Over the years I’ve learned much from the writings of Paul K. Saint-Amour, whose work on the violent intersections between modernism and air power has helped me think through my own project on bombing (‘Killing Space’) and, in a minor key, my analysis of cartography, aerial reconnaissance and ‘corpography’ on the Western Front in the First World War. A minimalist listing would include:
Like me, Paul also has an essay in Pete Adey‘s co-edited collection, From above: war, violence and verticality (Hurst, 2013): ‘Photomosaics: mapping the Front, mapping the city’.
He has just published an important essay, ‘On the partiality of total war‘, in Critical inquiry 40 (2) (2014) 420-449, which has prompted this post. What I so admire about Paul’s writing is his combination of literary style – these essays are a joy to read, even when they address the bleakest of subjects – critical imagination and analytical acumen, and the latest essay is no exception.
His central point is that the idea of ‘total war’ – which, as he insists, was essentially an inter-war constellation – was deeply partial. It both naturalized and undermined a series of European imperialist distinctions between centre and periphery, peace and war:
‘… forms of violence forbidden in the metropole during peacetime were practiced in the colony, mandate, and protectorate, [and] … the distinction between peace and war was a luxury of the center. At the same time, by predicting that civilians in the metropole would have no immunity in future wars, it contributed to the erosion of the very imperial geography (center versus periphery) that it seemed to shore up.’
Hence the partiality of what he calls ‘the fractured problem-space of the concept’: ‘A truly total conception of war would have insisted openly on the legal, ethical, political, and technological connections between European conflagration and colonial air control’ (my emphasis).
Paul advances these claims, and enters into this fraught ‘problem-space’, by tracking the figure of a Royal Air Force officer, L.E.O. Charlton (left). A veteran of the First World War, Charlton was appalled by his experience of colonial ‘air control’ in Iraq in the 1920s (‘direct action by aeroplanes on indirect information by unreliable informants … was a species of oppression’: sounds familiar) but became a strenuous advocate of bombing civilians as the ‘new factor in warfare’ in the future. Convinced that Britain was exceptionally vulnerable to air attack, the only possible defence was extraordinary air superiority capable of landing devastating ‘hammer blows’.
Now others have traced the lines of descent from Britain’s ‘air policing’ in Palestine, Iraq and the North-West Frontier in the 1920s and 30s to its bomber offensive against Germany in the 1940s – ‘Bomber’ Harris notoriously cut his teeth in both Iraq and Palestine, though one historian treats this as precision dentistry – and still others have joined the dots from yesterday’s imperial borderlands to today’s: I’m thinking of Mark Neocleous‘s (re)vision of police power (‘Air power as police power‘, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 31 (4) (2013) 578-93 and Priya Satia‘s genealogy of ‘Drones: a history from the Middle East‘, Humanity 5 (1) (2014) 1-31.
But Paul complicates these genealogies in important ways by showing how, within British military circles, war from the air was at once prosecuted and displaced/deferred. He argues that major air power theorists of the day reserved the category of ‘war’ for conflicts between sovereign states and relegated state violence ‘against colonial, mandate and protectorate populations’ to minor categories: ‘police actions, low-intensity conflicts, constabulary missions, pacification, colonial policing’. Indeed, at the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1923 the British delegation sought to abolish all air forces except those deployed ‘for police purposes in certain outlying regions’. The manoeuvre failed, yet it wasn’t until 1977 that the first Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention of 1949 recognised the right of subject populations to resist colonial domination, military occupation and racial repression, nominated such acts as constituting an ‘international conflict’, and extended to them the protections of international law. Several states have refused to ratify the AP, including the United States, Israel, Iran, India and Pakistan. Charlton’s original objection was to the use of air power outside declared war zones and against civilian subject populations: an objection that many would argue continues to have contemporary resonance in the CIA-directed drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.
But Charlton’s masters (and, ultimately, Charlton himself) ‘dissevered’ the meaning of ongoing state violence in the periphery from prospective state violence at the centre. ‘Home is the space of the total war to come‘ – the Royal Air Force evidently believed that lessons learned in the colonies could be repatriated to the metropolis – and this would necessarily involve the breaching of state borders. War from the air thus dissolved the distinctions between military and civilian spaces, as Giulio Douhet prophesied in the 1920s:
‘By virtue of this new weapon, the repercussions of war are no longer limited by the farthest artillery range of guns, but can be felt directly for hundreds and hundreds of miles… The battlefield will be limited only by the boundaries of the nations at war, and all of their citizens will become combatants, since all of them will be exposed to the aerial offensives of the enemy. There will be no distinction any longer between soldiers and civilians.’
Few military experts in Britain talked about Douhet before the 1930s, but Charlton had read him in French translation, referring to him in his Cambridge lectures published as War from the air: past, present, future (1935): John Peatycalls him ‘Douhet’s leading disciple in Britain.’ But in Charlton’s view war from the air also redrew the contours of military violence so that they no longer lined fronts but bounded areas. In principle this transformation of the target space provided for two different strategies, though in practice the differences between them were as much ideological as they were substantive. Air strikes could take the form of either area bombing, levelling whole districts of cities, or so-called ‘precision bombing’ that would dislocate strategic nodes within a networked space, and it was this that Charlton believed was the key to aerial supremacy:
‘[T]he nation conceived by air-power theorists was a discrete entity unified both by the interlocking systems, structures, and forces that would constitute its war effort and by their collective targetability in the age of the bomber. As the proxy space for total war doctrine, in other words, air-power theory provided limitless occasions for representing the national totality. The common figures of “nerve centres,” “heart,” and “nerve ganglia” all participated in the emergent trope of an integrated national body whose geographical borders, war effort, and vulnerability were all coterminous.’
In War from the air, Charlton had advocated a devastating attack on the enemy capital:
‘It is the brain, and therefore the vital point. Injury to the brain means instant death, or paralysis, whereas injury to the body or the members, especially if it be a flesh-wound, may mean nothing at all, or, at most, a grave inconvenience.’
And in his contribution to The air defence of Britain, published in 1938, Charlton used the figure of the ‘national body’ to underscore what he saw as Britain’s vulnerability to air attack: ‘We are laid out, as if on an operating table, for the surgical methods of the bomber.’ As it turned out, of course, air strikes were even less ‘surgical’ than today’s aerialists try to claim, but as I showed in ‘Doors into nowhere’ (DOWNLOADS tab), these bio-physiological tropes were refined by Solly Zuckerman when he sought to provide a scientific basis for the combined bomber offensive during the Second World War.
But precisely because the enabling experiments for these operations were carried out in a colonial laboratory, ‘outside the boundaries of the national body’, this couldn’t qualify as war – so this was ‘interwar’ in quite another sense too – and, Charlton notwithstanding, the ‘bombing demonstrations’ that took place in Iraq and elsewhere were not subject to much critical scrutiny or public outcry in Britain. On the contrary, within the metropole they were turned into popular entertainment at successive air displays at Hendon in North London in the 1920s (see below) (though, prophetically, by the 1930s, the pageant staged bombing runs against ‘the enemy’, and in War over England (1936) Charlton envisaged Britain forced to surrender after a devastating German air attack on, of all things, the Hendon Air Show) .
I think this argument could profitably be extended, because the desert ‘proving grounds’ had a cultural-strategic significance that, as both Priya Satia and Patrick Deerhave shown, can be unravelled through another figure who also enters this problem-space, albeit in disguise, T.E. Lawrence or ‘Aircraftsman Ross’ (I’ve suggested some of these filiations in ‘DisOrdering the Orient’)….
I hope I’ve said enough to whet your appetite. This is a rich argument about war’s geographies, at once imaginative and material, and my bare-bones’ summary really doesn’t do it justice. An introductory footnote reveals that the essay, and presumably Paul’s previous ones, will appear in a book in progress (and prospect), Archive, Bomb, Civilian: Total War in the Shadows of Modernism, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
The latest issue of Humanity: an international journal of human rights, humanitarianism and development 5 (1) (2014) – see my previous post here – contains a wonderful dossier on Drones between past and present. It includes Priya Satia, whose work I’ve admired ever since I read her wonderful Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East, on ‘Drones: a history from the Middle East’ (pp. 1-31), Anna Chotzen on ‘Beyond bounds: Morocco’s Rif War and the limits of international law’ (pp. 33-54: ‘From a legal standpoint, the United States’ drone offensives are eerily similar to Spain’s chemical war in Morocco a century ago’), and a Photo Esssay from Trevor Paglen (pp. 57-71), introduced by Nicholas Guilhot(pp. 55-56).
Priya’s essay is of particular interest to me, since it recovers the genealogy and, crucially, what she calls ‘the cultural history of bombardment’ that connects colonial practices of ‘air control’ to the ideologies that activate the drone strikes prosecuted by the US in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. She’s more sanguine about the transparency of those carried out by the USAF in Afghanistan than I am:
‘… in my conversations with military officers, it is clear how strongly the USAF wishes to distinguish its use of drones from ‘‘other agencies’ ’’ use of them, even while acknowledging that tactics are shared. The USAF’s drone strikes in Afghanistan are transparent; a JAG (judge advocate) assesses the proportionality of the action and the likelihood of collateral damage; official casualty figures line up well with independent counts.’
I now suspect it’s more than ‘tactics’ that are shared, and the lines between the USAF and the CIA are more blurred than – I agree – most military officers would wish. And my project on ‘Militarized vision‘ is trying to identify the parameters within which the USAF’s transparency and its visual mediations operate. But as she goes on to say, ‘However, all of this hardly matters politically, given the older and more recent history of aerial counterinsurgency in these regions.’ And she provides a rich and compelling account of that history and its traces in present memories and (para)military practices.
My work on drones has been invigorated by reading an outstandingly creative essay by Lucy Suchmanon ‘Situational Awareness: deadly bioconvergence at the boundaries of bodies and machines’, forthcoming at the ever-interesting Mediatropes. It’s sparked both an e-mail conversation and an invitation to speak at a symposium on Security by remote control: automation and autonomy in robot weapon systems at Lancaster University, 22-23 May. Here is the call for papers:
Remotely operated and robotic systems are central to contemporary military operations. Robotic weapons can select targets and deliver lethal force with varying degrees of human control, and technologies for fully autonomous weapon systems are currently in development. Alongside military reconnaissance and the prospective configuration of ‘killer- robots,’ drone technologies are being deployed for ostensibly peaceful purposes, most notably surveillance of public space, private property and national borders. More generally, the frame offered by contemporary security discourses has redrawn previous boundaries regarding the use of state violence in the name of homeland protection. But despite an extended history of investment in technologies that promise to rationalise the conflict zone and accurately identify the imminent threat, the legitimacy and efficacy of actions taken in the name of security is increasingly in question.
The purpose of this symposium is to present and debate current scholarship on the ethics and legality of robotic systems in war and beyond. By robotic systems we mean networked devices with on-board algorithms that direct machine actions (in this case, tracking, targeting and deploying force) in varying configurations of pre-programmed operation and remote human control. The line between automation and autonomy has come under renewed debate in the context of contemporary developments in remotely controlled weapon systems, most prominently uninhabited aerial vehicles or drones. For 
example, in April of 2013 a coalition led by Human Rights Watch initiated a campaign in favour of a legally binding prohibition on the development, production and use of fully autonomous weapon systems. Simultaneously, some military and robotics experts emphasize the advantages of automated weapons and argue that equipping robots with the capacity to make ethical judgments is an achievable technological goal. Within these debates, the ‘human in the loop’ is posited alternately as the safeguard against illegitimate killing, or its source. Implicit across the debate is the premise of a moment of decision in which judgements of identification and appropriate response are made.
While emerging arms control strategies focus on the ‘red line’ that would prohibit the development and use of weapons that remove human judgment from the identification of targets and the decision to fire, the question remains to what extent human judgment and decision-making are already compromised by the intensifications of speed, and associated increase in forms and levels of automation, that characterise contemporary war-fighting, particularly in situations of remote control. Rather than attempting to establish one or the other of these concerns as correct, or even as more important than the other, we seek to focus our discussion on the troubling space between automation and autonomy, to understand more deeply their intimate relations, and the inherent contradictions that conjoin them.
To explore the key stakes and lines of argument in this debate, we invite contributions from scholars in the fields of security, peace and conflict studies, international human rights law, anthropology/sociology of science and technology, technoculture and technomilitarism, computing, simulation and cyber law. The ambition for this event is to stimulate ongoing cross-disciplinary discussion and further research on this topic, drawing on the resources of the Lancaster University centres that are its co-sponsors.
Confirmed Speakers:
Patrick Crogan, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of the West of England in Bristol, scholar of technoculture, videogames and military technoscience, author of Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture (2011);
Derek Gregory, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, author of multiple works interrogating social and spatial dimensions of conflict, and currently completing a book titled The Everywhere War (forthcoming);
M. Shane Riza, command pilot and former instructor at the U.S. Air Force Weapons School, author of Killing Without Heart: Limits on Robotic Warfare in an Age of Persistent Conflict (2013);
Christiane Wilke, Associate Professor in Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, Canada. She has been researching legal responses to state violence and is working on a project about visuality, photography, and international law.
To indicate your interest in participating, or for further information, please contact Lucy Suchman l.suchman@lancaster.ac.uk.
I’m really excited about this; I’m part way through Shane Riza’s book, and it’s already clear that I’m going to learn a lot from the meeting.
The image at the top of this post comes from the CFP, incidentally, but the image below is Margaret Bourke-White‘s classic photograph from the rubble of a bombed German city, which I use when I talk about the ways in which the trauma of air war dislocates the very sinews of language and the capacity to write and re-present (see ‘Doors in to nowhere’, an extended reflection on W.G. Sebald: DOWNLOADS tab). Perhaps I’ll use my time at Lancaster (given the name, a peculiarly appropriate place) to join the dots between the two images and revisit ‘The natural history of destruction’ for the twenty-first century….
I’ll be talking about ‘Seeing like a military‘ at the Association of American Geographers’ Annual Meeting in Tampa (home of Joint Special Operations Command!) 8-12 April 2014, and here’s the abstract:
Modern war has long placed a premium on visuality, but later modern war deploys new political technologies of vision and incorporates them into distinctive modes of the mediatization and juridification of military violence. This paper sketches those general contours and then examines two episodes in more detail. Both were carried out by the US military. The first is a combat helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in New Baghdad in July 2007, the subject of a military investigation, a Wikileaks release (‘Collateral Murder’), and two documentary films (‘Permission to Engage’ and ‘Incident in New Baghdad’). The second is another combat helicopter attack, but this time facilitated by the crew of a MQ-1 Predator, on three civilian vehicles in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan in February 2010, which was the subject of a military investigation that has been documented in detail. I use these incidents to extend the debate about militarized vision beyond dominant discussions of ‘seeing like a drone’, and to raise a series of questions about witnessing and military violence under the sign of later modern war.
The title is obviously a riff on James C. Scott‘s Seeing like a state – not least his opening claim that ‘certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision’ – and the abstract is really just a summary of previous posts on Militarized Vision (see also ‘Unmanning’ here), but I’ll provide updates as the work progresses.
I’m deep into the detailed investigation of the Uruzgan incident. Previously I’d worked from a transcript of communications between the Predator crew, the ground forces commander and others – hence ‘From a view to a kill’ (DOWNLOADS tab) – but the detailed investigation files are eye-opening and are beginning to suggest a different narrative.
I’ve also widened the scope of the project (which, as the abstract suggests, was already about much more than the full motion video from Predators and Reapers). Although I won’t be talking about this in Tampa, I’m also examining another incident, an air strike on two tankers hijacked by the Taliban near Omar Kheil in Kunduz, Afghanistan in September 2009. The strike was carried out by USAF jets on the orders of the German Army (the Bundeswehr) from its Forward Operating Base at Camp Kunduz. It’s a complicated story that needs some background about (1) the Bundeswehr in Afghanistan and (2) air strikes and civilian casualties.
Bad Kunduz: the Bundeswehr and Afghanistan
After 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Germany provided the third largest contingent of troops to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), but Bonn saw its primary role as stabilisation and reconstruction – in fact, the government refused to describe its military operations in Afghanistan as a war at all – and following this mandate Camp Kunduz [below] served as the base for a Provincial Reconstruction Team which was instructed to maintain a ‘light footprint’: so much so that troops jokingly referred to the base as ‘Bad Kunduz‘ (‘Spa Kunduz’) because it was so removed from the fighting.
But the security situation deteriorated, and Taliban attacks on German patrols and bases intensified. By 2007 the Bundeswehr had formed Task Force 47, made up of regular soldiers and elite troops from the Kommando Spezialkräfte or Special Forces, to adopt a more offensive posture and, in particular, to identify Taliban commanders who would be placed on ISAF’s Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) for kill/capture missions. A detachment from Task Force 47 was also stationed at Camp Kunduz.
Still, in August 2009 Der Spiegel ran a story on ‘How the Taliban are taking control in Kunduz‘, and interviewed the base commander, Colonel Georg Klein, who described what the newspaper called the new ‘logic of the war’:
‘Kunduz has changed… I really don’t want to shoot at other people. They’re people too, after all. But if I don’t shoot, they’ll kill my soldiers.’
This ‘new logic’ would be demonstrated with hideous clarity a fortnight later. Yet – in principle, at least – it was constrained by a new Tactical Directive issued by General Stanley McChrystal in response to civilian casualties caused by coalition air strikes.
Air strikes and civilian casualties
Bombing had played a major role in the invasion of Afghanistan, and air strikes continued to be of decisive importance as the war with the Taliban continued (for more information, see here and here). They were also the main source of civilian casualties caused by coalition military operations; as the air war was stepped up and the body count soared so public hostility increased.
On 4 May 2009, just four months before the Kunduz air strike, there was yet another serious incident in which, according to a field investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross, at least 89 civilians were killed in a series of air strikes near the village of Garani (sometimes spelled Gerani or even Granai) in the district of Bala Baluk in Farah province. Afghan forces had moved to engage the Taliban, supported by ISAF advisers, and as the fighting intensified they were reinforced by a detachment of US Marines. Close Air Support (CAS) was requested, and the first air strikes were carried out by F/A-18F jets (shown as #F1-4 in the graphic below). In the early evening their fuel reserves became too low to continue, and they were replaced by a B-1 bomber which made three further strikes (#B1-3). In the first strike, three 500 lb GPS-guided bombs were dropped; in the second, two 500 lb and two 2,000 lb bombs were dropped; and in the third a single 2,000 lb bomb was dropped. You can find images of the aftermath at Guy Smallman‘s gallery here.
The ICRC report on the incident has never been published, in accordance with its usual practice, but Wikileaks released a cable from the US Ambassador in Kabul describing his meeting with the ICRC’s Head of Mission on 13 June to discuss the results. The ambassador praised the Head of Mission as ‘one of the most credible sources for unbiased and objective information in Afghanistan’ and accepted that the investigation was ‘certainly exhaustive’. But the casualty estimates were considerably higher than those made by ISAF’s own military investigation, from which I’ve taken the map above.
According to the Executive Summary prepared for US Central Command, ‘we will never be able to determine precisely how many civilian casualties resulted from this operation’. The military investigation concluded that 26 civilians had been killed but did ‘not discount the possibility’ that there were many more, and its authors also noted the ‘balanced, thorough investigation’ carried out by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission that cited ‘as many as 86 civilian casualties’. Other reports claim as many as 147 civilians were killed.
The details of the military’s own investigation remain classified; General David Petraeuspromised to show the strike video from the B-1 bomber in a press briefing (see also here), but it has never been released, though Wikileaks reportedly had an encrypted version in its possession (the issue formed part of the US government’s case against Bradley/Chelsea Manning). Although the CENTCOM report of 18 June ‘validated the lawful military nature of the strike’, it also expressed grave concern at ‘the inability to discern the presence of civilians and assess the potential collateral damage of those strikes’, and its recommendations included an immediate review of guidance ‘for employment of kinetic weapons, to include CAS, in situations involving the potential for civilian casualties.’
On 2 July McChrystal updated the existing Tactical Directive of October 2008 with a revised Tactical Directive – parts of it remained classified, but the ‘releasable’ version is here – which insisted that
‘We must avoid the trap of winning tactical victories – but suffering strategic defeats – by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people.’
Among other provisions, the directive specifically instructed commanders to ‘weigh the gain of using CAS against the cost of civilian casualties’. This is, of course, a requirement under international humanitarian law, but McChrystal went further and tightened the Rules of Engagement to such a degree that David Wood could write of the US Air Force ‘holding fire over Afghanistan’. Lessons from the incident were also incorporated into US Marine pre-deployment briefings (here; scroll down) and it was also used as the basis for a ‘tactical decision-making’ module in the US Army’s Afghanistan Civilian Casualty Prevention Handbook (June 2012) (pp. 58-67). But these lessons hadn’t been learned in time to prevent the tragedy that took place near Kunduz on the night of 3/4 September 2009.
The Kunduz air strike
At 8 p.m. on 3 September Colonel Klein received a report that two tanker trucks had been hijacked by the Taliban as they drove south through Kunduz province (‘Entführung der Tanklastwagen’ on the map above). Thomas Ruttig provides an excellent overview of how what the Bundeswehr called ‘the Incident at Coordinate 42S VF 8934 5219’ unfolded here:
‘ The trucks were owned by an Afghan private company and contracted to deliver airplane fuel to ISAF forces. When the two hijacked lorries got stuck crossing a shallow riverbed at the border between Aliabad and Chahrdara districts, away from the main road, in the middle of a night in Ramadan, the Taliban mobilised the inhabitants of nearby villages more or less under their control to pump the fuel out and get the lorries going again. A large number took the offer up. Meanwhile, with the help of ISAF air reconnaissance, the immobilised trucks were located. This was done by a B-1 bomber which had cameras on board so strong they could even identify the weapons carried by the hijackers.’
The B-1 had to withdraw in the early hours of the morning because it was running low on fuel, and according to some reports the US Air Force was unwilling to provide replacement aircraft unless there were ‘Troops in Contact’ (TIC) with the Taliban. Klein decided to confirm a TIC – even though his troops were not at the scene – and two F-15E fighter jets flew right over his Forward Operating Base and then took up their station near the tankers at 0108. These aircraft (the two shown below were photographed over eastern Afghanistan) are operated by two crew members, a pilot and a weapons systems officer, and are equipped with Forward-Looking Infrared Sensors that, as Rutting notes, ‘portrayed people on the ground only as black spots.’ The two jets eventually carried out an airstrike at 0150.
What is particularly interesting about all this is that – in the wake of McChrystal’s revised Tactical Directive and tightened Rules of Engagement – the American pilots of the two F15-Es were markedly reluctant to strike. They were eventually persuaded to do so by Klein, yet he had no direct ‘eyes’ on the events as they unfolded. He was relying on a visual feed from the strike aircraft to a Remote Operated Video Enhanced Receiver [ROVER] terminal and on ground reporting from a single Afghan informant – classified as C-3, the lowest grade for ‘actionable intelligence’ – who was communicating by telephone with other ‘sub-contacts’ at the scene; there were apparently five intermediaries between the local source and Klein. At least one of them was a Special Forces intelligence officer from Task Force 47 who was with Klein in the Tactical Operations Center; some reports suggest that he believed that four Taliban leaders on the JPEL were at the scene.
The 15-page (redacted) cockpit transcript is here; all times shown there are Zulu (i.e. GMT), but here I revert to local time to reconstruct what happened. Klein is with his Forward Air Controller codenamed ‘Red Baron’ – what the USAF calls a Joint Terminal Attack Controller or JTAC, which is how he appears in the transcript – in the Tactical Operations Centre at Camp Kunduz (marked as Lager der Bundeswehr on the map above and referred to as PRT KDZ in the SIGACT report below).
The JTAC first asks the pilots to ‘stay as high as possible’ so that they can transmit a wide-shot video of the scene to his ROVER-3 screen – although this isn’t the latest model the JTAC wants ‘the best picture possible to give the commander [Klein] the possibility to make a decision’ – and they paint the target with infrared. They are confident this won’t alert the people on the ground: ‘We got no friendlies in the vicinity of the target and I don’t believe the insurgents got N[ight] V[ision] G[oggles] to see the IR.’
The picture is poor and so the pilots fly lower; they offer to provide ‘a show of force’, which is a standard tactic in Afghanistan accounting for 10 per cent of all Close Air Support sorties (though, as this map shows, it was less common in Kunduz compared to the south; I’ve borrowed the map from the remarkable work of Jason Lyall that I noted in a previous post on air strikes in Afghanistan).
The JTAC declines, saying ‘I want you to hide’, so that the people on the ground will have no warning of an impending attack, which leaves the pilots wondering ‘how we’d be able to drop anything on that as far as current ROE [Rules of Engagement] and stuff like that…’ They’re not sure that this meets the criteria for a TIC, which would allow them to engage, because they can’t see any German troops (‘friendlies’) on the ground: ‘We’ve got 50 to 100 people down there all claiming to be insurgents but I’m not seeing any imminent threat…’
One pilot accepts that the JTAC might have better information, but wants to ‘dig a little more’:
‘I’m really looking to find out status of the people inside [a nearby building 200 metres away] and then what’s inside the trucks. And then we can “show of force”, scatter the people, and then blow up the trucks.’
Again he offers to make a show of force but tells the JTAC they are ‘showing no CDE [collateral damage estimate] concerns within about 200 metres of that target.’ The pilots agree that Camp Kunduz is ‘pretty far away’ from the scene so that it is not visibly in imminent danger, and they wonder if ‘there is anyone else we can talk to’ before committing to a strike. They even contemplate contacting US Central Command’s Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar for clearance.
The pilots ask for confirmation that there would be ‘no civilians in the vicinity of the fragmentations’ from their two 500 lb GBU-38 bombs dropped on the tankers – ‘is that possible with no C[ollateral] D[amage] E[stimate]?’ the lead pilot queries – and again they ask the JTAC to confirm that everyone on the scene is ‘hostile’:
‘That’s affirmative. We got the intel information that everyone down there is hostile.’
More vehicles are arriving on the scene and the JTAC insists that this is now a ‘time-sensitive target’. He then passes the pilots the standard 9-line briefing for a strike (see left). The first three lines are ‘not applicable’ because the aircraft are already on the scene, but the JTAC specifies the altitude, the target (‘insurgents on sandbank with 2 stolen trucks’), target location and mark, repeats ‘no friendly forces in area’, and asks them to remain on station for a Battle Damage Assessment.
As the target is designated by the pilots, they ask the JTAC whether he is ‘trying to take out the vehicles or are you trying to take out the pax [people]?’
‘We’re trying to take out the pax.’
They again ask the JTAC to confirm that there are no friendlies in the vicinity, and he reports that they are all ‘safe’ at Camp Kunduz ‘roughly fifteen click to the east.’ (In fact, the base is about 8 km to the north east, but the tankers are facing in the opposite direction and Ruttig estimates it would have taken them an hour or so to reach the base on the rough, unpaved roads of the region).
The pilots still have misgivings: ‘something doesn’t feel right but I can’t put my thumb on it.’ They debate between themselves whether ‘in accordance with our ROE right now’ they should obtain higher-level clearance. If troops are not in imminent danger clearance is required from ISAF Headquarters in Kabul, and if there is a risk of civilian casualties clearance would need to be obtained from NATO’s Joint Force Command. Before they can reach a decision the JTAC jumps back in:
‘Clearance approved by commander he is right next to me.’
They’re not convinced. ‘The ground commander is clearing us hot but I don’t know if it meets the [hostile] intent or not.’
Still reluctant to strike – one pilot asks the other if ‘you’re saying it’s no imminent threat even though the JTAC said it was’ – the lead pilot tells the JTAC that they would prefer ‘to get down low, scatter the pax and blow up the vehicles’.
It then emerges that ‘ISR’ is en route, which presumably means a Predator with higher definition sensors, but before the remote platform can arrive the JTAC responds to the pilot’s repeated suggestion to scatter the people and then hit the trucks:
‘Negative, I want you to strike directly.’
Still no contact with the remote platform, and the lead pilot asks ‘one last [time]’ for confirmation that this is an imminent threat.
‘Yeah, those pax are an imminent threat, so those insurgents are trying to get all the gasoline off the tanks and after that they will regroup and we’ve got intel information about current ops so probably attacking Camp Kunduz.’
At 1.51 a.m. local time Klein gives the order: ‘Weapons release!’ The F-15Es are again ‘cleared hot’. Two 500lb GBU-38 bombs are released.
Here’s the strike video:
And here are the first military reports of the action (SIGACT or Significant Act) via Wikileaks:
From the ground
In contrast to these distanced observations, this is how the attack was described to Der Spiegel by one of the tanker drivers:
‘I can’t say how many airplanes there were or what type there were. But, starting at around 10 p.m., you could hear the sound of aircraft, though it was very faint. The plane must have been flying very high. But, yes, in Afghanistan, we recognize the sound of fighter jets. Some of the people around the trucks must have certainly heard the sound as well, but the majority of them were just jockeying to get fuel more quickly.
The armed men were getting nervous. They started making lots of phone calls again. I thought they were calling their leaders and asking for advice, asking what they were supposed to do now. At a certain point, some of them started shouting and waving their weapons around. They were screaming at the people to get away from the trucks because bombs were about to start falling. But no one wanted to miss an opportunity to get some free fuel. Then, some of the armed men even started running away…. I was sitting with some of the armed men along the river quite a way away from the trucks, maybe 50 meters (164 feet). The men were arguing over whether they should kill me right away or use me as a hostage to try to extort money from my company. I was very afraid — also of a possible bombardment….
At first, there was a loud droning, like what you hear when a generator short-circuits. Then there was a bright flash. I just let myself fall forward and went down underwater. Even from there, I could feel the shock wave. For a few seconds, it was as bright as day. Even the water was heating up. When I came out of the water, the whole area around the tanker trucks was on fire. It looked like the ground was spitting up fire, though it was just the fuel from the trucks. It was unbearably hot. There were bodies lying everywhere; they were completely carbonized.’
And this is how the scene was described to Amnesty International by another Afghan eyewitness:
“When we heard the planes flying everyone was scared and people began to flee the area at around 10.00 or 11.00 pm but then when people saw that the planes were only flying [and not bombarding] they returned to take the fuel. The number of the people were increasing every minute but after midnight the number started to decrease as many people obtained enough fuel and didn’t have enough containers to carry more fuel. It was around 1.00-1.30 am when the planes disappeared…
At about 1.45am we heard the planes return from our village. I tried to call my brother who was still at the scene. I knew that something was wrong if the planes returned but it seemed that the planes had blocked the telecommunication systems and we couldn’t get through to our relatives to call them to come back. Then I saw a big fire coming from plane and a big explosion with fire every where. I could see it from our village. Flames were very high and everyone rushed to the scene because most of the families had their children and family members out there.
As we arrived at the scene we could see nothing but flames and smoke. At that time it was almost around 3.00 [am] we saw the bodies burned and unidentifiable, others were badly injured and crying. The planes reappeared and then everyone fled in fear of being attacked and targeted. Some people got their family members’ bodies but not everyone. We couldn’t take the wounded people with us because the planes were still flying and we had to leave them there. As the planes disappeared, we went back and it was very early in the morning – everywhere were many bodies we couldn’t identify them at the time. Then every one carried the bodies to the villages and we had to bury some without knowing who they were. There were at least 20 children among the dead.”
Here is AFP video of the aftermath:
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad provide another extraordinary account in the Guardian:
What followed is one of the more macabre scenes of this or any war. The grief-stricken relatives began to argue and fight over the remains of the men and boys who a few hours earlier had greedily sought the tanker’s fuel. Poor people in one of the world’s poorest countries, they had been trying to hoard as much as they could for the coming winter.
“We didn’t recognise any of the dead when we arrived,” said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. “It was like a chemical bomb had gone off, everything was burned. The bodies were like this,” he brought his two hands together, his fingers curling like claws. “There were like burned tree logs, like charcoal.
“The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone.”
So the elders stepped in. They collected all the bodies they could and asked the people to tell them how many relatives each family had lost.
A queue formed. One by one the bereaved gave the names of missing brothers, cousins, sons and nephews, and each in turn received their quota of corpses. It didn’t matter who was who, everyone was mangled beyond recognition anyway. All that mattered was that they had a body to bury and perform prayers upon.
If anybody still thinks that later modern war is somehow de-corporealized, they should read Abdul-Ahad’s full report. Ruttig takes up the story:
The number of people and specifically the number of civilians who were not ‘participating in hostilities’ killed in the strike is unclear to this day. It differs depending on the investigation report, some of which are published, while others remain classified. The still classified report by the then ISAF commander, General Stanley McChrystal – parts of which are cited in the report of the investigation committee of the German parliament, the Bundestag, that was published on 25 October 2011 – says “between 17 and 142 people” were killed. It does not seem to refer to killed civilians directly, but quotes local elders saying that possibly 30 to 40 civilians were killed. A report authored by a German military policeman who conducted an investigation at the location of the airstrike avoids stating whether there were what he called “non-involved civilians” among the dead …
The lawyers who brought the case before the Bonn court claim 137 people died, “undeniably many dozens of civilians”. An Afghan investigation commission, sent by President Hamed Karzai and led by police general Mirza Muhammad Yarmand, that was in the area between 4 and 10 September 2009, stated that 69 Taleban and 30 local residents – a term that leaves it open whether they were perceived as non-involved civilians or civilians that were supporting the Taleban in an operation – were killed.
An Afghan human rights group, Afghanistan Rights Monitor, which also conducted interviews with victims in the area, said on 7 September that 60 to 70 civilians were killed. Finally, UNAMA, as stated in its 2009 Protection of Civilians report (on p 18), after its own investigation, said that 74 civilians, including many children, had been killed. One of the problems, said UNAMA, was that the fireball produced by dropping munitions on the fuel tankers incinerated many of the bodies, making their identification impossible. However, according to probably the most extensive investigation, carried out by two Germans, Christoph Reuter, a journalist and occasional AAN author, and Marcel Mettelsiefen, a photographer, who repeatedly travelled to the region interviewing families and community members, ninety civilians “from children to old men” were killed. Reuter and Mettelsiefen published a moving book [Kunduz – above], naming the victims they had confirmed as having been killed and featuring photographs – ID documents, family photos and such – of each of the victims and their relatives. It was a powerful way to humanise the numbers of those killed and the scale of the loss to the community.
Military investigations and mediatizations
Immediately after the strike a senior ISAF officer made it clear that ‘The most important thing is for local official[s] to refute CIVCAS (civilian casualties).’ This is a leitmotif in ISAF’s response to incidents like this – CIVCAS reporting (or the lack of it) was a major preoccupation of the Uruzgan investigation – as the military battles to ‘control the narrative’ before the Taliban provide their own version of events. When McChrystal heard about the strike, however, he was reportedly furious:
He had just tightened up the rules for air strikes in the Afghanistan conflict. Bombs should only be dropped in the cases of acute danger to ISAF soldiers, in order to create the necessary trust in the foreign troops. The Kunduz air strike did not fit into this picture at all….
“Freely admit what we don’t know and say we are investigating,” he ordered the Germans. He assumed the first assessement that there had been no civilian victims had been incorrect. There was no way one could have made that determination from the air. The angered ISAF chief said he was “deeply disappointed.” The first statements from the Germans had been “foolishness.” He also said he had doubts that the rules of engagement had been followed and asked why soldiers were first sent to the scene three hours after the first accusations in the media of civilian casualties.
McChrystal was on the scene the next day – though Klein urged him not to go in case he was shot at – demanding to know why the Bundeswehr had waited so long to send a team to the strike site to conduct a ‘boots on ground’ Battle Damage Assessment and to provide a casualty report. On 9 September he announced the establishment of a Joint Investigation Board, which included a Canadian major-general (ISAF’s Air Component Element Director), officers from the USAF and the Bundeswehr, and military legal advisers (McChrystal’s detailed instructions to the Board are here).
Franz Josef Jung, Germany’s Minister of Defence, was soon on the offensive. He insisted that the Taliban’s seizure of the tankers ‘posed an acute threat to our soldiers’, that the strike was ‘absolutely necessary’ and that his officers had ‘very detailed information’ that the Taliban had planned to use the tankers to launch an attack. He was clearly displeased at McChrystal’s attitude (and determination), and five days after the strike had his Ministry set up a special task force (‘Group 85’) both to exploit an inside track to the investigation and to create a ‘positive image’ of the events. By then, an internal Bundeswehrinquiry had been completed. Its brief report described the incident as ‘Close Air Support’, determined that the Rules of Engagement for a ‘time-sensitive target’ had been followed and that Klein had the authority to order the strike, which was deemed ‘appropriate’, and declined to say whether ‘non-involved civilians’ had been killed alongside the Taliban.
But the subsequent, much more extensive report from ISAF’s Joint Investigation Board (75 pages plus 500 pages of attachments) flatly contradicted the German versions of what had taken place. According to Der Spiegel, which had seen the leaked report, the Board concluded that
‘Klein relied on only one person for “intelligence gathering,” which, even when combined with the aerial video images, was “inadequate to evaluate the various conditions and factors in such a difficult and complex target area.”
The report states it was not clear “what ROE (rule of engagement) was applied during the airstrike,” and that there was a “lack of understanding” by the German commander and his forward air controller (JTAC), “which resulted in actions and decisions inconsistent” with ISAF procedures and directives. Moreover, the report concludes, intelligence summaries and specific intelligence “provided by HUMINT (human intelligence) did not identify a specific threat” to the camp in Kunduz that night — the mandatory condition for an airstrike.’
In short, Klein knew that there were no ‘troops in contact’ but ‘believed that by declaring a “TIC” he would get the air support he wanted.’
Ironically, in 2008 Human Rights Watch had published a report showing that the likelihood of civilian casualties from air strikes in Afghanistan increased in TIC situations:
‘…we found that civilian casualties rarely occur during planned airstrikes on suspected Taliban targets… High civilian loss of life during airstrikes has almost always occurred during the fluid, rapid-response strikes, often carried out in support of ground troops after they came under insurgent attack. Such unplanned strikes included situations where US special forces units — normally small numbers of lightly armed personnel — came under insurgent attack; in US/NATO attacks in pursuit of insurgent forces that had retreated to populated villages; and in air attacks where US “anticipatory self- defense” rules of engagement applied.’
In any event, Klein’s own account was markedly different. In a two-page report ‘for German eyes only’, der Spiegel revealed,
Klein portrays himself as the person who tried to rein in the American fighter jets. He wrote that he called for smaller bombs to be used “contrary to the recommendation of the B-1B and F-15E pilots.” The German colonel also says that he limited the use of force to the tanker trucks and people in the immediate vicinity and forbade strikes on people elsewhere on the river bank. He wrote that the bombs were dropped solely on the sandbank “in order to definitively exclude the possibility of collateral damage in the neighboring villages.”
In January 2010 a Bundestag committee started to investigate how such different versions emerged and to determine who was responsible for the strike. Its final report is here and supporting documents here. ISAF still refused to release its own report, even to the parliamentary investigation:
There are many other ways of ‘seeing’ what happened, of course, and the strike has been the subject of at least two films. The first, Raymond Ley’s Eine mörderische Entscheidung (2013), A fatal decision, is a docu-drama shot for German television. You can watch the trailer with English-language subtitles here. The full German-language film is available on YouTube here: it’s long, but if you start at 1:13:10 you’ll pick up the story as the informant is phoning in to the Forward Operating Base; the immediate prelude to the strike starts at 1:22:37. There’s an English-language discussion by Verena Neeshere, which translates the title as A murderous decision but gives a good extended synopsis of the film. (The production company uses both English-language titles, but ‘fatal‘ is a better representation of the tenor of the film).
The second is Stefan and Simona Gieren‘s Kunduz (2012), a short film which builds on eyewitness reports to create a fictionalised German-Afghan photographer who witnessed the strike and tells his story to German doctors as he is is flown out from the area. You can see the trailer on vimeo here.
Preliminary observations
I still need to work my way through the Bundestag report in detail, but already several lines of inquiry are emerging that bear on my other case studies of ‘Militarized vision’.
(1) Militarized vision is not a constant. It’s an obvious point, but it can be sharpened because I don’t mean to confine this to the mundane (but still important) observation that political technologies of vision are constantly changing. So they are, but it’s clear that the ability of militaries to ‘see’ is differently and differentially distributed; there is a geography to militarized vision, and what Klein and his advisers saw on their screen was not what the F15E pilots saw – and that in turn was different to what the crew of the B-1 were able to see. This is about more than the resolution level of different imaging technologies, because:
(2) The politico-cultural construction of a wider ‘landscape of threat’ is crucial to the production and performance of a specific ‘space of the target’. In this case, the transition of the Bundeswehr‘s operational posture – the powerful sense of increasing and even impending Taliban attacks and the determination to take the offensive – clearly shaped the way in which Klein and those advising him (mis)read the developing situation. This in turn is shaped by developing legal geographies:
(3) The use of military force is clearly governed by international law which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, has an intimate relationship with technologies of vision. This extends beyond the requirements imposed by proportionality and distinction – including the US military’s ‘prosecution of the target’ and the ‘visual chain of custody’, though in this case it is notable that no military lawyers were involved in authorising the strike – because the legal armature that surrounds military violence is located at the intersection of international law, military law and domestic law. The relevance of McChrystal’s updated Tactical Directive and revised Rules of Engagement to the pilots’ field of vision is clear enough, but the refusal by Bonn to describe its military operations in Afghanistan as ‘war’ materially affected the way in which German law was brought to bear on Klein’s actions: his criminal prosecution was dropped soon after the government determined that the Kunduz affair was indeed a punctuation point – in fact an exclamation mark – in an armed conflict.
(4) And – to return to my first point from a different direction – what military investigations ‘see’ after an incident (and what they allow the public to see) is often radically different from what those caught up in the event-scene were able to see…
More to come.
Readings
There is a commentary on the strike by Constantin Schüßler and Yee-Kuang Heng,’The Bundeswehr and the Kunduz air strike 4 September 2009: Germany’s post-heroic moment?’, in European security 22 (30 (2013) 355-75. They explore not only the doctrine of force protection (in which risk is transferred to others in the field of view – see the still from Fatal Decision below – as I discussed in my commentary on what Grégoire Chamayou calls ‘necro-ethics’) but also the legal and media apparatus that enveloped the incident. For a more detailed treatment of the (il)legality of the strike, see Andreas Fischer-Lescanoand Steffen Kommer, ‘Entschädigung für Kollateralschäden? Rechtsfragen anlässlich des Luftangriffs bei Kunduz im September 2009’, Archiv des Völkerrechts 50 (2) (2012) 156-990, which makes extensive use of the Bundestag investigation, and Lesley Wexler, ‘International Humanitarian Law transparency’, Illinois Public Law and Legal Theory Research Papers Series 14-11 (2013) available via ssrn here.
For a discussion of the political landscape within which the strike took place, see Timo Noetzel, ‘The German politics of war: Kunduz and the war in Afghanistan‘, International Affairs 87 (2) (2011) 397-417; Thomas Rid and Martin Zapfe, ‘Mission command without amission: German military adaptation in Afghanistan’, in Theo Farrell, Frans Osinga and James A. Russell (eds), Military adaptation in Afghanistan (2013) 192-218. For the ethical perspective, Anya Topolksi has an extremely interesting essay, ‘Relationality: an ethical response to the tensions of network enabled operations in the Kunduz airstrikes’ forthcoming in the Journal of military ethics. Finally, Christine G. van Burken has an essay on ‘The non-neutrality of technology‘ in Military Review XCIII (3) (2013) 39-47 that spirals around the Kunduz strike and some of the issues that are central to my own focus on the political technologies involved.
The US military defines Close Air Support (CAS) as ‘air action by fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft against hostile targets that are in close proximity to friendly forces, and [it] requires detailed integration of each air mission with the fire and movement of those forces.’ It’s a difficult and dangerous business, and not only for the intended targets.
The technologies of CAS have been transformed but, according to the the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, its fundamentals haven’t changed since the First World War.
‘Pilots and dismounted ground agents must ensure they hit only the intended target using just voice directions and, if they’re lucky, a common paper map. It can often take up to an hour to confer, get in position and strike—time in which targets can attack first or move out of reach.’
To achieve what is in effect the time-space compression of the kill-chain, DARPA is developing its Persistent Close Air Support program to provide an all-digital system. The system ‘lets a Joint Tactical Air Controller call up CAS from a variety of sources, such as aircraft or missile platforms, to engage multiple, moving and simultaneous targets,’ explainsDavid Szondy (from whom I’ve borrowed the short-hand ‘digital airstrikes’). ‘By eliminating all the radio chatter and map fumbling, the exercise is much faster and more accurate with reduced risk of friendly fire incidents.’ The program manifesto, for want of a better word, includes these aims and specifications:
The program seeks to leverage advances in computing and communications technologies to fundamentally increase CAS effectiveness, as well as improve the speed and survivability of ground forces engaged with enemy forces.
The program envisions numerous benefits, including:
Reducing the time from calling in a strike to the weapon hitting the target by a factor of 10, from up to 60 minutes down to just 6 minutes
Direct coordination of airstrikes by a ground agent from manned or unmanned air vehicles
Improved speed and survivability of ground forces engaged with enemy forces
Use of smaller, more precise munitions against smaller and moving targets in degraded visual environments
Graceful degradation of services—if one piece of the system fails, warfighters would still retain CAS capability
PCAS has two components:
The first is PCAS-Air, which … involves the use of internal guidance systems, weapons and engagement management systems, and communications using either the Ethernet or aircraft networks for high-speed data transmission and reception. PCAS-Air processes the data received, and provides aircrews via aircraft displays or tablets with the best travel routes to the target, which weapons to use, and how best to use them.
The other half is PCAS-Ground, intended for improved mobility, situational awareness and communications for fire coordination. Soldiers on the ground can use an HUD eyepiece wired to a tablet that displays tactical imagery, maps, digital terrain elevation data, and other information [the image above is an artist’s impression of the Heads-Up Display]. This means they can receive tactical data from PCAS without having to keep looking at a computer screen.
PCAS-Ground has been deployed in Afghanistan since December 2012. The original plan, as the emphasis on ‘persistent’ implies, was to integrate the system with drones, but after the cancellation of the US Air Force’s MQ-X (‘Avenger’) program Raytheon announced that PCAS would be developed using a conventional A-10 Thunderbolt.
There is of course a long history to the digitisation and automation of the battlespace, and that reference to the First World War was not an anachronism. There were such intimate links between mapping, aerial photography and artillery ranging on the Western Front – whose cascade of updated imagery and intelligence underwrote the seeming stasis of trench warfare – that Peter Chasseauddescribed the result as ‘a sophisticated three-dimensional fire-control data base’ through which ‘in effect, the battlefield had been digitised.’ It was also, in a sense, automated; I discuss this in detail in ‘Gabriel’s Map’, but it’s captured perfectly in Tom McCarthy‘s novel C.
More obvious way stations to the present include the Vietnam-era Electronic Battlefield, whose sensor-shooter system I described in ‘Lines of descent’ (DOWNLOADS tab) as a vital precursor to today’s remote operations:
Another was the development of the PowerScene digital terrain simulation that was used to identify target imagery transmitted by proto-Predators over Bosnia-Hercegovina and to rehearse NATO bombing missions.
Remarkably, it was also used at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base during the negotiations that led to the Dayton peace accords. As one US officer explained: ‘It’s an instrument of war but we’ll use it for peace because you are willing to come to the table’. The system was used to explore proposals for potential boundaries, but the sub-text was clear: if agreement could not be reached, NATO had a detailed military knowledge of terrain and targets. (For more, see James Hasik‘s Arms and innovation: entrepreneurship and alliances in the twenty-first century defense industry (2008) Ch. 6: ‘Mountains Miles Apart’; Richard Johnson‘s ‘Virtual Diplomacy’ report here; and a precocious paper by Mark Corson and Julian Minghihere, from which I’ve taken the image on the left).
PowerScene was later used by USAF pilots rehearsing simulated bombing missions against Baghdad in the 1990s (see right) – the system fixed target co-ordinates and red ‘bubbles’ displayed threats calibrated on the range of surface-to-air missile systems – and when Anteon Corporation and Lockheed Martin introduced TopScene air strikes over Afghanistan in 2001 were also rehearsed over digital terrain.
But there is another side to all this, because digital platforms can also be used to enable others to display and interrogate the geography of air strikes. I’ve discussed this before in relation to the CIA-directed program of targeted killing in Pakistan here and here, but impressive progress has also been made in plotting air strikes across the border in Afghanistan.
The most remarkable use of USAF/ISAF data that I know is Jason Lyall‘s work in progress on what he calls ‘Dynamic coercion in civil wars’ – ‘Are airstrikes an effective tool of coercion against insurgent organizations?’ – which focuses on air strikes in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2011. This is part of a book project, Death from above: the effects of airpower in small wars; the most recent version of the relevant analysis is here. The map below is Jason’s summary of air strikes in Afghanistan 2006-11, but as I’ll explain in a moment, it gives little idea of the critical digital power that lies behind it.
First, the original USAF/ISAF data was in digital form, but transforming it into a coherent and consistent geo-coded database has involved a truly extraordinary enterprise:
We draw on multiple sources to construct a dataset of nearly 23,000 airstrikes and shows of force in Afghanistan during 2006-11. The bulk of the dataset stems from newly-declassified data from the Air Forces Central’s (AFCENT) Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in Southwest Asia, which recorded the location, date, platform, and type/number of bombs dropped for January 2008 to December 2011 in Afghanistan. These data required extensive cleaning to ensure that a consistent standard for each type of air operation was maintained and duplicates dropped. These data were supplemented by declassified data from the International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF) Combined Information Data Exchange Network (CIDNE) for the January 2006 to December 2011 time period. Finally, additional records from press releases by the Air Force’s Public Affairs Office (the “Daily Airpower Summary,” or DAPS) were also incorporated. … Each air operations’ intended target was confirmed using at least two independent coders drawing on publicly available satellite imagery. Merging of these records was extremely labor intensive, not least because of the near total absence of overlap between CAOC, CIDNE, and DAPS records. Only 448 events were found in all three datasets, underscoring the problems inherent in single-sourcing data, even official data, in conflict settings (my emphasis).
Second, to get the full visual effect of Jason’s analysis you absolutely need to see the animation that he’s made available on his website here; the image below is just a screenshot for September 2009 (I’ll explain why I chose that month in my next post).
But what about casualty figures? Josh includes a summary map of 216 air strikes involving acknowledged civilian casualties, taken from the same military databases (with all their limitations), and in January 2011 the US military released its data on ‘CIVCAS’ for the previous two years to the journal Science. They included casualties from all parties to the conflict:
The numbers show that 2,537 Afghans civilians were killed and 5,594 were wounded in the past two years. Most of the deaths – 80 percent – are attributed to insurgents, with 12 percent caused by coalition forces, a 26 percent drop.
Here is Science‘s visualization of the CIVCAS data, designed to capture the time-space rhythms of violence from multiple causes:
But other sources (notably the Afghan Rights Monitor and the UN Mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA, which produces six-monthly Reports on the protection of civilians in armed conflict) using different methodologies came up with much higher figures; here is a graph from the most recent UNAMA report showing casualties from air strikes 2009-13:
UNAMA added this comment:
UNAMA welcomes the reduction in civilian casualties from aerial operations but reiterates its concern regarding several operations that caused disproportionate loss of civilian life and injury. UNAMA also raises concerns with the lack of transparency and accountability about several aerial operations carried out by international military forces that resulted in civilian casualties.
You can find the full analysis by John Bohannon, which includes a discussion of both databases, at Science (open access) here.
To be sure, counting casualties is always a contentious (and often dangerous) affair. Getting information from the government of Afghanistan isn’t any more straightforward, as Nick Turse has shown: as he adds, ‘neither is it cheap’. But he persevered, and the wonderful Pitch Interactive(a data visualization studio that also produced the haunting representation of deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan)collaborated with The Nation to produce a stunning interactive of ‘civilian deaths that have occurred in Afghanistan as a result of war-related actions by the United States, its allies and Afghan government forces.’ Here’s a screenshot:
You will see running along the top the military commanders during each period; the red dots mark major events. It’s common knowledge – or should be – that the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was spearheaded by an intensive high-level bombing campaign (I described this in The Colonial Present), shown along that desperately deep left margin. But I suspect fewer people have grasped the reliance that ISAF has continued to place on air power. What stands out from the image above, clearly, is the disproportionate (sic) number of deaths attributed to air strikes (5, 622) compared with ground operations (794) throughout the period: the UNAMA data above suggest that this only started to change in 2013. You can read more about this in the essay by Bob Dreyfuss and Nick Turse that accompanied the interactive, ‘America’s Afghan victims’, here, and – as always – the tireless work of Marc Heroldis indispensable.
And to forestall a stream of comments, my title is not intended to suggest that digital technologies or the airstrikes they facilitate are somehow ‘immaterial’; nothing could be further from the truth. Or the killing fields.
I’m slowly working my war through Richard Overy‘s magisterial account of The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945; the subtitle is a necessary reminder that this wasn’t the only ‘bombing war’ of the period, but Overy’s scope is still much wider than the usual focus on the Blitz and the combined bomber offensive against Germany. Too soon for me to work out what I think, but there’s an appreciative review by another brilliant historian of the period, Richard J. Evans, in the Guardianhere. Evans calls The Bombing War ‘probably the most important book published on the history of the second world war this century.’
Evans’s summary of bombing’s ‘surprising inefficiency’ and ‘staggering inaccuracy’ is worth repeating:
Bombing was surprisingly inefficient. As Overy shows, poor visibility, the sudden deterioration of weather conditions, malfunctioning equipment, outdated and slow-moving aircraft, pilot inexperience or crew exhaustion, and enemy action varying from anti-aircraft batteries to night-fighters or the jamming of navigation beams, all reduced the effectiveness of bomber fleets. Aircraft crashed, ran out of fuel or suffered engine failure with astonishing frequency. In its raids on Britain from January to June 1941, for example, 216 German bombers were lost and 190 damaged; 282 of these were as a result of flying accidents. The death rate among bomber crews was appallingly high (crew members in Bomber Command had a one-in-four chance of surviving their first tour of duty, and a one-in-10 chance of surviving their second) but not all of it was as a result of enemy action. At the end of 1941 Bomber Command reckoned that it was losing six aircraft to accidents for every one shot down by the enemy. The British and especially the Americans could make good these losses, and more besides; in the end, Germany’s smaller resources meant that the German air force was increasingly outproduced.
Above all, bombing was staggeringly inaccurate. Bomber fleets had to fly high to avoid anti-aircraft fire from the ground, so even if the weather was clear, they were often unable to locate their targets effectively. On one mission, Robert Kee, a bomber pilot who later became a successful historian, “bombed some incendiaries at what we hoped was Hanover” but mostly dropped his bombs on searchlight concentrations because that was all he could see through the cloud. One report, compiled in September 1941, reported that only 15% of aircraft were bombing within five miles of their target. In the last three months of 1944, it was reckoned that only 5.6% of bombs fell within a mile of the aiming point if there was cloud, despite the use of electronic navigation aids. One raid on a major oil plant saw 87% of the bombs missing their target entirely, and only two actually hitting the buildings.
There’s also a thoughtful review of The Bombing War by Keith Lowehere; Lowe’s account of the bombing of Hamburg, Inferno: the devastation of Hamburg, 1943, is another tour de force, which describes both the execution of the air raids and the consequences for those on the ground. Claire Tomalin‘s review of Inferno closed with a sentence that has haunted me ever since I read it: ‘Once you are committed to fighting, you are going to kill the innocent with whatever technology you have developed.’ Overy does discuss those consequences too, but I think it’s fair to say that the tone of his discussion is largely (though not exclusively) policy-directed – a matter of response rather than experience.
There are now a number of major studies of the effects of bombing individual cities, and Jörg Friedrich‘s The Fire: the bombing of Germany 1940-1945 is also indispensable. But for an account of the experiences of those crouching (and dying) under the bombs on an equally epic scale to Overy, albeit confined to Britain and Germany, we have to wait for Dietmar Süss‘s Death from the skies: how the British and Germans survived bombing in World War II, due from Oxford University Press next spring. Originally published in 2011 as Tod aus der Luft, the book has been a bestseller in Germany. Stefan Goebel provides a detailed review here:
‘The publication of Tod aus der Luft is to be highly welcomed, not least because it breaks into a market that for too long has been dominated by popular accounts on the one hand and official histories on the other. Süß’s extraordinary book combines the virtues of both genres: delivered with great panache, it is also based on a scrupulous examination of archival records. Potential buyers of Tod aus der Luft can expect multiple ‘two-in-one’ deals: not only is this book both sophisticated and accessible, written by an academic historian with a background in journalism, it is also a stimulating synthesis of the social, political, and cultural history of war, and a thoughtful comparative study of Britain (or ‘England’, as Süß has it) and Germany in the era of the Second World War…
‘At the centre of this comparative study are not the political systems (even though Süß has a great deal to say about their institutional structures) but the emergence of a Kriegsmoral (war morale) at the intersection of individual experiences and political mobilization. Moreover, this hefty tome is not meant to be a comprehensive ac-count of the British and German bombing campaigns of the Second World War. Rather, the author’s approach might be described as a history of the air war ‘from below’: one that is focused on the fear, experience, and memory (of people on the ground) of death and destruction….
‘The construction of a Kriegsmoral became the central preoccupation of both societies during the air war. This book offers an intriguing exploration of the comparative method; the author’s discussion of British society during the Blitz throws many aspects of the German experience of the air war into much sharper relief (and vice versa).’
Both books are, appropriately, blockbusters: Overy comes in at 880 pp and Süss at 736 pp.
I’ve posted about this remarkable project before. The Air Force Research Institute has now made available online its historical database of air strikes. Although a USAF project, the Theater History of Operations Reportsis not confined to US airstrikes but includes allied strikes; the main focus is on World War I (from June 1916), World War II and Vietnam (from 1965-1969, though I haven’t yet checked whether this includes Laos and Cambodia).
The original description of the Project included the Korean War, Desert Storm (1991), Allied Force (1999), Afghanistan (2001 on) and Iraq (2003-11), but these are still classified and not yet available online. Here is the architect of the project, Lt Col Jenns Roberston, explaining the background:
That was a year ago. There’s now a Quick Start Guide here, and you can download the full, unclassified database and also ‘Grab and Go’ files for Google Earth. Latest background information here.
Here’s a grab of Allied bombing in Europe and the Mediterranean during World War II, though the key here is obviously to disaggregate and refine the data – which is precisely what the database allows. The red squares on the map are B-17 strikes but these overlay (for example) the orange squares of Wellington bombers so the impression at this scale is not particularly helpful.
And while we’re on the subject of World War II, don’t forget the Bomb Sight project, which maps the London Blitz in extraordinary detail: more here.
It’s important to look beyond Europe, of course. Roberston, who started work on the database in 2006, told the Air Force Timesthat he was surprised at the level of Allied bombing in the Pacific theater:
“We were blown away – no pun intended – by the level of bombing that was taking place, not only in the South Pacific but also in Burma, which is something that nobody looks at; Formosa, currently known as Taiwan; and the Philippines – how heavily those regions were bombed in the lead-up to bombing Japan proper.”
On bombing ‘Japan proper’ in World War II, as I’ve noted previously, the very best source is Japan Air Raids.org.
If anyone else is working through the disaggregated database too, do let me know how you get on.
This is the seventh in a series of posts on Grégoire Chamayou‘s Théorie du drone; this one covers the second chapter of Part II, Ethos and psyche.
2. ‘That others may die’
Chamayou opens with a quotation from a French naval officer, Raoul Castex, on early submarine warfare. Castex was a naval strategist of the first water (he rose to the rank of Admiral, though he was a captain when he wrote the essay Chamayou cites). His views were canvassed as widely as those of Alfred Thayer Mahan, and they were set out in detail in his five-volume Théories strategiques published by the Société d’Editions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales between 1929 and 1935. This was hailed as recently as 1995 in a report prepared for US Navy Doctrine Command by James Trittenas ‘perhaps the most complete theoretical survey of maritime strategy to ever appear.’
Castex was not fêted so enthusiastically in the 1920s, however, when his ‘synthesis on submarine warfare’ was seen as a defence of unrestricted German submarine attacks during the First World War. The first attacks had been against warships, but by early 1915 – and in large measure as a response to Britain’s naval blockade – the focus switched to merchant shipping. In the course of the war Britain lost over 12 million tons of merchant shipping to U-boats. In Castex’s view, the success of these attacks showed that the submarine was the instrument that would overturn Britain’s naval supremacy.
Britain bridled at the suggestion, and Castex’s supposedly exculpatory views were quoted in (mis)translation by Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty at the Committee on Limitation of Armaments in Washington in December 1921; they were repudiated by the senior French naval delegate and provoked a fierce political and public controversy in Britain. The British delegation had gone to the Washington conference to demand the total abolition of submarine warfare: submarines were virtually impossible to detect, and there was little defence against them (depth charges became available in early 1916, but these had minimal effect). Before the War, Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson had denounced submarines as “unfair, underhand, and damned un-British”, and during the war there were repeated condemnations of the sinking of merchantmen (and arguments over their ‘noncombatant’ status). By 1921 the focus of debate had switched back to military targets, and the Admiralty was gravely concerned that the ‘battlefleets of the world” – crucially, of course, those of the Royal Navy – “would be at the mercy of flotillas of submarines of improved design.” Britain’s position was opposed by France, Italy and Japan, and the attempt at abolition failed. Chamayou doesn’t bother with any of this detail – it’s all back-story and you can find much more here – but its relevance for drone warfare and campaigns against it should be obvious.
In his synthesis Castex noted that the practitioners of submarine warfare believed that it had finally realised the dream of risk-less warfare. Here is the passage that Chamayou cites (and its prefiguration of Chamayou’s hunting thematic could not be plainer):
‘They were invulnerable. War should be a game for them, a sport, a kind of hunting, where, having delivered and spread murder, all that would be left for them to do would be to revel in the sight of their victims’ agony. Meanwhile they would be safe from retaliation and, once back in port, they would busy themselves with stories of their hunting prowess.’
In Chamayou’s view, drones have reincarnated this myth – and these sentiments – in even stronger terms. They have transformed the meaning of ‘going to war’; the traditional model of combat is now being displaced by an altogether different ‘state of violence’ that degenerates into slaughter or hunting. One no longer fights the enemy, Chamayou contends, the enemy is simply eliminated as though one were shooting rabbits.
In the sixteenth century Chamayou says that the iconography of Death often portrayed a soldier fighting a skeleton – most famously in Holbein’s Dance of Death – in a struggle that was always pointless because Death mocked his adversary and always triumphed in the end. The imagery has now been appropriated in this unofficial patch produced for Reaper crews, where the soldier now assumes the position of Death itself (and becomes synonymous with the MQ-9 Reaper); the slogan – which is in fact a parody of “That others may live”, used as a patch by the USAF’s Pararescue teams – gives Chamayou the title for his chapter.
In a sense, then, both the submarine and the drone trumpet asymmetry as virtue. And as that parallel implies, the pursuit of asymmetry is by no means novel. Here is Sebastian Junger:
A man with a machine gun can conceivably hold off a whole battalion, at least for a while, which changes the whole equation of what it means to be brave in battle…. Machine guns forced infantry to disperse, to camouflage themselves, and to fight in small and independent units. All that promoted stealth over honor and squad loyalty over blind obedience….
As a result much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor: it’s not. It’s about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men.
Historical precedent cannot issue an ethical warrant, however, and Junger admits as much. Yet Chamayou notes that this is exactly the strategy used time and time again to justify drone warfare and to silence its critics. His example is an essay by David Bell directed at what he called ‘the increasingly vocal critics who doubt the morality, effectiveness, and political implications of “remote control warfare.”‘
‘[C]ritics tend to present this new frontier of warfare as something largely novel — a sinister science fiction fantasy come to life, and one that has the power to radically change the political dynamics of warfare. But if our current technology is new, the desire to take out one’s enemies from a safe distance is anything but. There is nothing new about military leaders exploiting technology for this purpose. And, for that matter, there is nothing new about criticizing such technology as potentially immoral or dishonorable. In fact, both remote control warfare, and the queasy feelings it arouses in many observers, are best seen as parts of a classic, and very old history.’
This is perfectly true, as far as it goes, and in my own work I have traced the historical curve of ‘killing at a distance’. I accept, too, that it is reasonable to ask those who object to killing from (say) 7,500 miles away to stipulate the distance from which they do consider it acceptable tokill (though I’m not sure how Chamayou would respond to such a question). As Bell wryly remarks, ‘None of today’s critics, as far as I know, have expressed any nostalgia for the pike, or other hand-to-hand weapons.’
Bell is a professor of history at Princeton, and I greatly admire his revisionist account of The first total war which troubles the usual identification of ‘total war’ with the bloody twentieth century and insists, instead, on Napoleon as the midwife of ‘warfare as we know it’. In fact, I’ve drawn on Bell’s work for my exploration of the French occupation of Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century.
But that’s the irony: Chamayou argues that it was precisely Europe’s colonial wars that epitomised the desire to kill others from a safe distance, whereas these are conspicuously absent from Bell’s defence of drone warfare. They don’t loom large in The first total war either, where Bell anticipates Chamayou’s challenge. He accepts that The first total war deals ‘only rarely with the world beyond Europe’ – the principal exception is indeed Egypt – and he acknowledges that ‘colleagues often suggested to me that the origins of modern total war are surely to be found on the early modern impperial frontier’:
‘Surely it was here, long before the French Revolution, that Europeans first dispensed with notions of chivalric restraint and waged brutal wars of extermination against supposed “savages”. Did not Europeans learn their worst behavior from imperial encounters in Asia, Africa, and the Americas?’
His answer, in fact, is no:
‘The horrendous slaughters of the Reformation-era wars of religion began well before most European empires had developed much beyond trading posts, and the worst examples occurred in the German states, which had no colonies. The development of the French and British overseas empires coincided with the introduction of relative moderation and restraint into European warfare, not with their disappearance.’
Bell attributes this state of affairs to the ‘dependence’of Europeans on indigenous populations. When later imperial armies embarked on Kipling’s ‘savage wars of peace’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he argues, ‘the colonial setting mostly offered Europeans a laboratory for testing their own preexisting ideas about war’: ideas that had been honed, so he insists, by the Napoleonic wars that are the focus of his book.
These are convenient and far from uncontroversial claims, but three riders are necessary that, taken together, reinstate the importance of colonial and imperial modalities of power.
First, Bell’s book glosses over the extraordinary violence of the French occupation of Egypt between 1798 and 1801, including the terrible victory at the Battle of the Pyramids and the French army’s savage and exemplary response to two insurrections in Cairo (he’s not alone: remarkably, Edward Said does much the same in Orientalism). The violence included close-quarter butchery but also stand-off artillery bombardments that rained shells down onto the city from the Citadel above. Here is an eye-witness account of the first insurrection:
‘The situation worsened by the time of the afternoon prayer. Violence and the atmosphere of siege increased. At that point (the French) fired their guns and bombarded the houses and the quarters, aiming especially at al-Azhar. They trained cannons and mortars on it, as well as on the positions of the fighters close to it, such as Ghawriya Market and al-Fahhamin. When this bombardment fell on the people, it was something which they had never witnessed in their whole life… ’
Second, whatever the origins of those ‘ideas about war’ – and they were, I think, clearly multiple – they were put into often spectacular effect during the colonial wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And it is those wars that show the most direct continuity with the places and the peoples who are now condemned to live and die under the shadow of the drone.
Third, as Chamayou shows in his discussion of ‘Counterinsurgency from the Air’, so-called ‘air control’ in the early twentieth century was an intrinsically colonial doctrine. The first experiments in bombing from aircraft took place over Libya before the First World War, and while bombing of civilian targets in Britain, France and Germany took place in the last years of the war, the use of airpower against peoples who had no capacity to strike back was a cornerstone of British policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and on the North-West Frontier of British India.
Chamayou argues that defenders of drone warfare who invoke the ‘nothing new under the sun’ argument do so in an attempt to relativise, even sedate contemporary violence. They invoke historical precedent – in effect: ‘This has happened time and time again before, so why all the fuss now?’ – but then fail to describe the bloody continuity that yokes past to present. Hence, as Chamayou concludes: ‘The drone is the weapon of an amnesiac post-colonial violence.’
My own inclination is to press this further. In The Colonial Present I suggested that what Chamayou describes here as a version of postcoloniality – I still think that term sadly premature – is haunted by Terry Eagleton‘s ‘terrible twins’: amnesia and nostalgia. Or, as Eagleton put it, ‘the inability to remember and the incapacity to do anything else.’ Drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere not only suppress the wretched consequences of previous ‘air control’ regimes but also yearn for the swagger and seemingly effortless domination that they imposed.
This is the sixth in a series of posts on Grégoire Chamayou‘s Théorie du drone. I had planned to cover Part II, Ethos and psyche, in a single post, but I’ve received several requests not to speed up, so I’m continuing chapter by chapter, with supplementary readings and comments as I go.
1. Drones and kamikazes
Soon after Oliver Belcher started his research programme with me – and I’m delighted to say his thesis on ‘The afterlives of counterinsurgency’ has now been submitted – we had one of many rich conversations about what he called ‘the art of war in an age of digital reproduction’. The reference, of course, was to Walter Benjamin‘s famous essay, usually translated as ‘The work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction.’ This seems to be widely regarded as the standard, even canonical version since its inclusion in the volume of Benjamin’s essays edited by Hannah Arendt and published as Illuminations.
But it has a more complicated history. Here is Eric Larsen:
‘After fleeing the Nazi government in 1933, Benjamin moved to Paris, from where he published the first edition of “Work of Art” in 1936. This publication appeared in French translation under the direction of Raymond Aron in volume 5, no. 1 of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Benjamin subsequently rewrote the essay and after editorial work by Theodore and Margarethe Adorno it was posthumously published in its commonly recognized form in his Schriften of 1955.’
In fact there were four versions of the essay, and several critics regard the second version as the most daring of all (you can find the third version here). In the third volume of Harvard’s Selected Writings this is translated as ‘The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility’ (1936) – it’s also available separately in the little book shown on the left – and includes this remarkable passage in an expanded Section VI:
Compared to that of the machine age, of course, this [pre-historic] technology was undeveloped. But from a dialectical stand-point, the disparity is unimportant. What matters is the way the orientation and aims of that technology differ from those of ours. Whereas the former made the maximum possible use of human beings, the latter reduces their use to the minimum. The achievements of the first technology might be said to culminate in human sacrifice; those of the second, in the remote-controlled aircraft which needs no human crew. The results of the first technology are valid once and for all (it deals with irreparable lapse or sacrificial death, which holds good for eternity). The results of the second are wholly provisional (it operates by means of experiments and endlessly varied test procedures). The origin of the second technology lies at the point where, by an unconscious ruse, human beings first began to distance themselves from nature. It lies, in other words, in play.
It’s extraordinary to read these words 75 or so years after Benjamin wrote them, and their intimations of armed drones and even the supposed ‘Playstation mentality’ that misguides those who operate them (though I think that argument misunderstands the extraordinary immersive capacity of videogames, but that’s another story that I’ve told elsewhere).
Chamayou starts his exploration of ‘Ethos and psyche’ by invoking yet another version of Benjamin’s iconic essay, but his basic point shines through the version I’ve quoted above. His purpose is to juxtapose one technology or at least its limit-case, sacrifice, which engages the human in the most direct and intimate way possible, once and for all, to another, from which (so he says) the human is disengaged in a mechanical act that is, in principle, endlessly repeatable.
Yet it turns out that this isn’t an historical succession in any simple sense at all: what Chamayou sees instead are two different genealogies – the kamikaze pilot and suicide-bomber on one side and the drone on the other – entwined in a truly deadly embrace.
The linchpin of his argument is provided by a Russian emigré engineer working for RAC, Vladimir Zworykin. Apparently alarmed by press reports in 1934 that the Japanese were considering the formation of a ‘Suicide Corps to control surface and aerial torpedoes’, Zworkyin proposed to use technology to counter the threat. Previous experiments with radio-controlled aerial torpedoes were all very well, but these were ‘blind weapons’ that inevitably lacked precision. The Japanese proposed to solve the problem by using human pilots to guide the explosive platform on to its target – Zworykin’s contrary solution was to guide the aerial torpedo through an ‘electric eye’ (a sort of proto-television).
The torpedo would be a glider,
‘carried on an airplane to the proximity of where it is to be used, and released. After it has been released the torpedo can be guided to its target with shortwave radio control, the operator being able to see the target through the “eye” [or Iconoscope] of the torpedo as it approaches.’
In 1935 Zworykin submitted a memorandum to the War and Navy Departments describing a television-controlled missile that could be guided beyond the line of sight, and five years later the US approved ‘Project Block‘ for RCA to develop TV-guided ‘assault drones’ in concert with the US Navy. When the first Japanese kamikaze units were formed they were indeed deployed against naval targets – but this wasn’t until 1944, so I’m not sure about the source of those much earlier reports that fired Zworykin’s imagination.
I described some earlier experiments with aerial torpedoes here, and you can find much more about Zworykin here and in Alexander Magoun‘s Television: the life story of a technology, pp. 78-84. He notes that the US Army Air Force was a latecomer to these experiments, and didn’t demonstrate a TV-controlled drone until October 1943, largely because its major investment was in heavy bombers capable of inflicting major destruction on cities and military-industrial targets. Project Aphrodite did experiment with the use of television to guide war-weary Flying Fortresses filled with explosives and napalm on to targets in Germany, but the attempts were largely unsuccessful and singularly irrelevant to the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II.
Nevertheless, Chamayou argues that to some degree Zworykin had identified the core principle that would later be used to develop the smart bomb and the drone. His sharper point is that the forerunner of the drone was an anti-kamikaze; sharper because this conceptual origin places the drone within a distinctive ethico-technical economy of life and death.
This ethico-technical economy can be read as an ethic of heroic sacrifice on one side and an ethic of auto-preservation on the other, each a mirror image of its other, ‘two visions of horror’. Chamayou joins several other commentators to connect the kamikaze attacks of the Second World war to suicide-bombers today, and so argues that in the global North today the cardinal opposition is usually expressed as ‘defiance of death’ versus ‘love of life’: the frequently repeated claim, as at once an explanation and a condemnation of suicide-bombing, that ‘they’ don’t value life as much as ‘we’ do. Yet, as Chamayou insists, it’s not ‘life in general’ that we value at all: it’s our lives that we cherish.
To develop this argument (which he will later elaborate in other dimensions), Chamayou cites Richard Cohen‘s editorial in the Washington Post on 6 October 2009:
As for the Taliban fighters, they not only don’t cherish life, they expend it freely in suicide bombings. It’s difficult to imagine an American suicide bomber.
He then uses anthropologist Hugh Gusterson‘s response to sharpen his point still further. Gusterson wonders, with Jacqueline Rose, why ‘dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant [than suicide bombing]: it is somehow deemed, by Western leaders at least, to be morally superior.’ He then reverses the terms of the argument (and in going so prefigures Chamayou’s own argument about the substitution of hunting for combat in many areas of later modern warfare and about the colonial antecedents of drone strikes):
[M]any people in the Middle East feel about U.S. drone attacks the way Richard Cohen feels toward suicide bombers. The drone attacks are widely perceived in the Middle East as cowardly, because the drone pilot is killing people on the ground from the safety of an air-conditioned pod in Nevada, where there is no chance that he can be killed by those he is attacking. He has turned combat into hunting. In this regard, the drone is the culmination of a long tradition of colonial war-fighting technologies — going back at least to the machine guns with which British and French colonial soldiers mowed down spear-carrying Africans –that ensure that the “natives” die, in an unfair fight, in considerably larger numbers than the colonial soldiers.
The drone operator is also a mirror image of the suicide bomber in that he too deviates, albeit in the opposite direction, from our paradigmatic image of combat as an encounter between warriors who meet as equals risking the wounding or killing of their own bodies while trying to wound or kill the others’ bodies. The honorable drama of combat lies in the symmetrical willingness of warriors to wager their bodies against each other for a cause. But now, in the words of the anthropologist Talal Asad, in his book On Suicide Bombing, U.S. “soldiers need no longer go to war expecting to die, but only to kill. In itself, this destabilizes the conventional understanding of war as an activity in which human dying and killing are exchanged.”
But there are two other twists to this story that Chamayou doesn’t pursue.
First, in his essay for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Gusterson confounds Cohen’s difficulty in imagining ‘an American suicide bomber’ like this:
‘For decades loyal U.S. soldiers in nuclear missile silos have trained to launch their weapons in the expectation that they would be killed almost immediately afterwards in the ensuing nuclear war. I once interviewed a former special-forces officer who was trained to hike behind enemy lines with a tactical nuclear weapon on his back and place it near an important target. Although the weapon had a timer, he expected to die at ground zero.
If such men were the elite nuclear suicide bombers whose mission was prepared but never carried out, the Cold War turned the whole country into a suicide bomber rehearsing obsessively for the moment when we would “push the button” and take down millions of our enemies with us. Seen in this light, Americans trained for the biggest suicide bombing mission of all.’
Second, there have been ‘successful’ American suicide bombers. To some historians the first candidate is Andrew Kehoe, who set off an explosion at a schoolhouse in Bath, Michigan in May 1927, killing 44 people, before setting off dynamite in his truck and killing himself and several other people. Whether you count this as a suicide bombing in the modern sense of the term depends on the criteria you think appropriate. Many commentators exclude Kehoe and identify three other, more recent American suicide bombers: Shirwa Ahmed, who drove a car bomb into a government compound in Puntland in October 2008, killing as many as 30 people; Farah Mohamed Beledi, who killed himself and three soldiers at a military checkpoint in Mogadishu in June 2011; and Abdisalan Hussein Ali, who attacked African Union troops in Mogadishu six months later. All three were Somali-Americans who had lived in Minnesota and were recruited by al-Shabaab.
But to exclude Kehoe and claim that these three were not ‘really American’ is to immediately trigger one of Chamayou’s key arguments about the ways in which killing and dying in the age of the drone are racialized. More soon.
Coda:
As I finished up this post, I discovered a young American performance artist, Ethan Fishbane, whose show American Suicide Bomber Associationhas been staged in New York and previously in Indonesia and South Africa.
Apparently he threw one of his stage ‘bombs’ into the garbage last week and unwittingly set off a bomb scare in Manhattan.
“I felt the response [by the police] was wholly appropriate,” he said. “Even if it’s just a prop for a theater piece, they were on top of it.”
I’ve drawn attention to the remarkable work of Cary Karacas before, notably the mesmerising essay he co-authored with David Fedman, ‘A cartographic fade to black: mapping the destruction of urban Japan in World War II’ [Jnl. historical geography 38 (2012) 306-28], which quite rightly won the prize for the paper published in the journal that made ‘the greatest contribution to the advancement of scholarship in historical geography’ in 2012; it’s available here. Bombing depends upon a whole series of cartographic visions, and there is something exquisite about using maps to expose rather than plan violence from the air like this.
You can also get a sense of their work from this beautifully illustrated essay by Eric Jaffe for the Atlantic last year, ‘Mapping urbicide in World War II’, and from this special (open-access) issue of Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Cary edited with Bret Fisk on ‘The fire-bombing of Tokyo: views from the ground’.
Working with Bret and translator Eri Tsuji, Cary also launched a new website, Japan Air Raids.org, which is a bilingual (hooray!) digital archive providing an extraordinary range of primary and secondary materials on the US bombing of Japan in the Second World War.
In Japan it took over twenty years following the end of the World War II before people began to make a concerted effort to remember the incendiary raids that destroyed a significant percentage of most of Japan’s cities, wiped out a quarter of all housing in the country, made nine million people homeless, killed at least 187,000 civilians, and injured 214,000 more (source). Thanks to the many Japanese citizens who over the last forty years have labored to write down survivor accounts, locate and preserve various records, and analyze the destruction of urban Japan (and the concurrent suffering and social upheaval that occurred), the history of the air raids has taken root in Japan in a variety of ways. Numerous books and articles have been published, resource centers and peace museums have been built, and both individuals and associations continue to carry out important research.
Outside of Japan, the lag time to look closely at the impacts of the air raids is even more pronounced. In 1977, historian Gordon Daniels lamented the fact that academics had largely ignored the air raids on Japan – and the so-called Great Tokyo Air Raid in particular – as a subject of inquiry. Little has changed since this observation. While a handful of important English-language books and articles have appeared since then, most deal with the topic strictly from the standpoint of examining, and on occasion criticizing, U.S. strategic bombing doctrines and campaigns. Analyses about what the air raids entailed for the Japanese civilians on the ground and the cities in which they lived have yet to be written. Consequently, interested citizens and intellectuals who cannot read Japanese have minimal access to materials that shed light on the devastating effects of the incendiary bombing campaign on Japanese communities, cities and society. Additionally, while considerable English-language primary and secondary source documents related to the air raids exist, to date they have been beyond the reach of most people save for a handful of individuals who possess the inclination, time and resources required to visit the physical archives holding them.
By taking advantage of technological developments that allow for digitization, storage, and global retrieval of documents, we hope that this digital archive will play an important role in encouraging people to learn about and further research this area, and in fostering collaboration among a variety of individuals and groups. Additionally, by democratizing archival access to materials related the Japan air raids, we hope to open this field to the general public, scholars, professional and lay researchers, university students, and even middle/secondary school educators and their pupils.
The project is ongoing, but it’s already clear that this is a stunning achievement – visually, intellectually and politically – and a truly generous and absolutely indispensable resource.
Over the years I’ve learned much from the writings of Paul K. Saint-Amour, whose work on the violent intersections between modernism and air power has helped me think through my own project on bombing (‘Killing Space’) and, in a minor key, my analysis of cartography, aerial reconnaissance and ‘corpography’ on the Western Front in the First World War. A minimalist listing would include:
Paul advances these claims, and enters into this fraught ‘problem-space’, by tracking the figure of a Royal Air Force officer, L.E.O. Charlton (left). A veteran of the First World War, Charlton was appalled by his experience of colonial ‘air control’ in Iraq in the 1920s (‘direct action by aeroplanes on indirect information by unreliable informants … was a species of oppression’: sounds familiar) but became a strenuous advocate of bombing civilians as the ‘new factor in warfare’ in the future. Convinced that Britain was exceptionally vulnerable to air attack, the only possible defence was extraordinary air superiority capable of landing devastating ‘hammer blows’.
But precisely because the enabling experiments for these operations were carried out in a colonial laboratory, ‘outside the boundaries of the national body’, this couldn’t qualify as war – so this was ‘interwar’ in quite another sense too – and, Charlton notwithstanding, the ‘bombing demonstrations’ that took place in Iraq and elsewhere were not subject to much critical scrutiny or public outcry in Britain. On the contrary, within the metropole they were turned into popular entertainment at successive air displays at Hendon in North London in the 1920s (see below) (though, prophetically, by the 1930s, the pageant staged bombing runs against ‘the enemy’, and in War over England (1936) Charlton envisaged Britain forced to surrender after a devastating German air attack on, of all things, the Hendon Air Show) .
geographical imaginations 