Drone: Remote Control Warfare

Since the early 20th century, “advocates of air power have repeatedly prophesied the imminent obsolescence of ground forces,” yet they have always been wrong, writes Gusterson, professor of international affairs at George Washington University (People of the Bomb) in this short, astute, and disapproving examination of the latest failed attempt to rule from the sky. Gusterson acknowledges that drones are more accurate than crewed aircraft but adds that they kill plenty of bystanders. Moreover, modern armies are capable of shooting drones down, revealing them to be a continuation of 19th-century colonial warfare in which soldiers with superior weapons annihilated forces possessing far less sophisticated weaponry. Given the drone’s position in asymmetrical warfare, Gusterson makes an apt analogy with suicide bombers that some will find very unsettling: When people are killed by an unsuspected suicide bomber in their midst, this is considered a despicable, cowardly act. When people are killed by a drone safely piloted from 7,000 miles away, how is that to be received? Military leaders find drones irresistible because they seem to make military intervention cheap and easy, but they enable a “kind of permanent, low-level military action that threatens to erase the boundary between war and peace.” Gusterson’s insightful editorial shows less interest in drones’ effectiveness than their dismal effect on the ethics of war. [em](June) [/em]