Drone Warfare and the Limits

Journal of International Political Theory2015, Vol. 11(1) 128 –144

© The Author(s) 2015Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1755088214555597

ipt.sagepub.com

Drone warfare and the limits of sacrifice

Bianca BaggiariniYork University, Canada

AbstractRené Girard argues that violence and the sacred are inseparable, yet how do the political boundaries of sacrifice shift when state violence is privatized and increasingly disembodied? This article provides a Foucauldian challenge to Girard by invoking the mutually reinforcing problem of military privatization and drone warfare. Using Foucauldian work on race and biopolitics, I will explore how military privatization permits states to (precariously) call for the end of sacrifice. I trace the genealogical trajectories of the citizen-soldier to argue that military privatization, as exemplified by the burgeoning industry of private military and security companies and the current American administration’s use of drone warfare, allows for the removal of sacrifice as a feature of the post-World War II social contract between states and citizens. Historically, the sacrifices of citizen-soldiers have been consecrated within the boundaries of the nation and memorialized in a way that allows for both the production of shared collective memory and a projected future-oriented discourse of unification through shared national or ethnic destiny. Drones, as the technological extension of the philosophy of military privatization and the high-tech expression of ‘pre-modern’ violence, reveal tensions between embodied combat, citizenship and sacrifice.

KeywordsDrones, military privatization, sacrifice, US military, violence

Introduction

A cursory glance at international politics shows that unmanned aerial systems (UAS), colloquially termed ‘drones’, constitute a prolific presence globally. By 2022, the global drone sector is expected to reach a market value of US$82 billion (Medina, 2014) despite no consensus on how to govern the expansion of the industry and curtail the innumerable

Corresponding author:Bianca Baggiarini, Department of Sociology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada. Email: [email protected]

555597 IPT0010.1177/1755088214555597Journal of International Political TheoryBaggiariniresearch-article2015

Article

at Univ of Newcastle upon Tyne on January 10, 2015ipt.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://ipt.sagepub.com/

Baggiarini 129

problems associated with the military applications of drones. UAS are a pillar of US counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. The synchronistic efforts of the US government, the Pentagon, arms manufacturers, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the private contractors1 suggest a future of militarized violence as always-already transcending the numerous vulnerabilities of the citizen-soldier. Regarded by some as ‘too fat to fight’,2 ordinary bodies appear ill-prepared to combat the (savage yet shrewd) enemy. In the asymmetrical yet perpetual Global War on Terror, whose archi-tects are also explicitly casualty averse (Mandel, 2004; Shimko, 2010), the privatization of militaries serves as a necessary but insufficient social pre-requisite in the quest for ‘clean’ bloodless war. UAS extend this social philosophy of privatization, delivering enhanced battlefield capabilities to the war fighter by promoting situational awareness, understanding, ownership of data and dominance through combat unmanning. But the meaning of awareness is not entirely clear.

Consider the Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems International’s annual con-vention, of which I was in attendance. A military official quipped, ‘Nothing ruins a good war story like an eye witness’. Here, enhanced sight and interpretation of data wrought by UAS are distinct from the politicized act of witnessing. Agamben (2002) defines the wit-ness, on the one hand, by the subjective potential for testimony and thus the production of truth as recognized by law and, on the other hand, as a survivor: ‘a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can there-fore bear witness to it’ (p. 17, emphasis added). UAS, as techniques of government, enable situational awareness by bringing ‘populations into the terrain of state legibility and secu-rity so that they might become governable subjects’ (Adey et al., 2013: 3; emphasis added). In contrast to sovereign power, governing ‘presuppose[s] the freedom of the gov-erned’ (Rose, 1999: 4). UAS enact permanent mechanisms of surveillance, which gener-ate the constant fear of death. Governing at a distance undermines the transformative potential of witnesses, whose experiences of drone wars have no clear temporal bounda-ries, and therefore cannot be. We can imagine that ‘good’ post-9/11 war stories should include themes of American exceptionalism and heroic, masculine sacrifice, triumph over evil and national destiny – not murder, clandestine assassinations or unjust occupations. The inability to bear witness is informed by ongoing racism and neo-colonialism, which is integral to drone violence in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) in North Waziristan, Pakistan, and in other undeclared war zones. Killing at a distance forecloses the encounter between executioner and victim. Insofar as the technology offers more ease in effectively closing in on a battle space (shortening the kill chain), it is nonetheless a space where the enemy is intimately known, generating an intimacy-in-distance.

In this article, I argue that the military application of drones signifies a troubling of embodied combat, citizenship and sacrifice. The synthesis of citizenship and sacrifice was a centuries-long process that hailed the citizen-soldier as the ultimate embodiment of sacrifice. Modern citizenship promotes a nationalistic willingness to die for the nation (Balakrishnan, 2009; Brubaker, 1992: 145). This symbiosis is eroded through privatiza-tion and combat unmanning, which pivot on how states govern sacrifice. The outsourc-ing of violence through private military corporations (PMCs) and the techno-fetishism of drones are co-constitutive responses to the perceived need to unman combat. They



130 Journal of International Political Theory 11(1)

emerge in tandem with a Euro-American fascination with ‘clean’ wars. Together, PMCs and UAS free states from the accountability typically associated with state-centric and defence-oriented wars. Both phenomena reflect the logical endpoint in the (impossible) quest for bloodless war. Yet, bloodshed reminds us that war is a human practice. In attempts to minimize bloodshed (through technological prowess) or conceal it (bypass-ing Congress, privatizing the effects of violence), an ineradicable paradox of liberal modernity is revealed: ‘liberal regimes [which idealize peace] have now committed to war without end, temporally, spatially, and politically’ (Reid, 2006: 2–3). Drones, which I claim are high-tech expressions of pre-modern sovereign violence, reconfigure sacri-fice as being, first, a trope integral to war and, second, as an embodied, social practice. As Girard (Girard and Gregory, 1979) succinctly states, ‘sacrifice deals with humankind’ (p. 90). What is the meaning of bodies for sacrificial violence in relation to disembodied combat? How do privatization and drones, when taken together and accepting a symbio-sis, reshape the imagination and applicability of sacrificial violence?

Following Girard, society cannot function without an understanding of the sacred. Although his contributions to literary and religious theory are profound, it is less clear what Girard’s work offers critical political sociology. Yet, in supplementing Girard with Foucauldian sensibilities, his impulse can be extended to illustrate the importance of sacrifice in a particular empirical context: the global War on Terror. First, I argue that the biopolitics of sacrifice are essentially contested. Sacrifice does not exist a priori as it is often retroactively and discursively constructed. Girard essentializes sacrifice, rendering it a universal truth that unfolds rather formulaically, making the ‘analytic point of depar-ture and point of arrival foreordained’ (Taussig-Rubbo, 2011: 141). A straightforward application of Girard’s analysis risks romanticizing the extent to which global wars are necessarily contingent on sacrifice, thereby de-historicizing the role that gendered and racialized bodies play in the meaning of the sacrificial violence.

Nevertheless, the idea that people desire to avoid the contagion of the other through bloodshed is particularly apt when theorizing drones: ‘the only way to avoid contagion is to flee the scene of violence’ (Girard and Gregory, 1979: 28). UAS mean that soldiers never arrive onto the scene of violence since they engage in violence from a safe dis-tance. Drones prevent contagion since there is no need to face the humanity of the ‘other’, the enemy. Second, I show how drone warfare emerges as the logical extension of the socioeconomic and political philosophy of military privatization. Third, I suggest what post-sacrificial violence would mean for future wars. Briefly, in postmodern, techno-fetishist wars, the deaths of citizen-soldiers are (inconsistently) profane. Technology has shifted the terrain of sacrifice in that killing and being killed are no longer the legacy of the citizen-soldier. In the removal of the ‘social’ from war, markets, managerial exper-tise, the need to offer flexible responses to new wars (Duffield, 2001) and the distanced, permanent and panoptic gaze(s) of drones, as well as data collection, storage, and inter-pretation, are the new sacred grounds of state violence.

The biopolitics of sacrifice

Diverging from policy and investigative journalism, critical academics point to the geo-politics of drones and their capacity as governmental technologies (Adey et al., 2013;



Baggiarini 131

Shaw, 2013), the nexus of democracy and democratic potentialities in the use of unmanned systems (Sauer and Schörnig, 2012), the morality of distanced combat (Coeckelbergh, 2013) and relatedly, an ‘ethical turn’ captured in the political philoso-phizing regarding the risks and benefits of autonomous robots in war (Arkin, 2010; Lin, 2010; Sharkey, 2010). Whitehead and Finnström (2013) suggest that global wars reflect cyclical outbursts of violence without a guaranteed endpoint, generating ‘never ending social routines’ (pp. 1–25). Killing becomes increasingly invested in magical realities, where the space of virtuality connects directly to the lethality of materiality (p. 9). Furthermore, they argue,

war is not an aggregation of violent acts that finally reaches a given threshold of carnage to become war rather than armed conflict, counterinsurgency or peacekeeping, but is the invocation and creation of a particular political reality that engages allies and enemies, civilians and soldiers, in a particular style of violent interactions. (p. 7)

This style of violence is predicated on the ‘bracketing of the allegedly modern from the allegedly premodern or even primitive’ (p. 3). Similarly, as Larry George (2002) explains, the protracted Global War on Terror reveals war as paradoxically both the disease of and remedy for the social body. These ‘pharmacotic’ mimetic wars use sacrificial rituals in a ‘politically cathartic and unifying function – to “cleanse” and “purge” these societies of internal disorder and remove troubling dissenters’ (p. 164). George claims that war sanc-tifies politics by ‘transubstantiating the blood shed by compatriots and enemies, as well as by innocent scapegoats and demonized dissenters, into various kinds of fungible polit-ical power’ (p. 165). Sacrificial acts bring together the opposing realms of the sacred and profane (Hubert and Mauss, 1964) and offer a positive surplus for whoever or whatever is to receive the benefit of the sacrifice, which emerged out of negative destruction (Bataille, 1991). In this way, ‘fallen soldiers remain the property of the state’ (Edkins, 2003: 95) and this in turn reifies state power. Sacrificial violence is repetitive and regen-erative as it codifies power through a reorganization of social ties and marks the differ-ences that sustain them (Schott, 2010). In unequal societies, ‘the privileged are overcompensated for any sacrifices they make and those with little or no resources are under-compensated for their (often large) sacrifices. While all social life requires some sacrifice, not all sacrifices are necessary and just’ (Pearce, 2010: 48). Therefore, the demand for sacrifices in current wars is increasingly untenable, particularly as the United States’ democratic deficiencies become more apparent.

I theorize UAS as an effect of liberal governments’ and militaries’ thinking on sacrifice as burdened with tension regarding the deaths of soldiers. Taussig-Rubbo (2009, 2011) claims that the sensibilities and schematics of sacrifice include whether killing is made visible or invisible. He argues that sacrifice is a key feature of politics and liberal govern-ment is concerned with establishing a monopoly over its discursive trajectories and com-municative potentiality, despite there being clear inconsistencies and contradictions in sacrificial systems (Pearce, 2010). Since ‘the boundaries of the self only become clear through the imagination of sacrifice’ (Kahn, 2008), sacralization entails a negotiation between sovereign and biopolitical power in determining the meaning and parameters of subjectivity. UAS were largely sold on the basis that they protect American (racialized as




white) life. As a collection of technological artefacts, strategic and tactical systems and practices that supplement war fighters, the US Department of Defence (2013) claims3 that ideally these systems will gain greater autonomy such that ‘the algorithms must act as a human brain does’. For now, the application of unmanned systems involves significant human interaction, but the goals of net-centric warfare assume a gradual shift from humans ‘in the loop’ to humans ‘on the loop’, and regards bodies as obstacles (Masters, 2008).

In the modern era, sacrifice rests on the value of life. Foucault (1978) and Agamben (1998) argue that modernity is predicated upon processes of demarcation, regulation and discipline, which render some expressions of life politically meaningful: life that is trans-cendent and proficient marked by its political capacity. This political life is in contrast to mere animal existence (bare life) that is marked by a lack. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the domain of the biological came under the control of the state, biopoliti-cal technologies of power were manifested within and against the population. Biopolitics enhances social equilibrium through a disciplining of individual forces, in conjunction with regulatory technologies aimed at the biological characteristics of the population (Foucault, 1978). Whereas the sovereign power of the King was strictly concerned with authorizing death, in late biopolitical societies, sovereignty, and indeed the potential for self-sacrifice, comes to be diffused among the People. As popular sovereignty came to inform citizenship, the internal and external regulation of populations became a chief concern of the state. From the eighteenth century onwards, these developments produced a normative relationship between the soldier and the state understood as a form of an exchange marked by notions of mutual responsibility: the soldier-citizen sacrificed his individual self through military service – a sacrifice that was potentially permanently through injury or death – so that public goods might flourish. In exchange, the state would provide institutional support and services for the soldier and his dependants: his legacy might also be memorialized, thus reifying soldiers’ privileged acts of sacrifice. Governmentality does not indicate the loss of sovereignty but instead the crystallization of ‘petty sovereigns’, ‘reigning in the midst of bureaucratic army institutions mobilized by aims and tactics of power they do not inaugurate or fully control’ (Butler, 2006: 56).

As Woodward (2008) explains in her analysis of the contradictions within British nar-ratives of the meaning of military sacrifice, ‘State-military discourses around the meaning of the figure of the soldier, and the meaning of the participation of that soldier in military activities, are adamant and persuasive that military participation constitutes national ser-vice’ (p. 378). When a member of the US military dies in battle, this is considered the most grand of sacrificial acts for the nation (Pearce, 2010). Such acts crystallize in the social contract, which reached its peak after the Second World War. The welfare-state contract reflects the spatial order of the nation and thus arranges social relations within the bounda-ries of the state. The hegemonic ascendance of neoliberal socioeconomic ideals erodes the ‘social’ in citizenship, putting this already precarious relation of mutual exchange with the goal of solidarity or community into an awkward confrontation with the decentralizing ‘race to the bottom’ iterations of global neoliberal economic capitalism.

The nation-state system is deeply intertwined with the soldier-citizen archetype and its associated expressions of symbolic nationalized performance, which hinge on a com-plex imaginary and discourse of sacrifice. Furthermore, the model of the soldier-citizen



Baggiarini 133

as a model is deeply rooted in a political imaginary that renders nation-states as discrete, territorially contained entities opposed to other discrete states. National armies, as a product of securitized technocratic reason, facilitated the development of the nation-state. This rationality required that soldier-citizens undergo systematic physical and moral discipline so that, ideally, their vitality would solidify the overall strength of the military and the population at large. Soldiers, with their privileged location in the official state narrative of sacrifice, were key to the wider project of nation building, as well as the developing institution of formal citizenship. According to Balibar (2004), states cannot become nation-states if they do not ‘appropriate the sacred, not only at the level of rep-resentations of a more or less secularized “sovereignty,” but also at the day-to-day level of legitimation, implying the control of births and deaths, marriages …’ (p. 20). The demarcation and then re-appropriation of the sacred produce noteworthy intersections between disciplinary and biopolitical modes of power, which morally regulate, rank, subordinate and hierarchize bodies.

Nationalized narratives of war have been equally dependent on a related understand-ing of foreign enemies. These narratives of otherness extended the legitimacy of the nation and naturalized violence against perceived others, while affirming its territorial borders and the need to protect the nation from ‘dangerous’ people. Foreign wars were inspired and legitimized by both imperialism and racism. As war became a state privi-lege, it also became the prerogative of an institutionalized army or military apparatus. War became both a model and a principle of intelligibility of politics and thus a grid for analysing politics (Foucault, 2003). In this way, as Girard and Gregory (1979) explain, sacrifice creates the necessary conditions for the socially acceptable use of violence. Sacrifice allows for the displacement of vengeance onto a scapegoat. Unchecked vio-lence is only tamed through sacrifice or through the implementation of a judicial system. Sacrifice is therefore an act of violence without risk of vengeance and is the mechanism by which violence can be enacted in a purifying or ‘pharmacotic’ (George, 2002) way: violence is directed out of the community, thereby protecting the community from its own capacity to commit violence against itself. Moreover, race permits the sovereign power of ‘letting die’ (Foucault, 2007).

The exteriorization, rationalization and spatialization of war included identifying colo-nies and racialized subjects as zones of exception. As such, the impetus to kill was realized outside or as exception inside the rules contained within Western legal and moral achieve-ments. The culmination of these historical moments, the ‘synthesis between massacre and bureaucracy, the incarnation of Western rationality’ (Mbembe, 2003: 23), demarcated the colonies as the space of exception. In these spaces, the rules of sovereignty and confined warfare among equal states did not apply. The state aimed to ‘civilize’ colonial populations and to rationalize the sovereign act of killing, based on ‘the centrality of the state in the calculus of war [, which] derives from the fact that the state is the model of political unity, a principle of rational organization, the embodiment of the idea of the universal’ (Mbembe, 2003: 24). As such, the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native was used to justify colonial war and occupation, which was a matter of

seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physical geographical area … the writing of new spatial relations (territorialisation) was, ultimately, tantamount to the production of




boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the subversion of existing property arrangements, the classification of people. (Mbembe, 2003: 26)

Conflict between the two opposing biologically/racially defined groups allows for the state to emerge as the necessary mediator of the logic of war, acting as a precursor to the logic of permanent warfare. Foucault (2003: 256) answers the question of how death functions in a system characterized by the biopolitical imperative to maximize life through an explo-ration of how race and racism, the production of enemies through the deployment of race and racial categories, become the necessary and sufficient precondition for the right to kill. Biopolitical projects, rationalities and techniques of power thus allow the state to be both the cause and the solution of state-sanctioned violence; race is integral to this dynamic. While sovereign states are able to memorialize some deaths and negate others, their claims to legitimacy are undermined when they offload aspects of their authority onto PMCs. This undermines the normative potential of mutual exchange between the citizen and the state. In theory, the idea of the social contract, at least in its contemporary liberal form, requires a democratic essence, and an impetus towards accountability, that corporations simply can-not (or will not) guarantee. The politics of sacrifice engages state-soldiers and private con-tractors at disparate yet not mutually exclusive levels: the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), I will argue, has generated ‘flexible soldier-citizens’ who offer sacrifices but whose labour cannot be considered sacrifices. This is because their deaths do not coalesce with one national audience and as such cannot be adequately represented or validated by the public. In contrast, state-soldiers bear the characteristics of sovereignty and are bound to its legal, nationalized and cultural symbols. Historically, their deaths have been consid-ered irreversibly sacrosanct.

Given that sacrifice is partly about the power to name and legitimize certain deaths as having public significance, the power to recognize certain deaths as ‘loss’, the privatization of warfare invites the question of what is at stake in the negation of sacrifice. Recall that sacrifice is not about a material act but is an effect of a social mechanism that recognizes the act as sacrificial or not. The outsourcing of violence implies that governments can disa-vow the burden of humanness in war. Alas, this is the cornerstone of both privatization and the desacralization of citizenship (Brubaker, 1992). The ritualization of the sacrifices of state-soldiers produces foundational narratives and thus has a communitarian effect. Moreover, unlike private contractors, their actions are consecrated within the boundaries of the nation and memorialized in a way that allows for both the production of shared collec-tive memory and a projected future-oriented discourse of unification through shared national or ethnic destiny. As an archetype of citizenship, the soldier-citizen normalizes a belief that soldiers’ actions in wartime reflected the highest echelon of sacrifice. In the period of nation building, social relations are engaged within the boundaries of the nation-state. However, globalized wars, combined with denationalization (Sassen, 2002: 280) and military privatization, threaten the soldier-citizen’s status as a stable subject of sacrifice.

The social and political context for drones

The era of total warfare marked a critical turning point in the history of soldier-citizen-ship, sacrifice and technological change. The First World War reflected ‘the combination



Baggiarini 135

of modern nationalism, industrialism and technological limitations … whose defining characteristic was mass’ (Shimko, 2010: 10). As Lieber (2005) states, the firepower acquired in the First World War was greatly limited by problems with accuracy. These were eventually resolved during the nuclear revolution in the Second World War, which revealed the ‘speed with which total annihilation [could be] carried out, and the ability to do so without first achieving success on the battlefield’ (Lieber, 2005: 126). From machine guns to air assaults and bombing, the Second World War altered the spatial logic of the battlefield, creating further distance between soldiers and their targets and allow-ing the American military to achieve what would become its dominant military status through air assaults. Accordingly, American war making into the Cold War period was defined by a military doctrine of annihilation and resource-based approach to warfare, evidenced by conflicts in Korea and Vietnam (Adamsky, 2010: 79). While over 19 mil-lion people died in combat during the Second World War, the deaths of North American soldiers were regarded as honourable and continue to be remembered as noble sacrifices. Total wars, which involve mass numbers of troops, facilitate deaths that are regarded as legitimate sacrifices. Limited wars, such as liberal humanitarian wars, turn casualties into a political problem (Mandel, 2004). PMCs emerged as the solution to what Duffield (2005: 61) identifies as conflicting needs: to maintain traditional military capacity (demand sacrifice) while also remaining flexible in new wars (disavowing sacrifice).

Efficiency and military success eventually came to be linked with reducing and avoid-ing (citizen-soldier) casualties. Strategies were thus developed to distance American sol-diers from combat. Casualty aversion was full-fledged by the 1990s when significant force reduction was required to finance technology, although, to be sure, casualty aversion escalates in moments when the public questions the legitimacy of wars (Shimko, 2010). The military was not exempt from the broader institutional transformations that marked industrial societies at this time: like other institutions, it too shifted from a labour to capi-tal-intensive organization (Manigart, 2006). The decline of the mass army model comple-mented a restructuring that emphasized privatization and professionalization (Joachim and Schneiker, 2012; Stachowitsch, 2012). Managers and technicians increasingly con-ducted war, as opposed to combat leaders (Moskos, 2000: 15). The professionalization of the military was essential for the realization of the goals of the RMA: ‘a policy agenda emphasizing the exploitation of technological advances to preserve and even improve the United States’ long-term strategic position’ (Shimko, 2010: 2). Without this professionali-zation, the incorporation of precision-guided weapons would have remained in the realm of the abstract (Adamsky, 2010: 59–61). In part, casualty aversion was a product of the identity crisis and emasculation suffered by the American body politic after Vietnam (Masters, 2008). While recuperating from the political and symbolic consequences of defeat, American military strategists addressed the disciplinary problems associated with the transition to an all-volunteer force. The Gulf War was and still is widely hailed as a milestone success insofar as the American casualty rate was relatively low; this was attrib-uted to an unprecedented application of military technology (Shimko, 2010).

The RMA made technological advancement a key component of casualty avoidance. Borrowing ideological language, the RMA makes constant reference to ‘trade liberaliza-tion’, ‘economic reform’ and ‘free markets’ – the classic buzzwords of neoliberal capital-ist accumulation (Parenti, 2007). The RMA contains a complex set of practices that




emerged, in part, within the dictates of global capitalism. Flexible citizenship was an integral model that freed both military and global economic objectives to facilitate the compression of time and space in mobile and transnational sites of capitalist production, to reduce human casualties during war and to allow for efficient strategies of global mili-tary, political and economic dominance. It includes ‘technological mastery, omnipotent surveillance, real-time “situational awareness,” and speed-of-light digital interactions’ (Graham, 2008: 37). These developments reflect a profound desire to overcome the lim-its of the body of the soldier-citizen. This strategy, ‘a completely automated weapons system devoid of human involvement’ (Graham, 2008: 51), is packaged in the language of economic efficiency and the protection of life since it seeks to substitute bodies with technology. The increasing reliance on technical reason is not a coincidence. It is inextri-cable from the privatization and outsourcing of sacrifice and with widespread practices that unfold in relation to the securitization of citizenship.

Securitization has become a chief concern for the modern state. By securitizing citi-zenship, ‘technologies of governing are employed that displace the governing of popula-tions from authorities and sites traditionally located in the state to other sites and actors such as private companies, international organizations, and even individuals and their own self-government’ (Rygiel, 2008). Hence, ‘citizenship as government is not just internationalized but also privatized and individualized’ (Rygiel, 2008: 211). Private con-tractor’s bodies represent and absorb the synthesis of the RMA with the ideology of securitization; they are actors whose sacrifice may be denied, celebrated and/or privat-ized. In other words, the meaning of their deaths is not determined a priori but rather socially constructed by competing discourses. Thus, after 9/11, PMCs were hailed as necessary actors in the successful implementation of the goals of the RMA: ‘simply put, one could not tell the story of the Iraq war without any [a] discussion of PMCs’ (Singer, 2004: 6). PMCs are the effect of the widening of the meaning of security such that the boundaries of the nation-state were no longer capable of effectively administrating secu-rity as dwindling Euro-American state militaries were thought to be ineffective in new wars (Duffield, 2001). Thus, there was an unprecedented intervention of PMCs into Iraq following the American-led 2003 invasion, which was justified through the assertion that Iraq was harbouring weapons of mass destruction, among other claims that falsely linked Iraq with the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Simultaneously, the American government outsourced many of their operations to PMCs, rendering the war effort unprecedentedly reliant on non-state, corporate actors (Singer, 2004). In 2007, there were more private contractors than US soldiers on the ground in that country (Hartung and Pemberton, 2008). At the height of the war, private contractors outnumbered US troops, and some have estimated that there were as many as 50,000 armed security personnel (Singer, 2004, 2005). PMCs offer services in informa-tion technology, logistics and support, military training, combat and security (Alexandra et al., 2008). PMCs therefore supplement weakening state armies, and they also satisfy neoliberal sociopolitical and economic desires for techno-rational, geopolitical and sci-entific mastery of space and time. As such, they are now conceptualized as integral to how states manage and imagine security threats. PMCs thus reflect, respond to and fur-ther blur the distinctions between civilian and combatant, war and peace (Kinsey, 2006). Critically, wars are no longer fought on battlefields between opposing armies wearing



Baggiarini 137

uniforms. Instead, the battlefield is everywhere: cities, towns and countryside (Kinsey, 2006: 52). Battlefields are virtually constructed and simulated (Der Derian, 2001), and threats are conceptualized as having transnational origins and effects. After the East-West conflict officially dissolved, new threats, enemies and transnational security issues emerged, such as the drug trade, environmental degradation, poverty and immigration (Moskos, 2000). PMCs are a permanent fixture in the security industry, filling the gap that asymmetrical wars create.

Drone warfare: The end of sacrifice?

Privatized warfare is a site where economic and military objectives intersect. This align-ment cannot be separated from the dynamic social meaning attributed to war, combat and sacrificial violence. The significant incorporation of private military contractors into cold and hot war theatres shows how the discursive and material qualities of sacrifice are con-tested in relation to politics. PMCs are integral to the state’s use of violence in the media-tion of social relations. Military privatization captures the tensions between fragmentation and centralization: fragmentation occurs within military labour as a result of the RMA and the need for flexible citizenship. Centralization is seen in ongoing attempts to generate national consciousness through a public spirit that continues to glorify war and America’s place in the world as democratic model. Liberals and civic republicans alike regard citi-zenship as a public mode of being, an affective and performative demonstration of belong-ing that implies an active and willing subordination to the rule of law in exchange for sociopolitical rights and certain economic guarantees – a public contract between the citi-zen and the state (Isin and Turner, 2002). But securitized, desacralized and flexible citi-zenship means that governing by contract (Freeman and Minow, 2009) has supplemented, if not entirely replaced, governing from the social point of view (Rose, 1999).

Since 9/11, drones have been used in 95% of the United States’ targeted killings, thus normalizing the technology and the surveillance practices that unfold from it. US President Barak Obama dramatically increased their use, and the Air Force now trains more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots (Helmore, 2009). Despite the clear preference for weaponized drones loaded with precision-guided Hellfire missiles and the industries’ near-obsessive insistence that they are more ‘precise’ than ever, the kill ratio has been low. A total of 50 civilians have perished for every militant killed (Sluka, 2013: 183). In other words, the number of high-level targets killed, as a percentage of total casualties, is low: roughly 2%. Still, the United States counts all military-aged males as militants, a claim that can only be verified posthumously (Living Under Drones). Signature strikes target people who are not identified but merely display a certain ‘pattern of life’ – racial profiling gone global. CIA members do not personally identify these targets, but rather ‘they exist as digital profiles across a network of technologies, algorithmic calculations, and spread-sheets’ (Shaw, 2013). Indeed, what Shaw (2013) names a topological spatial power means a drone’s victim never hears the missile that kills him (Rhode in Benjamin, 2013: 149). Targeted communities are often referred to in dehumanizing and homophobic terms, while the discourses of technology are saturated with sexual innuendo. For example, as Benjamin (2013) states, people attempting to flee the attacks, commonly known as ‘dou-ble taps’, are referred to as ‘squirters’; the technological prowess of Hellfire missiles is




described in phallic and sexually violent language, as being able to ‘lock into targets before or after a launch [and] engage targets to the side and behind them without manoeu-vring into position’ (p. 44). According to one drone pilot, the code name for casualties is ‘bugsplat’. Suspected militants are termed ‘poor bastards’, ‘prairie dogs’, ‘barbarians’, ‘savages’ and ‘rats slithering through the slums’ and are imagined as mice being snagged by hawks circling above (Martin and Sasser, 2010). In the FATA area of Pakistan, from 2004 to 2012, between 2562 and 3325 people were killed in drone strikes, of whom 474–881 of these casualties were civilians, including 176 children (International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, ‘Living Under Drones’). Despite suggestions that these drone strikes are illegal under international humanitarian law, the US government has only barely admitted to a drone programme. In May 2013, President Obama stated in rela-tion to drones that ‘dozens of highly skilled al-Qaida commanders, trainers, bomb makers and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted … Simply put, these strikes have saved lives’.4

The violence of drones is of course not just material. It is also symbolic since the threat of immanent violence is maintained 24 hours a day. It is a style of violence that always-already exists as a future potential. Drones create a constant state of fear for tar-geted communities; people report curtailing their activities for fear of being associated with the wrong person, landmark or situation. As the Living Under Drones Report attests to, many people are traumatized and report fearing the presence of drones. They fear death daily. As one interviewee said,

if, for instance, there is a drone strike and four or five of your villagers die, and you feel sad for them and you feel like throwing everything away, because you feel death is near – [death is] so close …

This terrorization has produced widespread distrust of the US military. Moreover, first responders, neighbours and humanitarian workers, who attempt to rescue the injured and to recover bodies, risk becoming victims themselves because of ‘double tap’ policy, in which an area is targeted multiple times in quick succession. The deaths of Pakistani tribal members, who are a priori considered bare life, do not count in the registry of death and suffering. This shows a deeply racialized politics underpinning the international and soon to be domestic use of drones. As Shaw and Akhter (2012) explain, the FATA region has long existed as a colonized space of exception, as an ungovernable buffer state:

The Pakhtuns [tribes] were theoretically to retain a measure of autonomy over their own affairs, but control was exercised through subsidies provided to selected tribal leaders from the British. The British state thus extended its control, but not its rule’. (p. 1498, emphasis added)

Violence at a distance, as a moral-epistemological conundrum (Coeckelbergh, 2013), exists at a micro- and macro-level: between the fighter and the enemy (embodied distance), surpassing the enemy through full-spectrum dominance (spatial and temporal distance). As previously stated, this technology attempts to generate governable, docile subjects. In doing so, drones provide distance from the normative framework offered by the social contract, privatizing and depoliticizing the experiences of those who are implicated in war practices, as perpetrators and as victims (Baggiarini, 2013). To be sure, this domestic



Baggiarini 139

distance from the normative framework of the social contract, because it is marked by the desire to overcome the politics of the body, produces violence, racialized and gendered effects internationally. Ibrahim Mothana, a Yemini writer and activist, writes,

in Yemen, we fear that the signature strike approach allows the Obama administration to falsely claim that civilian causalities are non-existent. In the eye of the signature strike, it could be that someone innocent like me is seen as a militant until proven otherwise. How can a dead person prove his innocence? For the many labeled as militants when they are killed, it’s difficult to verify if they really were active members … let alone whether they deserved to die. (Greenwald, 2013)

When violence is privatized, it is also depoliticized and de-historicized (Leander and van Munster, 2007). ‘Virtual war dehumanizes the victims, desensitizes the perpetrators of vio-lence, and lowers the moral and psychological barriers to killing’ (Sluka, 2013: 187). Drones, which supposedly offer ‘clean’ warfare, result in the deaths of thousands of inno-cent civilians.

Furthermore, drones are part of a war strategy that is embedded in increasing cases of post-traumatic stress disorder and an epidemic of suicide. Targeted killings promote a sanitized war aesthetic both ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’, characteristic of a postmodern vir-tual warscape. Despite ongoing and brutal civilian deaths, in which bodies are inciner-ated and destroyed in very unclean ways, the bombs are still regarded as smart. Survivors often cannot recover the bodies of loved ones and thus cannot properly mourn. Killing has become an invisible, mechanized practice. As corporatization and militarization are increasingly indistinguishable, technologies of war will continue to simultaneously mys-tify and rationalize violence (Beier, 2012). Drones allow for the disavowal of sacrifice and the transcendence of the physical, moral and economic limits of the human body. Yet, the body is essential in the imagining of sacrifice. Without the political recognition of bodies and without humans (including perpetrators) bearing witness to violence, the myth of sacrifice appears as a cultural glitch.

Conclusion

I argued that military privatization is an effect of the neoliberal restructuring of capital-ism. In this context, state and non-state actors have competing biopolitical investment in the meaning and application of sacrificial violence. Liberal governments aim to control the communicative potentiality of sacrificial rhetoric. Part of the state’s strategy for man-aging sacrifice is to privatize it and move the effects of the deaths of soldiers into the domain of the private family, thereby neutralizing them by placing it within a gendered framework of mourning (Butler, 2006; Taussig-Rubbo, 2009: 86). The relationship between citizenship and sacrifice has weakened in light flexible citizenship, and the pri-vate contracting of soldiery captures a shift relative to the sacrificial logic that is bound up with the archetype of the soldier-citizen. If it is the case that private contractors cannot make any claims to sacrifice, then we must ask why the state might deem the ‘end of sacrifice’ beneficial in strategizing future, corporatized drone wars. If state-soldiers place an increasing burden on the state, because of the political toll of unpopular wars, or the financial costs of lifetime support for veterans in an era of austerity, the inclusion of




private contractors and high technology provides respite for the state. The end of sacri-fice will make the death of soldiers profane, thereby reconfiguring the relations between soldiers, citizens and states (Baggiarini, 2014).

To sell war to mass audiences, the drawing of a fundamental distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is required. National identity fuels this distinction giving the dichotomous rendering racial and ethnic symbolic content. But the corporatization and privatization of war not only allow the disavowal of sacrifice but also make only precarious and time-sensitive space for sacrificial discourse. When states use sacrificial rhetoric, it risks being regarded as a thinly veiled attempt to resuscitate national identity and thus appears, at time, as anachronistic. As US society becomes even more unequal, making legitimate war will become more fraught and thus possibly even more remote, clandestine, discrete and un-human: the ‘unbearable humanness’ of drone wars (Shaw and Akhter, 2012).

In contrast to Girard, I have suggested that the content of sacrifice, especially in rela-tion to globalized wars, is deeply political and cannot be theorized universally but rather only in particular contexts. This essay has illuminated how postmodern war suggests not the end of sacrifice per se, but a clear trajectory showing the increasing unevenness of sacrifice as war becomes more antisocial. The imagery of sacrifice – as being tied to blood, transcendence and moral achievement through the negative destruction of the body and ultimately death – seems only to gain content in moments when a nationalistic and militarized consciousness is in need of regeneration. In practice, there is a clear avoidance of this kind of sacrificial performance. Photographs of dead soldiers no longer circulate for public consumption or oversight. Governments shy away from politicizing or calling attention to the deaths of soldiers, and the deaths of private military contractors are not considered sacrifices. In the spirit of Foucault, power no longer recognizes death. North Waziristan is one ‘exceptional’ site of governance among several where violence (as a broad continuum of acts) is externalized onto the bodies of racialized others in the form of extrajudicial killings. Here, the rules of conventional warfare do not apply. The victims make up a community of scapegoats in the negotiations between the United States and its allies or enemies in the Global War on Terror. Drone technology is hailed as the final solution, that which will save us from (or at least sanitize) our collective sins. Drones are thus Barak Obama’s solution to the spatial, political and economic limitations and unworkability of detention centres like Guantanamo – Guantanamo on wings. Girard and Gregory (1979) write of a scene of violence, wherein ‘two men come to blows, blood is spilt, both men are thus rendered impure’ (p. 28). Drones, as a high-tech expression of ‘pre-modern’ violence, enable the purity of nineteenth century imperial civilizing mis-sions to continue, well into the present.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Professors Elisabetta Brighi and Antonio Cerella, as well as the anony-mous reviewers for their invaluable criticisms.

Notes

1. Private contractors are key partners in the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) counterter-rorism and drone assassination programme. The company formerly known as Blackwater is



Baggiarini 141

active in the assembling and loading of Hellfire missiles onto Predator aircraft, work formerly done by CIA personnel. Benjamin (2013) quotes Scahill claiming, ‘it is Blackwater that runs the program for both the CIA and JSOC’ because

contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [over-seen by Congress], so they just don’t care. If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That’s the mentality. (pp. 63–64)

2. A 2010 report by ‘Mission: Readiness’, an organization of retired, senior military experts, warned that childhood and adult obesity might soon pose a threat to national security. It claims that 75% of young Americans are unable to join the military because of weight, edu-cational inadequacies, asthma, criminal records and drug abuse (Mission: Readiness, 2010).

3. The Department of Defence’s (DOD) report, entitled ‘Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2013–2038’ claims that ‘research and development in automation are advanc-ing from a state of automatic systems requiring human control toward a state of autonomous systems able to make decisions and react without human interaction’ (p. 29).

4. See the Recommendations and Report of the Task Force on US Drone Policy.

References

Adamsky D (2010) The Culture of Military Innovation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Adey P, Whitehead M and Williams A (2013) From Above: War, Violence and Verticality. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Agamben A (2002) Remnants of Auschwitz. New York: Zone Books.Agamben A (1998) (Trans Daniel Heller-Roazen) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.

Stanford: Stanford Universit Press.Alexandra A, Baker D and Caparini M (eds) (2008) Private Military and Security Companies:

Ethics, Policies and Civil-Military Relations. New York: Routledge.Arkin R (2010) The case for ethical autonomy in unmanned systems. Journal of Military Ethics

9(4): 332–341.Baggiarini B (2013) Private war, private suffering, and the normalizing power of law. Advances in

Gender Research 18(1): 165–188.Baggiarini B (2014) Remaking solider-citizens: Military privatization and the biopolitics of sacri-

fice. St. Anthony’s International Review 9(2): 9–23.Balakrishnan G (2009) Antagonistics. London: Verso.Balibar E (2004) We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press.Bataille G (1991) The Accursed Share. New York: Zone Books.Beier JM (2012) Dangerous terrain: Re-reading the landmines ban through the social worlds of

the RMA. In: Cooper N and Mutimer D (eds) Reconceptualising Arms Control. New York: Routledge, pp. 157–173.

Benjamin M (2013) Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. New York: Verso.Brubaker R (1992) Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.Butler J (2006) Precarious Life. New York: Verso.Coeckelbergh M (2013) Drones, information technology, and distance: Mapping the moral episte-

mology of remote fighting. Ethics and Information Technology 15: 87–98.Department of Defence (2013) Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2013–2038 (report).

Washington: Department of Defence.




Der Derian J (2001) Virtuous War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Duffield MR (2005) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and

Security. London: Zed Books.Edkins J (2003) Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Foucault M (1978) History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Random House.Foucault M (2003) Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (ed

M Bertani and trans. D Macey). New York: Picado.Freeman J and Minow M (2009) Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.George L (2002) The pharmacotic war on terrorism: Cure or poison for the US body politic?

Theory, Culture, and Society 19(4): 161–186.Girard R and Gregory P (1979) Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore, MD: Hopkins Fulfillment

Services.Graham S (2008) Imagining urban warfare. In: Cowen D and Gilbert E (eds) War, Citizenship,

Territory. New York: Routledge, pp. 33–57.Greenwald G (2013) A young Yemini writer on the impact and morality of drone-bombing his

country. The Guardian, 1 May. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentis-free/2013/may/01/ibrahim-mothana-yemen-drones-obama

Hartung WD and Pemberton M (eds) (2008) Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Helmore E (2009) US now trains more drone operators than pilots. The Guardian, 22 August. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/23/drones-air-force-robot-planes

Hubert H and Mauss M (1964) Sacrifice (trans. WD Halls). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law) (2012) Living under drones: Death, injury and trauma to civilians from US drone practices in Pakistan. 25 September.

Isin EF and Turner BS (eds) (2002) Handbook of Citizenship Studies. London: SAGE.Joachim J and Schneiker A (2012) Of ‘true professionals’ and ‘ethical hero warriors’: A gender-

discourse analysis of private military and security companies. Security Dialogue 43(6): 495–512.

Kahn PW (2008) Sacred Violence. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Kinsey C (2006) Corporate Soldiers and International Security: The Rise of Private Military

Companies. New York: Routledge.Leander A and van Munster R (2007) Private security contractors in the debate about Darfur:

Reflecting and reinforcing neoliberal governmentality. International Relations 21(2): 201–216.

Lieber K (2005) War and the Engineers: The Primacy of Politics over Technology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lin P (2010) Ethical blowback from emerging technologies. Journal of Military Ethics 9(4): 313–331.

Mandel R (2004) Security, Strategy, and the Quest for Bloodless War. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Manigart P (2006) Restructuring the armed forces. In: Caforio G (ed.) Handbook of the Sociology of the Military. New York: Springer, pp. 323–344.

Martin MJ and Sasser CW (2010) Predator: The Remote-Control Air War Over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot’s Story. Minneapolis, MN: Zenith Press.

Masters C (2008) Bodies of technology and the politics of the flesh. In: Parpart J and Zalewski M (eds) Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations. New York: Zed Books, pp. 87–108.



Baggiarini 143

Mbembe A (2003) Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1): 11–40.Medina D (2014) Drone markets open in Russia, China and Rogue States as America’s wars wane.

The Guardian, 22 June. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jun/22/drones-market-us-military-china-russia-rogue-state

Mission: Readiness (2010) Too fat to fight (report). Washington, DC: Mission: Readiness.Moskos C (2000) Toward a postmodern military: The United States as a paradigm. In: Moskos C,

Williams JA and Segal D (eds) The Postmodern Military. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 14–31.

Parenti C (2007) Planet America: The revolution in military affairs as fantasy and fetish. In: Dawson A and Schueller MJ (eds) Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 88–105.

Pearce F (2010) Obligatory sacrifice and imperial projects. In: Chambliss WJ, Mechalowski R and Kramer RC (eds) State Crime in a Global Age. New York: Routledge, pp. 45–66.

Reid J (2006) The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Rose N (1999) Powers of Freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press.Rygiel K (2008) The securitized citizen. In: Isin E (ed.) Recasting the Social in Citizenship.

Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press, pp. 210–239.Sassen S (2002) Towards post-national and denationalized citizenship. In: Isin E and Tuner B (eds)

Handbook of Citizenship Studies. London: SAGE, pp. 277–291.Sauer F and Schörnig N (2012) Killer drones: The ‘silver bullet’ of democratic warfare? Security

Dialogue 43(3): 363–380.Schott R (2010) Sexual violence, sacrifice, and narratives of political origins. In: Birth, Death, and

Femininity. Bloomington, IN; Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.Sharkey (2010) Saying ‘no!’ to lethal autonomous targeting. Journal of Military Ethics 9(4):

369–383.Shaw IGR (2013) Predator empire: The geopolitics of US drone warfare. Geopolitics 18(3):

536–559.Shaw IGR and Akhter M (2012) The unbearable humanness of drone warfare in FATA, Pakistan.

Antipode 44(4): 1490–1509.Shimko K (2010) The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Singer P (2004) The private military industry and Iraq: What have we learned and where to next?

(Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) Policy paper). In: Proceedings of the International Security Forum (ISF), Montreux, 4–6 October. Available at: ftp://budgie3.ethz.ch/dcaf/_docs/PP4_Singer.pdf

Singer P (2005) Outsourcing war. Foreign Affairs 84(2): 119–133.Sluka J (2013) Virtual war in the tribal zone: Air strikes, drones, civilian casualties, and losing

hearts and minds in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In: Whitehead NL and Finnström S (eds) Virtual War and Magical Death. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, pp. 171–193.

Stachowitsch S (2012) Military gender integration and foreign policy in the United States: A femi-nist international relations perspective. Security Dialogue 43(4): 305–321.

Taussig-Rubbo M (2009) Sacrifice and sovereignty. In: Culbert J and Sarat A (eds) States of Violence: War, Capital Punishment, and Letting Die. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. 83–127.

Taussig-Rubbo M (2011) The unsacrificeable subject. In: Sarat A and Shoemaker K (eds) Who Deserves to Die? Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 131–150.

Whitehead N and Finnström S (eds) (2013) Virtual War and Magical Death. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press.


http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jun/22/drones-market-us-military-china-russia-rogue-state



Woodward R (2008) Not for queen or country or any of that shit … Reflections on citizenship and military participation in contemporary British soldier narratives. In: Cowen D and Gilbert E (eds) War, Citizenship, Territory. New York: Routledge, pp. 363–385.

Author biography

Bianca Baggiarini is a PhD Candidate in sociology at York University, Toronto. Her research inter-ests include postmodern feminist and citizenship theory, genealogies of violence and privatiza-tions therein, and drones. She has previously published in St. Anthony’s International Review and Advances in Gender Research and has a forthcoming chapter in a book on gender and private security, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Maya Eichler.



Documents

Drone Warfare and the Limits