Cu
ent Anthropology Volume 60, Supplement 19, Fe
uary 2019 S77
Drone Warfare in Waziristan and the
New Military Humanism
y Hugh Gusterson
Hugh
at Ge
G St
pape
publi
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US drone warfare in Waziristan has been legitimated through a discourse of military humanism that claims very low
ates of civilian casualties and a concern to spare the lives of the innocent. In practice, in concert with the Pakistani
government’s counterinsurgency campaign and the tactics of the Taliban, drone strikes in Waziristan have killed sub-
stantial numbers of civilians and, in a manner reminiscent of the effects of death squads in Central and Latin America,
have torn apartWaziri civil society while creating a culture of te
or. “Drone essentialism” (a false conviction that drones
are inevitably used in a way that minimizes suffering) has concealed a process of “ethical slippage” through which drone
operators relaxed their operational practices. This process of slippage enabled drones to become te
or weapons even
as they functioned at the level of discourse as alibis—signifiers of discriminate force. One task of anthropological analy-
sis is to prize open the contradictions inherent in this situation.
We see war as a surgical scalpel and not a bloodstained sword.
In so doing, we mis-describe ourselves as we mis-describe the
instruments of death. (Ignatieff 2000:214–215)
How is it possible to wage an aerial te
or campaign against a
foreign te
itory with sufficient intensity to cause considerable
civilian casualties and shred its social fa
ic, all the while claim-
ing that one has acted with great restraint and humanitarian
concern? This is what the United States has done in the so-called
tribal areas of Pakistan.
US leaders and national security officials have defended drone
warfare by arguing that it represents a kinder, gentler way of
fighting insurgents in the Middle East and Africa, and a mode
of war better aligned with international law, than the alterna-
tives. (In fact, they have presented it asmuch as a kind of instant
law enforcement, meting out execution to guilty “te
orists,” as
amodality of warfare.) GeorgeW. Bush’s CIA director,Michael
Hayden (2016), described drone warfare as “the most targeted
and effective application of firepower in the history of armed
conflict,” and called the drone “an exquisite weapon when you
want to be both effective and moral” (Shane 2015:75). John
Brennan (2012), Obama’s CIA director, said, “by targeting an
individual te
orist or small numbers of te
orists with ordnance
that can be adapted to avoid harming others in the immediate
vicinity, it is hard to imagine a tool that can better minimize
isk to civilians than remotely piloted aircraft.” In a similar vein,
Harold Koh (2010), legal advisor to the State Department dur-
Gusterson is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs
orge Washington University (Hortense Amsterdam House, 2110
eet NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA [ XXXXXXXXXX]). This
was submitted 17 XI 17, accepted 18 IX 18, and electronically
shed 16 I 19.
9 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights re
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ing theObamaAdministration, said, “because drone technology
is highly precise, if properly controlled, it could be more lawful
and more consistent with human rights and humanitarian law
than the alternatives.”
Such statements by Hayden, Brennan, and Koh are classic
examples of American “military humanism”—a
oadly liberal
discursive formation within which war is represented as an
unfortunate obligation thrust upon the exceptional nation, the
United States, by a dysfunctional world which the United States
has a salvationist responsibility tomend, albeit by force of arms.
The best known exponent of the term “military humanism” is
Noam Chomsky (1999), who critiqued the United States fo
waging war in Kosovo in 1998 in the name of democracy and
international order while acting outside international law and
without a United Nations mandate. Chomsky portrays official
US claims of concern for human rights and civilian casualties as
a cynical smokescreen that hides a ruthless appetite for geo-
strategic advantage and access tomarkets andmaterials.1 Here I
use anthropology to theorize and critique military humanism
in a less polemical way as an elaborate, compelling, flawed, and
contradictory discourse that, like all hegemonic discourses, legit-
imates acts of violence and oppression while seeming compel-
ling to many of its speakers. Within the American discourse of
military humanism, the United States is represented as patient
and fo
earing and, when driven to violence, always seeking
its most enlightened and compassionate mode of execution. In
keeping with the prevalence of cost-benefit analysis in Ameri-
can public discourse, military humanism is often figured in a
mathematical idiom, fusing the tropes ofmoralism and rational
choice (Erickson et al XXXXXXXXXXThus technical arguments about
1. For a different, more anthropological, critique of military humanism
that focuses on the construction of familial community, see Jauregui (2015).
served XXXXXXXXXX/2019/60S19-0008$10.00. DOI: XXXXXXXXXX/701022
XXXXXXXXXXon May 30, XXXXXXXXXX:58:48 PM
nd Conditions (http:
www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
4. https:
obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23
emarks-president-national-defense-university (Obama 2013).
S78 Cu
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civilian casualties, claims of precision targeting, and counter-
factual na
atives about casualties in hypothetical alternative
scenarios play an important role in American public discourses
about military intervention, with new technologies often pre-
sented as magically salvationist actors in the drama. The pre-
eminent example is the conventional American defense of the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which the use
of the atomic bomb is said to have ended a
utal war and
avoided the bloodletting of an otherwise inevitable US land
invasion of Japan. According to this argument, the destruction
of two cities at a cost of at least 200,000 civilians dead was a
moral act because it saved more lives, Japanese as well as
Americans, in the long run (Gusterson XXXXXXXXXX
Drone Warfare
Claims about the technomorality of dronewarfare are premised
on particular technological capabilities of the Predator and
Reaper drones. Unlike directly piloted aircraft, Predator and
Reaper drones can circle for as long as 40 hours, relaying video
footage of the te
ain below to a network of control stations in
the Middle East, in Europe, and in the United States, along
with details of cell phone calls on the ground.3 Drones’ ability to
linger for extended periods of time while relaying detailed in-
formation to a distributed network of analysts allows drones
to systematically track suspected insurgents even as analysts
and military lawyers evaluate the evidence that the suspects are
indeed insurgents who are fair targets for attack. If they are
deemed appropriate targets, a drone’s extended endurance in
the air allows drone operators to defer a strike until there are
no—or at least only a few—civilians nea
y and to consult
with military lawyers who can decide whether likely civilian
casualties would be deemed “proportionate,” and therefore ac-
ceptable, within the frame of the laws of war. Drone operators
can also use special software (Bugsplat) to calculate the prob-
able damage radius (and thus the likelihood of civilian “col-
lateral damage”) depending on the ordnance selected and the
placement of the missile. GPS technology along with lasing of
the target enables the drone operators to guide a missile quite
precisely. Indeed it is claimed that the Reaper drone, which
ca
ies a more diverse a
ay of ordnance than the Predator, can
destroy one room in a house while leaving the rest of the house
standing, killing an insurgent while sparing the other occupants
of the house (Coll 2014; Elish 2017; Martin and Sasser 2010;
Whittle 2014; Williams 2013).
In his memoir drone operator Matt Martin (Martin and
Sasser 2010:53) describes one drone strike thus:
I began preparations for a shot by scrutinizing the target from
all angles in order to choose the best approach to minimize
2. See Stimson XXXXXXXXXXfor the classic statement of this argument.
3. Although 40 hours is the record, missions are typically closer to
24 hours (https:
fas.org/irp/program/collect/predator.htm; Defense News
2015).
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collateral damage. I calculated that if I dropped one right
down themiddle of the yard on top of the Ford, the
ick wall
would buffer the explosion and leave adjacent houses rela-
tively undamaged. Nobody else should be hurt, which was
an integral element of our rules of engagement. I doubted
whether B-17 and B-29 pilots and bombardiers of World
War II agonized over dropping bombs over Dresden or Berlin
as much as I did over taking out one measly perp in a car.
At one point CIA director John Brennan claimed that,
over the preceding year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral
death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of
the capabilities we’ve been able to develop” (Shane 2011:A1).
Two years later, in a speech at National Defense University,
President Obama claimed that, for a drone strike to go for-
ward, “there must be near certainty that no civilians will be
killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.”4
In fact, it is difficult to say with precision howmany civilians
have been killed in drone strikes (and in counterinsurgency
warfare in general). As law professor Christiane Wilke (2017:
1139–1140) argues, the “considerable disagreement about the
number of casualties, especially their status as civilian or non-
civilian, might suggest that the line between civilians and com-
atants is not as clear as supporters of new technologies that
allegedly reduce ‘collateral damage’ and civilian casualties would
like to suggest.”5 Anthropologist Madiha Tahir (2016:14) points
out, writing about Waziristan, “video and photography of the
aftermath of a drone strike is rare. The security forces and the
opposition fighters don’t allow it, but it’s also rare because,
ironically, the social space of the Tribal Areas has been so
worked over by spies and informants collecting and surveil-
ling that recording (of whatever kind) has become something
of a suspect act. Why are you documenting? For whom?” US
commentators often reject reports from journalists or human
ights activists in the target country as exaggerated, but official
US assessments (done largely by the drone operators them-
selves) have their own liabilities: drone operators may not
know how many civilians lie inside collapsed buildings and, in
a war where insurgents do not wear uniforms, they have used
a flawed methodology that “counts all military-aged males in a
strike zone as combatants . . . unless there is explicit intelli-
gence posthumously proving them innocent” (Becker and
Shane 2012:11). But as sociologist TylerWall (2016:1128) points
out, “military-aged men in the FATA region, not unlike Black
men in the United States, are deemed suspicious and frequently
killed for simply belonging to a ‘suspect’ population.”6
5. See Rappert XXXXXXXXXXon deeper epistemic difficulties in estimating
casualties in war.
6. Eventually, conceding that claims of no, or very low, civilian casu-
alties lacked credibility, the Obama Administration released an official
estimate in 2016 that drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya
had killed between 64 and 116 civilians, though this was widely seen as
XXXXXXXXXXon May