â A truck filled with people, âmilitary-aged malesâ is perfect for a strike. âThey were always trying to kill people,â explains Heather, a former drone pilot, in the film. âAll these officers, it looks good on their rĂ©sumĂ© if they kill more people.â But there are children. Toddlers or adolescents? âOh, sweet target!â Praying? Call the kill chain. âThe party begins!â 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. âThis is weird.â
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...