Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (War Culture)

Unmanning studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone—including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness—are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to “man” and the paradoxes at their basis. "Unmanning explores the largely understudied development and failure of unmanned aircraft from 1936-1992. Katherine Chandler uses a genealogical approach to explore how contradictions between human, machine, and enemy act politically in the distinct periods of World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam, Israel, and the First Gulf War. The key contributions that Unmanning makes to the field of critical military studies are to problematize what drones and unmanned aircraft are through an analysis of history, to demonstrate how networked actions between human and nonhuman that comprise unmanned aircraft operate through duplicity, and to examine the failures central to the development, experimental use, and deployment of drones that are at once technological, social, and political."-- Provided by publisher Studies the conditions that create contemporary unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes from 1936-1992. Rather than primarily treat the drone through the War on Terror, this book instead shows how the assembled parts of drone aircraft prefigure targeted killing well before these events. Cover Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction 1. DRONE 2. American Kamikaze 3. Unmanning 4. Buffalo Hunter 5. Pioneer Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index About the Author