Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Drone
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/18/1959
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://anthropology.columbian.gwu.edu/hugh-gusterson * https://elliott.gwu.edu/gusterson * http://thebulletin.org/bio/hugh-gusterson * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Gusterson
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 96017807
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n96017807
HEADING: Gusterson, Hugh
000 00757cz a2200157n 450
001 2700155
005 20110728074907.0
008 960227n| acannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 96017807
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca04017259
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC |d ViFGM
100 1_ |a Gusterson, Hugh
670 __ |a Nuclear rites, c1996: |b CIP t.p. (Hugh Gusterson) data sheet (Hugh Phillimore Gusterson)
670 __ |a Why America’s top pundits are wrong, c2005: |b eCIP t.p. (Hugh Gusterson) data view (b. Jan. 18, 1959)
670 __ |a George Mason Univ. Cultural Studies PhD Program web site, viewed July 27, 2011 |b under Faculty (Professor, Anthropology and Sociology; PhD Stanford University, 1992) |u http://culturalstudies.gmu.edu/faculty_detail.html#gusterson
953 __ |a jg04 |b sf10
PERSONAL
Born January 18, 1959; married Allison Macfarlane (former chair of Nuclear Regulatory Commission); children: two.
EDUCATION:Cambridge University, B.A., 1980 (first class honours); University of Pennsylvania, M.Sc., 1982; Stanford University, M.A., 1986, Ph.D., 1992.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 1992-2006, began as assistant professor, became associate professor; George Washington University, Columbian College of Arts & Sciences, Washington, DC, professor of anthropology. Resident scholar, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, 2014-15; Buchdahl lecturer, North Carolina State University, 2016. Also taught at George Mason University, beginning 2006.
MEMBER:American Association of Anthropology (member of executive board, 2009-12), American Ethnological Society (president, 2013-15).
AWARDS:President’s Award, American Anthropological Association, 2013; Scholar’s Award, National Science Foundation, 2014.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including T. Barkawi and K. Stanski, eds., Orientalism and War, Hurst, 2012, and M. Evangelista and H. Shue, eds., The American Way of Bombing: Changing Ethical and Legal Norms from Flying Fortresses to Drones, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 2014. Contributor to periodicals and professional journals, including American Ethnologist, American Scientist, Boston Globe, Boston Review, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Chronicle of Higher Education, Cultural Anthropology, Foreign Policy, Los Angeles Times, Nonproliferation Review, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Science and Public Policy, and Washington Post.
SIDELIGHTS
Hugh Gusterson holds the position of professor of anthropology at George Washington University, where his “expertise,” explained the contributor of a biographical blurb appearing in the Bulletin, “is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science.” “Dr. Gusterson’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of the conditions under which particular bodies of knowledge are formed and deployed,” wrote the contributor of another biographical blurb to the George Washington University Colombian College of Arts and Sciences Web site, “with special attention to the science of war, the military, and nuclear weapons. His research addresses the problem of how to understand knowledge as a cultural formation.” He is the coeditor of Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society, and The Insecure American, the coauthor of Understanding Teen Drinking Cultures in America, and the author of the monographs Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex, and Drone: Remote Control Warfare.
Two of Gusterson’s books—Nuclear Rites and People of the Bomb—grew out of the anthropological research he performed as a graduate student in California. While he was working toward his Ph.D. at Stanford, stated Claudia Dreifus in a New York Times interview, Gusterson began “wondering about doing fieldwork at Livermore, this famous nuclear weapons lab only a hour’s drive from the university. In 1984, it was unusual to be doing fieldwork in your own culture. If you did it at all, you studied down—ghetto residents, welfare mothers. Nowadays, there’s a fast-growing field, the anthropology of science.” Gusterson did not expect that he would become interested in, and sympathetic with, the lives and interests of his scientist-subjects. “Many of the Livermore weapons scientists had been active against the Vietnam War when they were younger,” Gusterson told Dreifus. “Some had been active in the civil rights movement. One guy had been a Vietnam protester in graduate school. But when he got out of school, it was a very bad time in the physics job market, and he didn’t have many options. He decided if he took a job as a conventional weapons designer, he’d be making weapons that actually killed people. On the other hand, as a nuclear weapons designer he felt that he was making weapons that would save people’s lives.”
Nuclear Rites
Nuclear Rites examines the ways in which nuclear scientists develop and maintain a common self-supporting culture from an anthropologist’s point of view. “Nuclear Rites works to view the researchers as complex human beings rather than as caricatured Dr. Strange-loves,” stated Paul Rogat Loeb in MIT Technology Review, “and examines how they form their identities as bomb designers. Central to Gusterson’s task is a look at Livermore’s ethos of secrecy. Security checks, which emphasize the scientists’ membership in a rarefied community, buttress their pride in their skill, knowledge, and patriotism. But at the same time, such measures frequently push them to monitor their actions and police themselves against suspect behavior, like attending the meetings of peace activists. Formal and informal rules also prevent Livermore scientists from discussing their work with outsiders.”
In fact, Gusterson found out that this act of separation helped scientists disassociate themselves from the potential real-world consequences of their work. “In Nuclear Rites,” wrote Tom Engelhardt in a Nation review, “Gusterson focuses on how a weapons laboratory was able to meld such disparate individuals into a unitary elite of nuclear adepts. He argues that Livermore is ‘a high-tech version of the secret societies that anthropologists have traditionally studied all over the world.’ He pushes that comparative framework in fascinating directions, showing how, for the budding weapons scientist, life in the lab is organized into an elaborate system of rites and taboos. Over time, these add up to a powerful initiation process whose effect is to separate the scientist from the world.” “This is more than clever,” Engelhardt enthused. “It offers a new way, for instance, to make some sense of the arcane secrecy and classification systems associated with the national security state. It also offers a vision of the complex ways in which those who hold our lives in their hands arm themselves against what they are doing, turning … potentially mutilated bodies quite literally into bodies of data.”
Drones looks at another way in which scientists have applied high technology to warfare. “Gusterson’s insightful editorial,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “shows less interest in drones’ effectiveness than their dismal effect on the ethics of war.” Because most Americans (including designers and pilots) are kept from understanding the true nature of drone warfare, the consequences of misplaced strikes never reach them and they never have to deal with the morality of their actions. “Gusterson aims to reframe debate for a public kept largely in the dark about the shifty nature of these strange technological beasts,” stated Kurt Jacobsen in Logos. “Sixty percent of Americans polled favor drone warfare, though support drops under thirty percent if civilians are endangered (which they almost always are). Drone strikes collapse the distinction between civilians and combatants and, further, the ‘new form of state violence, hybridizing war and police actions, wriggles out of international laws of war, and indeed the US Constitution.’” “Gusterson’s slim volume is among the most careful, concise and insightful,” said Jacobsen, “scrupulously giving all due credit along the way to other sharp investigators such as Patrick Cockburn, Medea Benjamin and Grigoire Chamayou. Gusterson, among many revealing themes, examines why so many well-trained and otherwise decent participants in the Drone ‘kill chain’ are either suckers for blatant rationalizations or else resort to them for the sake of careerist expedience.” “In sum,” Jacobsen concluded, “‘drones are an imperial border-control technology for the age of late capitalism,’ a tool of a stratified global society picking on the down and outers. Even anyone who thinks they know all there is to know about drone warfare will profit from Gusterson’s rich and penetrating study.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Bookwatch, October, 2004, review of People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex.
MIT Technology Review, July, 1997, Paul Rogat Loeb, review of Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, p. 66.
Nation, December 30, 1996, Tom Engelhardt, review of Nuclear Rites, p. 25.
New York Times, May 21, 2002, Claudia Dreifus, “A Conversation with Hugh Gusterson: Finding Rich Fodder in Nuclear Scientists.”
Publishers Weekly, April 25, 2016, review of Drone: Remote Control Warfare, p. 82.
ONLINE
Bulletin, http://thebulletin.org/ (March 5, 2017), author profile.
George Washington University Colombian College of Arts & Sciences, https://anthropology.columbian.gwu.edu/ (March 5, 2017), author profile.
George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs, https://elliott.gwu.edu/ (March 5, 2017), author profile.
Logos, http://logosjournal.com/ (summer, 2016), Kurt Jacobsen, review of Drone.
Background
Dr. Gusterson’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of the conditions under which particular bodies of knowledge are formed and deployed, with special attention to the science of war, the military, and nuclear weapons. His research addresses the problem of how to understand knowledge as a cultural formation, and how to analyze the historical and structural transformations of science and technology. He asks questions such as: How do cultures of science initiate and shape participants? How can we critically assess universalist claims about scientific and military “truths?” How do scientists justify their complicity with the projects of nation-statets?
Education
PhD. 1992, Stanford University
M.A. 1986, Stanford University
M.Sc. 1982, University of Pennsylvania
B.A. 1980 (Modern History), Cambridge University, first class Honours
Areas of Expertise
Anthropology of science, public anthropology, international security, nuclear weapons
Background
After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1992, Hugh Gusterson was an assistant professor and then an associate professor with tenure in anthropology and science studies at MIT. He received fellowships and awards from MacArthur Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Science Foundation. He moved to George Mason in 2006 as a professor of anthropology and sociology.
Since early 2013, Dr. Gusterson has added several notable accomplishments to his already stellar record:
He was awarded a fellowship to spend the 2014-15 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Previous fellows include Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann, George Kennan, and Noam Chomsky.
He received an NSF grant for a new project — an enthnographic history of the polygraph.
He was elected to be the president of the American Ethnological Society for 2015-17. The AES is the oldest anthropological association in the United States. It now has 4,000 members and is a section of the American Anthropological Association.
Current Research
An ethnographic history of the polygraph — the world the polygraph has created and the “practical knowledge” of those who administer or take polygraph tests.
Education
Ph.D., Stanford University
Publications
Drone: Remote Control Warfare (MIT Press, 2016).
The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It, ed., with Catherine Besteman, (University of California Press, 2009);
Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong, ed., with Catherine Besteman, (University of California Press, 2005);
People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and
Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1996).
Hugh Gusterson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hugh Gusterson
Nationality American
Fields Anthropology
Institutions George Washington University
George Mason University
MIT
Alma mater Cambridge University (B.A.)
University of Pennsylvania (M.A.)
Stanford University (Ph.D.)
Hugh Gusterson is an anthropologist at George Washington University,[1] back from leave at the Institute for Advanced Study[2] at Princeton. His work focuses on nuclear culture, international security and the anthropology of science. His articles have appeared in the LA Times,[3] the Boston Globe, the Boston Review[4] the Washington Post,[5] the Chronicle of Higher Education,[6] Foreign Policy,[7] and American Scientist.[8] He is a regular contributor to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.[9]
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Works
2.1 Editor
2.2 Videos
2.3 Chapters
3 References
Biography[edit]
Hugh Gusterson grew up in England. He has a B.A. in history from Cambridge University, a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania (as a Thouron Scholar), and a PhD in anthropology from Stanford University. He taught at MIT from 1992-2006 before moving to George Mason University. One of the founders of the anthropology of science,[citation needed] his early work was on the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists. More recently he has written on teenage use of alcohol.[10] and counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan.[citation needed] A leading critic of attempts to recruit anthropologists for counterinsurgency work, he is one of the founders of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.[citation needed]
Gusterson served on the American Association of Anthropology's Executive Board from 2009–12, co-chaired the committee that rewrote the Association's ethics code 2012, and currently serves on the Association's Task Force on Engagement with Israel/Palestine. He is President-elect of the American Ethnological Society.
He is married to Allison Macfarlane, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). They have two children.
Hugh Gusterson
Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science. He has written two books on the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists: Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Gusterson also co-edited Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong (University of California Press, 2005) and its sequel, The Insecure American (University of California Press, 2009). He is currently writing a book on the polygraph. Previously, he taught at MIT's program on Science, Technology, and Society, and at George Mason's Cultural Studies program.
A CONVERSATION WITH/Hugh Gusterson; Finding Rich Fodder In Nuclear Scientists
By CLAUDIA DREIFUSMAY 21, 2002
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Share
Tweet
Email
More
Save
Say the word ''anthropologist'' and images of Margaret Mead in Samoa or Bronislaw Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders may spring to mind. But for Dr. Hugh Gusterson, 43, a professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the intensive scrutiny of scientific investigation is applied not to island natives but to mostly affluent white men with ''Ph.D.'' affixed to their names.
Since 1984, Dr. Gusterson has studied nuclear weapons scientists based at the Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories, exploring the ways they adjust to culture-shattering events like the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the moratorium on nuclear weapons testing.
The results of his research are described in ''Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War,'' published in 1996. Now he is working on a sequel, and a book of essays is due in 2003.
Dr. Gusterson lives in Somerville, Mass., with his wife, Dr. Allison Macfarlane, and their 6-month-old child, Graham. Dr. Macfarlane is a geologist specializing in nuclear waste. Around M.I.T., the Gustersons are known as the ''nuclear couple.''
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
''Why shouldn't I study nuclear weapons scientists?'' Dr. Gusterson asked. ''Anthropology is the study of humanity and this is a part of human life.''
Q. How did you first decide to study the folkways and mores of nuclear weapons scientists?
A. It started for me in the 1980's. I was in graduate school, Stanford, where I'd been admitted to do African anthropology. Before that, I'd worked as an activist for the nuclear freeze in San Francisco. What I thought about, whenever my mind was at rest, was the arms race -- why it existed, how to stop it.
One day, while I was still with the nuclear freeze, I was sent to a high school to debate a weapons designer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Tom Ramos.
I was shocked to discover that I really liked him, as a person. Till that moment, people on the other side of the debate were very abstract to me. I'd never met any of them. Yet, my whole life was devoted to undoing their work. I began to wonder more about what kind of people they were.
Back at Stanford, I began thinking about dropping Africa and wondering about doing fieldwork at Livermore, this famous nuclear weapons lab only a hour's drive from the university. In 1984, it was unusual to be doing fieldwork in your own culture. If you did it at all, you studied down -- ghetto residents, welfare mothers. Nowadays, there's a fast-growing field, the anthropology of science.
Q. How did you find your way into a tight community of scientists?
A. There was an undergraduate in my department whose father worked at Livermore. My adviser said, ''Why don't you drive down there and see so-and-so's father?'' So I drove there one evening. I had really intended to just to talk with him about the feasibility of doing this research. This gentleman, who was a weapons designer, immediately asked me if I had brought a notebook and when I said yes, he said, ''I will now tell you my life history.''
He then spent the next three hours reciting his story. He came from this aristocratic family in North Korea. He had escaped from North Korea as a very young man. When he came to the U.S., he learned physics. He wanted to work on nuclear weapons to make a contribution to the struggle against communism.
This man led me to other people in the lab. Thereafter, whenever I interviewed someone, I'd ask my subject to refer me to others. I also began a program of ''deep hanging out.'' I moved to the town of Livermore. My roommates often worked at the lab. I went to local churches, to bars, to the singles group. I ate lunch at the lab's cafeteria.
Q. What's the difference between your methods of getting to know scientists and spying?
A. I always identified myself and explained what I was doing. In anthropology, there are strong ethics codes. People have a right not to be studied if they don't want to be.
Q. What kind of information did your hanging out with scientists net?
A. For starters, I was surprised to find out how many weapons scientists were liberals -- at least at Livermore. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where they also do nuclear research, is a somewhat more Republican place.
Science Times
We’ll bring you stories that capture the wonders of the human body, nature and the cosmos.
Enter your email address
Sign Up
Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
SEE SAMPLE MANAGE EMAIL PREFERENCES PRIVACY POLICY
Many of the Livermore weapons scientists had been active against the Vietnam War when they were younger; some had been active in the civil rights movement. One guy had been a Vietnam protester in graduate school. But when he got out of school, it was a very bad time in the physics job market, and he didn't have many options. He decided if he took a job as a conventional weapons designer, he'd be making weapons that actually killed people. On the other hand, as a nuclear weapons designer he felt that he was making weapons that would save people's lives through ''strengthening deterrence.''
Q. Were the weapons designers interesting people?
A. They were often mavericks, eccentrics.
One of my favorites was an H-bomb designer, who when I gave a presentation on my research showed up dressed in a loincloth and carrying this goat's head with a rattle inside it. Every time I made a point, he'd shake the goat's head. He was satirizing me, I think. He was saying, ''We are your primitives. We are your 'boys in the woods.' ''
Q. So what moved the scientists?
A. Some people, like the Korean gentleman, wanted to fight communism. Others liked working in a place that had the best equipment, lots of support staff and really interesting science to do. People often said that there was something intoxicating about the physics. It becomes deeply fascinating to try and figure out how to make the weapons make a bigger bang with less plutonium or how to reshape the inner configuration of the weapon.
These guys worked at it 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and the testing of their designs was what they lived for. It captured all their imaginative resources. They were making a small star. A hydrogen bomb is a small star you've created on earth.
I became fascinated by what the tests meant to these scientists. I found their mannerism became so intense when they talked about nuclear tests. If you were an elite designer, you spent 18 months preparing for this event that lasts for two shakes of a lamb's tail. They might go weeks and weeks without a getting a good night's sleep as they approach this climactic moment of The Test.
Q. Why was testing the weapons so important?
A. That's when they got their feedback. They got to know whether they had understood the physics by whether the bomb goes off, and it goes off with the strength they predicted. I think there's this sense of transcendent power: to mobilize that force, to make the earth move. It's the biggest bang you can make and it's your bomb that does that!
But I think also at a deep unconscious level, this is where the scientists convinced themselves, ''We're in control the weapons, they don't control us.'' You build the bomb, you predict how it will work, you see the prediction come true, and you say, ''I'm in control of this.'' But I also think at the end of the day that scientists just like to do experiments.
Q. How did your subjects react to the 1992 halt of American nuclear weapons testing?
A. They talked a good deal about being thrown away. There was one guy who put a sign on his office door, ''Will work for food.''
It was only when this bargain was struck between the Clinton administration and the weapons labs people that some of this anxiety abated. The government agreed to buy them all sorts of expensive equipment that simulated nuclear weapons tests.
But the older guys will say that nothing can really replace a live nuclear test. The younger guys have this forlorn wistfulness about having missed out on something really important. Nowadays, some of the guys go camping at the Nevada test sites on weekends. It's their sacred place.
Q. How did you perceive the marriages and personal relationships of your weapons scientists?
A. I often found emotional distance in their relationships. I think the physicist's temperament is not one that's conducive to emotional intimacy, by and large, anyway. On top of that, the demands of classification and secrecy can cause a tremendous distance in a marriage, cause a lot of pain. The women who did best at being married to physicists were very independent resourceful women who expected to live independent lives.
Q. How were you changed by your time among the weapons scientists?
A. I came into the project like many antinuclear activists, convinced that the bomb was a threat to human survival, afraid of it, full of bad dreams about it. Interestingly, over time, I absorbed the weapons scientists' sense of ease with the bomb. I no longer have the bad dreams I used to have about nuclear war.
In some ways, I'm like the monogamous anthropologist who has spent years with a polygamous group: seeing men with four wives comes to seem natural, after a while. But then, I think, if you're not changed by the culture you've studied, you haven't done the fieldwork properly.
People Of The Bomb
The Bookwatch.
(Oct. 2004):
COPYRIGHT 2004 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
Full Text:
People Of The Bomb
Hugh Gusterson
University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Ave. South #290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
0816638608 $19.95 www.upress.umn.edu
Author Hugh Gusterson is a nuclear freeze activist with an unusual anthropologist's background, so it's not surprising his People Of The Bomb:
Portraits Of America's Nuclear Complex takes a dual approach to analyzing how the nature and presence of the nuclear bomb has penetrated to
American identity and psyche. His fifteen years of field research at weapons labs across the country incorporates this plus analysis of popular
movies, political speeches, media focus on war, and intellectual circles alike to provide a hard-hitting analysis of the impact of the nuclear
complex on American perspective.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"People Of The Bomb." The Bookwatch, Oct. 2004. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA123754857&it=r&asid=94973668000674ba1acb6fc46d3b9f4b. Accessed 5 Feb.
2017.
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486347841973 2/9
Gale Document Number: GALE|A123754857
---
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486347841973 3/9
Drone: Remote Control Warfare
Publishers Weekly.
263.17 (Apr. 25, 2016): p82.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Drone: Remote Control Warfare
Hugh Gusterson. MIT, $24.95 (216p) ISBN 978-0-262-03467-8
Since the early 20th century, "advocates of air power have repeatedly prophesied the imminent obsolescence of ground forces," yet they have
always been wrong, writes Gusterson, professor of international affairs at George Washington University (People of the Bomb) in this short,
astute, and disapproving examination of the latest failed attempt to rule from the sky. Gusterson acknowledges that drones are more accurate than
crewed aircraft but adds that they kill plenty of bystanders. Moreover, modern armies are capable of shooting drones down, revealing them to be a
continuation of 19th-century colonial warfare in which soldiers with superior weapons annihilated forces possessing far less sophisticated
weaponry. Given the drone's position in asymmetrical warfare, Gusterson makes an apt analogy with suicide bombers that some will find very
unsettling: When people are killed by an unsuspected suicide bomber in their midst, this is considered a despicable, cowardly act. When people
are killed by a drone safely piloted from 7,000 miles away, how is that to be received? Military leaders find drones irresistible because they seem
to make military intervention cheap and easy, but they enable a "kind of permanent; low-level military action that threatens to erase the boundary
between war and peace." Gusterson's insightful editorial shows less interest in drones' effectiveness than their dismal effect on the ethics of war.
June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Drone: Remote Control Warfare." Publishers Weekly, 25 Apr. 2016, p. 82. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450904602&it=r&asid=27b03a10e0d129fda5dc55598888e577. Accessed 5 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450904602
---
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486347841973 4/9
Nuclear Rites
Paul Rogat Loeb
MIT's Technology Review.
100.5 (July 1997): p66.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Technology Review, Inc.
Full Text:
What is it like to design weapons of mass annihilation? How do the people who produce such weapons justify their work? MIT anthropology
professor Hugh Gusterson spent two and a half years at the Lawrence Livermore Labs, where scientists have been creating atomic weapons since
1952, and his book Nuclear Rites addresses those questions. Gusterson began as a nuclear peace activist, then was struck by how much he
personally liked a Livermore scientist he debated. Nuclear Rites works to view the researchers as complex human beings rather than as
caricatured Dr. Strange-loves, and examines how they form their identities as bomb designers.
Central to Gusterson's task is a look at Livermore's ethos of secrecy. Security checks, which emphasize the scientists' membership in a rarefied
community, buttress their pride in their skill, knowledge, and patriotism. But at the same time, such measures frequently push them to monitor
their actions and police themselves against suspect behavior, like attending the meetings of peace activists. Formal and informal rules also prevent
Livermore scientists from discussing their work with outsiders, including their own spouses. One wife never found out about her husband's
project until she sat in on his interview for the book.
Gusterson goes on to point out that the nuclear tests the Livermore scientists supervise are critical rites of passage, strengthening community ties.
The act of surmounting the massive technical obstacles these tests present reinforces participants' shared assumption that atomic weapons, if
handled competently, are controllable. And this sense of mastery carries over to the political and military context in which the bombs are to be
used. For the scientists, in other words, nuclear tests supply a "symbolic simulation" of the "system of deterrence itself," Gusterson writes. In fact,
many Livermore scientists regard their bombs as such a powerful deterrent that they believe they will never be used, and thus differentiate their
work from the production of conventional military technologies like napalm. Some even marched in 1960s antiwar protests or opposed ReaganBush
environmental policies.
Yet whatever their beliefs, Livermore scientists focus less on political matters than on the satisfaction of meeting technical challenges. Designing
nuclear weapons piques their scientific curiosity. They have the privilege of working with highly intelligent colleagues in what one described as
"the ultimate toy shop" of state-of-the-art equipment. They avoid having to genuflect to academic or corporate bureaucracies. And they channel
their passion for invention into what Gusterson calls "a source of binding energy" - something capable of holding them together even when
outsiders question their mission.
Other studies of atomic weapons facilities - including New York Times science writer William Broad's Star Warriors, novelist Grace Mojtabai's
Blessed Assurance, and my own Nuclear Culture - have described a similar mix of political silence and technical passion, and a similar sense of a
world apart. But Gusterson raises some new issues. Most significantly, he reports that most of the scientists he talked to mentioned the potential
human impact of their bombs only in passing. Perhaps because they have concentrated so intensely on demanding and ever-changing technical
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486347841973 5/9
specifications, they seem to have converted the bodies onto which their weapons might land into what he calls "a set of components that undergo
mechanical interactions with blast waves and glass fragments."
Embracing Vulnerability
Gusterson maintains that such a sense of abstraction is key to enabling people to develop bombs. To illustrate his point, he contrasts the responses
of three scientists who witnessed aboveground nuclear blasts. The first embraced his work with unalloyed enthusiasm and described the bomb's
impact as "impressive" and "interesting . . . a very spectacular result." The second described the blast as "just stunning," but then acknowledged a
"very heavy feeling," a physical sense of foreboding that brought forth continuing misgivings about his work. The third scientist, though he
witnessed a smaller blast from just as far away, described crouching over, terrified, and feeling his heart beat as he urinated in his pants. Although
this man could talk the technical talk as well as any of the others, he felt physically frail when faced with an actual nuclear explosion. That
sensation eventually led him to stop working on such weapons.
What makes Gusterson's preoccupation with the scientists' detachment especially interesting is that it allows him to arrive at a new understanding
of their opponents. If those who carry out the mission of labs such as Livermore need to repress a gut feeling of vulnerability, those who question
that mission are more or less required to embrace it, in his view. Otherwise the lab's business becomes, to quote one scientist, "no stranger than
making vacuum cleaners." As Nuclear Rites perceptively notes, doctors helped spearhead the Reaganera nuclear peace movements not only
because particular individuals, like Helen Caldicott, were charismatic, but also because they offered a countervailing expertise to that of the
weapons strategists. They provided credible, specific details about the horror of potential cataclysm, and helped us imagine the physical impact of
a typical bomb on actual human beings. They helped shift public discussion of the arms race from technical abstractions to the potential of global
annihilation.
Unfortunately, Gusterson fails to acknowledge that the peace movement is built on more than personal fear. Activists I interviewed for my book
Hope in Hard Times consistently stressed that terror of their own death by atomic fire was not driving them: they knew they'd die one way or
another at some point. Rather, what stirred their hearts was the unprecedented threat to the world they expected to leave behind. Although
Caldicott and others may have brought many to the movement by taking them into the eye of the nuclear hurricane, grassroots activists say they
persisted because of their sense that they are responsible for something larger than themselves.
But probably the most serious shortcoming of Nuclear Rites is that Gusterson does not distinguish between respecting people's narratives and
abdicating judgment on critical moral issues. He repeatedly undercuts his insights with academic theories that suggest it's impossible to find clear
right and wrong in the actions of either the weapons designers or their opponents, only "competing regimes of truth," as French philosopher
Michel Foucault says. One moment Gusterson dissects the ways that Livermore's weapons designers silence any qualms in the face of their
community's cultural pressures. The next he cites theorists like Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard, who resist the very idea that there
could be an absolute definition of morality or truth. Or he quotes the notion of anthropologists Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky that
environmental activists respond less to real ecological threats than to socially conditioned trigger points based on their own background.
It's a strength of the book that Gusterson likes the weapons designers. Without his empathy for his subjects, he could hardly have understood
them as well as he does. Still, the actions undertaken at Livermore and other institutions in America's atomic archipelago have had human
consequences that go beyond ideology, conditioning, or cultural creation. Maybe the Livermore bomb designers are right, that America had - and
has - no other course. Maybe they are wrong, as I strongly believe, and blinded by their investment in their work. But to imply that all we can do
is observe how people create contending belief systems is simply to ignore the question.
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486347841973 6/9
We indeed live in a time of competing ethical frameworks. Nevertheless, shared bases for discussion do exist - like the duty to avoid causing
human pain and to alleviate that pain whenever possible. Such ethical touchstones don't furnish unequivocal prescriptions: Livermore's scientists
would argue that their weapons, far from causing pain, actually prevent it by maintaining the stability of deterrence. But the theories Gusterson
seems to favor too often enshrine the uncertainties and ambiguities of our time, so that none of us need act on our convictions. This useful book
would be still better if it had a clearer and stronger moral voice.
PAUL ROGAT LOEB is the author of Nuclear Culture (New Society Publishers), Generation at the Crossroads (Rutgers University Press), and
the forthcoming Soul of a Citizen (St. Martin's Press).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Loeb, Paul Rogat. "Nuclear Rites." MIT's Technology Review, July 1997, p. 66+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA19997965&it=r&asid=87221077087014113428932346b22579. Accessed 5 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A19997965
---
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486347841973 7/9
Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold
War
Tom Engelhardt
The Nation.
263.22 (Dec. 30, 1996): p25.
COPYRIGHT 1996 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
Full Text:
As I worked my way through the final pages of Hugh Gusterson's "ethnographic study of a nuclear weapons laboratory," I couldn't help thinking:
Where are those Trobriand Islanders now that we need them? Here is an M.I.T. assistant professor committed to a "repatriated anthropology"
(let's not begin to examine that bit of scholastic jargon), who has produced a truly odd document on a subject of importance - rich yet
disappointing, full of curious insights yet half-blind to itself. Gusterson intends, as a start, to bring back to the homeland several generations of
anthropological experience with the tribal peoples of what is now called the Fourth World. In this commendable impulse lies a largely
unexamined stew of motives. In one way, Nuclear Rites represents a kind of scholarly pay-back time: Let's bring home practices that objectified
and oppressed others and see what it feels like. It also holds within it an urge to shock: Let's put our elite institutions side by side with "primitive"
ones (the quotation marks now being obligatory) and feel an uncomfortable and/or thrilling shock of recognition. Yet Gusterson, a British citizen
without security clearance, also aimed to use such methods to sidle up to one of the most unsettling and secretive parts of our society: our nuclear
landscape and those who inhabit it.
In 1987, as the cold war was ending, Gusterson moved to Livermore, California, a community dominated by the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory. There he spent two years as if in Samoa or the Brazilian rainforest, gaining the trust of the indigenous people and examining their
cultural rites and practices. The main tribal members he chose to study were the physicists (as well as the technicians, bureaucrats and
administrative staff) who made the science that made nuclear weapons policy possible. Since its founding in 1952, the lab has "designed eighteen
warheads for the American nuclear stockpile." In fact, by the late eighties, it had managed to insinuate itself into every conceivable nuclear niche,
from the latest work on Star Wars weaponry to research on nuclear waste disposal, nuclear winter scenarios and the effects of radiation on the
human body. In addition, it ran nuclear tests for the Pentagon that, by confirming the "reliability" of the U.S. arsenal, contributed much to the
framing of nuclear policy and the limiting of debate about it.
Gusterson approached his field work assuming that nuclear weapons scientists would be a homogeneous group of conservative and authoritarian
patriots. He was surprised to discover, however, that they had views ranging from right-wing and evangelical to liberal and even leftist. A number
of the scientists he grew close to had actively opposed the Vietnam War or U.S. intervention in Central America or were committed
environmentalists. Most of them were, in addition, remarkably open with him. Unlike "fraudulent executives or drug dealers evading the `Sixty
Minutes' camera crew," they were unembarrassed, undefensive and unapologetic about their work. They were also generally nice (niceness, as
any journalist who has dealt with public information officers knows, being quite an effective American defense system). They did not seem to
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486347841973 8/9
him to be living in an obvious state of "denial" over the nature of their work, and yet, for such a heterogeneous group, they held a remarkably
limited and cohesive view of that work They were uniformly convinced that the stability ("peace" not being a word in their vocabulary) and
safety of the world were dependent on the further production and testing of nuclear weaponry. They were not, in their own eyes, men (and a few
women) working toward the possible extermination of humanity but so many Horatios at the bridge of deterrence, protecting our society against
nuclear catastrophe.
In Nuclear Rites, Gusterson focuses on how a weapons laboratory was able to meld such disparate individuals into a unitary elite of nuclear
adepts. He argues that Livermore is "a high-tech version of the secret societies that anthropologists have traditionally studied all over the world."
In his book's middle chapters, he pushes that comparative framework in fascinating directions, showing how, for the budding weapons scientist,
life in the lab is organized into an elaborate system of rites and taboos. Over time, these add up to a powerful initiation process whose effect is to
separate the scientist from the world, fuse him to the nuclear project and allay his anxieties about the potentially uncontrollable forces he may be
unleashing. "To become a full-fledged member of the weapons design community," Gusterson writes, "new scientists must master an arduous,
esoteric knowledge, subject themselves to tests of intelligence and endurance, and finally prove themselves in a display of the secret knowledge's
power."
This is more than clever. It offers a new way, for instance, to make some sense of the arcane secrecy and classification systems associated with
the national security state. It also offers a vision of the complex ways in which those who hold our lives in their hands arm themselves against
what they are doing, turning (as Gusterson would put it) potentially mutilated bodies quite literally into bodies of data, or of how, in confusing
their machines with themselves, they transform the potential horror of nuclear war into a technological aesthetic of pleasure.
Unfortunately, this book also demonstrates that such a comparative framework can take us only a disappointingly short way into the uniqueness
of our nuclear situation. Livermore is not, after all, a tribal group from the Fourth World; and so what is new and strange about our nuclear
landscape often escapes such comparisons. Gusterson does have a fine eye for the exotic detail, and his book has many striking touches - the
weapons scientist who uses color photos of nuclear tests for his living-room decor, or those who uniformly deny that they ever have nuclear
dreams, or who live in terror of a nuclear warhead not going off. Yet all the comparative power of anthropology seems only to tame this throughthe-looking-glass
world, making what is truly unsettling about atomic science and the policies it shores up seem simply banal. In the end,
Gusterson's approach, incapable of expressing what is singularly disturbing about nuclear weapons, in effect confirms the comforting world view
of his secret society of weapons scientists - that there is little out of the ordinary and so nothing to fear here. As a result, Nuclear Rites has the feel
of a scholarly excursion, hardly different from any small-scale study of some distant tribal group.
Gusterson cannot be fully faulted for this. Nothing has been harder since Hiroshima than grasping the ways in which nuclear weapons and
nuclear fear have come to possess our consciousness. But there is an aspect to the taming of his subject, to the blunting of his book's potential
impact, that falls closer to home, and it is too important to ignore, for Gusterson has been involved in an initiation rite of his own, which bears a
striking relationship to the one his scientists underwent and which, I suspect, leaves him too close to his subjects for comfort. To see this,
however, one must first look to a half-submerged text in Nuclear Rites that cohabits uneasily with the anthropological one. It is a confessional text
about a young man who, as the antinuclear movement grew in the early eighties, underwent a conversion experience, felt a kind of primal terror
in the face of the weapons Livermore's scientists were creating, and became an antinuclear activist.
In the interstices of Nuclear Rites, Gusterson wants to own up to a reverse journey he took through the looking glass. He wants the reader to
understand how in his fieldwork at Livermore he moved from what he now thinks of as a "culture of terror" (the antinuclear movement) toward
the culture that produced that terror. He wants the reader to understand how and why "I lost my anxiety about [nuclear] weapons and
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486347841973 9/9
progressively absorbed the sense of ease I found among the scientists with whom I now spent most of my time.... Nuclear weapons laboratories
had become banal, everyday places for me." No longer fear-inspiring, they included people he "had come to like. The political had become
personal for me in a most ironic way."
What may have brought him closest to the world of the weapons scientist, however, was not friendship but his journey from activism to academic
professionalism that in certain ways paralleled theirs and took him into the adjacent tribal community of the university. His book, which grew out
of his doctoral dissertation, is not just an analysis of the rites of a First World elite group but literal evidence of the initiation "rites" he himself
endured. This process included the arduous mastery of esoteric language ("my own positional relationship with that situation") and knowledge
(including the now-obligatory citations of Foucault), not to speak of the obligatory framing of his discussion in a way meant to exclude the rest of
us ("Cultural Critique and Ethnographic Authority" is one introductory subhead). As a system of rites and taboos, the university initiation process
means to separate the scholar from the world, to create from a heterogeneous group of individuals a body of colleagues with similar attitudes
toward the possession and transmission of knowledge - even if its end point, tenure, is far less dramatic than a Nevada desert explosion.
Gusterson's impulse as an anthropologist - to approach a world close at hand that we probably know less about but should know far more about
than the world of the Jivaro or the Masai - is commendable. The secret world of the weapons laboratory, which may downsize but will not go
away, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and deterrence theory, should be opened to us. But like his scientists, Gusterson, on returning to his
"lab" faced a daunting system of classifications, rites and taboos that allays anxieties only by taming reality.
There are, of course, no Trobriand Islanders who might visit both Livermore and M.I.T. as well as more central institutions of power in our
society and help us see afresh the rites and taboos of our world that blind us to deeper questions. So who will help a promising anthropologist free
himself from the muffling rites of his profession so that he can tell us, as he struggles to do in this book, truths we need to know?
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Engelhardt, Tom. "Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War." The Nation, 30 Dec. 1996, p. 25+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18984375&it=r&asid=6ec9bc370a07a4e0c7f23fc428cd908e. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18984375
Review: Hugh Gusterson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare. MIT Press 2016
by Kurt Jacobsen
Inside a foreign policy seminar, as a sour sort of luck would have it, I actually heard an Army officer, who was on leave to pick up an advanced degree, blurt just a bit too blithely that drone strikes in Pakistan were perfectly fine because the national government quietly approved. Why? Remote control warfare was reckoned to be the least worst of Pakistan’s paltry options, given all the scorch marks that the US was determined to inflict across the tribal wilderness bordering Afghanistan. Ninety percent of Pakistanis nonetheless oppose drones and three quarters accordingly regard the US as an enemy. No intervention at all, was not among the options. Apparatchiks really believe this stuff and do so because they want to believe it. How this self-serving stance differs from deception is not so easy to figure out.
Among a blizzard of new books probing drone warfare, Hugh Gusterson’s slim volume is among the most careful, concise and insightful, scrupulously giving all due credit along the way to other sharp investigators such as Patrick Cockburn, Medea Benjamin and Grigoire Chamayou. Gusterson, among many revealing themes, examines why so many well-trained and otherwise decent participants in the Drone ‘kill chain’ are either suckers for blatant rationalizations or else resort to them for the sake of careerist expedience. Readers may not be terribly comforted to learn that drone operators turn for guidance to an oracular computer program, sort of like a Jiminy Cricket on their shoulder, which forecasts collateral damage from any proposed air strike. The software is dubbed bugsplat.
Pilotless planes were armed as early as 2001 but only seemed to gain major media attention a decade later. Drone warfare has been a story mostly ‘told from the point of view of executioners” who are giddy about this magic wand means of rubbing out faraway foes. Drones, the author emphasizes, can only slither around the skies in decidedly asymmetric situations such as counter-insurgency campaigns. Any adequately armed State can blast the impertinent snoops out of the air in minutes flat. Indeed, seventy-six nations have drone capability themselves. So Drones are “an inherently colonialist technology,” somewhat advanced over flimsy biplanes that Britain dispatched over Iraq in the 1920s to strafe any impudent natives.
A key theme is how unmanned aerial gadgets offer operators both extremely remote and intimate experiences at the same time, reducing all normal human senses to a single menacing voyeuristic vision. Did Nazi camp guards not view the untermenschen in much the same clinical manner? Merely press a trigger and down hurtles a Hellfire rocket to whack the designated nuisance, a termination, as the saying goes, with extreme prejudice. So far there has been precious little urgency for authorities to consider the wider picture – beyond a screen fixation – because, as that arch old bit of imperial doggerel goes, ‘Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not.’ The more things change . . .
For all the Konrad Lorenzian cant about men as killer apes, the Pentagon long has been distressed as to how few natural born killers there are. S.L.A. Marshall’s controversial World War II study Men Against Fire found that only about a third of GIs in combat fired their weapons. An urgent aim since then has been to boost the firing rate, and distance remains the surest palliative for outbreaks of conscience. Pilots, for example, glimpse little of what they slaughter and therefore are fairly reliable trigger-pullers. Recall the Wikileaks footage of a scornful helicopter crew splattering Iraqi civilians on a street corner. Yet, as drone whistleblowers like Cian Westmoreland attest, emotions still interfere. Even drone operators seven thousand miles from the fray suffer stress tantamount to PTSD, if they lack the proper sociopathic nerve for their duties. The author, in passing, makes a telling plea for understanding PTSD as a “moral injury” rather than as a neurological condition.
Gusterson aims to reframe debate for a public kept largely in the dark about the shifty nature of these strange technological beasts. Sixty percent of Americans polled favor drone warfare, though support drops under thirty percent if civilians are endangered (which they almost always are). Drone strikes “collapse the distinction between civilians and combatants and, further, the “new form of state violence, hybridizing war and police actions, wriggles out of international laws of war, and indeed the US Constitution.” Gusterson highlights how rapidly norms melted from an initial reluctance to murder people from high altitude to casual acceptance. Though the CIA was banned by a 1976 executive order from assassinating executives and conducting other ‘extrajudicial killings, after 9/11 all norms and good sense seem to have been abandoned.
Afghanistan is the most heavily droned patch on the planet. The first aerial assassination attempts went embarrassingly awry, missing Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, who slipped away or perhaps were never there. Gusterson instructively quotes a Pentagon spokesperson on one such miscue: ‘We’re convinced that it was an appropriate target . . .[although] we do not yet know who exactly it was.” A drone strike killed an al-Qaeda leader linked to the 1995 USS Cole bombing. A US citizen died as well but a survivor of the strike was acquitted of terrorism charges afterward in Yemen. A report found 41 instances in which the same prominent target was ‘killed” in more than one drone attack. F-16s and Predators, tracking a switched-on cell phone, killed an anti-Taliban Afghan leader on election tour instead of a Taliban leader. Bureaucratic dimwits insisted anyway their data was correct.
Gusterson distinguishes “mixed drone warfare,” in Iraq and Afghanistan where Drones function as air support for soldiers on the ground, and “pure drone warfare” in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia where no US forces at least officially prowl and the Drones hunt ‘bad guys.’ One pervasive hitch is that everyone on screen becomes a shimmering blur, and anxious ethnocentric beholders can make a threatening mirage out of whomever they monitor. Gusterson cites the tempting ‘leaps of logic’ that ignorant observers often make to fill in gaps about movement and motives of their quarry. Technology “gives you a false sense of security” about identifying purported enemies. Is that a child or insurgent? Why take a chance? Above all, “a palpable hunger to attack” drives the way screen images are construed. The anesthetizing aesthetics of their video game takes over. Splat.
A Predator can lurk up to 24 hours at 10 to 15 thousand feet. The Reaper is twice as powerful, four times the price (22.5 million each) and hauls eight times the payload. Astonishingly, over half of Air Force pilots now are trained for drones. The share of ‘remote pilot aircraft’ shot up from 5% in 2005 to 31% by 2012. Manufacturers are ecstatic. No Yank is at risk in the cockpit, which is fortunate especially because half of all drones crack up. Three people in a tricked-out trailer guide each drone, slaving twelve hour shifts six days a week. The bleary-eyed Spartans sift assiduously through a confusing array of contradictory demands and murky orders. The ballyhooed pinpoint accuracy claims for drone weaponry suspiciously recalls the vaunted Norden bombsight of World War II, which had difficulty locating a German city, let alone a pickle barrel. Upbeat high-tech tales are geared to sooth public concerns. Gusterson goes on to contend the US has “created a new approach to counterinsurgency warfare and border policing that is organized around new strategies of information gathering, precision targeting, and reconceptualizing enemy forces as a cluster of networks and nodal leaders.”
US officials worry about Taliban fighters crossing to Pakistan from Afghanistan to regroup and return. So Drones have turned tribal area residents into, as a Waziristan chief complains, ‘psychiatric patients.” Tribal life has been reconfigured to avert encounters with these fickle ever-hovering death dealers. Yet you can’t do this just anywhere, at least as yet. Can you imagine, for example, the British government conducting drone strikes in the Irish Republic during the Northern Irish ‘troubles’ because known IRA members were roving around there? What would the consequences have been?
Reuters reports that drones kill 12 times as many ‘low level’ people as high profile targets. So-called “signature strikes” kill crowds of suspected insurgents based purely upon behavior patterns. “Double tap strikes” means help won’t go near a site for hours for fear of a follow-up missile. Comparing estimates by London’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2400-3900 casualties with 10 to 40% civilian), the establishmentarian Long War Journal (2,900 casualties with 156 of them civilians), and the conservative New America Foundation (2200 – 3600 casualties with 7 to 14% civilians), the author finds the upper end estimates most credible. Gusterson draws a valid parallel between drones and suicide bombing, as both undermining the reciprocity of vulnerability inherent in war, thereby changing war’s character in unappreciated ways. To victims on the wrong end the distinction between a technical device and a wired-up insurgent disappears in the blast wave. Drones amount to a kind of black magic where you stick a pin in a digital doll and your quarry suffers. The nerve-wracking plight of those beneath flight paths makes one appreciate why our ancestors, however deluded, raged to burn imaginary broomstick-riding counterparts at the stake.
A sort of warmed -over ‘felicific calculus’ vainly is resorted to on the fly by officials who reckon how many innocent lives might be saved later by taking a number of innocents right now in an attack on presumed enemies. However much an otherwise critical film like Eye in The Sky dignifies it, the calculus smacks more of Madeleine Albright than Jeremy Bentham. The whole purpose of these gimmicks is to create and exploit slippage between rhetoric and reality to achieve the elite’s underlying goals.
What strikes one most keenly is how Vietnam, and its criminally discarded lessons, echoes everywhere. Any military-aged male is an insurgent, as in Vietnam. The target list piles up, as in Vietnam. This form of warfare is a perpetual enterprise in which blundering perpetrators keep accruing more power. Drones only motivate more rebel recruitment, as in Vietnam. The US confuses “killing with winning,” as in body-counted Vietnam. Decapitation does not work. The enemy is more incensed than demoralized and the US military consequently demands more resources and more of the same strategy, as in Vietnam.
The battlefield, under the 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AUMF), also is reinterpreted to extend wherever the enemy might be. The drone bathes itself in self-legitimating accuracy and does it not lead to a preference to kill instead of capture? To protect against any imagined threat, anything goes. Obama, once a constitutional lawyer, managed to assert that Libya strikes were not relevant to the War Powers Act because no US troops were on the ground, an argument which opens the door to attacks anywhere anytime by unchecked executive orders.
Gusterson foresees the difference between war and peace evaporating as we move into a world without demarcated battle zones. He brings up the key applicable concept of moral hazard: “a situation where a person may be willing to take risks because they know someone else will bear the consequences,’ which is the very definition of elite rule at home as well as in foreign policy. Drones can retard the expected waning in the ‘rally around the flag’ effect occurring as wars go badly or – same thing – on and on. Insulating citizen soldiers almost guarantees conflicts will continue and even spread.
The author demolishes the “legalistic opportunism and disingenuousness with which the Obama Administration has made its case, picking and choosing tidbits from the law as if it were a buffet dinner while building up executive power.” If war is not reciprocal such that both sides suffer to a degree “then it is torture,” and so far we do not award medals for torture. Finally, there is no such thing as “absolutely unilateral” action because the targeted parties eventually find ways to hit back, as we have learned in the last year. In sum, “drones are an imperial border-control technology for the age of late capitalism,” a tool of a stratified global society picking on the down and outers. Even anyone who thinks they know all there is to know about drone warfare will profit from Gusterson’s rich and penetrating study.
Kurt Jacobsen is book review editor at Logos.