DRONE WARFARE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

A drone pilot tracks suspected terrorists for days, receives orders to fire, and then watches as human beings disappear in an explosion. A few hours later, the shift is over, the pilot drives down a Nevada highway toward home, perhaps stopping off to catch a daughter's soccer game before dinner. Such are the surreal circumstances in the “robotics revolution” of modern warfare, in which those identified as U.S. enemies can be observed, tracked, and killed by remote, without risk to the pilots. Drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have been run by the military, whereas the drone program in countries with which the U.S. is not formally at war—Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia—have been controlled by the CIA. For these latter strikes, the president heads a top-secret process by which specific terrorists are identified for kill or capture, “of which the capture part has become largely theoretical” (Becker and Shane Reference Becker and Shane2012).

The U.S. military perceives multiple advantages to drones. They are relatively precise weapon systems and can perform surveillance over long intervals, allowing for tracking of movements, identification of weapons, and other forms of intelligence gathering. This is said to translate into lower rates of collateral damage. Drones can linger over a battlefield and serve as the eyes of ground troops and human-piloted aircraft. Drones furthermore allow surveillance, pursuit, and targeting of individual people. They can be used in high-risk situations without the concern of returning a pilot safely to base. Finally, they are cost-effective.

Multiple objections are raised against drone warfare, many of which will be taken up later in this article through a gendered analysis, which offers new insights and innovative means of engaging with these concerns. First, drone warfare alienates the U.S. military and public from violence. This argument views war's brutality to pose a limit to warfare. On the battlefield, “the built-in check on killing, namely, that the one engaged in the killing risks being killed himself [sic], is gone” (Cole Reference Cole2012). Rendering warfare less painful domestically might also lead U.S. administrations to resort to lethal violence more readily.Footnote ⁶ Similarly, war by remote might compromise the U.S. public's ability and inclination to imagine living with drones overhead and seemingly random missile strikes, which would render killing easier.

Second, U.S. drone warfare is criticized as undemocratic. The drone campaign vests extraordinary power in the executive office, overrides the judicial process, demobilizes the U.S. public, and militarizes the CIA, while placing terrorist suspects, including U.S. citizens, on a kill list. As suspects are killed rather than captured for trial, the executive branch, in effect, adopts a “take no prisoners alive” approach (Becker and Shane Reference Becker and Shane2012). Drone strikes have killed more people than were incarcerated at Guantanamo, and the latter “at least had a chance to establish their identities, to be reviewed by an oversight panel and, in most cases, to be released” (Volker Reference Volker2012). The administration's justifications for drone strikes emphasize that they are cheap and easy, with little domestic blowback, yet Kaag and Kreps (Reference Kaag and Kreps2012) caution that this replaces moral justification with practical efficiency.

Furthermore, whereas the post-9/11 large-scale invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq included sustained efforts to rally U.S. popular support, drone warfare is accompanied by an effort to avoid public attention and open debate (Boyle Reference Boyle2013). The Obama administration has further closed off public scrutiny in refusing to release related legal memos. Democracies, which require the sunlight of public scrutiny to flourish, “do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a [Department of Justice] safe” (Becker and Shane Reference Becker and Shane2012).

Third, drone strikes produce collateral damage. Both the Bush and Obama administrations blocked access to comprehensive casualty information. Local reporting and human rights investigations, however, attest that drone strikes frequently yield civilian casualties (Johnsen Reference Johnsen2012). For example, in 2009, Obama's first strike on Yemen mistook a Bedouin village for a terrorist training camp, killing more than 40. The noncombatant casualty rates of drone warfare incrementally add up, and there is the attendant concern that the media will overlook the slow accretion of civilian casualties (Becker and Shane Reference Becker and Shane2012; Kaag and Kreps Reference Kaag and Kreps2012).

Also controversial is the U.S. definition of collateral damage: individuals and property that are not lawful military targets (Kaag and Kreps Reference Kaag and Kreps2012). Central to this definition has been the practice of counting all military-age males (MAMs) in a strike zone as combatants and thus legitimate targets. This gendered guilt-by-association logic operates under the notion that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good” (Becker and Shane Reference Becker and Shane2012). But in practice and legally it is not people but men who are defined as potential threats and thus killable.

Finally, drone strikes are also critiqued as counterproductive. Despite a perception of drone strikes as fast, convenient alternatives to long and messy wars, they are “rarely decisive and often incur significant political and diplomatic costs” (Robinson Reference Robinson2012, 111). Independent journalists and researchers have argued UAV civilian casualties to be central to Al Qaeda's rapid expansion, replacing Guantánamo as “the recruiting tool of choice for militants” (Becker and Shane Reference Becker and Shane2012; see also Johnsen Reference Johnsen2012). Thus, while drone strikes kill Al Qaeda militants and leaders, they arguably exacerbate the problem of terrorism (Volker Reference Volker2012). Conservative columnist Mark Steyn wrote that for many in targeted regions, drone warfare confirms Al Qaeda's charges against the U.S.,

Drones, in this logic, are both counterproductive and an indication of U.S. weakness.

FEMINIST PEACE POLITICS, MASCULINITY, AND THE NEW WAR

This paper uses gender as an analytical tool to illuminate new political problems and supply new questions, as well as to suggest one means by which the study of people and their experiences of drone warfare might productively inform war research on weaponry, strategy, and abstract considerations of the state (Enloe Reference Enloe2000; Hawkesworth Reference Hawkesworth2005; Ruddick Reference Ruddick, Lorentzen and Turpin1998; Sylvester Reference Sylvester2013, 4). It builds upon feminist IR research to investigate “the political effects of … the coding of certain forms of human conduct as inherently masculine or feminine” in order to better understand the implications for both war and gender relations (Hawkesworth Reference Hawkesworth2005, 149). As per much of feminist IR research, furthermore, it understands war and gender as mutually constitutive, with warfare as an “extension of ‘masculine’ domination and ‘masculine’ domination [as] an extension of and preparation for war” (Ruddick Reference Ruddick, Lorentzen and Turpin1998, 196; see also Cohn Reference Cohn1987; Connell Reference Connell2001; Elshtain Reference Elshtain1987; Enloe Reference Enloe2000; Goldstein Reference Goldstein2001; Prugl Reference Prugl2003; Scott Reference Scott2002; Sjoberg Reference Sjoberg2013; Tickner Reference Tickner1992; Young Reference Young2003).

This relation operates at both individual and state levels. At the individual level, gender is a means of mobilizing men to war, as “[m]ilitaries invoke for their soldiers and project onto the enemy models of masculinity that spur fighting” (Ruddick Reference Ruddick, Lorentzen and Turpin1998, 199; see also Elshtain Reference Elshtain1987; Goldstein Reference Goldstein2001). Furthermore, “our” soldiers are hailed as warrior-protectors, necessary to shield innocents from the enemy, who are represented as a “particularly malignant form of swaggering masculinity” (Ruddick Reference Ruddick, Lorentzen and Turpin1998, 199; see also Peterson and Runyan Reference Peterson and Runyan1999). Race and ethnicity are often deployed alongside masculinity to represent enemy combatants as particularly dangerous predators (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2002; Bayard de Volo Reference Bayard de Volo2012; Peterson Reference Peterson, Sjoberg and Via2010; Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988; Ruddick Reference Ruddick, Lorentzen and Turpin1998, 199). Finally, as Thobani (Reference Thobani2002, 291) has pointed out, “Rendering invisible the humanity of the peoples targeted for attack is a strategy well-used to hide the impact of colonialist and imperialist interventions.”

Service members’ gender performance is idealized as masculine, with the expectation that they exhibit courage, strength, and mastery of emotions (including the suppression of fear and empathy) (Butler Reference Butler1990; Goldstein Reference Goldstein2001). Masculinity, which confers status, is not an essential quality that one simply is but rather a quality that must be achieved, produced, and reproduced continuously. Goldstein (Reference Goldstein2001) suggests masculinity itself is a weapon of war, deployed to induce men to fight (252). Femininity serves as the binary contrast, lending meaning to masculinity by representing that which masculinity is not (Elshtain Reference Elshtain1987; Scott Reference Scott1999). Goldstein (Reference Goldstein2001) documents the historically unvarying nature of the gender-war link in which wars have been fought by men virtually alone. However, the approach also suggests that a significant change to war would impact gender.

Feminist analyses also examine the gender-war system at the state level (Bayard de Volo Reference Bayard de Volo2012; Milliken and Sylvan Reference Milliken and Sylvan1996; Peterson and Runyan Reference Peterson and Runyan1999; Scott Reference Scott2002; Young Reference Young2003). Young (Reference Young2003) argues that taking a gender lens to war and security “means seeing how a certain logic of gendered meanings and images helps organize the way people interpret events and circumstances” (2). She identifies the “logic of masculinist protection” relative to post-9/11 U.S. security events, revealing a paternalistic state promising protection from the assaultive masculine enemy-other in exchange for citizens’ blind obedience, which both legitimated authoritarian power in the U.S. and justified war abroad (Young Reference Young2003, 2).

Gender as a category of analysis directs our focus toward shifting meanings of masculinity, militarization, and war attached to individuals and states alike (Scott Reference Scott1999). Neither war nor gender is static—how do changes in one impact the other? What happens when war is roboticized—increasingly pursued through drones as proxy combatants such that the human soldiers of superpowers are not endangered?

MILITARIZED MASCULINITY: COURAGE, STRENGTH, AND MASTERY OF EMOTIONS

Below, I consider how drone warfare challenges the masculinity-war association through three intersecting traits that define at once an idealized man, an idealized combatant, and an idealized state: courage, strength, and mastery of emotions (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2001, 266–67). I argue that drones unsettle militarized masculinity, which refers to and derives meaning from the performance of these traits. First, courage is linked to physical risk as well as honor. It is difficult for a drone pilot to demonstrate courage and thus enhance masculine status by killing remotely while sitting safely thousands of miles away. Similarly, a state that pursues war surreptitiously and without risk is open to criticism as cowardly and without honor.

Second, with advancements in war robotics, combatants’ physical strength, already less important in modern warfare, now verges on irrelevance. Drone piloting requires skill and mental stamina, but not the physical strength and toughness associated with idealized masculinity and combatants. UAVs open up combat possibilities for those traditionally understood to be physically disqualified—one drone operator, for example, “was still sitting in the cockpit, her stomach pressing up against the keyboard, in her ninth month of pregnancy” (Abé Reference Abé2012). But they also unravel the tight knot connecting masculine-militarism to strength. Drone weapon systems similarly render strength less relevant for the targeted enemy in terms of resistance or evasion. The U.S. collateral damage formula by which all military-aged men in a strike area are considered legitimate targets renders all men within a geographic location at once both de jure dangerous enemy combatants and de facto powerless. This equation also contributes to a reading of the U.S. state as strong but brutal—a strength unchecked by ethics or empathy.

Finally, mastery or suppression of emotions—especially fear and empathy—is a core trait of militarized masculinity. For the drone crew, removed from battle and physically safe, mastering fear or resisting the impulse to flee is not a persuasive means of securing masculinity. Yet drone warfare takes a high emotional toll on its operators. In contrast, it renders war less emotionally disturbing for the U.S. public, dampening public outrage because U.S. combatants are not endangered and civilian casualties half a world away are often unknown or misrecognized as enemy combatants.

This overview of the war-masculinity nexus suggests recalibrations in gender-military affairs, as drone warfare is less effective in conferring venerated forms of masculinity at the individual and state levels. Below, I explore this dynamic more thoroughly through specific domestic and international examples. These cases were not selected randomly. Rather, I take an interpretive approach to better understand drone warfare in terms of the meanings attached to beliefs and actions, contextualized in time and place. I selected cases that have received significant media and academic attention but little to no gender analysis. Underpinning this approach is the idea that such research can yield new insights into the workings of both war and gender.

At the individual level, I suggest that masculinity is compromised for drone pilots such that we find popular unease with warriors who are remote from violence, experience no personal risk, rely not upon bravery or strength but upon high-tech training, and whose work stations resemble cubicles—in other words, combatants who resemble office workers. At the state level, drones are a means for the U.S. to demonstrate toughness to domestic and international audiences. Yet there is a troubling and potentially counterproductive (for the U.S. state) paternalist and imperialist expression of rescuing feminized regions abroad while killing without risk.

MILITARY DISTINCTIONS: MEDALS MAKE THE MAN

In the United States, discomfort with drone warfare goes beyond the ethical and constitutional issues discussed earlier and rests in part with the hierarchy within masculinity that informs “combatant” and “war hero.” For example, an opinion editorial rhetorically asked, “What do we want to be as a nation? … A country where people go to the office, launch a few kill shots and get home in time for dinner? A country that instructs workers in high-tech operations centers to kill human beings on the far side of the planet because some government agency determined that those individuals are terrorists?” (Volker Reference Volker2012). In contexts in which killing in war is otherwise accepted, why is killing by high-tech workers distasteful? In addition to the implicit argument that it makes war too easy, I propose that “high-tech worker” operates as a binary opposite to “war hero”—one is what the other is not, informing a hierarchy within masculinity in which office worker is the devalued term. Drone warfare, in removing personal risk from battle, also removes opportunities for demonstrations of courage. An age-old motivation for war—proving oneself a man—disappears, along with the possibility of becoming a hero. Why is it better to have “boots on the ground” doing the nation's killing? The op-ed above leaves the phrase “workers in high-tech operations centers” to speak for itself. What it suggests is discomfort with relinquishing combat to those with subordinate masculinity—implicitly, nerds.

Debate over a proposed new medal sheds light on this discomfort. By 2011, the U.S. Air Force was training more pilots for UAVs than for any other single weapon system (Gates Reference Gates2011). The scale and speed of this shift generated intense pressure to direct military personnel into these new specializations, a challenge heightened by a generalized disregard for drone piloting. A significant line of criticism within the military and beyond centers on questions of honor, skill, courage, risk, and the perceived easy life of drone operators, which in turn reflects upon the masculine status associated with the job. A British former Air Chief Marshal, for example, condemned drone strikes as “virtue-less war” involving neither heroism nor courage (Mayer Reference Mayer2009). According to an investigative media report, “Drone pilots were seen as cowardly button-pushers” (Abé Reference Abé2012). Journalist Glenn Greenwald, asserting that “[k]illing while sheltering yourself from all risk is the definitional opposite of bravery,” observed that the military justified drone warfare by “pretending that the act entails some sort of bravery, so the U.S. military is increasingly taking steps to create the façade of warrior courage for drone pilots” (Greenwald Reference Greenwald2012).

I argue the façade is a gendered one, an effort to bolster the masculine status of drone pilots. Some military officials, for example, de-emphasize the drone advantage of protecting pilots, redirecting attention from this demasculinizing representation. U.S. General Michael Moseley insisted that rather than keeping “pilots out of harm's way,” the drone's key advantage is the ability to “stay airborne for up to 14 hours fully loaded” (U.S. Air Force 2006). The military also emphasizes drone continuity with traditional aircraft: drone operators are “pilots,” wear flight suits, and “can speak of having ‘served … through telewarfare in Iraq and Afghanistan’” (Blair Reference Blair2012, 69).

These associations seem tolerated (if barely) within the military, but the proposed Distinguished Warfare Medal for drone operators crossed a line, generating intense and ultimately successful criticism. The standing military recognitions for drone operators did not acknowledge exceptional acts of service, negatively impacting drone operators’ careers as well as the overall status of the job. In 2013, outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta proposed the Distinguished Warfare Medal (DWM) to honor drone pilots and other troops far removed from battle for “extraordinary achievements that directly impact on combat operations, but that do not involve acts of valor or physical risk that combat entails” (Garamone Reference Garamone2013).

Major David Blair (Reference Blair2012), in an influential military journal, identified medals as one of the military's highest forms of recognition, the ranking of which sends a powerful message about “what the service considers valuable and worthy of respect” (Blair Reference Blair2012, 66). In the current award system, “we tell people that what they are (and what they fly) matters more than what they do. … [which] reinforce[s] the caste structure” (Blair Reference Blair2012, 66). I suggest this hierarchy, in which drone operators rank far below fighter pilots, is a gendered one.

Critics disparaged the DWM as “the Nintendo Medal” and “the Geek Cross” (Chakraborty Reference Chakraborty2013; Shane Reference Shane2013). Some questioned the need for such a medal, while others argued against its high rank, above the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with “V” (for valor) medals, awarded to those wounded or killed in action and for specific heroic acts performed under fire in combat, respectively. Senator Joe Manchin explained, “Awards earned in combat for heroism, patriotism and a commitment to make the ultimate sacrifice for the freedoms we enjoy every day should not rank below a medal earned in relative safety” (Maze Reference Maze2013). In the midst of intense criticism from veterans groups, the media, and elected officials, incoming Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel halted production of the medal less than a month after Panetta announced it.

Medals, then, are broadly understood as recognition for valor at personal risk. Killing without risk is questionable in terms of virtue and can seem predatory, as the Predator drone's name advertises. But why does drone warfare require this pretense of medals, this gesture toward courage? That Panetta intended this medal to rank above those earned on the battlefield suggests both the future importance of “unmanned” forms of combat as well as the challenge of attracting military personnel to such specialties. It further suggests recalibrations in gender-military affairs in which transformations in warfare pressures the gender status quo.

Blair's (Reference Blair2012) argument for drone warfare medals generated debate on military electronic forums, including flyingsquadron.com. There, Champ Kind dismissed Blair's argument: “How about we just answer this in the same manner that you tell that questionable piece of ass in the morning: ‘Of course I respect you. … Now… move along. …’”Footnote ⁷ Cap-10, a pilot stationed in a conflict zone, responded more vehemently to Blair: “SHUT YOUR MAN PLEASING CAKE HOLE! You get to go home every night, throw the wife's heels to the ceiling, and watch kiddo's t-ball games and NFL Sunday Ticket on the weekend.”Footnote ⁸ Lawman invoked the danger faced by traditional pilots by trading heavily on ethnicity, sexuality, and gender:

Medals are gendered status markers. They identify heroes, and heroes are popularly conceived as men (and sometimes women) who have performed acts of valor, which in turn assumes a context of personal risk (Braudy Reference Braudy2005; Goldstein Reference Goldstein2001). But medals serve another military purpose as incentives for doing what the military requires of combatants. Historically, the challenge has been to encourage men to disregard personal safety in order to kill, rescue comrades, and possibly die. This definition of military hero overlaps with idealized masculinity, the definition of a Real Man (Braudy Reference Braudy2005). Currently, however, the military particularly needs highly trained individuals to sit in trailers in the Nevada desert to work long and irregular hours at a relatively low-status job. As it appears to not require courage, strength, or toughness, this job does not overlap with traditional idealized masculinity. Indeed, drone operators are commonly perceived to have cushy-armchair, button-pusher jobs readily performed by low-status men (e.g., geeks or nerds) and women. If the military seeks achievements irrespective of acts of valor, what will “hero” come to mean? An Andy Singer cartoon (see Figure 1) depicting a statue of a future war hero—a stout man in T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops clutching his “weapon,” a video game remote—suggests both the absurdity and the popular fear underpinning this alternative masculinity that threatens to depose the familiar brute force masculine heroes.

Figure 1.

What will “hero” come to mean? http://www.andysinger.com/

The clash between shifting military needs and militarized masculinity suggests gender recalibrations. Remote-controlled weaponry, in effect, decouples strength and courage from military heroism such that these attributes coexist with and are increasingly displaced by other attributes, such as technical prowess and manual dexterity.Footnote ¹⁰ Traditional arguments barring women from combat, such as lack of upper-body strength, are rendered moot. However, the numerical and normative masculine domination of the computer and video gaming industry suggests the possibility of new barriers for women (Parkin Reference Parkin2014). Although this section has linked drone warfare readjustments in the masculine hierarchy relating to combatant and hero, I argue below a different tension in the gendering of the U.S. state, one between protective and predatory masculinity.

PROTECTOR OR PREDATOR? MASCULINITY AND THE STATE

At the 2010 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama told a not-so-funny joke about his command of drone strikes as he introduced the Jonas Brothers, a pop band. In mock seriousness, he warned the band members to steer clear of his daughters: “Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You'll never see it coming.” The logic of patriarchal masculine protection in national security is rarely expressed so literally, but the anecdote is faithful to the general narrative (Young Reference Young2003). In brief, the patriarch (a national leader or the state itself) assumes protection of the feminized weak (figuratively, “womenandchildren” at home or abroad) in the face of a menacing or predatory masculine threat (Enloe Reference Enloe1993).

However, one person's masculine protector is another's masculine predator. I propose that not only is U.S. drone power experienced by many abroad as the menacing predator against which one needs protection, but this is arguably counterproductive to stopping terrorism. To say the least, drones have become “a provocative symbol of American power” (Becker and Shane Reference Becker and Shane2012). In addition to attacks on civilians mistaken for militants, there are reported incidents of “follow-up strikes on wounded survivors of initial strikes, killing not only the intended targets but also anyone attempting to rescue the injured” (Amnesty International 2013, 30). From the perspective of the strike zone, such rescuer attacks signal a powerful yet abusive masculine.

A 2013 U.S. Justice Department white paper substantiates this assessment, declaring the president would not be constrained by national sovereignty: “[a drone strike will proceed] with the consent of the host nation's government or after a determination that the host nation is unable or unwilling to suppress the threat” (U.S. Department of Justice 2013). This suggests the U.S. to be the self-appointed global patriarch, as nations that do not consent are rendered, in effect, legally incapable of consent and thus wards of the (U.S.) state. Unable to protect their own borders against penetration by U.S. drones or al Qaeda, countries such as Pakistan and Yemen are demasculinized. The global patriarch is the decider on behalf of feminized host nations; though unlike a benevolent patriarch considering the best interests of women and children under his care, decision making revolves around the best interest of the global patriarch.

Meanwhile, the United States as masculinist protector directs U.S. public attention away from a civilian terrain bloodied by drone strikes (Shaw and Akhter Reference Shaw and Akhter2012, 1502; Thobani Reference Thobani2002). The Obama administration generally refuses to provide information on particular strikes or estimates on civilian casualties (Amnesty International 2013). Drone violence is magnified when we acknowledge the psychological trauma on local populations from the omnipresent possibility of a strike (see Amnesty International 2013). Abroad, this has been interpreted as evidence of an unremorseful, arrogant, and menacing superpower, “[f]eeling no obligation to apologise or explain, count bodies or answer for its crimes” (Monbiot Reference Monbiot2012). Commentators sometimes fault the U.S. with a sense of omnipotence: “Those now dispensing judgment from on high are not gods, though they must feel like it” (Monbiot Reference Monbiot2012).

Indeed, as Obama declared in his 2012 State of the Union speech, “From Pakistan to Yemen, the al Qaeda operatives who remain are scrambling, knowing that they can't escape the reach of the United States of America.”Footnote ¹¹ They can run, but they can't hide. In U.S. drone warfare, if evasion is futile, death is normalized. The U.S. military has assigned its drones bellicose names and imagery. The U.S. Navy Program Executive Office's emblem for its Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons features the Grim Reaper, replete with scythe and glowing red eyes (see Figure 2). The Reaper's predecessor, the Predator, is similarly menacing, as it indicates a weapon that preys on humans. Though surveillance is a primary purpose even for drones with strike capability, the names and imagery advertise their lethality, operating to dehumanize human targets as preyed upon or reapable in the natural order of things.Footnote ¹² As the predator hunts and kills prey, Mother Nature is not so much cruel as inevitable and necessary. Similarly, the Grim Reaper of centuries past patiently waited bedside with an hourglass for the appointed moment to harvest a life, evoking the cycle of life, the normalization of death. Such representations at once pose weapon systems as agents (reapers and predators) while obscuring the human hand that guides remote killing and encouraging the misrecognition of violence for natural and timely death.

Figure 2.

This symbol first surfaced on the Internet in an Instagram photo posted by Wired reporter Spencer Ackerman. http://instagram.com/p/NvzD_5v5LW/?modal=true (last accessed October 14, 2014).

Despite such ascriptions to its weapon systems, domestically the U.S. has assumed a protectionist masculine role in the name of protecting feminized others from a predatory—and often racialized—masculine (Abu Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2002; Shepherd Reference Shepherd2006; Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988; Young Reference Young2003). However, the perspective radically shifts in nations targeted by drones. For example, from Iraqi soldiers’ perspective, surrendering to drones reflected negatively on the masculinity of both predator and prey: “[I]t is regarded as somehow unseemly or cowardly for a man to hide behind a machine in taking prisoners, and the act of surrendering to something less than a man (like a woman or a machine) is regarded as shameful” (Manjikian Reference Manjikian2014). Alternatively, drones with strike capabilities can project a predatory masculinity, a powerful and abusive masculine that both emasculates targeted men and calls forth a local masculine protector.

Concerned with this latter reading, some military strategists and commentators call attention to blowback: that drone warfare “allows our opponents to cast our country as a distant, high-tech, amoral purveyor of death. It builds resentment, facilitates terrorist recruitment and alienates those we should seek to inspire” (Volker Reference Volker2012). General Stanley McChrystal allowed that in some regions, drones are “hated on a visceral level” and contribute to a “perception of American arrogance” (Alexander Reference Alexander2013). After an attack killed two local leaders who had been resisting Al Qaeda, infuriated villagers protested: “[S]ome … say there was an upwelling of support for Al Qaeda, because such a move is seen as the only way to retaliate against the United States” (Worth, Mazzetti, and Shane Reference Worth, Mazzetti and Shane2013). I propose a gendered lens provides new insight: drone warfare is perceived on the ground as a ruthless expression of predatory masculinity, which in turn invites and legitimates a masculine response. Furthermore, although these unmanned aerial vehicles in a sense unman states such as Pakistan and Yemen, it is also rather simple to turn the masculine expression of drone strikes on its head: “Drones are the weapons of cowards” (see, for example, Kurbjuweit Reference Kurbjuweit2012; Manjikian Reference Manjikian2014). From American arrogance to blowback and cowardice, gender is threaded through the meanings attached to drone warfare and the state.

GENDERING BODIES: OUR ENEMIES, OUR SELVES

Drones are feared in part for their precision. However, distinguishing by remote between terrorists and civilians, enemies and innocents, is imprecise, with no resemblance to a court of law. Rather, the drone crew and video analysts, unfamiliar with and disdainful of local customs and traditions, attempt to identify weapons and interpret behavior of those they are tracking. They can fall back on judgments based upon visible characteristics such as height and clothing. As I show, these crude proxies are highly gendered, a point often missed in critical analyses of drone warfare.

To explore the gendered nature of tracking and targeting “baddies,” as they are sometimes termed in military parlance, I examine the U.S. attack on February 21, 2010, that killed 23 civilians in central Afghanistan. This was a coordinated effort between the drone crew in Nevada, civilian video analysts or “screeners” in Florida (employees of military contractor SAIC, Inc.), U.S. Special Forces in a Taliban-controlled area, as well as an A-10 jet and two Kiowa helicopters. The unprecedented release of the drone crew communication transcript and Department of Defense investigation of the attack provide a rare glimpse into drone warfare (Cloud Reference Cloud2011).Footnote ¹³

Several critiques of drone warfare have examined this transcript, yet none employ a gendered analysis (Crawford Reference Crawford2013; Gregory Reference Gregory2011; Pugliese Reference Pugliese2013). A gendered lens yields new insights into the meanings the drone crew attached to their actions and points to gender implications of the technology. Below I chart an oscillating predatory and protective imperialist masculinity that is constituted by the object of its aggression: first, feminized men, then feminized women and children. An imperialist racism informs this gendering of human targets: an Afghani woman as “an object of protection from her own kind” is used to justify “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2002; Spivak Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988, 296). Drone crews charged with close observation of the human impact of the violence they unleash are viscerally immersed not only in combat, but also postcombat carnage (Gregory Reference Gregory2011, 203). The gendered, raced, and aged bodies of those killed and maimed speak back to the crew, marking a crucial distinction in warfare with gendered implications: unlike other combat pilots, drone crews perform post-attack surveillance that can call into question the type of masculinity they performed.Footnote ¹⁴

The operation began predawn, when U.S. surveillance identified a three-vehicle convoy as possible Taliban closing in on a U.S. Special Forces team. An armed Predator was called in for surveillance. As the five hours of recorded drama unfolded, the drone crew shifted subjectively from a baldly predatory masculinity directed at enemy military-aged males (MAMs) to a protective masculinity on behalf of embodied women and children, both masculine subjectivities informed by race-ethnicity. The drone crew was primed to identify the group as exclusively MAMs, marking them as both a menacing enemy and a killable target. While the enemy, it seems, can be imagined as feminized, it cannot be imagined as embodied women.

One hour into the surveillance, the drone pilot, relying on infrared sensors that read temperature differences, asked crew members if one figure on the video feed was holding something across the chest. The drone sensor agrees, “Yea it's kind of weird how they all have a cold spot on their chest.”Footnote ¹⁵ Despite many possible explanations, the pilot asserts that the cold spots are rifles hidden under “man dresses,” rendering these bodies culturally inferior and effeminate, but a menace nonetheless, as they are men with weapons. When passengers exited the vehicles to pray, this confirmed to the drone crew that they were tracking Taliban who were “gonna do something nefarious.”Footnote ¹⁶

The civilian video analysts (“screeners”) in Florida, however, identify one and possibly two children in the group.Footnote ¹⁷ The drone sensor erupts, “Bull (expletive) … where!? … I don't think they have kids out at this hour [roughly 5 a.m.], I know they're shady but come on.”Footnote ¹⁸ The pilot clarifies that identifying the figure in question as a MAM “means he's guilty.” By implication, a child present could shut down the attack. Frustrated by cautious screeners, he further laments, “[W]hy are they so quick to call (expletive) kids but not to call (expletive) a rifle?” At just over three hours, the ground force in Afghanistan inquires, “[W]hen we say children, are we talking teenagers or toddlers?” to which the drone sensor responds, “Something more towards adolescents or teens.”Footnote ¹⁹ The ground force and drone crew agree that “12–13 years old with a weapon is just as dangerous,” thus transforming children into killable targets.

With a jet, helicopters, and a Reaper UAV also called in, the Predator crew worries they will be left out of the kill; the drone pilot intones, “[H]ope we get to shoot the truck with all the dudes in it.”Footnote ²⁰ At 4:17 hours in the transcript, based on drone intelligence, ground command gives the go-ahead and the helicopter fires, destroying the vehicles, killing 23 and wounding another 12. But the drone crew immediately senses something “weird,” as individuals are not running for cover as would be expected of trained militants. Five minutes later, one asks, “Are they wearing burqas?” and another allows, “That guy looks like he's wearing jewelry and stuff like a girl, but he ain't … if he's a girl, he's a big one.”Footnote ²¹

Twenty-five minutes after the attack, the screeners identify “3 females and 1 child [and] 1 possible child,” and victims are observed waving in surrender.Footnote ²² The drone crew seems defensive but is also concerned to pass along the new information to protect these Afghans from another U.S. attack. The drone sensor admits, “Yeah, at this point … I personally wouldn't be comfortable shooting at these people.” The tragedy continues to dawn on the crew:

The Sensor observes another individual who looks “[y]ounger than an adolescent to me.”Footnote ²⁴ From omniscient vision, the crew backtracks into the fog of war:

The drone operators, now aware they called a strike on civilians, including women and children, express anger at the perceived masculine shortcomings of the civilian men just attacked for not tending to or attempting to protect the women and children. In effect, the drone crew morphs from masculine predators into masculine protectors as the sensor declares, “These guys all need to get their asses kicked. … These dudes over here. One's that are standing up [versus those lying wounded or dead]. … All their women are over here. Kids.”Footnote ²⁵

The transcript ends as the drone pilot, the last to abandon the subject position of predatory masculinity hunting MAMs, radios ground forces approaching the destroyed convoy: “[B]e advised … we have … multiple MAMs … wandering around the vicinity.”Footnote ²⁶ Another crew member interjects: “Well don't forget the women and children, dude. …” The pilot concedes, “I know. I know.” As the drone crew seems to struggle against the notion that they are the enemy in this scenario, the process is profoundly gendered. To attack armed Muslim MAMs indicates one version of masculinity performed by the drone crew, unarmed civilians including Muslim women and children quite another.

Military and academic literature often discusses counterinsurgency as “war amongst the people” in which “enemy combatants look like everyone else” (Defense Science Board 2004, 154; Gregory Reference Gregory2011, 200). A gender lens reveals a problem with this claim, as the U.S. military attempts to differentiate men from women and children in strike zones. This gender distinction, in which men are guilty and “womenandchildren” are innocent, does not necessarily protect women and children (Enloe Reference Enloe1993). It is unclear how often the U.S. has deferred strikes due to the presence of women or children. Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was with family when a CIA drone strike targeting him killed his wife and several other family members (Becker and Shane Reference Becker and Shane2012). Under the Obama policy, unlike adult men, his wife was not guilty by association with Mehsud.

At first glance, this suggests a feminist catch-22. On the one hand, a feminist position militates against women as legal children, incapable of consent, ideology, enmity, or combat (see Shepherd Reference Shepherd2006, 20). On the other, women are not as empowered as men to make decisions, much less engage as combatants, and so are less likely to be considered legitimate targets in war. But the feminist issue goes deeper, as this U.S. drone policy essentially judges people guilty and killable on the basis of gender. As drone warfare circumvents the accused's day in court, the crude means by which all but Al Qaeda and Taliban upper echelon are judged as legitimate targets revolve around gender. As men are rendered dangerous and thus killable, women are rendered de jure children.

The recalibration in gender-military affairs, then, foretells a high-tech patriarchal imperialism, and citizens of the global periphery living under drones suffer the daily trauma and periodic mistakes of war, with the familiar lack of acknowledgement, much less alarm, from the imperialist center. In this high-tech patriarchal imperialism, informed by ethnicity, nationality, and gender, brown women and children need protection and brown men need killing. Ultimately, for all the purported precision, this new weapon system is not equipped with special insight into people's hearts or an ability to parse the intricacies of consent and intent. Instead, the clumsy and imprecise stand-ins of gender, physical stature, mannerisms, and travel companions are used to determine guilt and innocence. Within a drone strike zone, all MAMs are guilty, all womenandchildren are innocent, but no one is protected.

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL: REMOTE KILLING AND EMOTIONAL CONTROL

Control of emotions, particularly fear, is a key measure of masculinity and ideal warriors (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2001). This would seem a simple challenge for those who kill by remote. However, for all the physical ease of drone strikes, it can extract a severe emotional toll on drone crews. Compared to other methods of long- and medium-range killing, drones return the gore to war for those doing the killing, as the audio-visual technology “viscerally immerses physically remote operators in combat” (Gregory Reference Gregory2011, 203). One drone controller recalled the first time he fired a missile, killing two men instantly: “[H]e could see a third man in mortal agony. The man's leg was missing and he was holding his hands over the stump as his warm blood flowed onto the ground—for two long minutes” (Abé Reference Abé2012). The problem is compounded by the familiarity that a drone crew develops with those they track: “We watch people for months. We see them playing with their dogs or doing their laundry. We know their patterns like we know our neighbors’ patterns. We even go to their funerals” (Abé Reference Abé2012).

Perhaps to counteract the intimacy of killing in high resolution, drone crews employ language that dehumanizes their human targets: a person killed by a strike is “bug splat,” likening human bodies to dead bugs on a windshield; survivors who run for cover are “squirters” (see Cohn Reference Cohn1987). Nonetheless, killing half a world away produces psychological trauma in drone crews, particularly those who have seen video of casualties of women, children, or other civilians (Chapelle, Salinas, and McDonald Reference Chappelle, Salinas and McDonald2011; Dao Reference Dao2013).

In this sense, drone warfare is radically distinct from the visual experience provided by the “smart bombs” consumed by the U.S. public during the Gulf War (Butler Reference Butler, Benhabib, Butler, Cornell and Fraser1994; Chow Reference Chow2006; see also Gregory Reference Gregory2011). Butler posited that the Gulf War's video-equipped bombs championed a “masculinized Western subject,” as the U.S. TV audience identified “with both bomber and bomb, flying through space … and yet securely wedged in the couch in one's own living room” (Butler Reference Butler, Benhabib, Butler, Cornell and Fraser1994, 44–45). As the camera was destroyed on impact, “recording … a thoroughly destructive act which can never record that destructiveness,” viewers enacted “the allegory of military triumph … through the disembodied enactment of the kill that produces no blood,” thus “a figure for imperial power which takes the aerial, global view, the disembodied killer who can never be killed” (Butler Reference Butler, Benhabib, Butler, Cornell and Fraser1994, 45).

The view of the killer who can never be killed no longer self-destructs upon impact. In increasingly higher resolution, the view reveals blood and dismembered limbs and the desperate efforts of those who struggle to hold on to life. Such is the intimate virtual proximity of the new view that it triggers emotional trauma in drone crews and is withheld from public consumption (Gregory Reference Gregory2011). The rare transcript of a drone strike gone wrong, discussed above, reveals the hyperfocus on the gendered, ethnicized bodies of potential targets, which ultimately divides the wounded and dead into two categories—successes and mistakes. Is that body wearing a burqa? Is that a rifle in his man-dress? Is that a killable man or a woman-child? The gendered corporeality of those destroyed speaks back to the killers, telling them about themselves: you are a hero/you are a murderer. It is this gendered voice that pierces the drone warrior virtual armor, inflicting emotional wounds to the combatants who cannot be killed.

GENDER, DRONES, AND DEMOCRACY

This paper set out to explore gender recalibrations prompted by the rise of drone warfare, as drones challenge characteristics defining the ideal man, ideal combatant, and ideal security state. I argue that as the new weaponry renders courage and physical strength nearly irrelevant, the traditionally valorized masculine attributes associated with heroism are eclipsed. As this masculine recalibration unfolds, the U.S. state applies a strict gender distinction to the strike zones abroad by which male = combatant and female = noncombatant, thus defining all military-aged men as enemies and all women as innocents. As the state creates new gendered and racialized means of adjudicating guilt and innocence, the immersive nature of drone warfare and subsequent emotional damage to drone crews is also gendered.

The state and individual levels further interact as the United States maintains a demobilized population through secrecy, presenting a contrast to the post-9/11 protective masculine state identified by Young (Reference Young2003) and posing new threats to democratic values. For Young, citizens and residents who accept the security state out of fear of attack “allow themselves to be positioned as women and children in relation to paternal protector-leaders” (Young Reference Young2003, 20–21). But with low-intensity drone warfare, leaders do not promulgate fear so much as encourage a blind faith in a high-tech patriarchal state that, with purportedly laserlike precision, eliminates terrorists abroad.

Drone combatants, hampered in their performance of traditional militarized masculinity but in high demand by the military, suggest new militarized masculine performances as well as enhanced opportunities for women combatants. The disassociation of strength from combat theoretically opens opportunities for a range of body sizes and abilities. Do these developments suggest a new era of degendered militarization and gender equality? Three decades ago, Stiehm (Reference Stiehm1982) rejected the gendered protector/protected hierarchy in favor of a society of men and women defenders: “citizens equally liable to experience violence and equally responsible for exercising society's violence” (374). Drone warfare potentially fosters future gender equality among citizen-defenders. However, these remote defenders, equally responsible for exercising society's violence, would be equally unlikely to experience violence from those the U.S. considers enemies. If the U.S. transitioned from a domestic protector-protected dichotomy that sustains gendered inequalities in citizenship toward a society of men and women defenders-by-remote, this gender equality could be achieved through warfare defending an increasingly predatory masculine state.

Indeed, though the U.S. state self-represents as masculine protector, for many who fall under their shadow, drones project a representation of the United States as masculine predator. This in turn summons local masculine protectors, potentially growing the ranks of those the U.S. considers terrorists but that a local population might well understand as heroes and real men. In this sense, rather than prophesying the end of militarized masculinity, drones suggest a gendered cycle of violence.

Future feminist IR research on drone warfare would be enhanced by intra- and interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-pollination. Sylvester's (Reference Sylvester2013) recent call to study war as experience provides an analytical bridge linking such diverse gendered inquiries. As per Sylvester (Reference Sylvester2013), as feminist IR develops its analytical focus beyond states, strategies, and militaries to include the human experience of war from multiple perspectives, the field must expand its methods and literatures. Among these, an interpretive approach employing ethnographic methods is well suited to examine the experience of war, as it attends to the meanings individuals attach to beliefs and actions, contextualized in time and place (Bayard de Volo Reference Bayard de Volo2001). What is the gendered, lived experience of drone warfare for leaders, combatants, victims, and their loved ones? How do meanings attached to U.S. drone warfare domestically and internationally vary across race, ethnicity, class, and gender? Addressing such questions are key proximate steps in delving deeper into the gender-war nexus to flesh out the implications of the robotics revolution and remote killing for shifting conceptions of democracy and equality within the U.S. and globally, including the danger of a paternal authority circumventing consent to assert its will.