#Drone geographies
Last year Apple rejected Josh Begley’s Drones+ app three times. The app promised to send push notifications to users each time a US drone strike was reported, but Apple decided that many people would find it ‘objectionable’ (they said nothing about what they might feel about the strikes). When he defended his thesis at NYU earlier this year, Begley asked: ‘Do we really want to be as connected to our foreign policy as we are to our smart phones? … Do we really want these things to be the site of how we experience remote war?’1 These are good questions, and Apple’s answer was clear enough. A number of other artists have also used digital platforms to bring into view these sites of remote violence – I am thinking in particular of Begley’s Dronestream and James Bridle’s Dronestagram, but there are a host of others2 – and their work set me thinking about the multiple and compound geographies through which these operations are executed. In this article I will focus on just four of them.
My view is both narrow and wide. It is narrow because I discuss only the use of Predators and Reapers by the US Air Force in Afghanistan and Iraq, sometimes as part of Joint Special Operations Command, and their involvement in CIA-directed targeted killings in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Other advanced militaries also operate drones, some of them armed and some for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), as part of networked military violence, but it is even more difficult to detail their operations. The US Army and Marine Corps use drones too, but most of these are much smaller and limited to providing ISR for close combat and ground attack. Within these limits, my view is also wide, however, because I want to disclose the matrix of military violence that these remote platforms help to activate. Much of the critical response to drones is unduly preoccupied with the technical (or techno-cultural) object – the drone – and virtually ignores these wider dispositions and propensities. This is, I will argue, both an analytical and a political mistake.
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