you will upload a 2-paragraph (6-8 sentences/paragraph) reflection to the discussion board connecting Tuesday’s readings with one or more reading from the previous week. These are not meant to be summaries of the readings but opportunities for you to a) connect with the materials through your own ideas and experiences; b) develop critical reading practices; and c) practice synthesizing course readings and concepts. Questions you may address but are not limited to include: How do readings and course concepts relate to your own experiences within and outside of the university, your communities, families, and peers? How can you make connections between readings/course concepts and contemporary political contexts?
Duke University Press
Chapter Title: THE LABOR OF SURVEILLANCE AND BUREAUCRATIZED KILLING New
Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators
Chapter Author(s): PETER ASARO
Book Title: Life in the Age of Drone Warfare
Book Editor(s): LISA PARKS, CAREN KAPLAN
Published by: Duke University Press. (2017)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv121033r.16
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Life in the Age of Drone Warfare
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12
THE L ABOR OF
SURVEILLANCE AND
BUREAUCRATIZED KILLING
New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators
PETER ASARO
T H E R E W A S A M A S S I V E increase in the number of drone aircraft
used by the United States military over the first decade of the twenty-first
century.1 Along with this, there was an expansion of the capabilities of
drone technologies and an increase in the sophistication and types of missions and tasks for which drones are used. From 2001 to 2012 the number
of unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs) in the U.S. military grew from seventy
to seven thousand. They were also armed for the first time with weapons,
creating the new aircraft role of “hunter-killer,” combining remote surveillance and lethal capabilities. This new role has largely been described as an
economical and effective military tool for U.S. operations in the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars and the Libyan civil war and as a politically expedient
tool for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, and
Somalia.2 The New America Foundation estimates that as many as 2,600
people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan alone from their first
use there in 2004 until 2012.3 Following a more rigorous methodology, the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates the total number of p
eople
killed by the 344 drone strikes during that period in Pakistan as between
2,562 and 3,325, with as many as 881 of these being confirmed civilian
deaths.4 Casualties from drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan have not
been tracked or analyzed by journalists, nor does the military release their
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own estimates, but the total is likely to be significantly higher given the
greater number of missions flown in those war zones.
The U.S. military has strongly embraced the use of drones for a complicated set of reasons, alignments of interests, perceived military advantages,
and internal policy and budgeting priorities. They are keenly interested in
optimizing the effective use of drone technologies, which includes comprehensive reviews of missions, accidents, training programs, support infrastructure, operator performance and health, and other factors, including
public perceptions of the use of drones.5 Because the operators of these
drones are an essential element of the complex socio-technical system that
constitutes military drone operations, drone operators have been singled
out as the subjects of a variety of research studies, especially studies of their
psycho-physical performances and visual-motor skills. This particular focus
has been due in part to perceived differences in the nature of “remote piloting”
from “being in the plane” and the technological challenges of designing interfaces for such remote operations. L
ittle, however, is known or discussed
outside the military about the experiences of drone operators.
In this chapter, I w
ill be investigating the p
eople who operate these
drones, as workers involved in the labor of surveillance and killing. In
viewing drones as mobile platforms for surveillance, we can look to the
operators of these systems, and the organization and management of their
work, as constituting a particular form of the labor of surveillance. And
insofar as these drones are armed with lethal weapons, we can also consider
the relationships between this labor of surveillance and a unique form of the
labor of killing. Of course, t here are many jobs in contemporary society
that involve surveillance (in prisons, hospitals, offices, factories, shopping
centers, and numerous other places). Yet the kind of surveillance offered
by remote-controlled flying robotic cameras is new and rapidly growing.6
There are also many jobs that involve killing (in slaughterhouses, medical
research labs, the military, and others).7 What makes drone operators particularly interesting as subjects is not only that their work combines surveillance and killing but also that it sits at an intersection of multiple networks
of power and technology, visibility and invisibility. Their work is a focal
point of discourses about the ethics of killing, the effectiveness of military
strategies for achieving political goals, the cultural and political significance
of lethal robotics, and public concerns over the further automation of surveillance and killing.
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While the work of killing performed by drone operators bears a certain resemblance to other forms of killing labor and shares with it certain
cultural meanings, social stigmas, and psychological burdens, it is in many
ways unique. Its uniqueness becomes most obvious when it is compared to
other military jobs that also involve killing. Some of these involve killing
at a great distance, such as the work of snipers, artillery gunners, aerial
bombardiers, or ballistic missile operators. Among t hese, only snipers share
the long and persistent voyeurism of drone operators, as they peer through
their rifle scopes at potential targets. Yet snipers differ in being a mile or
less from their targets, terrestrially bound, and in danger of being found
out, tracked down, and killed. The sniper also feels the weather, smells the
smells, and interacts with the local p
eople in a way that a drone operator
does not. The work of drone operators resembles in some ways the work
of drawing up lists of aerial bombing targets. Since its invention in World
War I, this work has been done in command posts by teams of workers
who make their decisions based on maps and photos, intelligence reports of
varying accuracy, consultations with lawyers and superior officers, collaborative decision processes, and often under intense time pressures. Yet t hese
bombing planners do not ride along in the plane, nor are they called on
to make judgments about events in real time and to change their targeting
decisions based on live high-resolution video streams of potential targets.
In this chapter, I w
ill use the phrase bureaucratized killing to refer to
the particular form of labor that killing takes in the work of drone operators, which is constituted by the kind of bureaucratic labor organization
developed within the military to do things like generate lists of bombing
targets, in combination with the more “hands-on” work of deciding when
and where to pull the trigger that more closely resembles the killing work
of the sniper. Because this form of killing involves self-conscious processes
and efforts at rationalization—at both the individual and organizational
levels to make the processes more efficient, more accurate, and more manageable—it is most appropriate to approach this subject as a form of killing
that has an elaborate and intentional bureaucratized structure as well as a
psychological dimension.8 Consequent with the historical emergence of this
rational bureaucratization has been an intense computerization and technocratic management of the human labor involved in this complex system
of remote surveillance and killing. And thus, t here are certain parallels to be
drawn between the regimes of scientific expertise applied to understanding
and managing workers and the technologies they use in factories and offices
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and the kinds of scientific knowledge produced to understand the work of
drone operators and the design of the technologies they use.
At this point, I should also clarify what I mean by the term subjectivity
and why the subjectivity of drone operators is an interesting topic for study.
Within sociological literature, there has been a rich discussion of the ways
social “subjects” are constructed by the social structures in which they find
themselves.9 More recent theories have identified the formation of subjectivities in the day-to-day activities and habits of individuals, and still others
have shown how “subjects” have been constructed through systems of
knowledge by experts, systems of data collection, and modes of discourse.10
In terms of the subjectivities of workers and labor, there is a long historical
evolution of systems of expertise that have been deployed to construct and
manage the subjectivity of workers and to respond to the emergent resis
tance to industrial and postindustrial modes of labor.11 From Taylorism
to mental hygiene, to the quality of working life, to business process re-
engineering, to the worker-as-entrepreneur, these attempts to actively construct and shape the subjectivities of individual workers in particular ways
have had real consequences on large-scale social formations of labor, the
subjective experience of workers, and the ways in which we conceive of and
discuss their labor. This chapter will extend this notion of “subjectivity” to
drone operators in order to better understand how systematic knowledge
has been deployed to constitute their subjectivity, as well as how it falls
short yet still grasps for greater control over the labor of bureaucratized
killing.
From the Taylorist vision of observing and decomposing the movements of workers to ethnographies of the workplace, much of the science of
labor organization and management seeks to make the practices, skills, and
knowledge of workers more visible. Running against, or at least across, this
trend are cultural imperatives to render invisible certain distasteful forms of
work. From the “dirty” work around sanitation or sex work, to dealing
with the materiality of human illness and mortality, to the low prestige
and wages assigned to various forms of undesirable work, there are both
explicit and implicit means within e very society to render some forms of
work “visible” and others “invisible.”12 This is tied up with cultural ideals
and values and is often a source of political tension among groups of p
eople
who are systematically excluded from desirable forms of work, or whose
work is systematically hidden, unrecognized, undervalued, or underpaid.
Killing work in particular has been traditionally set apart from other forms
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of work in many societies.13 Indeed, the formation of a separate social class
of “warriors” to grapple with the ambivalent nature of socially sanctioned
killing can be seen as a cultural expression and enforcement of the difference between killing work and other forms of work. From the execution
chamber to the slaughterhouse to the battlefield, there are complicated politics surrounding the visibility and concealment of socially sanctioned forms
of killing. Even while the work of drone operators has become increasingly
important to the military, and to national and international politics, the
actual work of drone operators has remained largely hidden from public
view and increasingly protected from the prying eyes of journalists and
social scientists. And even within the military, drone warriors are subject to
powerful social pressures not to reveal or discuss their work or its psychological or emotional stresses.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a technology that is often referred to as “unmanned,” there has been relatively little public discussion about the people
who operate these drone aircraft or the character of their work. What little
public discussion there has been tends to be highly politically charged—
not only because it deals with military service personnel but because it is
also perceived as expressing implicit judgments on the U.S. policies that
are being pursued using these technologies. While it may be both practically and theoretically impossible to completely understand what it is like
to operate t hese drones in military missions with lethal consequences, it is
worthwhile to examine the social semiotics—the signs, social relations, and
systems of knowledge that constitute them—that have emerged in various
attempts to describe this work. That is, as drone technologies have taken
on increasing military and political significance, a range of discourses have
emerged that attempt, in various ways, to describe the operators of these
drones. These discourses range from the subjective and “what-it-is-like”
to be a drone operator to the objective and techniques for the scientific
understanding of the labor performed by drone operators and the means
of improving or optimizing it. From a semiotic perspective, each of these
discourses is trying, in its own way, to represent drone operators and their
labor and, through these representations, to influence how the technology is developed and how it will be used to achieve military and political
goals. This chapter provides a fresh perspective on the technological and
political debates through a more careful analysis of the ways in which
these discourses are framing and constructing the subjectivities of drone
operators.
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To say that the discussion of drone technologies and their appropriate
uses is politically charged would be an understatement. There is, in fact, a
powerful and highly developed rhetoric within military and foreign policy
circles concerning the use of remote-piloted aircraft and unmanned aerial
vehicles. This predominantly positive rhetoric touts the capabilities of the
systems, primarily in the areas of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (isr), as well as their emerging role as weapons in close air support
of ground forces, support of manned air missions, and their use by special
forces in targeted killings.14 This rhetoric often focuses on the ability of
military robotics, among which drones are the most prominent, to perform
work that is “dull, dirty and dangerous” in ways that protect the operators
and thus reduce the risk of conducting such operations. This is coupled
with a positive economic cost-benefit analysis according to which t hese missions can be conducted at a greatly reduced cost when compared to manned
aircraft and other technological alternatives, such as satellite imagery or
special forces operations. More importantly, drone technologies are praised
for their ability to protect their operators from the traditional threats of
combat aviation by allowing them to conduct their work at a very great
physical distance. I call t hese purported advantages collectively the “heroic
myth” of drones, as it is a rhetorical framing that grants the technology itself agency in reducing costs and risks while increasing military capabilities.
According to this myth, the technology serves to enhance the virtues of the
pilots and operators and their ability to wage war ethically.15
There is also a critical rhetoric that expresses various concerns about drone
technologies, especially their use in delivering lethal weapons. One such criticism focuses on the distance between operators and the combat zones where
their actions take place, arguing that this creates emotional distance, ethical
detachment, and psychological dissociation from the consequences of t hose
actions. Another criticism concerns the video game–like nature of the interfaces these operators use and implies that they will increasingly treat real-
world missions like video games, blurring the distinctions between reality
and fantasy, again raising the specters of distance, detachment, and dissociation, or, even worse, a “trigger-happy” excitement like that experienced
in fast-paced video games. Closely related to this is the notion that by making
the use of lethal force so easy, like the so-called push-button war, it w
ill
increase killing overall and civilian casualties and accidents as well.16 There
is also a criticism that by failing to take any risk in face-to-face combat, or
even being in an aircraft high above a combat zone, this form of military
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practice exhibits fear and cowardice or lacks the honor or justice of combat
in which the soldiers from each side can both kill and be killed. Collectively,
I call t hese purported dangers the “antiheroic myth” of drones, as it frames
the technology as turning brave and virtuous warriors into unethical killers
or even cowards.
Both mythologies, the heroic and the antiheroic, fail to capture the complexity of the reality presented by the use of drone technologies. In large part,
this is b
ecause they both consider only the agency of the technology and
fail to consider how human subjectivity and agency is transformed in using
the technology in ways that are more than mere reactions to the technology.
Yet they both capture relevant concerns about the use of lethal military force
and the development, acquisition, and use of these technologies. By examining the kinds of subjectivities these technologies are creating, this chapter
illuminates the transformations in how drone operators understand themselves, as members of the warrior class in modern society and as laborers
in a bureaucratized system of killing.
This chapter is largely concerned with the labor and psychological demands
placed on those who are d
oing the surveillance, analyzing the images, piloting
the drones, and making decisions to use lethal force. There are numerous
implications of these technologies for those who are observed as well, both
obvious and subtle—from the constant fear of an imminent strike from the
buzzing aircraft that circle overhead to the finger-pointing, rumors of tracking
devices, and killing of suspected informants in the aftermath of a strike.17 And
while these implications are important to my larger research project, they will
not be the focus of this chapter. I w
ill, however, consider the implications of the
new subject positions of drone operators to the larger discourse about using
weaponized drones and their role in risk management.
The obvious challenge to studying the subjectivity of drone operators
is that of access. Not only is their work systematically hidden from public
view but much of it is also protected by official security policies that prohibit drone operators from discussing the details of their work with anyone
who does not have the proper security clearances. Informally, they are also
strongly discouraged from discussing their work with journalists and academics, even in its general structure or outline. The only scientific researchers allowed access to these operators are employed by e ither the military
or the private contractors developing and evaluating the technologies. The
few instances in which journalists or academics have been allowed to interview drone operators or visit their workplaces have been limited to training
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centers or noncritical operations, and the names and identities of operators
have been withheld or obscured. While this is claimed to be for the protection of the drone operators, it is curious that these sorts of restrictions do
not apply to soldiers or pilots serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of
whom are interviewed in the press and who presumably have much more
exposure to threats and harm. Regardless of the motives behind this policy,
it presents a serious methodological challenge to gaining access to the work
of drone operators. As such, I will elaborate this subjectivity through a variety of diverse and partial sources, each with its own limitations. More
specifically, I w
ill merge my analysis of a series of military medical reports
with a journalistic account of a military inquiry into a friendly-fire drone
strike and a critical analysis of a short art film that combines an interview
with an actual drone operator with scripted scenes of an actor portraying
a drone operator.
Stress and the Cognitive Demands on Drone Operators
here are various dimensions in which we might consider the “subjectivT
ity” or “subject position” of drone operators as well as various discursive
attempts to frame and articulate the subjectivity of drone operators. These
subjectivities are interesting insofar as they become relevant to social and
political debates about the military effectiveness of drones as well as the
political, social, and moral implications of this form of warfare. One key
area of interest and debate has focused on the psychological stress experienced by drone operators. With the increasing use of military drone aircraft,
there have been numerous anecdotal reports of the increasing stress levels
of their operators.18 This additional stress has been attributed primarily to
two factors: the psychological complexity of moving back and forth, on a
daily basis, between remote combat operations in a foreign land and domestic and family life in the suburbs; and the intimate nature of the video
surveillance that t hese operators conduct. That is, they could be surveying a
potential target, such as a h
ouse or car, or tracking an individual for more
than eight hours a day, using high-resolution cameras that allow operators
to see and recognize the personal details and daily activities of their potential
targets. They are also required to continue to survey the target a fter attacking it, in order to confirm the deaths of the targets and any civilians nearby.
This intimacy, it has been suggested, puts greater emotional stress on drone
operators than on individuals in other types of combat roles.19
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Recently, there have been several medical and occupational psychology
studies commissioned by the Pentagon and nato to investigate how and why
the people who inhabit the new subject positions of drone operators are
experiencing higher levels of stress than other combat duty assignments.20
Collectively, these scientific studies confirm some aspects of the anecdotal
reports and disconfirm o
thers. For the most part, they do find much higher
levels of stress among drone operators than other civilian and military jobs.
However, this stress was reported as primarily due to the massive increases
in the use of these drones, placing greater labor demands on the relatively
small number of pilots and analysts who must meet these demands. In this
sense, the stress is perceived to be the predictable result of overwork rather
than the peculiarities of the subject position. Yet there are other significant and interesting details within these studies that warrant more careful
scrutiny and analysis and that point to the particular nature of the subject
positions created by remote-controlled killing as being both unique and
stressful. This chapter will thus seek to contextualize these studies into a
larger framework for understanding the changing nature of the professional
and psychological subjectivity of combatants placed in the roles of remote-
control killing using drones.
The increased use of drones and its incumbent psychological impact
on operators and implications for military strategy and foreign policy together raise a complex series of questions about the ethics and values of
warriors, the value and nature of military interventions in contemporary
international relations, the use of lethal force by states, and the labor of
killing as performed by combatants. In many ways, the ascendancy of the
drone as the weapon of choice in the early twenty-first century is the result
of its perceived ability to reduce the costs and the risks, both political and
economic, of collecting intelligence and using lethal force against remote
and sparse enemies. As such, it has come to be seen as the politically ideal
military weapon for the “global war on terror.” Much like precision-guided
munitions (pgms) a decade earlier, which greatly lowered the cost-per-target
of bombing, drones greatly reduce the costs of aerial surveillance, close air
support, and other high-demand military missions. And also like pgms, they
raise a moral question of the practical implications of reducing the costs of
using lethal force—by reducing collateral damage and its political costs as
well as the economic cost of any given strike mission. The worry is that they
enable increased use of lethal force in the form of more missions and longer
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targeting lists, ultimately leading to a greater overall lethal impact on both
combatants and civilians, and may also influence the choice of strategies, or
continued use of strategies, such as targeted killings. Drones lower the po
litical costs of losing U.S. personnel in two powerful ways. Primarily this lies
in their ability to lower the number of casualties, or the risk of such casualties, among pilots and sensor operators, thus reducing the political damage
that such U.S. casualties might cause. They also reduce the severity of any
international crises stemming from the loss of the aircraft or capture of U.S.
forces. This was demonstrated clearly with Iran’s capturing of a stealth U.S.
drone flying over its territory,21 which might have been a much more severe
crisis for the United States had a pilot also been captured (as Francis Gary
Powers was when his u-2 spy plane crashed in the Soviet Union in 1960).
While drones are often referred to as “unmanned vehicles,” this term obscures the reality of the human labor involved in operating these remotely
piloted aircraft. The reality is that, like traditional manned aircraft, drones
require extensive maintenance and a significant number of technical specialists to keep them in the air and flight-ready as well as to arm them
with munitions or remove unused munitions a fter a mission. Often these
ground crews are also responsible for launching and landing the aircraft
from airfields close to the area of operation, passing control back and forth
to the remote pilots in Nevada and other locations, mostly in the continental United States. The military demands round-the-clock combat air patrols
(caps), and there is always a demand for more. Often a single cap will
involve more than one crew change of drone operators (i.e., multiple labor
shifts), as the Predator drone can fly for up to eighteen hours. As soon as the
drone lands, it is serviced, refueled, and rearmed by ground crews and then
launched again. A single Predator drone requires eighty service personnel
to keep it operational.
What the military considers the “operators” is a relatively small group of
individuals who typically work in a ground control station (gcs) at a g reat
distance from the drone’s area of flight operation and often at a g reat distance from the drone’s launch and recovery air base. These operator crews
vary depending on the particular type of drone and sometimes even the mission. This chapter is concerned primarily with the “large and lethal” drones
(the mq-1 Predator and the mq-9 Reaper). For these drones, the operator
crews consist of three p
eople, with separate roles but often overlapping
tasks and responsibilities. The “pilot” is an officer who is in command of
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the crew and in control of the aircraft, though much of the aircraft’s a ctual
maneuvering is done by automated systems. The “sensor operator” is not
an officer but an enlisted service member who is primarily in charge of
the various cameras, radars, and sensors onboard the aircraft and also responsible for targeting the weapons and guiding missiles in-flight. The final
member of the crew is the “mission intelligence coordinator,” whose main
duty is to communicate with intelligence analysts and various databases,
to manage the communications of the other crew members, and to verify
information and assist in understanding and interpreting the intelligence
being gathered by the drone.22
The tighter coupling of surveillance and the decisions to use lethal force,
as is found in weaponized drones, place new and unique cognitive demands
on drone operators. While in traditional air operations, which largely
separated the gathering of intelligence from the use of lethal force, operators w
ere able to focus on specialized tasks and avoid the distractions and
demands of related tasks. A target was a target, and a pilot’s job was to
correctly identify it and destroy it. Selecting the target was someone else’s
job. A drone pilot, in consultation with the sensor operator and the mission intelligence coordinator, must now consider w
hether a potential target
is in fact a valid target. The drone operators are much more aware of the
complexities of making that judgment and the uncertainties inherent in it,
and they ultimately share in the responsibility for any mistakes made. An
operator will usually need to get permission to use lethal force from a
superior officer, but depending on the “rules of engagement,” there may
be circumstances in which they are authorized to make that determination themselves. Similarly, sensor operators are much more aware of the
consequences of their intelligence estimations and judgments as well as the
operational pressures of the mission, which in traditional air operations
would have been much more remote. And while the role of the mission
intelligence coordinator has not changed much in its description, the reality
of its practice has gone from preflight briefings and occasional interactions
during a combat mission to a real-time interaction with the pilot and the
sensor operator in a fast-paced multimedia and social media environment
of intelligence gathering and killing.
As a result of this transformation, the traditional compartmentalization
and separation of intelligence analysis and interpretation, as well as target designation and killing, has been broken down and reconfigured. This
places greater psychological demands on all three roles because it becomes
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more difficult to shift responsibility to others or to ignore the consequences
of one’s own decisions and actions. Surprisingly, perhaps, the military studies found that this was not the largest source of stress among drone operators. Indeed, combat as a source of stress was not found to be significantly
different for drone operators than for other combat-related military
jobs, thus dispelling one of the speculated c auses of anecdotal reports of
high stress among drone operators. Yet this is perhaps only a result of the
assumptions made by these studies and the bias in self-reporting, within
which operators find it easier and more acceptable to discuss the stresses
of their careers than to discuss the stresses of combat and killing. To better
understand the new forms of labor experienced by drone operators, I turn
now to an analysis of each role in turn.
Pilots
The demands of remote operating these drones have transformed each of
the three crew roles relative to comparable roles in traditional manned aircraft. In a traditional crew, the aircraft itself would typically contain only
a pilot, whose primary duty would be the constant hands-on control of
the aircraft, along with operating and interpreting multiple radar and electronic warning systems and visual identification tasks with the unassisted
eye. They are also responsible for maintaining communication with a flight
operations center and commanding officers who give authorization for the
use of lethal force in strike missions, the sensor operator, and the mission
intelligence coordinator. While the pilots in traditional missions were in
control of the aircraft and the release of the weapons, they rarely saw their
target for any length of time prior to releasing their weapons b
ecause they
traveled at high speeds and for relatively short periods of time. In most
manned combat missions, the target is simply a set of geographic coordinates that w
ere obtained from another source, such as soldiers on the
ground, an aircraft or satellite up above, or the outcome of the analysis of
multiple intelligence sources. Traditional pilots also rarely remained close
to a target to observe the consequences of their attack, a task called “battle
damage assessment” that was often given to unarmed surveillance aircraft
or soldiers on the ground. This is very different from what ground-based
drone pilots experience.
An air force study on drone-operator burnout and stress lists eleven
duties for drone pilots, covering a broad range of piloting, surveillance,
targeting, and b
attle damage assessment tasks.23 The study also notes that
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these tasks must be conducted in a very complex environment of mediating technologies:
An additional challenge related to piloting the aircraft is the demand
to attend to and interpret visual and auditory data from several
sources to sustain situational and spatial awareness. Specifically, pi
lots are required to multitask and sustain vigilance to multiple forms
of input from the aircraft, other aircrew, and military personnel
(e.g., ground forces). These multiple tasks include translating two-
dimensional imagery into mental representations while performing
numerical calculations for maneuvering the aircraft. It is important
to note that despite the automated nature of the mq-1 Predator and
mq-9 Reaper during certain phases of flight, the pilot must manually
maneuver the aircraft for deployment of weapons, b
attle damage assessment, strategic positioning for surveillance and reconnaissance,
avoiding bad weather, and controlling the aircraft during equipment
or system failures. For effective and efficient operations, the pilot
also works closely with the [sensor operator], mission intelligence
coordinator, and other military personnel on the ground and in the
air for identification and discrimination of targets and deployment of
weapons. . . . The pilot must draw from an inherent set of cognitive
aptitudes and personality traits to successfully master a wide knowledge and skill set.24
While many of t hese tasks are similar to t hose of traditional pilots, much of
the new complexity lies in working “closely with the sensor operator, mission intelligence coordinator, and other military personnel.” This kind of
interpersonal communication and coordination involves a variety of tasks
that require the pilot to become a very sophisticated information processor.
The pilot must interpret a variety of pieces of information from various
sources, which are in turn mediated by various technologies and interfaces,
and must both issue and receive commands as well as conduct analyses and
make complex decisions in consultation with a variety of other people. In
short, the pilot must multitask to an extraordinary degree. This complexity
will be explored in greater detail below in discussing the role of the mission
intelligence coordinator, whose job is to coordinate the communications
with personnel outside the drone crew.
In addition to the information and communications complexity of pilots,
they also have significant visual-motor skill demands. These were examined
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in some detail in a 2006 study that assessed the medical review requirements on drone pilots.25 On the basis of the complexity of the tasks they
are required to do, the study recommended that there should be a specialized set of medical standards for evaluating potential drone pilots. From a
medical perspective, drone pilots fall somewhere between traditional pilots
and traditional ground operations staff. This is not so surprising considering that “sudden incapacitation” of a drone pilot may not have the severe
consequences that it might for a traditional pilot due to the many automatic
flight controls, though it may still be more severe than the incapacitation of
someone not in direct control of a massive piece of flying military hardware.
But a closer reading of this medical study reveals that the “new demands”
placed on pilots are primarily the number of distractions they are subject
to in the form of information and communications media. In particular, the
study recommends a test that combines the traditional visual-motor skill
task with a difficult cognitive task requiring shifts in attention and memory
recall (simulating the complex and dynamic information environment of the
drone cockpit). That is, while the overall visual-motor skills of drone pilots
are less demanding than those of traditional pilots, there are significantly
more cognitive information-processing demands placed on drone pilots, and
the study recommends testing these skills in potential drone pilots.
It is also important to note that the stress studies found that one of the
most significant sources of stress for pilots stemmed from their frustration
and difficulty with the computer interfaces and the design of the gcs, or drone
cockpit.26 The poor design of user interfaces was also cited as a key factor
contributing to “human errors” by an earlier comprehensive study of all the
reported “mishaps” involving drones up to 2005.27 Mishaps are any accidents resulting in property damage in excess of $20,000 or h
uman casualties. It is worth noting that this study found that approximately 80 percent
of the mishaps attributed to human error were actually the result of poorly
designed interfaces, insufficient training in the gcs systems, or both. There
is a long tradition of ascribing the responsibility from the failures of poorly
designed interfaces to the humans rather than the interfaces.28 We should
similarly recognize that when h
uman errors are attributed to stress, a significant amount of that stress is in fact coming from the design of technology.
Sensor Operators
Sensor operators are essentially sophisticated camera operators, though instead of a tripod, dolly, or crane, their cameras are mounted in articulated pods
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in the nose and belly of a drone. These cameras provide very high-resolution
video streams from the visible spectrum as well as thermal infrared imagery
and sophisticated radio frequency imaging such as synthetic aperture radar.
While the first generation of Predator drones carried a single cluster of instruments that could point in a single direction, newer models carry the
Gorgon Stare system that can follow twelve independent ground locations,
each with its own video feed (from one of the sensors), and the argus-is
(Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System)
for wide-area persistent surveillance, giving them the capability of following thirty independently controlled video streams from a single drone.29 In
addition to controlling the sensors collecting these video streams, sensor
operators are also involved in monitoring the content of t hose streams, interpreting them, and offering opinions to the pilot and mission intelligence
officer as to their meaning.
According to the burnout and stress study, while the sensor operator
need not fly the drone, he or she still requires a set of sophisticated visual-
motor and cognitive skills in order to accomplish the eleven duties.30 These
are primarily the cognitively demanding tasks of visual analysis and its contextualization within mission objectives and dynamic events:
As can be surmised from [the list of sensor operator duties], this enlisted aircrew position requires a person to visually discriminate and
synthesize vari
ous images and complex data on several electronic
screens while maintaining heightened vigilance to numerous sources
of visual and auditory information necessary for sustaining situational
and spatial awareness. . . . The sensor operator must also effectively
communicate with aircrew to report the identification and discrimination of targets and to assist in the deployment of weapons . . . [and]
sustain visual targeting during and following the employment of weapons to ensure accuracy and damage assessment. This task includes visually observing the destruction of fixed and moving objects (such as
buildings and cars), as well as the wounding and death of human combatants. Moreover, the sensor operator must be attentive to several
procedural checklists and processes with advanced computer systems
while simultaneously translating two-dimensional information from
video screens into four-dimensional mental imagery and spatial analyses . . . in a confined environment with specific rules of engagement,
tactics, and techniques.31
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It is clear from this description that the job of the sensor operator is far more
demanding and complicated than that of a traditional image analyst whose
main responsibility is mostly limited to just one of these duties: “detecting, analyzing and discriminating between valid and invalid targets using
sar [synthetic aperture radar], electro-optical, low-light, and infrared
full-motion video imagery, and other active or passive tracking systems.”
The study also elaborates on the c areer trajectory of these sensor operators. Many of them began as imagery analysts who were primarily trained
in interpreting images. N
eedless to say, they find the new responsibilities
involved in the direct control of the sensors, as well as the targeting decision
processes and weapons guidance, much more demanding than their more
traditional role in simply analyzing visual imagery, a task that they continue
to perform as drone sensor operators.
Mission Intelligence Coordinators
While the researchers in the medical studies of burnout among drone operators conducted interviews with a significant number of mission intelligence coordinators, they do not describe the role or stresses of this crew
member as explicitly as they do for pilots and sensor operators. It is thus
more difficult to analyze just how their subjectivities have been shaped
by the weaponization of drones and the bureaucratization of remote killing. However, it seems reasonable that they would experience most of the
same forms of stress as other members of the drone crew, along with some
forms specific to their specialized role. While their tasks often intersect
and overlap with t hose of the pilot and sensor operator, the mission intelligence coordinator is the h
uman interface between computer databases of
intelligence information containing archived data and analyses as well as
the person responsible for coordinating with human intelligence analysts
at remote locations in real time through audio communications and text
messaging.
Perhaps the best way to develop an understanding of what mission intelligence coordinators do and their subject position is to examine a journalistic account of a friendly fire incident reported in the Los Angeles Times
in 2011.32 Because this incident resulted in the accidental deaths of Marine
Staff Sgt. Jeremy Smith and Navy Hospitalman Benjamin D. Rast, it was
subject to significantly more scrutiny than most drone missions, including
an official inquiry conducted by the Pentagon:
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The 381-page report, which has not been released, concludes that the
Marine officers on the scene and the Air Force crew controlling the
drone from half a world away were unaware that analysts watching
the firefight unfold via live video at a third location had doubts about
the targets’ identity. The incident closely resembles another deadly
mistake involving a Predator in early 2009. In that attack, at least 15
Afghan civilians w
ere killed after a Predator crew mistook them for
a group of Taliban preparing to attack a U.S. special forces unit. In
that case, analysts located at Air Force Special Operations Command
in Florida who were watching live battlefield video from the aircraft’s
high-altitude cameras also had doubts about the target. Their warnings that c hildren were present were disregarded by the drone operator and by an Army captain, who authorized the airstrike.33
Within the team of drone operators, it is the role and responsibility of the mission intelligence coordinator to manage the complex streams of communications between the drone pilot, the sensor operator, superior officers, troops
on the ground, and the host of analysts at other locations. In this friendly fire
case, these communications broke down with tragic consequences:
Smith, Rast and another Marine had separated from the others and
had taken cover behind a hedgerow, where they w
ere firing on insurgents in a cluster of nearby buildings. Infrared cameras on the
Predator overhead had picked up heat signatures of the three men
and detected muzzle flashes as they fired their weapons at insurgents.
Air Force analysts who were watching the live video in Terre Haute,
Indiana, noted that the gunfire appeared aimed away from the other
Marines, who w
ere behind the three. The analysts reported that gunshots were “oriented to the west, away from friendly forces,” the Pentagon report says. But the Predator pilot in Nevada and the Marine
commanders on the ground “were never made aware” of the analysts’
assessment. The analysts, who communicated with the Predator pi
lot via a written chat system, w
ere never certain who Smith and Rast
were. At one point, the analysts described the pair as “friendlies,” but
withdrew that characterization a few seconds later. They later wrote,
“Unable to discern who personnel were.”34
Unfortunately, in this case, the communications w
ere taking place directly between the pilot and the remote analysts, via a text-based chat ap-
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plication. In other words, the mission intelligence coordinator was failing to
coordinate their communications. Contributing to this failure was the fact
that the mission intelligence coordinator was a trainee, not yet fully skilled
in performing the responsibilities of that role:
Even a written assessment that the gunfire was aimed in the wrong
direction was not passed along to the pilot by the Mission Intelligence
Coordinator, a crew member responsible for relaying information to
the pilot, the report says. The coordinator was a trainee supervised
by a trainer. The report blames the attack on a fatal mix of poor
communications, faulty assumptions and “a lack of overall common
situational awareness.” It recommends that a Marine lieutenant and
two sergeants in Smith’s platoon be “formally counseled” and suggests detailed reviews of battlefield procedures, but it said no one
involved in the attack was “culpably negligent or derelict in their duties.” “The chain of events . . . was initiated by the on-scene ground
force commander’s lack of overall situational awareness and inability
to accurately communicate his friendly force disposition in relation to
the e nemy,” the report said. The report, which was originally classified secret and written by a Marine colonel, criticizes the analysts for
failing to make sure the pilot understood that the gunfire was aimed
away from the Marines. The analysts “should have been more assertive,” it says, and “should have persisted with their assessment u
ntil
the crew either accepted or refuted the assessment.”35
What becomes apparent in this breakdown of the system of people and
technologies that constitute drone operations is the constructed nature of
“situational awareness.” This concept is often assumed to be something that
simply exists, u
ntil it is missing or mistaken. Rather, situational awareness—
the overall awareness of what is happening in a given situation—is the result of deliberate efforts, labor, and communications of a complex team.
Moreover, the fact that the members of this team all have access to high-
resolution imagery of the same situation does not mean that they all “see”
the same thing. The visual content and interpretation of the visual scene
are the products of analysis and negotiation among the team as well as
the context given by the situational awareness—which is itself constructed.
And while the team may often come to different interpretations of the same
situation, in most cases of failure such as this one, they mistakenly believed
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that they had come to the same conclusions, or failed to communicate their
alternate interpretations.
Through the absence of an effective mission intelligence coordinator in this
case, we can begin to piece together the unique subject position that the coordinators are meant to occupy. As the only crew members not directly involved
in controlling the drone or its surveillance sensors, their job is to operate
the complex network of databases and communications with remotely located intelligence analysts who are viewing the same video streams as the
drone crew. However, b
ecause they are physically located within the ground
control station, they are in a superior position to assess the “situational
awareness” of the drone crew as well as to second-guess and correct their
interpretations and judgments. This is not the case for those remotely located analysts:
The analysts in Indiana told investigators that they did not believe
they should intervene to block an airstrike if U.S. troops w
ere possibly in danger, even if they had doubts about the targets. When U.S.
troops w
ere under fire, the analysts told investigators, “they were
to adopt a non-interference role, unless they observed an imminent
violation” of the laws of war or w
omen and children were present,
the report said. The email chat system also contributed to the breakdown in communications, investigators said. After the Afghan civilians w
ere mistakenly targeted in early 2009, the Air Force began
installing equipment so drone video analysts could talk directly with
drone pilots. The new equipment was not in place at the Indiana base
in April, however.36
So we can see again that the technologies that deliver information and
mediate communications are clearly also a source of “stress” for mission
intelligence coordinators. Indeed, we can see more clearly how the “frustrations” with a technology can lead directly to system failures that result in
friendly and civilian deaths.
While the responsibilities of coordinating communications and information are not new, the kind of subjectivity engendered by new communications technologies certainly is. As mentioned in the discussion of pilots,
a major source of stress for drone operators is the poor design of their
interfaces. Here we see a Pentagon report explicitly blaming the design of
the e-mail chat system for contributing to the breakdown in communication that led to t hese mistaken deaths. Moreover, it is precisely the physical
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presence of the crew members, which is acknowledged to be so important
to situational awareness, that has been radically transformed h
ere. That is,
by removing the drone operators from the combat theater, they are now
completely dependent on the information provided by their mediating technologies in order to reach their decisions. So too are the analysts in Indiana,
and this introduces yet another layer of remote mediation. In the context
of such dependence, the interpretation and meaning of the images, the actions of soldiers, civilians, and suspected insurgents, and indeed the very
identification of a figure in the image as one of those categories, is an active
process that is shaped, influenced, and constituted by these mediated practices. What we find is a pilot in Nevada having a live chat with an imagery
analyst in Indiana in order to select a target in Afghanistan on which they
will fire a deadly laser-guided missile. Within such a mediation, shared
understanding can be difficult to achieve, and misunderstandings and misinterpretations are likely to occur. The real work of the mission intelligence
coordinator can thus be seen as coordinating these communications, keeping miscommunications in check, and correcting misunderstandings in real
time.
Now that we have a clearer sense of the kinds of labor that drone operators perform, we now turn to a consideration of how their new subjectivities are related to their experience of stress and burnout.
Stress, Burnout, and PTSD
It is important to note that the two later military research reports on drone
operator stress focus on what they call “burnout.”37 The subclinical diagnosis of burnout has emerged as a psychological condition that lies between
the normal “stress” of day-to-day military work and the clinical diagnosis
of posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd), which entails possible medical interventions, loss of duty assignment, discharge from the military, and the
lifelong impacts of a mental health disorder, including strained social relations, medical treatments and expenses, and limited employment opportunities in civilian life. As a medico-bureaucratic compromise, burnout can
be severe enough to warrant managerial interventions, such as a temporary
relief of duties (some time off to rest), without the grave professional and
medical interventions that follow from ptsd (permanent loss of duty assignment or discharge from the military). That is, burnout is considered a
normal reaction to high levels of stress rather than a clinical or pathological
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reaction to such stress. It is perceived as being alleviated through a contextual change (removing the stress) rather than as a psychological condition
that requires treatment of the patient (reforming their mental life). The escalation of stress from an occupational issue to a medical issue also carries
many implications, including dismissal from duty:
According to usaf [U.S. Air Force] aeromedical policy, performing
and operating in a high-demand, high-operational, and high-precision
aviation-related position requires an optimal level of physical and
psychological functioning. Although operators may be perceived to
be generally healthy, if they suffer from a physical or psychological
condition that has the potential to lead to degradation in the perfor
mance of their duties, then they are disqualified from such aviation-
related operations. A general reason for holding operators to such high
aeromedical standards is due to the perceived risk that subtle decrements in health can have on elevating the risk for an aviation mishap
in which the threat to human life, national security, foreign relations,
military operations, and loss of a multimillion dollar aircraft is often
high. Although occupational burnout is not a categorical psychiatric
diagnosis, it stands to reason that such a condition leads to perfor
mance degradation and, if untreated, may lead to significant emotional
difficulties (e.g., anxiety and depression).38
By framing burnout as an occupational category instead of a medical category, it allows superior officers and support staff to try to manage the severe
stress of drone operators without losing their skilled labor, which is in such
high demand.
It is here where we begin to see the Taylorist aims of these studies most
clearly. The studies, which are only indirectly concerned about the stress
and psychological health of drone operators, are primarily concerned with
attaining the “optimal level of physical and psychological functioning” of
the drone operators as a means of maximizing their labor productivity and
minimizing the risk of costly mishaps. In this sense, the health of the drone
operators is not an end but a means to an end. There is also a clear distinction being made between psychological stress that interferes with job per
formance (burnout) and psychological stress that interferes with daily life
or mental health (ptsd).
In one study, the researchers found that much of the reported stress was
due to operators’ long work hours and the stresses of late-night shift work:
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“The most commonly cited stressors accentuating occupational stress for remote piloted aircraft operators included long hours (50+ hours a week), shift
work, human-machine interface difficulties (ergonomic design of equipment
and gcs), inefficiencies in computer-based input and command procedures,
and difficulty juggling the demands of personal and domestic life with military operations.”39 Right after long hours, which might reasonably apply
to any demanding form of labor, we find difficulties with the technology itself
as the leading source of stress. This includes the h
uman–machine interface
and its effects on cognition, its ergonomic design and effects on the body, and
frustration with the inefficiency of the rules and procedures governing the
bureaucratized labor they perform, both those imposed by machines and
those imposed by command procedures, protocols, and regulations. Earlier
studies of medical review standards mentioned above noted that one of the
most difficult aspects of drone operators’ jobs was the coordination of precise hand-eye tasks along with complex verbal tasks. This may cause one to
wonder which side of the human–machine interface is failing or to blame
one side (the human or the machine) as inadequate, as in the report on the
friendly fire incident above, which blames the analysts for not speaking up
while merely noting that their communications technologies were making
that difficult.
After these issues, the reports focus on the stresses that have long been
the focus of post-Taylorist scientific labor management, such as the quality
of working life movement’s focus on ideals of job satisfaction, home life, and
career prospects.40 In its latest incarnations, productivity is sought by treating each individual in an organization as an “entrepreneur” who is constantly
striving to increase her own productivity and advance the goals of the organ
ization along with her own career. In this sense, these pilots have adopted the
subjectivity of an entrepreneur within the military hierarchy. While military
personnel have always sought promotions and better duty assignments, it is
rather startling that these medical studies found one of the largest sources
of occupational stress among drone operators coming not from combat,
or even from the technical challenges of flying an aircraft and conducting
operations halfway around the world, but from concerns over the future of
their careers. This was closely followed by the stresses of managing a family
life alongside a military career. A possible reason for this focus is that the
uncertainties of the “pilot as career entrepreneur” can be rectified through
organizational change, while the relief of other stresses requires far more
complex technological interventions and social changes.
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The career stress issue is an important one for understanding the subjectivity of drone operators in the broader context of military service. The first
generation of drone pilots was chosen from pilots already flying manned
aircraft. Second-generation drone pilots were initially trained in manned
aircraft but never given a manned flight duty. With the heavy demand for
drone pilots, the U.S. military is now training more of them than they are
training pilots for all types of manned aircraft combined. They are also
seeking to reduce the cost of that training by eliminating all manned aircraft flight training for f uture drone pilots—the U.S. Army has long trained
drone pilots without any manned aircraft experience while the U.S. Air
Force was more reluctant to do so. Thus, current trainees work primarily
on simulators and eventually real remote-operated aircraft but no longer fly
a manned plane in the course of their training.
Within the military hierarchy, and especially within the U.S. Air Force, being
a pilot carries a special, prestigious status and identity. It is expensive to train
pilots, and it is physically and mentally demanding to fly. Pilots are accordingly
seen as a distinct and privileged class within the military. Indeed, only they are
allowed to wear “flight wings” insignia on their uniform to designate them to
all as pilots. They are only allowed to wear t hese wings for as long as they are
certified to fly. Within the U.S. Air Force, only officers can be pilots, whereas
the other branches permit enlisted service members to fly some types of
aircraft. Initially, the U.S. Air Force did not grant pilot status, and wings
insignia, to drone pilots, at least not for their drone training and duties
alone. Because some drone pilots had wings before becoming drone operators, those that did not felt left out and perceived themselves as having a
significantly lower status. In this way, the lack of wings and full pilot status
for drone pilots led directly to one form of the “career stress” that Joseph
Ouma, Wayne Chappelle, and Amber Salinas discuss. That is, for those who
were manned aircraft pilots, moving to drones was seen as less prestigious
than flying manned aircraft, and thus such an assignment meant a lowering of both current status and future career prospects. It also made it more
difficult for them to acquire the flight time needed to keep their wings and,
with no clear career route to return to flying manned aircraft, it could mean
the eventual loss of their status as pilots. For those who came in without
pilot’s wings, there was little or no hope of ever getting them or the prestige
and status associated with wearing them.
In 2009 the U.S. Air Force recognized this problem and addressed it with
two major changes. First, it moved to recognize the hidden labor of drone
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operators by changing the official term for drones, which at the time was
“unmanned aerial vehicles,” b
ecause “unmanned” seemed to imply that
the systems were autonomous or did not have a crew or pilot. Rather, they
had a “remote” crew, and so the official term within the U.S. Air Force
is now “remotely piloted aircraft” (rpa). It is interesting to note that the
other service branches, in which pilot status is significant but not nearly
as much so, have retained the term uav. The U.S. Air Force also moved to
designate drone pilots with the status of full-fledged pilots by giving them
wing insignia for their uniforms, though they issued them special wings that
distinguish drone pilots from the pilots of manned aircraft. Whether these
moves ultimately served to alleviate the c areer stress of drone pilots is uncertain, but it was certainly a powerful symbolic gesture toward trying to instill
prestige status to their work.
The career stress of sensor operators was similar to that of drone pilots.
Many of them were initially trained as imagery analysts. Because the job
of drone sensor operator involves rather unique and demanding skills, it is
much more stressful than most imagery analysis jobs but lacks a clear c areer
path toward advancement and promotion afterward. That is, while most
image analysts could move up into more specialized fields of analysis, or to
more sophisticated image platforms like satellite imagery, drone sensor operators are not likely candidates for such assignments. And due to the high
demand for people to do the drone work, and their enlisted status, they are
unlikely to ever be promoted out of that duty assignment.
The family and geographic location demands cited by the studies as additional sources of stress among drone operators are interesting because these
are direct consequences of the remote operation of drones and also support
the popular perceptions that remote warfare is stressful because of the shift
between war zone and home life. If drone operators w
ere “in theater” or in
the aircraft, they would be based in Iraq, Kuwait, or Afghanistan and flying
their missions from t here. One of the perceived advantages of drones is that
they do not require this, which is a huge cost savings. But this appears to
come at a psychological price. While those who serve overseas often report
being homesick and missing their families, and families report the stress of
being without the service member, there are also psychological advantages to
physical presence in the war zone. First, one is much more aware of what it is
like to live in that place and its culture and society, as both a soldier and a civilian, which is difficult to understand from merely watching video streams.
Moreover, there is a shared sense of hardship and comradery among soldiers
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serving together. This allows them to connect to one another emotionally
and relate to a common shared experience, which offers a form of psychic
relief that does not require the intervention of medical professionals.
Drone operators, however, must return to their family lives each day.
This can mean killing insurgents remotely at night and taking the kids to
school the next morning. On the one hand, this means that all of the usual
stresses of home life are added to the stresses of work and combat. On the
other hand, it means constantly moving back and forth between ordinary
civilian life and military combat on a daily basis. For those who do experience combat stress, there is little chance that they would find comfort and
shared understanding among the civilian population, and there are many
powerful cultural forces within the military that would prevent them from
discussing it with military colleagues.41
While it might be surprising that the demands of f amily and career should
turn out to be more stressful than combat, we should take a moment to
consider the biases inherent in the methodology of these studies. One must
keep in mind that within military cultures, t here is an imperative to show
strength and hide weakness, especially emotional weakness. There is also
a taboo against acknowledging the stress of combat. A clinical diagnosis
of ptsd, or even anxiety or depression, can result in the end of one’s military
duty assignment or career, a discharge, and the stigma can even follow one
to the civilian world, with a lifelong medical condition and bills and limited
civilian employability. As such, it is difficult for drone operators to describe
or admit to experiencing combat-related stress. Even u
nder the conditions
of these studies, which provided anonymity to the operators, they are not
likely to discuss such experiences with a medical professional. In some cases,
they may have even been in denial of the existence of these kinds of stresses
in order to protect their military careers. The researchers admit as much in
one study:
Combat-related stressors were not rated as within the top sources
of stress among participants. Such a finding is helpful for line commanders and medical personnel in understanding occupational stress.
However, Chappelle et al. (2011) proposed that such a finding should
also be interpreted cautiously when considering individual operators.
It is likely that t here are Predator/Reaper operators who perceive the
deployment of weapons and exposure to live video feed of combat
(i.e., destruction/death of e nemy combatants and ground forces) as
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highly stressful even though it is not reported as the main source of
occupational stress.42
The medical studies also claim that drone operators suffer from ptsd at
similar rates as other combatants. This would mean that drone operators
experience ptsd at a rate of about 4–17 percent, which is the estimated
rate for units deployed to combat zones in the Iraq War.43 Given that they
interviewed over four hundred drone operators, it is statistically highly
unlikely that none of the subjects were actually experiencing or would
soon be diagnosed with ptsd. It seems more likely that they were simply
failing to report it to the researchers. It is likely that all forms of combat
stress were significantly avoided or underreported in the course of these
studies, as they are more generally. To get a better understanding of the
subjectivity of combat stress as experienced by drone operators, we must
turn to other sources.
5,000 Feet Is the Best
The artist and filmmaker Omer Fast’s submission to the 2011 Venice Biennale was a thirty-minute film titled 5,000 Feet Is the Best.44 The film consists
of a series of scripted scenes involving an actor intercut with a documentary
audio interview with a real drone operator that together offer insights and
reflections on the new subjectivities of drone operators. For the purposes of
this chapter, I w
ill accept the documentary portion of the film as being an
actual and accurate report of at least one individual operator’s description
of his own experiences. While the medical studies we have reviewed conducted such interviews, they did not reveal the content of those interviews
but merely summarized them. The film thus offers a more detailed insight,
if only into the experiences of a single operator.
Based on his description of his work, the documentary interview in the
film is with a sensor operator who describes what he has seen during his
five years of operating a Predator drone from an air base in Nevada. In
the course of the interview, he acknowledges that he currently suffers from
ptsd and left his assignment and the military as a result of it. While his
psychological condition may only be shared with a percentage of drone operators, his subjective experience of his work is certainly shared with most if
not all drone operators, or at least with Predator sensor operators operating
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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One aspect of that subjectivity is that of the voyeurism of surveillance from
high above. The drone operator tells us: “Five thousand feet is the best. We
love it when we are sitting at five thousand feet. You get more description,
plus at five thousand feet I mean, I can tell you what type of shoes you are
wearing, from a mile away. I can tell you what type of clothes the person
is wearing, if they have a beard, their hair color and everything else. So,
there are very clear cameras on board. We have the ir infrared, which we
can switch to automatically. That will pick up any heat signatures or cold
signatures.” He goes on to describe the strange world revealed by infrared
thermal imaging, from the white blossoms where p
eople sat down and then
left to the glowing beacons of lit cigarettes to the disturbed soil around
roadside bombs. In another vignette, the drone operator describes the stress
of remote killing:
Usually I w
ouldn’t get home until about ten o’clock in the morning,
jump in the shower, get some breakfast, play some video games for a
few hours, then try to sleep. A lot of guys over t here, believe it or not,
play video games in their f ree time. I guess that’s their way of unwinding. Mine w
ere a lot of role-playing games, flight simulators. I guess
Predator is similar to playing a video game, but playing the same video
game four years straight e very single day on the same level. One time I
just watched the same h
ouse for a month straight—for at least eleven
hours, every day, for a month. But then you have your moments where
there is a real emergency going on. And that is just where stress comes
into play. How do I hit that truck? And in what way do I hit that
truck? How far away should I put the missile to get the truck? So that
way I don’t have any damage to the surrounding buildings or to the
people or hurt anybody else’s life that is around there. And sometimes
I make mistakes.
In this account, we see some of the elements of the stresses of domestic
life and also the cognitive and interpretative challenges that make the job
stressful, according to the medical studies. It also addresses a popular idea
that drone operators are “PlayStation warriors” and treat their work like
a video game. While there are some similarities in terms of the interfaces
and activities, drone operations are usually much more boring and tedious,
with brief moments of incredible pressure and stress. And even for these
operators, video games can be a form of relaxation, a way of decompressing
from their work. Together this should make it clear that there is not a real
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danger that drone operators are confusing reality for a game or treating the
work lightly.
It is also clear that they take the responsibility of using lethal force seriously and fear making m
istakes. They do in fact make m
istakes, and the
killing of innocents is often cited as a source of ptsd. The drone operator
in the film goes on to describe some of the combat stress he experienced,
which is missing from the military medical studies:
I mean, there are horror sides to working Predator. You see a lot of
death. You know you see it all—as I said, I can tell you what kind of
shoes you are wearing from a mile away; it is pretty clear about every
thing else that is happening. I mean, t here came a point a fter five years
of doing this that I just had to think about all this loss of life that was a
direct result of me. I mean, there was a lot of personal stuff I had to go
through, and a lot of chaplains I had to talk to just because of that. And
the one f actor that we talked about that helped me was that if it w
asn’t
me who was doing it, then some new kid would be doing it, but worse.
I was twenty-six at the time. A lot of p
eople look at me like, how can
you have ptsd if you weren’t active in a war zone? Well, technically
speaking every single day I was active in a war zone. I mean, I may not
have been personally harmed but I was directly affecting p
eople’s lives
over there every single day. There is stress that comes with that, with
having to fire, with seeing some of the death, with seeing what is going
on, having anxiety, looking back at a certain situation or incident over
and over and over, you know, bad dreams, loss of sleep. You know, it’s
not like a video game; I c an’t switch it off. It’s always t here. There was
a lot of stress with that. They call it virtual stress.
The operator goes on to describe the first time he killed someone as a drone
operator. He says that it did not impact him immediately the first time he targeted a Hellfire missile at some insurgents who had planted a roadside bomb,
but soon a fter that the bad dreams started. We can see in this passage a hint of
how combat stress is also being managed in the boundaries between medical
and psychological interventions and other forms of intervention. While the
experiences described by the drone operator clearly constitute combat stress,
and he is eventually diagnosed with ptsd, for many years his stress is managed in a variety of ways other than medical intervention or psychological
treatment. For instance, rather than discuss his stress with a psychologist,
which might lead to a diagnosis and stigma along with therapy, he gets most
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of his emotional and psychological counseling through a chaplain. While
the military clergy are trained in dealing with combat stress, the methods
and options are much more limited than what medical treatment can offer.
While the chaplain provides the drone operator with a degree of counseling,
he is able to do so without threatening the operator’s job or military status.
In the long run, however, this counseling is not sufficient to prevent the ptsd
that later afflicts the operator.
Conclusion
The work of remote surveillance and killing that drone operators perform
is difficult, stressful, and exhausting. Even the U.S. Air Force has recognized
that this work deserves more respect than it often receives. Yet the military’s strategy in studying this labor is primarily targeted at optimizing its
efficiency. Toward this end, the U.S. military has incorporated elements of
the quality of working life movement and its concerns about quality of life
issues that affect job stress and performance, such as home life and satisfaction with geographic location, along with a conception of self-directed
entrepreneurialism within military c areers as a motivational strategy within
a professional, postconscription military. The military is thus conscientious
of developing c areer paths for striving drone operators to avoid these
jobs becoming stigmatized as a “dead end” and to thereby reduce the c areer
stress of the operators who perform them. Yet the remoteness of the work
and the contextual shifts between combat zone and domestic life continue
to present problems.
There are many complicated ethical issues raised by the management of
combat stress. While t here is a strong interest in managing the stress expe oing
rienced by combatants, as well as ptsd, the technological means for d
this may impose a greater moral distance between those making combat
decisions and further alienation from the lives of t hose directly affected by
those decisions. Further analysis may be able to determine the extent to
which many of the stresses of combat, and the bureaucratization of killing
enacted through the use of drones, are in fact being redirected, projected,
or simply denied by most drone operators. U
ntil then, it is clear that drone
technologies and the integration of surveillance with remote killing have
created new and complex forms of human–machine subjectivity.
The mythologies surrounding the use of lethal drones, both the heroic
and antiheroic, seem to fall short of the complexities of the new subjectivi-
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ties of drone operators. The heroic myth, that the technology enables more
precise use of lethal force and thus engenders a more ethical form of warfare,
is only partly true. What is true is that the technology is capable of more deliberate and precise use of force than some military technologies. But what
is also true is that the technology presents far more potential targets and
shapes the interpretations and determinations of targets in unpredictable
ways. It also puts far greater cognitive, moral, and emotional burdens on
drone operators, who must engage with increasingly complicated information and communications systems in order to make these determinations.
These burdens result in degrees of stress, burnout, and ptsd greater than in
other military and combat operations. In other words, the work of surveillance and killing, once compartmentalized, isolated, and hidden, is now
becoming formalized, collaborative, and visible within the ground control
stations of lethal drones. Within this process of the bureaucratization of surveillance and killing, we find the mediating technologies as both enablers of
these new bureaucratic forms of labor and themselves sources of stress and
breakdown. This is in part because of poor design and misguided assumptions about how these systems will be used and the psychological needs of
their users. But it is also because these technologies have exposed the hidden
labor by failing to support it.
Some, but not all, aspects of the antiheroic myth are also proven by t hese
studies of drone operators. Drone operators do not treat their jobs in the
cavalier manner of a video game, but they do recognize the strong resemblance between the two. Many drone operators are often also video game
players in their free time and readily acknowledge certain similarities in
the technological interfaces of each. Yet the drone operators are very much
aware of the reality of their actions and the consequences they have on the
lives, and deaths, of the people they watch via video streams from half a
world away, as they bear witness to the violence of their own lethal decisions. What they are less aware of, which is revealed by a careful analysis
of the various accounts of their work surveyed in this chapter, is that their
work involves the active construction of interpretations. The bodies and
actions in the video streams are not simply “given” as soldiers, civilians,
and possible insurgents—they are actively constructed as such. And in the
process of this construction, the technology plays both an enabling and a
mediating role. I use the term mediating here to indicate that it is a role
of translation, not of truth or falsity directly but of transformation and
filtering. On the one hand, there is the thermal imaging that provides a
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view into a mysterious and hidden world of relative temperatures. And thus
these drone technologies offer a vision that contains more than the human
alone could ever see. On the other hand, we can see that the lived world
of human experience, material practices, social interactions, and cultural
meanings that they are observing are difficult to properly interpret and fully
understand from a lofty perch, and that even the highest resolution camera
cannot resolve the uncertainties and misinterpretations. There is a limit to
the fidelity that mediation itself can provide, insofar as it cannot provide
genuine social participation and direct engagement. This applies both to
surveillance and visuality, which is necessarily incomplete, but also to the
limited forms of action and engagement that mediating technologies permit.
While soldiers on the ground can use their hands to administer medical aid
or push a stalled car as easily as they can hold a weapon, the drone operator can only observe and choose to kill or not to kill. Within this limited
range of action, meaningful social interaction is fundamentally reduced to
sorting the world into friends, enemies, and potential enemies—as no other
categories can be meaningfully pursued.
Notes
A version of this chapter appeared as “The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators,” Social Semiotics 232
(2013): 196–224.
1. Sifton, “A Brief History of Drones”; Singer, Wired for War.
2. Department of Defense, “Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap”; Mayer, “The
Predator War”; Sifton, “A Brief History of Drones.”
3. New America Foundation, “Year of the Drone.”
4. Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “Covert War on Terror.”
5. Department of Defense, “Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, fy2011–2036.”
6. For concerns about domestic uses, see Stanley and Crump, “Protecting Privacy from
Aerial Surveillance.”
7. Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds.
8. M. Weber, Economy and Society.
9. M. Weber, Economy and Society.
10. For the former, see Bourdieu, Distinction; and Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. For the latter, see Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class; Foucault,
Discipline and Punish; Rose, Governing the Soul; Rose, Inventing Our Selves; C. Taylor,
Sources of the Self; T. Miller, The Well-Tempered Self; and Scott, Seeing Like a State.
11. P. Miller and Rose, “Production, Identity and Democracy”; Asaro, “Transforming
Society by Transforming Technology.”
12. Star and Strauss, “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice.”
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13. Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds.
14. They are also being used extensively by the Central Intelligence Agency for targeted
killings, but since these operations are almost completely opaque to public scrutiny
and academic study, and outside the view of even the military studies on which
my research draws, I will say little about these admittedly significant operations;
Department of Defense, “Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, fy2011–2036”;
Singer, Wired for War.
15. See, for example, Strawser, “Moral Predators.”
16. Plotnick, “Predicting Push-Button Warfare.”
17. Wilson, “In Gaza, Lives Shaped by Drones.”
18. Singer, Wired for War.
19. Singer, Wired for War.
20. Tvaryanas, “The Development of Empirically-Based Medical Standards”; Chappelle, McDonald, and King, “Psychological Attributes Critical to the Perfor
mance”; Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas, “Facets of Occupational Burnout”;
Chappelle, Salinas, and McDonald, “Psychological Health Screening.”
21. Peterson and Faramarzi, “Iran Hijacked US Drone.”
22. Chappelle, McDonald, and King, “Psychological Attributes Critical to the
Performance.”
23. Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas, “Facets of Occupational Burnout.”
24. Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas, “Facets of Occupational Burnout.”
25. “In particular, ground-based controller duty standards lacked sufficient rigor to
address many of [the] concerns associated with current uas operations while flying
duty standards were unnecessarily restrictive. Therefore, it is recommended a separate set of medical standards be created for career uas pilots flying large or weaponized uass”; Tvaryanas, “The Development of Empirically-Based Medical Standards.”
26. Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas, “Facets of Occupational Burnout.”
27. W. Thompson, Tvaryanas, and Constable, “U.S. Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
Mishaps.”
28. Hutchins, “How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds”; D. Woods and Shattuck, “Distant Supervision–Local Action.”
29. Deptula, Air Force Unmanned Aerial System.
30. Ouma and Salinas, “Facets of Occupational Burnout.”
31. Ouma and Salinas, “Facets of Occupational Burnout.”
32. Zucchino and Cloud, “U.S. Deaths in Drone Strike”; Cloud, “Anatomy of an Afghan
War Tragedy.”
33. Zucchino and Cloud, “U.S. Deaths in Drone Strike.”
34. Zucchino and Cloud, “U.S. Deaths in Drone Strike.”
35. Zucchino and Cloud, “U.S. Deaths in Drone Strike.”
36. Zucchino and Cloud, “U.S. Deaths in Drone Strike.”
37. Chappelle, McDonald, and King, “Psychological Attributes Critical to the Perfor
mance”; Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas, “Facets of Occupational Burnout.”
38. Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas, “Facets of Occupational Burnout.”
39. Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas, “Facets of Occupational Burnout.”
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40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
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P. Miller and Rose, “Production, Identity and Democracy.”
Kime, “Study.”
Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas, “Facets of Occupational Burnout.”
Richardson, Frueh, and Acierno, “Prevalence Estimates of Combat-Related ptsd.”
It can be viewed in a linear form on the Internet; see http://www.gbagency.fr/en/42
/Omer-Fast/#!/Works/tab-55.
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11/12/2015
The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike | Boston Review
The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike
Nasser Hussain
October 16, 2013
http://bostonreview.net/world/hussain-drone-phenomenology
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The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike | Boston Review
“The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead.
The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.” This account of what a drone feels and sounds like from
the ground comes from David Rohde, a journalist who was kidnapped and held by the Taliban for seven months in 2008. Yet this
kind of report rarely registers in debates in the United States over the use of drones. Instead these debates seem to have reached an
http://bostonreview.net/world/hussain-drone-phenomenology
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The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike | Boston Review
impasse. Opponents of drone strikes say they violate international law and have caused unacknowledged civilian deaths. Proponents
insist they actually save the lives of both U.S. soldiers, who would otherwise be deployed in dangerous ground operations, and of
civilians, because of the drone’s capacity to survey and strike more precisely than combat. If the alternative is a prolonged and
messy ground operation, the advantage of drone strikes in terms of casualties is indisputable, and it is not my intention to dispute it
here.
But the terms of this debate give a one-sided view of both the larger financial and political costs of drones, as well as the less than
lethal but nonetheless chronic and intense harm continuous strikes wage on communities. This myopia restricts our understanding
of the full effects of drones; in order to widen our vision, I provide a phenomenology of drone strikes, examining both how the world
appears through the lens of a drone camera and the experience of the people on the ground. What is it like to watch a drone’s
footage, or to wait below for it to strike? What does the drone’s camera capture, and what does it occlude?
•••
Contemporary drones introduce an unparalleled capacity to see and survey. The use of unmanned aircraft dates back at least to the
Vietnam War, and missiles have long been used to target individuals or discrete locations. They started out as fairly basic
surveillance aircraft, first used in the mid-1990s in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, but by early 2001, drones were equipped with
firepower. Since their first appearances in the war on terror, in the first two years after 9/11, drones have been regarded as a
distinctly global resource, the means by which the war on terrorism “goes global.” The first-generation Predator, pressed into
service after 9/11 in Afghanistan, was armed with two Hellfire missiles that had a limited range of 400 nautical miles. All this
changed in 2007 with the second generation Reaper: equipped with four Hellfire missiles as well as two 500lb laser guided bombs,
and able to fly over 16 hours fully armed for up to 3200 nautical miles, this new drone is the “first purpose built hunter-killer
UAV.” The Reaper also has an all-weather, day or night radar, linked to a sensor ball that houses image-intensified and infrared
cameras. And even this impressive surveillance ability will pale in comparison to the new generation drone called Gorgon Stare,
which will increase the single video feed of the Reaper to 12 and eventually to 65 video feeds, so that “a drone which now stares
down at a single house or vehicle could keep constant watch on nearly everything that moves within an area of 1.5 square miles. The
year after that, the capability will double to 3 square miles.”
In addition to their military prowess, the remote operation of drones from control centers thousands of miles away has made them
legendary, the stuff of science fiction. The pilots who command the drone and fire its missiles do so based on a real-time video feed.
So no matter how expansive the drone’s vision, or how natural the images it relays seem, all this seeing and killing is based on what
can be seen through a camera. Drone strike footage is not a film in any common sense of the term, but it is still video footage, shot
from a camera and visible on a screen, and its filmic qualities demand attention.
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The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike | Boston Review
What the Camera Can See
There is a longstanding intimacy between air power and the visual field. Aerial vision, from the primitive conditions of pilots flying
bi-planes over deserts and mountains, to the infrared camera footage from a drone’s eye, belong to what Martin Jay calls the “scopic
regimes of modernity.” Paul Virilio’s classic War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception was written before the advent of drones,
but its general argument is more applicable today than ever. For Virilio, the story of twentieth-century war is inseparable from
evolving cinema techniques. From telescopic viewfinders atop rifles to sophisticated cybernetic cameras, optical devices mediate
and produce the act of taking aim, aligning an imaginary axis from eye to object. As Virilio explains, “the act of taking aim is a
geometrification of looking, a way of technically aligning ocular perception along an imaginary axis that used to be known in French
as the ‘faith line’ (ligne de foi). . . to denote the ideal alignment of a look which, starting from the eye, passed through the peep-hole
and the sights and on to the target object.” Aerial vision occupies a special place within Virilio’s narrative: “At the turn of the
century, cinema and aviation seem to form a single moment. By 1914, aviation was ceasing to be strictly a means of flying and
breaking records; it was becoming one way, or perhaps even the ultimate way, of seeing.”
We have become too accustomed to seeing from the air, which violates all the familiar geometry and perspective of our mundane,
grounded vision. The exhilaration of the bird’s-eye view, or the god’s-eye view, so palpable in early accounts of flying, stems from
the possibility of outstripping human limitations. But in another respect, aviation is very much tied to the modern mode of seeing,
because from the very beginning it has been linked to photographic and cinematographic representation. Shooting a film, or
focusing on a target, are not cheap puns, but reminders of a shared genealogical origin. Indeed, this way of looking is so naturalized
that we forget that seeing through an aperture produces a particular and partial visual construction.
Aerial vision at once expands the range of view and hones in on a perceived target. But this focus inwards, this claim of precise aim,
is not just one amo…