I saw a man

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Derek Gregory

Last week I was in Bloomington for the drones conference – more on that later – but while I was there I managed to finish Owen Sheers‘ new novel, I saw a man. All of the reviews I’ve seen so far (and they have been very, very good: see here, here and here, for example) praise the way in which Owen so beautifully recovers the circles of grief that spiral from a drone strike on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that accidentally killed a party of foreign journalists, including Caroline, the wife of the book’s narrator. ‘Despite its “fire and forget” name tag,’ we are assured, ‘once a Hellfire had been released there would always be someone who never would.’

In fact, Owen and I had corresponded about the details of drone strikes and casualty investigations while he was working on the book, and he certainly treats mourning and memory with extraordinary skill and empathy. Restricting the victims to those outside the region, apart from a local driver and interpreter, may make the task easier – much of the story plays out in Hampstead – but it’s still formidably difficult.

Yet the book is also, equally centrally, about distancing. Michael is an author with a reputation for effacing himself from his narratives. Towards the end, in a phrase that powers the book’s meta-fictional twist (and which in some editions is captured on a cover from which Sheers’ own name is absent), Michael is told:

“Isn’t that what you’re always saying? You need distance to see anything clearly? To become your own editor.”

Even when he tries to lose himself in his fencing lessons, his instructor insists:

“DISTANCE! DISTANCE MICHAEL! It’s your best defence!”

And it is of course distance that is focal to the fateful drone strike. Those most directly involved in the kill-chain are soon effaced from the official narrative:

“A U.S. drone strike.” That was all the press release said. No mention of Creech, screeners, Intel coordinator, an operator, a pilot. It was as if the Predator had been genuinely unmanned. As if there had been no hand behind its flight, no eye behind its cameras.

And those who were killed are artfully turned into the authors of their own destruction (a tactic that is routinely used on Afghan and Pakistani victims too), even sacrificed for a greater good (international humanitarian law’s vengeful doctrine of ‘necessity’):

[T]he Pentagon statement also made mention of the journalists “working undercover,” of “entering a high-risk area.” They had known, it was implied, the dangers of their actions. And, the same statement reminded the world, an influential terrorist had been successfully targeted. The weight of blame, Michael knew, from the moment it happened, was being dissipated, thinned.

But distance is not a moral absolute (one of the most egregious mistakes of critics of drone warfare: if you think it wrong to kill someone from 7,000 miles away, over what distance do you think it is acceptable?). In a narrative arc that will be familiar to many readers, the pilot of the drone (Daniel) is haunted by what happened, and by the dismal intimacy of death.

Each morning, as he sets off from his home outside Las Vegas to drive to Creech Air Force Base, Daniel reflects on the similarity of the distant Charleston mountains to those over which he would soon be flying his Predator or Reaper. It’s a common trope, actually: George Brant makes much of it in his play Grounded. ‘Despite their proximity,’ though, Daniel hadn’t been into them and didn’t really know them.

They were his daily view but not yet his landscape, a feature of his geography but not yet his territory. Unlike those other mountains, 8,000 miles away. Those mountains Daniel knew intimately. He’d never climbed in them, either, but he was still familiar with the villages silted into their folds, the shadows their peaks threw at evening and the habits of the shepherds marshalling their flocks along their lower slopes. Recently he’d even been able to anticipate, given the right weather conditions, at what time the clouds would come misting down the higher peaks into the ravines of the valleys. Over the last few months he’d begun to feel an ownership over them. Were they not as much his workplace as that of those shepherds? For the troops operating in the area they were simply elevation, exhaustion, fear. They were hostile territory. But for Daniel they were his hunting ground, and as such it was his job not just to know them but to learn them, too. To love them, even, so that from the darkness of his control station in Creech, he might be able to move through their altitudes as naturally as the eagles who’d ridden their thermals for centuries.

It’s a brilliant paragraph, reflective and revealing, that captures the ways in which the pilot’s optical knowledge is transmuted into ‘ownership’, knowledge pinned to power, and distanced from the corpographies of troops on the ground for whom the mountains meant only ‘elevation, exhaustion, fear’ [see also here]. Daniel was freed from all that, soaring high above them, precisely because his territory appeared elsewhere. If, as Stuart Elden suggests, territory can be conceived as a political technology that asserts a claim over bodies-in-spaces, then one of the most perceptive passages in I saw a man is the description of Daniel scanning ‘the territory of his screen (my emphasis)’…

Distance, intimacy, experience: all mediated by political technology and in consequence highly conditional and always partial. That is how the pilot is made free to pursue what Grégoire Chamayou calls his ‘man-hunting‘: because what appears on the screen is a target – not a man or a woman.

Or, as the book’s epigraph says: ‘I saw a man who wasn’t there….’

Banquet’s ghosts

Posted on June 27, 2015 by Derek Gregory

I’ve just finished a remarkable book by Atef Abu Saif, The drone eats with me: diaries from a city under fire (Comma Press, 2015). The city in question is Gaza:

On 7 July 2014, in an apparent response to the murder of three teenagers, Israel launched a major offensive against the Gaza Strip, lasting 51 days, killing 2145 Palestinians (578 of them children), injuring over 11,000, and demolishing 17,200 homes.

The global outcry at this collective punishment of an already persecuted people was followed by widespread astonishment at the pro-Israeli bias of Western media coverage. The usual news machine rolled up, and the same distressing images and entrenched political rhetoric were broadcast, yet almost nothing was reported of the on-going lives of ordinary Gazans – the real victims of the war.

One of the few voices to make it out was that of Atef Abu Saif, a writer and teacher from Jabalia Refugee Camp, whose eye-witness accounts (published in The Guardian, The New York Times, and elsewhere) offered a rare window into the conflict for Western readers. Here, Atef’s complete diaries of the war allow us to witness the full extent of last summer’s atrocities from the most humble of perspectives: that of a young father, fearing for his family’s safety, trying to stay sane in an insanely one-sided war.

Over at the electronic intifada Pam Bailey explains:

Although already the author of four novels and a political science text, Abu Saif did not write this book with publication in mind. Rather, it began as entries to his diary, printed only after Ra Page, founder of Comma Press, recognized the potential in the passages shared by his friend in Gaza.

The writing alternates between poignant simplicity and dramatic flourishes and haunting metaphors. Abu Saif often uses a comparison to hunger and eating to describe the rapaciousness of war and those who “feed” off of it. “Destruction is a rich meal for the media,” he writes. “Their camera does not observe the fast of Ramadan, it devours and devours. It is constantly eating new images.”

The diary begins on 6 July — two days before the officially declared beginning of the war — with this chilling observation: “When it comes, it brings with it a smell, a fragrance even. You learn to recognize it as a kid growing up in these narrow streets. You develop a knack for detecting it, tasting it in the air. You can almost see it. It lurks in the shadows, follows you at a distance wherever you go. If you retain this skill, you can tell that it’s coming — hours, sometimes days, before it actually arrives. You can’t mistake it. War.”

I’ve been asked to speak on drones later this year at a conference at UC Santa Barbara on Metamorphosis: Animal, Human, Armor – the image above is from the extraordinary British film of Kafka’s novella: you can catch a clip on YouTube here – and no doubt partly for this reason I too have been taken by the ways in which, as Pam notes, Abu Saif turns again and again to tropes of human-machines feeding (captured in the title of the book too). I’d read parts of the diary as it was being composed – see here, for example – but the imaginary of predation is now even more compelling and even more shocking:

As the noise of the explosion subsides, it’s replaced by the inevitable whir of a drone, sounding so close it could be right beside us. It’s like it wants to join us for the evening, and has pulled up a chair.

Later:

The food is ready. I wake the children and bring them in. We all sit around five dishes: white cheese, hummus, orange jam, yellow cheese, and olives. Darkness eats with us. Fear and anxiety eat with us. The unknown eats with us. The F16 eats with us. The drone, and its operator somewhere out in Israel, eat with us.

More once I’ve worked out what I want to say at the conference, but for now there is a particularly thoughtful review and response to Abu Saif by Jacob Bacharach at The Rumpus here.

Future imperfect and tense

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Derek Gregory

A clutch of forthcoming books on war that seek, in different ways, to illuminate dimensions of what I’ve been calling ‘later modern war’:

Antonia Chayes‘ Borderless Wars (due in August at an eye-popping price from Cambridge University Press):

In 2011, Nasser Al-Awlaki, a terrorist on the US ‘kill list’ in Yemen, was targeted by the CIA. A week later, a military strike killed his son. The following year, the US Ambassador to Pakistan resigned, undermined by CIA-conducted drone strikes of which he had no knowledge or control. The demands of the new, borderless ‘gray area’ conflict have cast civilians and military into unaccustomed roles with inadequate legal underpinning. As the Department of Homeland Security defends against cyber threats and civilian contractors work in paramilitary roles abroad, the legal boundaries of war demand to be outlined. In this book, former Under Secretary of the Air Force Antonia Chayes examines these new ‘gray areas’ in counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism and cyber warfare. Her innovative solutions for role definition and transparency will establish new guidelines in a rapidly evolving military-legal environment.

Christopher Coker‘s Future War (due in September from Polity):

Will tomorrow’s wars be dominated by autonomous drones, land robots and warriors wired into a cybernetic network which can read their thoughts? Will war be fought with greater or lesser humanity? Will it be played out in cyberspace and further afield in Low Earth Orbit? Or will it be fought more intensely still in the sprawling cities of the developing world, the grim black holes of social exclusion on our increasingly unequal planet? Will the Great Powers reinvent conflict between themselves or is war destined to become much ‘smaller’ both in terms of its actors and the beliefs for which they will be willing to kill?

In this illuminating new book Christopher Coker takes us on an incredible journey into the future of warfare. Focusing on contemporary trends that are changing the nature and dynamics of armed conflict, he shows how conflict will continue to evolve in ways that are unlikely to render our century any less bloody than the last. With insights from philosophy, cutting-edge scientific research and popular culture, Future War is a compelling and thought-provoking meditation on the shape of war to come.

Brian Massumi‘s Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (due in September from Duke University Press):

Color coded terror alerts, invasion, drone war, rampant surveillance: all manifestations of the type of new power Brian Massumi theorizes in Ontopower. Through an in-depth examination of the War on Terror and the culture of crisis, Massumi identifies the emergence of preemption, which he characterizes as the operative logic of our time. Security threats, regardless of the existence of credible intelligence, are now felt into reality. Whereas nations once waited for a clear and present danger to emerge before using force, a threat’s felt reality now demands launching a preemptive strike. Power refocuses on what may emerge, as that potential presents itself to feeling. This affective logic of potential washes back from the war front to become the dominant mode of power on the home front as well. This is ontopower—the mode of power embodying the logic of preemption across the full spectrum of force, from the “hard” (military intervention) to the “soft” (surveillance). With Ontopower, Massumi provides an original theory of power that explains not only current practices of war but the culture of insecurity permeating our contemporary neoliberal condition.

A world of proliferated drones

Posted on June 13, 2015 by Derek Gregory

A new report from Kelley Sayler at the Center for a New American Security, A world of proliferated drones, starts to map what she calls ‘the likely contours of a drone-saturated world’. The report emphasises that the United States does not have a monopoly on drones – more than 90 states and non-state actors have them – but unusually the report pays close attention to the repurposing of small, commercial off-the-shelf drones. It begins by summarising their capability for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance:

‘Current commercial drone technologies – available for purchase in either pre-assembled or customizable, component form – enable a number of high-end capabilities that were formerly the monopoly of major military powers.

Many commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) drones – including the best-selling model, the DJI Phantom – are now equipped with GPS and waypoint navigation systems. These systems enable the drone to accurately determine and hold its position, in turn removing the need for line-of-sight communications and allowing for autonomous flight… Operators of pre-assembled systems can also take advantage of smartphone-based control systems, dramatically improving ease of use. Such systems enable the user to navigate the drone simply by selecting a destination on a map or even by merely tilting the user’s phone…

High-definition video cameras are also widely available on COTS drones and, when combined with video downlinks, can provide real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to multilocation receivers, though these capabilities are often limited by range and battery life.’

The report emphasises the potential weaponisation of these small drones for what it calls ‘overmatch’, in effect reversing the terms of asymmetric warfare, through (for example) the development of ‘flying IEDs‘:

‘While such systems may not appear sophisticated in a traditional military sense, ground-emplaced IEDs have caused thousands of American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and proved profoundly hard to defeat. Drones will enable airborne IEDs that can actively seek out U.S. forces, rather than passively lying in wait. Indeed, low-cost drones may lead to a paradigm shift in ground warfare for the United States, ending more than a half- century of air dominance in which U.S. ground forces have not had to fear attacks from the air. Airborne IEDs could similarly be used in a terrorist attack against civilians or in precision strikes against high-profile individuals or landmarks.’

But the report also makes much of the US’s continued military-industrial investment in high-end drones. Here various forms of stealth technology make much of the running, or at least issue most of the promissory notes, since today’s Predators and Reapers can only operate in more or less undefended air space – which is another way of saying they can only be used against the weak and/or with the complicity of other states (as in Pakistan and Yemen) – and face immense difficulties in what the US Air Force calls A2/AD [anti-access/area-denial] environments (see here and here). But I’m particularly interested in what the report has to say about the use of large military drones to act as communications relays. Here the emphasis is on the ability of these remote relays to integrate what is otherwise often remarkably un-networked warfare and to extend the range of operational control and transmissable data.

‘Large military-specific systems offer a number of additional improvements in communications capabilities. Many include wide-band satellite communications (SATCOM) that expand the amount and extend the range of transmittable data, providing distant ground stations with real-time ISR. Like some baseline systems, high-end systems are generally capable of line-of-sight communi- cations with other platforms operating in their area and, for this reason, are often employed as communications relays. Perhaps the most vivid example of the force-multiplying effects of such capabilities is the EQ-4 – what is essentially an RQ-4 Global Hawk outfitted with the Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN). BACN serves as a universal translator for a diverse set of U.S. aircraft that are not otherwise capable of communicating with each other due to incompatible data links – providing a vital connection between, for example, fourth-generation F-16 fighter jets, B-1 bombers, and stealthy, fifth-generation F-22s [BACN is also used on conventional platforms: see here for its role in co-ordinating an air strike in Afghanistan]. Communications relay capabilities will also allow states to operate drones at extended ranges (300 to 800 kilometers) without satellite communications, allowing significant penetration into neighboring countries or contested areas’ (my emphasis).

Steve Graham and I are presently working on an essay on drones and satellite communications: so much of the discussion of geospatial intelligence has focused on satellite imagery, but the geographies of satellite communications (and, crucially, bandwidth) play a major role in the deployment of drones and in the highly variable quality of the imagery they transmit to users across the network.

Digital capture and physical kill

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Derek Gregory

When he was the US Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Lt Gen David Deptula frequently warned about the danger of ‘swimming in sensors and drowning in data‘. He was talking about crossing what he saw as the divide between ‘industrial age’ and ‘information age’ warfare, and specifically about the extraordinary volumes of data captured as full-motion video feeds from Predators and Reapers:

Dan Gettinger provides an excellent overview in ‘Drone geography: mapping a system of intelligence’ here. But there are other systems of intelligence involved in these strikes and other forms of what Deptula called ‘data crush’.

Operating in close concert with real-time ISR carried out from these remote platforms are other modes of digital data capture, not least the panoply of communications intercepts carried out by the National Security Agency. In many cases the targets Air Force crews are tasked to track and ultimately to kill by the CIA or the US military have been identified through SIGINT (signals intelligence) derived from ‘harvesting’ e-mails, text messages and cell phone calls.

These have become increasingly important in today’s wars where the targets are often mobile. E-mails can provide a vector of likely locations to be watched from the air, while call and messaging data reveal general vectors of movement:

(The tracks above are taken from an NSA report on ‘SKYNET: Courier detection by machine learning’ released by The Intercept).

But it’s important not to misrepresent this as system of total surveillance: as Grégoire Chamayou insists, ‘it matters less to the NSA to actively monitor the entire world than to endow itself with the powers to target anyone – or, rather, whomever it wishes’ (what he calls ‘programmatic surveillance’).

It’s programmatic in several senses beyond the legal-political armatures that Chamayou initially emphasizes: it also implies, crucially, algorithmic executions. The software programs used by the NSA and associated agencies to tunnel into this data and extract signals from the noise are myriad – see for example this NSA white paper on ‘co-traveller analytics‘ – but even armed with these deadly algorithms (see also here) there is a concern about data crunch.

Writing in the Washington Post Ashkan Soltani and Barton Gellman reported that in 2012 FASCIA, the NSA’s databank, was ingesting almost 5 billion records a day:

Hence, as Peter Maass reports in The Intercept, the NSA’s own officers have become alarmed at rising metadata levels. In 2011, for example, a deputy director in the Signals Intelligence Directorate was asked about ‘analytic modernization’ at the agency

“We live in an Information Age when we have massive reserves of information and don’t have the capability to exploit it… I was told that there are 2 petabytes of data in the SIGINT System at any given time. How much is that? That’s equal to 20 million 4-drawer filing cabinets. How many cabinets per analyst is that? By the end of this year, we’ll have 1 terabyte of data per second coming in. You can’t crank that through the existing processes and be effective.”

I’m working my way through these files as part of my ‘Deadly dancing’ essay on targeted killing in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. I’m particularly interested in the ways in which these two systems of digital capture – signals intercepts and video-feeds – intersect. On occasion, the two systems even become one: for example, the NSA’s GILGAMESH program relies on sensors attached to a Predator to track a cell phone to within 30 feet of its location while SHENANIGANS similarly ‘vacuums up massive amounts of data from any wireless routers, computers, smart phones or other electronic devices that are within range’.

In any event these two, closely connected systems of digital capture are also often the harbingers of a physical kill. As Michel Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, admitted to David Cole last year: ‘We kill people based on metadata.’

And the reliance on algorithms and the expert systems they animate ensures, as Louise Amoore insists, that ‘there is then nothing exceptional about the exception; they are derogated to and derive from “expert knowledges”.’

As Louise’s comment implies, all of this speaks directly to the FATA as a space of exception, and the first section of my essay treats its production in detail (you can find early sketches here and here); but in the second section I connect this to the FATA as a space of execution. Formally, I suppose this and its derivative expert knowledges parallel Stuart Elden‘s suggestion that territory be treated as a political technology, but the space of execution (like the space of exception) has a paradoxical topology since here and elsewhere its calculus enables the United States to enact an extra-territorial claim over the territory of another sovereign state.

Drone strikes in the FATA then appear as the deadly tip of an extended spear, the product of a dense network of collaboration and calculation between the CIA (which directs the strikes), the NSA and its associated agencies (which provide the geospatial intelligence), and the US Air Force (which executes them).

The intelligence component of the network is transnational. There is a long history of often fraught collaboration between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, and the NSA also derives what it calls ‘locational intelligence’ from its Five Eyes partners – the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – and its Tier II partners which are contracted for specific projects and paid for their services: an NSA document for 2013 in the Snowden cache shows that this includes Pakistan, but it is impossible to know when this contractual relationship started and whether it has been discontinued.

The NSA also conducts a version of ‘remote split’ operations. Just as Predators and Reapers are controlled from the United States via satellite link and fiber-optic cable (once forward deployed crews have handled the take-off) – see the slide above – so much of the NSA’s interception and analysis of global communications takes place in the United States, harvesting data through two overarching systems:

1 Intercepts of foreign communications from submarine fiber-optic cables, the physical channels of the web; these are UPSTREAM intercepts conducted ‘as data flows past’ under legal authorizations that flow from Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA: passed under Bush and extended under Obama and permits the monitoring of electronic communications of foreigners abroad); some take place at more than a dozen switching stations within the US, exploiting its pole position within the web, while the rest take place overseas, often in conjunction with other intelligence services (FVEY and Tier II ‘Third Parties’); multiple software programs [FAIRVIEW, BLARNEY, STORMBREW, OAKSTAR] are used to harvest the data, which together amount to c. 9 per cent of Internet traffic collected under S702.

You can also find a stunning interactive map that attempts to annotate the submarine cable intercepts based on the Snowden cache here.

2 Direct collection of data from servers of major Internet companies and corporations (Google, Microsoft, AOL, Skype etc) in response to demands under S702 that requires ISP to turn over any data matching court-approved search terms; these are DOWNSTREAM intercepts because the data has already been collected by the companies (un)concerned; the data include e-mails and social network activity, and together these intercepts are the major source of raw intelligence, accounting for 91 per cent of Internet traffic collected under S702. The chart below from The Verge refers to the NSA collecting ‘your’ data but the ‘you’ is a global collective. PRISM – ‘the code name for a data-collection effort known officially by the SIGAD US-984XN…. that collects stored Internet communications based on demands made to [US] Internet companies’ started in 2007; this too exploits what the NSA calls the US’s position as ‘the world’s telecommunications backbone.’

1 and 2 provide DNI data [Digital Network Intelligence]; but 1 also allows the harvesting of DNR data [Dialed Number Recognition] and, according to a PRISM briefing slide dated April 2013, is ‘coming soon’ to 2 (PRISM).

According to Boundless Informant, an NSA collection visualisation tool, during a 3-day period ending in March 2013 DNI intercepts from Pakistan accounted for 13.9 per cent of global DNI intercepts (#2 after Iran, which accounted for 14.5 per cent) and 11.1 per cent of global DNR intercepts (#2 after Afghanistan, which accounted for 17.6 per cent). Aggregating the two – shown on the map below – Pakistan was the state subject to the most intense interception during that period (12.3 per cent of all global DNI and DNR intercepts).

DNR is vital for drone strikes, since these so often depend on tracking cell-phones to identify the target in motion — see my post here — and for this reason the NSA has also forward deployed tactical cells working in close concert with military SIGINT units at (for example) Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. In short, its operations are not only ‘remote’ and are clearly ‘split’. These intercepts are often of direct and immediate utility, but bulk collections of call data records from (for example) Pakistan Telecom providers are also mined via SKYNET to identify suspects and convert them into targets via ‘Joint Enterprise Modelling and Analytics’ (JEMA) [AOI in the slide below refers to Area/Actor of Interest].

It is this combination of the transnational and the local – which parallels the network in which those flying the Predators and Reapers are embedded – that characterises what Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge call code/space:

‘Given that many of these code/spaces are the product of coded infrastructure, their production is stretched out across extended network architectures, making them simultaneously local and global, grounded … in certain locations, but accessible from anywhere across the network, and linked together into chains that stretch across space and time to connect start and end nodes into complex webs of interactions and transactions. Any space that has the latent capacity to be transducted by code constitutes a code/space at the moment of that transduction.’

As you can see from the subtitle, their primary interest is everyday life. But in the cases that most concern me, the conversion of everyday life into code/space is a precursor to everyday death.

In the FATA and elsewhere code/space is clearly a highly asymmetric field, as it is intended to be, but those who are summoned into presence within the space of execution – a process that Louise Amoore calls ‘the appearance of an emergent subject’, of ‘pixelated people’ that emerge on screens scanning databanks but who also appear in the crosshairs of a video display – are not wholly ignorant of what is taking place, of the ‘coding’ of their space. It is of course the case that crews can see without being seen, and Grégoire Chamayou has argued that ‘the fact that the killer and his victim are not inscribed in “reciprocal perceptual fields” facilitates the administration of violence’ because it ruptures what psychologist Stanley Milgram in his experiments on Obedience to authority called ‘the experienced unity of the act.’ And yet those who are living under drones have developed their own apprehensions; they have learned, in some small measure, how to counter their digital capture and to reduce their physical vulnerability.

Reconfiguring global space (II)

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Derek Gregory

The full programme and abstracts for ‘Reconfiguring global space: the geography, politics and ethics of drone war‘ (Indiana University, 14-17 July) is now available.

Now I’ve read the abstracts this looks even more exciting than it did when all I had was a list of names… There are so many contributions that intersect with my own work and interests I’m looking forward to some lively exchanges – and to learning a lot.

M2-Griever

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Derek Gregory

From The Onion:

In an effort to limit the fallout from any unintended collateral damage, the Pentagon has dispatched a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles to the Middle East specially designed to express condolences for the civilian casualties of U.S. drone airstrikes, sources confirmed Wednesday.

The remotely piloted aircraft, known as the M2-Griever, have reportedly targeted bereaved individuals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and other restive regions. Military officials confirmed that the state-of-the-art drones have already flown hundreds of covert condolence missions in an effort to convey the U.S. government’s official regrets to those mourning the death of innocents caught in the midst of American combat operations…

“The Griever represents the future of warfare damage control,” said U.S. Air Force general Mitchell Holt… “From our command center in Nevada, we possess the tactical capability to project compassion anywhere in the world,” he added.

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Reconfiguring global space

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Derek Gregory

In July I’m thrilled to be speaking at Reconfiguring Global Space: the geography, politics and ethics of drone war, to be held at Indiana University – Bloomington, 14-17 July.

The other speakers – which explains why I’m thrilled to be going – include Medea Benjamin, Mark Neocleous, Priya Satia and Madiha Tahir: people I know only through print, video or e-mail (sometimes all three!) and it will be good to meet them in non-digital form. Which, given the subject of the conference, is an all too appropriate wish….

There are lots of other interesting participants too: the outline program is here, and the organizers hope to have full details available at the end of this month.

Noises off

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Derek Gregory

Matt Gallagher has an excellent double review of George Brant‘s play Grounded and Andrew Niccol‘s film Good Kill at The Intercept here:

‘[B]oth leave viewers with only keyhole snippets, stories of American homefront trauma with little reckoning of life on the receiving end of the unmanned aerial campaigns…

As Americans funding the largest war machine the world has ever known, it’s not just about us, even when we’re the ones pulling the trigger on the ground or pressing the joystick in Nevada. It’s also about them, because they are the ones living with the consequences of what our post-9/11 wars have wrought. Perhaps ironically, perhaps not, recent creative work produced by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Maurice DeCaul’s play Dijla Wal Furat and Elliot Ackerman’s novel Green on Blue, recognize this. We’re well past time the rest of America recognizes it, too.’

As I’ve noted before, ‘popular culture continues to be preoccupied with what happens in Nevada – and what happens on the ground is left shrouded in so many shades of grey.’

If you’re wondering about Matt’s recommendations (he is the author of Kaboom: embracing the suck in a savage little war, incidentally), then you can find discussion and reviews of Dijla Wal Furat: between the Tigris and the Euphrates (which had its premiere in February) here, here and here, and Green on Blue here and (especially) here.

Der Himmel über Berlin

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Derek Gregory

At the end of February Tatiana Bazzichelli, director and curator of the Disruption Network Lab, invited me to be a keynote speaker at Eyes from a Distance: on drone systems and their strategies in Berlin in April.

Disruption Network Lab is an ongoing platform of events and research focused on art, hacktivism and disruption. The Laboratory takes shape through a series of conference events at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin.

The goal of the Disruption Network Lab is to present and generate new possible routes of social and political action within the framework of hacktivism, digital culture and network economy, focusing on the disruptive potential of artistic practices. The Disruption Network Lab is a conceptual and practical zone where artists, hackers, networkers, critical thinkers and entrepreneurs enter into a dialogue. The programme is developed through artistic presentations, theoretical debates and keynote events. This series of events establishes local and translocal partnerships with other spaces and institutions.

The specific aim of Eyes from a Distance was unerring:

What is the politics and the regime of power beyond drone-systems? Which are the consequences both on militant networks and civil society of an increasing automatism of conflicts? Can we track down the hidden strategies that move target-killings? Can we understand better drone technology? This event combines reflections on the political and technological infrastructure of drone-systems, the use of them in massive and weaponised military programmes, and the artistic and activist response to this.

I was already committed to presentations at the Balsillie School/CIGI and to the AAG Conference in Chicago so, with immense reluctance, I had to decline. Now I know what I missed – not only the wonderful city of Berlin but also a brilliant programme that would have kept me inside on both evenings.

You can find two video clips (one by Brandon Bryant, which I’ve embedded above) published as part of the documentation of the meeting here, and over at We Make Money Not Art, Regine has provided three detailed reports from the meeting (with useful links): The Grey Zone: the (il)legitimacy of targeted killing by drones, Eyes from a Distance: personal encounters with military drones, and Tracking Drones, reporting lives.

Intersecting with the themes raised by Eyes from a Distance, I highly recommend a new essay/work-in-progress by Sara Matthews on ‘Visual Itineraries of the Sovereign: The Drone Gaze‘. It was originally developed for a panel on “The Ethics and Itineraries of Visual Data” at the meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Montreal in March.