w i n n e r o f t h e

E n l o e A w a r d
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Drone Disorientations

HOW “UNMANNED” WEAPONS QUEER THE EXPERIENCE OF KILLING

IN WAR

CARA DAGGETT
Johns Hopkins University, USA

Abstract -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Killing with drones produces queer moments of disorientation. Drawing on queer
phenomenology, I show how militarized masculinities function as spatiotemporal
landmarks that give killing in war its “orientation” and make it morally intelligible.
These bearings no longer make sense for drone warfare, which radically deviates
from two of its main axes: the home –combat and distance –intimacy binaries.
Through a narrative methodology, I show how descriptions of drone warfare are rife
with symptoms of an unresolved disorientation, often expressed as gender anxiety
over the failure of the distance –intimacy and home –combat axes to orient killing
with drones. The resulting vertigo sparks a frenzy of reorientation attempts, but
disorientation can lead in multiple and sometimes surprising directions – including,
but not exclusively, more violent ones. With drones, the point is that none have yet
been reliably secured, and I conclude by arguing that, in the midst of this confusion,
it is important not to lose sight of the possibility of new paths, and the “hope of new
directions.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keywords
drones, militarized masculinities, queer phenomenology, robotic war, narrative

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2015

Vol. 17, No. 3, 361– 379, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2015.1075317
# 2015 Taylor & Francis
 INTRODUCTION

Drones queer the experience of killing in war. New drone geographies and
bodies – fleshy –steely (Holmqvist 2013), pixilated (Amoore 2009), prosthetic
(Pugliese 2013) – cannot be located along the hierarchy of militarized mascu-
linities that helps to render killing in war morally intelligible.1 For the most
part, militarized masculinities have proven exceptionally resilient in adapting
to technological change. With drones, the readaptation has yet to be secured;
drone warfare remains slippery and illegible, and herein lies its potential as a
site for queer politics.
In order to explore the queerness of killing with drones, I draw upon Sarah
Ahmed’s (2006) queer phenomenology to understand drone warfare as disor-
ienting, the sensation we feel when we venture off the “straight” lines of het-
eronormative sexual orientation. Disorientation is “vital” (157) to Ahmed, as it
is often only through being disoriented – when we lose our direction, our
sense of being at-home among familiar objects – “that we might learn what
it means to be orientated in the first place” (6). However, Ahmed warns
that disorientation does not necessarily spark progressive reactions, given
that “[b]odies that experience disorientation can be defensive, as they reach
out for support or as they search for a place to reground and reorientate
their relation to the world” (158). What is important for queer politics, then,
is not disorientation itself, but rather cultivating openness toward disorienta-
tion, as “[t]he point is what we do with such moments of disorientation, as well
as what such moments can do – whether they can offer us the hope of new
directions, and whether new directions are reason enough for hope” (158).
In this light, queer politics becomes a broader “political orientation,” but
Ahmed also insists that it remains allied to a sexual orientation, as “to lose
sight of the sexual specificity of queer would also be to ‘overlook’ how
compulsory heterosexuality shapes what coheres as given, and the effects of
this coherence on those who refuse to be compelled” (172).
With drone warfare, “the sexual specificity of queer” and its effects cannot
be overlooked: war is oriented by heterosexuality, which “shapes what coheres
as given.” Feminists also argue that war’s moral distinctions, including the
warrior archetypes that order the act of killing in war, are deeply intertwined
with and secured by the ongoing iteration of gendered hierarchies.2 The hege-
monic masculinity of the warrior is defined against both the feminine and the
queer, marking the “straight” path of combat, whose familiar landmarks
(enemy, courage, combat, coward) provide moral and practical bearings for
killing in war. Hunter-killer drones (hereafter referred to as drones, although
they are only a small, albeit significant, subset of autonomous military tech-
nologies)3 render these waypoints strange. Drones are “genderqueer bodies”
(Sjoberg 2014, 91), human –machine assemblages that do not track onto
male –female, human – machine binaries. Besides the illegibility of drone
assemblages, drones also disorient by pointing attention in unfamiliar
directions, making contact possible between strange objects and bodies (the

362 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

operator screen, the air-conditioned box of combat, the figures spied through
drone cameras, assassination).
As a result, drones provoke widespread disorientation along many “lines”
that orient state violence, but here I want to focus on how killing with
drones deviates from two prominent lines in particular, both of which are
crucial to orienting the “straight path” of killing in war: the axes of dis-
tance – intimacy and home– combat. These constitute a compass for militarized
masculinities, but they no longer function as reliable mapping devices for
drone warfare. Drones are often understood as flying along the extreme end
of the distance –intimacy continuum, such that the “tele-techno mediated”
distance between the “doer and the deed,” known as a “remote split operation”
(Pugliese 2013), purportedly makes killing easier.4 However, narratives from
drone operatives show that this axis is too “crude” to describe the experience,
wherein “it is now possible to be both close and distant, according to dimen-
sions that are unequal and that combine a pragmatic co-presence” (Chamayou
2015, 116). Similarly, drone operators find themselves uncomfortable along
the home –combat binary, as they are “deployed-at-station,” a novel military
concept for the “in-betweenness” of killing with drones. Because drone oper-
ators are protected from death, they are disqualified from performing as “real”
warriors because their bodies are not sited in combat.
The loss of these orienting axes necessitates new compasses, new paths and
new maps, but none have yet to be secured. Many efforts at reorientation will
be conservative, seeking the rapid reconfiguration of familiar bearings; this is
already evident among military and political leadership (Manjikian 2014 notes
this trend). However, when actual bodies are so discomfiting that they must
be deemed unreal and relegated off the map of militarized masculinities, we
are deep in “gender trouble” (Butler 1990, 2004). For Judith Butler, the appear-
ance of the “unreal” alerts us to moments when gender iterations stutter and
are most vulnerable to renegotiation. Likewise, by making familiar objects
and terrain strange, disorientation opens up opportunities for a queer politics,
for “shifting grounds, or even clearing new ground, which allow us to tread a
different path” (Ahmed 2006, 170). So while there are certainly callous and
triumphant narratives about killing with drones, at the same time sensations
of discomfort and even trauma also recur as prominent themes that deserve
further analysis.
The possibility that the relationship between militarized masculinities and
killing in war can be meaningfully tinkered with thanks to the queerness of
drone warfare, opening up new and less violent “lines,” is easy to fault, or
even dismiss outright, as naı̈ve and fantastical. The critical literature on
drone warfare is largely pessimistic, and justifiably so. It is commonly
feared that drone warfare will lead (and has led) to war becoming (even) less
prone to democratic resistance (Singer 2012; Chamayou 2015) and (even)
more callously violent (Masters 2005; Pugliese 2013; Coker 2013). However,
in outlining the pernicious effects of drones, there is a risk of overemphasizing
their dangerous tendencies as already stabilized and inexorable. A queer

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cara Daggett/Drone Disorientations 363

 reading of drone warfare makes possible a gesture toward hope. It is not a
dreamy, blinkered hope, blind to dangerous possibilities, but rather a strategic
hope borne of an appreciation for the tenuousness of (re)orientations, which
are especially vulnerable in moments of disorientation.5
In order to make the case for the queerness of killing with drones, and the
possibility of a queer politics in the midst of drone disorientations, the first
section of this article argues that drones are uniquely disorienting technologies
because they cannot be located along traditional gendered maps that orient
killing in war. In particular, drones deviate from the mutually reinforcing
axes of distance – intimacy and home– combat. Of course, if killing with
drones is all too easy and convenient, then any disruptive queerness is negli-
gible. In other words, drones may send a shiver of discomfort through oper-
ators and the US public, but this can be successfully ignored without
compromising the integrity of the old paths of killing in war. The military
can continue to “hold the line” (Manjikian 2014, 58).
Although these grim assumptions are not necessarily wrong, they are pre-
mature, and they risk missing small openings to push away from the old,
“straight” lines of killing in war. A narrative methodology can help to inves-
tigate the parameters of drone disorientation and stake out these openings.
Narrative offers a way to access bodily experiences, such as those of killing
with or dying by drones,6 that are otherwise “impossible to reproduce” by
those who live them (Wibben 2011, 44). Moreover, Annick Wibben (2011)
notes that narrative is “profoundly political” (43) because it involves selection
and interpretation through which we “invent an order for the world” (2). Living
under drones induces its own sickening disorientation,7 but here I focus on its
partnered phenomenon, whose contours are deeply contested: the disorienta-
tion of killing with drones felt among US operators, the media and the public.
In the second and third sections I show how narratives of drone warfare are rife
with symptoms of an unresolved disorientation, often expressed as gender
anxiety over the failure of the distance – intimacy and home– combat axes to
orient killing with drones. The resulting vertigo sparks a frenzy of reorienta-
tion attempts, but disorientation can lead in multiple and sometimes surprising
directions – including, but not exclusively, more violent ones. With drones,
none have yet been reliably secured, and in the midst of this confusion,
there is also the frail, yet real, “hope of new directions” (Ahmed 2006, 158).

ORIENTATIONS OF KILLING IN WAR

Military cyborgs are nothing new. The horse –stirrup – warrior – spear assem-
blage is not strictly human, and likewise the aircraft – guided missile – fighter
pilot assemblage. The drone assemblage is the latest entry along this conti-
nuum of human – machine agents of war. After all, cyborgs of the past were
also novel and radically disorienting machines that produced queer
moments, and that affected almost every aspect of killing and dying in war.

364 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Moreover, Grégoire Chamayou (2015) traces a long history of technologies that
enable “one-sided killing,” a practice that was especially pronounced in colonial
wars, where seemingly ignoble means of killing from a safe distance (e.g.
machine guns) were justified when used against “barbaric” inferiors (91–95).
In this sense, the drone, in its supposed newness, is “a weapon of an amnesiac
postcolonial violence” (95).
Any claims about the novelty of drones should therefore be cautiously
qualified. Nevertheless, it is possible to show how drone warfare disorients
in its own unique fashion, especially by deviating so completely off the
home – combat and distance – intimacy axes. Home – combat and distance –
intimacy are interrelated in space and time, and together, they function as a
compass that maps the moral framework of killing in war, locating the pinna-
cle of hegemonic warrior masculinity at the site of intimate killing in the midst
of combat, with other experiences judged by their proximity to this point. A
hegemonic warrior masculinity is secured not just through the difficult act
of killing up close, but in doing this while making one’s body vulnerable to
being killed.
The distance –intimacy axis orders the technologically mediated experience
of killing, ranging from close combat (hands, knives) to long-range bombers
and missiles. Dave Grossman’s (1995) influential study on the psychological
dimensions of war, while it is oversimplified, features the distance – intimacy
axis prominently, and is useful as a heuristic (Chamayou 2015, 115), a map
of popular assumptions about how distance – intimacy orients killing in war.
Grossman finds a widespread resistance to killing, and argues that it is
especially pronounced in close combat, when the human to be killed is recog-
nized as human (119). The distance enabled by long-range technologies, such
as guided missiles from aircraft or ships, makes it possible for soldiers to deny
the humanity of victims and therefore to kill large numbers of people, and even
civilians, which they otherwise would not have been capable of doing (100).
Gender, meanwhile, oozes throughout Grossman’s text, although he does
not include it categorically in his “anatomy of killing.” Nevertheless, gender
hierarchies are crucial in grounding the distance – intimacy axis, helping
straight bodies to “sink” more comfortably along its path (Ahmed 2006,
160). The proximity to killing appears to be a powerful indicator of gender
status, such that those who kill are elevated above those who do not, and
those who kill at the closest range often achieve the most secure, and hegemonic,
militarized masculinity.8 Even among noncombat roles, proximity to killing
appears to exert an ordering effect, wherein roles are hierarchically oriented
around their support of the “warfighter.”
Meanwhile, the home – combat axis sites the soldier’s body according to
gradations of lethal risk, peaking at the ideal of mutual vulnerability
between soldiers’ bodies. Feminists have shown the importance of a home-
front, coded as feminine, as a space inhabited by bodies to be protected by
war. For example, Cynthia Weber (2002) notes that the doubled feminine/
homefront, as both women’s bodies and homesites, functioned in World War

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cara Daggett/Drone Disorientations 365

 II as “the foundation from which American masculinity could be projected into
the world, and the place where debates about moral certainty/uncertainty were
resolved in favour of moral certainty.” With the “traditional heterosexual
codes” that ground these homesites/homebodies as anchors, narratives of
war could “tame” and “contain” uncertainty in the world and at home, or, to
adapt Ahmed’s terminology, properly reorient queer moments along hetero-
normative lines. Weber goes on to show how this relationship breaks down
and becomes queer with 9/11 and the War on Terror, as, unlike in World
War II, there are “no clear enemies, no clear homefronts, and no clear tra-
ditional codes” (141).
Following 9/11 and since Weber’s prescient analysis, drones increasingly
became a predominant weapon of the “war on terrorism,” well suited to
waging war amid the dislocation of enemy, homefront and traditional codes.
Fittingly, drone warfare also operates in a different dimension than that
ordered by the home – combat and distance –intimacy axes. With drone
warfare, we no longer have our bearings on Grossman’s map of lethal technol-
ogies, for, as Chamayou (2015) pointedly asks, “Where should the drone be
positioned in the diagram?” (115). Arguments could be made in both
directions: there is a maximal distance between shooter and target, putting
drones beyond long-range bombers, but at the same time there is an odd inti-
macy made possible by the drone cameras and surveillance capabilities. The
drone thus demands that we “disaggregate what the unitary term ‘distance’
covers and diffract a horizontal axis that has become too crude” (116).
Meanwhile, both terrorism and drone warfare make combat on homesites,
while at the same time these agents of violence avoid entering idealized
sites of combat while marked as uniformed bodies made mutually vulnerable
to enemy soldiers. The experience of drone warfare is somewhere between
being “deployed-in-theater” (i.e. combat) and not being deployed: it is
being “deployed-on-station,” which a Government Accountability Office
(GAO 2014) report deemed “a new concept in warfighting” (26) whose
effects on morale the Air Force has yet to fully come to terms with (27). As
one drone operator describes it, “Those are two very, very different worlds.
And you’re in and out of those worlds daily. . . . So, I am there and then I
am not there and then I am there again” (Bergen and Rothenberg 2014,
116). It is a dizzying, in-between, back-and-forth, there-ness, where “I” and
one’s actions become uniquely difficult to locate in space and time. Those
who live under drones also dwell in-between home and combat, in a
no-man’s land, but whereas drone operators feel themselves switch and slide
and float around from the “kill-box” to soccer practice, targeted bodies are
immobilized, stuck under surveillance whether they are getting married, defe-
cating or building bombs.
Technologies of “one-sided” killing – machine guns, aircraft bombing –
have stretched this mutual vulnerability ideal in the past, of course, moving
soldiers away from this pinnacle of militarized masculinity (and thus provok-
ing anxiety about compromising warrior virtues). However, the bodies aboard

366 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

bombers or submarines are still transported to sites of elevated risk and bodily
discomfort away from home. Moreover, the combined “downhill” effect,
moving soldiers away from the warrior pinnacle, was arguably to make
killing easier, which perhaps assuages the corresponding loss of warrior
status. These technologies may perturb the home– combat binary, but the pres-
ence of even slightly elevated risk to soldiers’ bodies keeps them on the map.
While this reorientation of long-distance killing may be shaky, it has yet to be
achieved for drones (and terrorism), which fly completely off the map. Formal
military discourses tend to purposefully sidestep the disorientations of drone
warfare, but the following section shows that it is easy to find such gender
anxiety elsewhere, in popular and media narratives as well as in interviews
with drone operators themselves.

HOT POCKETS AND JOYSTICKS

“Technostrategic” discourses of drone warfare lend credence to the fear that the
altered spatiotemporal experience produced by drone warfare makes killing
easier. Cristina Masters (2005) sums up this concern, shared by many drone
critics, when she writes that “the discipline once required for soldiers actually
to kill enemy combatants has virtually disappeared because to kill in battle
is to aim at a blip on a radar screen or a heat-sensored image” (123). These
possibilities recur throughout “technostrategic” narratives of drone warfare.
Just as Carol Cohn (1987) observed with nuclear technostrategic discourses,
these narratives use rational language, euphemism and abstraction (A2/AD
and C4I) – as well as a great deal of barely concealed machismo (“launching
element” and “penetration” of airspace) – to distance the use of lethal technology
from its deadly consequences.
However, these technostrategic discourses, which handle drone warfare as
“business as usual,” while treating drones as tools that only “reinforce hege-
monic masculinity” (Manjikian 2014, 57), are in conflict with other discourses
that anxiously highlight the disruptive nature of drone warfare along the
home – combat and distance –intimacy binaries. In these narratives, the dis-
tance afforded by drones disqualifies drone operators from counting as
“real” warfighters. Frequently repeated details in these stories depict the com-
forts of drone operators through the tropes of the office drone, or the “cubicle
warrior” (Coker 2013, 111). An Economist article (June 21, 2014) on drone
warfare was jokingly titled “Dilbert at War” and referred to these Air Force
pilots as the “chair force.” It is difficult to find a description of drone
warfare that does not include at least one of the following descriptors: that
the trailers in which operators work are sited in the deserts of the American
Southwest but are air-conditioned (implicitly contrasting this to the uncom-
fortable heat of desert combat in Iraq), or that drone operators are surrounded
by the accouterments of the office worker, sitting in ergonomic chairs, drink-
ing coffee and eating junk food.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cara Daggett/Drone Disorientations 367

 Another repeated motif sites the drone operators’ bodies in the domestic
sphere, juxtaposing their combat experience both temporally and spatially
with running errands for their spouses or coaching a kids’ soccer team. The
heteronormative coding that relies upon the separation of the site in which
protecting occurs (combat) from the sites to be protected (home, grocery
store, soccer field) fails to make sense of being “deployed-at-station.” Drone
operator Matt Martin recalls his first mission flying an MQ-1 Reaper and drop-
ping bombs, marveling that “I had already been in on a kill. Then I remembered
that Trish had asked me to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home” (Martin
and Sasser 2010, 2). Similarly, when Brandon Bryant, a former drone operator,
gave a more critical interview about drone warfare, he received many hateful
comments that emphasized the safety, and often queerness, of his body, such
as “I broke a fucking nail on that last mission!” and “Maybe they should wear
seatbelts” (Power 2013). This is also evident in the frequent comparison of
drone operators to adolescent video gamers, where the inference is that their
lethal acts are also somehow immature and domesticated. If killing has some
relationship to the pleasure of (heterosexual) sex, and firing weapons can
feel like ejaculation – a phenomenon noted by Grossman (1995, 136) –
then for the metaphor of the drone gamer, operating a drone is like masturbat-
ing to online porn. It might have its (guilty) pleasures, but it is nothing like sex
with a “real” woman/killing in “real” combat.
If drone operators’ bodies are feminine or adolescent/immature, both of
which are to be kept in the domestic sphere, then logically they cannot earn
combat medals. Indeed, such arguments were instrumental in quashing the
proposal for a “drone medal” that would have had a higher status than
medals like the Purple Heart or Bronze Star, medals that require soldiers to
have risked their life in combat. There was a “firestorm” of controversy, not
so much over the medal but because of its elevated status vis-à-vis other
combat medals. The reaction “ranges from rage to a mix of anger and amuse-
ment,” and comments to the media “derided” and “mocked” drone operators, as
some “suggested the award could be a gold-plated Xbox controller, among
other things” (Air Force Times, April 15, 2013). Bryant recalls that “[s]ome
troops thanked the drone crews for being ‘angels in the sky,’ but more often
they were the butt of jokes, mocked as ‘chair-borne rangers’ who would
‘only earn a Purple Heart for burning themselves on a Hot Pocket’” (Power
2013). An Army employee told the Washington Times (February 15, 2013)
that a combat medal should not “honor people whose only hardship is spilling
hot coffee in their lap as they move their joystick to fly a drone.” Here again,
attention is drawn to the cowardly body of the soldier and, repeatedly, to his
chair-bound genital region and his “joystick,” where his greatest risk is an
unwelcome touch on the lap from comforting (and juvenile, in the case of
Hot Pockets) food and drink. The uproar led to a change in the medal that
effectively elevated any award earned “in combat” above the “drone medal.”
Many support and logistics roles involve similar office-type work, also in
noncombat sites, but these roles are already understood to occupy the

368 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

lowest status among militarized masculinities. They do not disorient or
deviate. Meanwhile, one anonymous drone operator can boast that, whereas
fighter pilots initially avoided drone roles, now “RPA [remote-piloted aircraft]
pilots are getting the most combat experience of anyone . . . There is pride
associated with flying RPA’s” (Bergen and Rothenberg 2014, 113). The inten-
sity of the ridicule levied at drone operators, therefore, appears to be a response
to such presumptions, chafing at drone operators who would “count” them-
selves as combat pilots and appeal to an elite status vis-à-vis more traditional
combat orientations. The increasing share of combat performed by drone
assemblages in comparison to “manned” aircraft only provokes additional
anxiety. In other words, drones kill off the map, but awarding a medal
would seem to (improperly) position them back on it. Putting them on the
map, though, would seriously undermine its coordinates. And yet, drones
keep killing.
This has led the Air Force to try to address the status issues by giving drone
operators some of the insignia that marks “real” pilots in order to reorient
operators’ bodies. This is why drone pilots wear flight suits, and also why
the Air Force began to give drone operators wings to wear on those flight
suits, although the wings have a different design that distinguishes them as
drone wings (i.e. not “real” wings.) There are even fears that drone warfare
appears cowardly to other countries (Gusterson 2010; Singer 2010). In the
documentary “The Islamic State” (VICE News 2014), an ISIL press officer
declared, “Don’t be cowards and attack with drones. Instead send your soldiers,
the ones we humiliated in Iraq.” A special operations officer felt so strongly
that drones were cowardly that he perceived Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (whom
he calls AMZ), the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, as a more highly masculinized
fighter. He argues that “[i]f you see it through [the enemies’] eyes, you can
understand what they think. Even AMZ was right there hanging his balls
out on the battlefield in terms of personal risk, leading his men in combat”
(Singer 2010, 331).
The mark of the coward may be bearable if killing with drones is indeed rela-
tively easy, prosecuted from a distance, the operators cocooned in a desert
trailer and taking pride in their pseudo-combat roles. The mutually exposed
balls of the special forces and AMZ can go on fighting at the pinnacle of mili-
tarized masculinities, orienting combat despite the “unmanned” drones
buzzing offstage, flown by operators whose balls are burned only by Hot
Pockets.

“IN THE LOOP” BUT OUT OF LINE

The “PlayStation” critique of drone operators assumes that killing with drones
is a relatively easy task. This is not borne out in many drone operator narra-
tives, where killing with drones can be intimate and sometimes even traumatic
– or, at least, invokes what drone commander Bill Tart calls a certain “serious-

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cara Daggett/Drone Disorientations 369

 ness” (The Huffington Post, 15 May 2013). In this section, I cite transcripts and
interviews with more than a dozen drone operators who are both critical and
supportive of drone warfare, and also draw upon narratives from several other
operators, though they are not quoted.9 The relatively small (but growing)
number of drone operators who have narrated their experiences in public
means that these narratives cannot claim to be representative of all drone
operators’ experiences. Nevertheless, they can support some analysis
because there is a striking consistency in the stories, even between operators
who are critical of drone warfare and those who relate a more positive experi-
ence. All seem to agree that their experience of war is not always distanced and
unaffected. Besides the reported experiences of the operators, evidence of this
appears in some early studies of operator “burnout,” a “sub-clinical” category
that reflects “normal” responses to stress (Asaro 2013, 214), and even combat-
level rates of PTSD among drone operators, a diagnosis made possible by the
redefinition of PTSD to include “existential” trauma.10 Despite the official,
“technostrategic” discourse of military reports, elsewhere the military openly
expresses concern about the “strain” on drone operators (GAO 2014). The
Air Force publicly worries that it cannot supply enough pilots to meet the Pen-
tagon’s demand for 65 “combat air patrols,” that is, killer drone platforms: of
the 1,200 pilots needed to fulfill this, there are only around 1,000 and falling,
and while the Air Force trains 180 pilots every year, it loses 240 (GAO 2014).
Indeed, the difficulties faced by drone operators are a consistent theme
throughout narratives of killing with drones. According to Chamayou
(2015), this theme functions largely as a military public relations campaign:
by insisting that killing with drones is difficult, “particularly when one has a
graphic view of its effects” (102), then drone operators can be brave and
drone warfare becomes more publicly palatable. While heeding this possibility,
I want to take seriously the remarkably consistent expressions of discomfort,
intimacy and sometimes trauma in operator narratives as evidence that any
such public relations campaign remains unfinished. As Wilcox (2015) writes
of precision warfare more broadly, we should not assume that this is a “seam-
less” operation. Precision warfare is messier on the ground than it claims to be,
but it is also messier for its operators, invulnerable as they are to death. Bodies
resist tidy integration into drone systems, and Wilcox notes how “the pro-
duction of human bodies as information processors is incomplete; that is,
the human bodies are in excess of their integration into the precision ‘kill
chain’ or information-gathering and decision-making process” (148). The
uncertainty of killing, and the mess and gore and fading heat signatures (if
not the smell and splatter and taste), seep through.
In particular, these operator narratives about killing with drones show how
bodies can “exceed” the operation by becoming disoriented, by needing more
navigational sustenance when it comes to taking another’s life than drone
warfare currently provides. It appears that queer moments of vertigo arise in
the failure to transplant the fine-grained experience of flying a drone onto
the larger-scale maps that orient killing in war. So while operators may

370 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

orientate to the landmarks that dot the new geographies of drone warfare
(Gregory 2011; Asaro 2013) – toggling attention between the Nevada “kill-
box,” the military chat rooms, the “patterns of life” deemed threatening –
after doing so, they struggle to place these landmarks onto the terrain of tra-
ditional combat maps.
Narratives from drone operators expose these moments of failure. Distance
and intimacy no longer make sense as coordinates. Drone warfare is not inter-
preted as an experience of mediated distance but as one of blended attachment
and agency. Caroline Holmqvist (2013) has called this an “immersive” experi-
ence, similar to the power of video games “to draw players into their virtual
worlds,” and one that allows drone operators to “see more than soldiers in
theatre” (542). An anonymous drone operator recalls “that the action felt so
intense one time, when his drone thousands of miles away was about to
crash, he instinctively reached for the ejection seat” (Singer 2010, 329).
Drone operators often describe it as a muddling of the space –time of “there”
and “here.” In the recent play “Grounded” (Brant 2013), the drone operator
(a former fighter pilot grounded due to pregnancy) is watching a car that
starts to look like hers. Confused, she muses, “Same war different desert / Or
same desert different war / No different desert different war / I don’t know /
Anyway.” Many drone operators also explicitly deny that they are video
game warriors; as one argues, “You are 18 inches away from 32-inch, high-
definition combat. . . . You are there. You are there. . . . It’s not detached. It’s
not a video game. And it’s certainly not 8,000 miles away” (Air Force Times,
April 21, 2012).
The drone assemblage also makes possible a new kind of intimacy through
its network of humans, satellite connections, cameras, algorithms and steely
bodies (Gregory 2011; Holmqvist 2013). Operators can stare at the same area
for hours, weeks and even months, as without human limitations to restrain
its endurance, the drone can “loiter.” One operator called Mike (a pseudonym)
reflects that:

[i]t might be little things like a group of kids throwing rocks at goats. . . . You get
a sense of daily life. I’ve been on the same shift for a month and you learn the
patterns. Like, I’ll know at 5 a.m. this guy is gonna go outside and take a shit.
(Mother Jones, June 18, 2013)

Performing lengthy surveillance can mean watching a suspected “target” play

with his kids, make love to his wife in an open field, attend a wedding or
funeral, until, as another drone operator says,

You become immersed in their life. You feel like you’re a part of what they’re
doing every single day. So, even if you’re not emotionally engaged with those
individuals, you become a little bit attached. I’ve learned about Afghan culture
this way. . . . They are human beings, right? That is the bottom line, so it affects
you to watch the impact of a kinetic strike. (Bergen and Rothenberg 2014, 115)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cara Daggett/Drone Disorientations 371

 The intensity of this (one-sided) connection with targeted human bodies
through lengthy, intrusive surveillance is almost unprecedented in the
military.
In this way, drones alter the experience of killing: the human – drone assem-
blage weaves through all the roles along the assembly line of the killing
process, or the “kill-chain,” which were formerly compartmentalized in a
way that helped to “[render] the business of destruction unexceptional”
(Gregory 2011, 196). In modern military kill-chains, the people doing the
killing are usually (though not always) sheltered from the morally murky
decisions of target selection, or the intimate familiarity that comes with sur-
veillance, as well as from the gory aftermath of the corpses and destroyed
buildings. In contrast, drones produce what David Gregory (2011) calls a
“late modern kill-chain,” which now involves dozens of people spread
across the planet, wherein drone operators and others involved in the drone
assemblage can play at least some role in all the steps of the military killing
process: surveillance, targeting decisions, firing, and also determining how
many people were killed (196). As Peter Asaro (2013) argues, “This places
greater psychological demands on all three [drone operator] roles because it
becomes more difficult to shift responsibility to others or to ignore the conse-
quences of one’s own decisions and actions” (207 –208).
Moreover, the onslaught of information that pours in from chat rooms, from
ground troops and from drone sensors, all of which purportedly lends itself to
“precision” targeting, can heighten operator anxiety. Added to this, the
lengthy surveillance produces more data than the military can even analyze.
The resulting uncertainty can have ambivalent consequences for operator
accountability. Especially in fast-tempo operations, there is evidence that
accountability can be occluded rather than heightened. The Los Angeles
Times (Cloud 2011) obtained a military transcript of one such incident,
when drones killed a group of civilians; the operators sounded eager to kill
(“oh, sweet target”) and callous once the mistake was known and it became
evident that children had died (“no way to tell from here”). Similarly,
Gregory (2011) argues that operators primarily form attachments with Amer-
ican troops on the ground, and that this kind of one-sided intimacy will only
reinforce “the techno-cultural distinction between ‘their’ space and ‘our’ space,
between the eye and the target” (206). There is certainly evidence of this effect
in reported experiences of drone operators, as well as in the relative invisibility
of “the space of the target” in the media (204).
At the same time, other drone operators describe feeling guilt and grief.
While it could be argued that the military transcript above reflects a more
honest, unmediated, reaction than such post-event expressions of grief, the
frequency with which such expressions appear should urge us against dismiss-
ing them altogether. As Asaro (2013) observes, “The mythologies surrounding
the use of lethal drones, both the heroic and antiheroic, seem to fall short of the
complexities of the new subjectivities of drone operators” (220). Bryant claims
that he

372 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 recalls it even now, years later, burned into his memory like a photo negative:
“The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And
there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s
holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg,
and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the
ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die.
I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he
was lying on.” (Power 2013)

In an op-ed for the Guardian on 29 December 2013, former drone operator

Heather Linebaugh agonizes that “[w]e always wonder if we killed the right
people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civi-
lian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.”
Even drone operators who are triumphant about their ability to kill “bad
guys” report moments of difficulty. When Martin fires a missile at “Rocket
Man” (who Martin says “had it coming”), an elderly man walks by just as
the bomb detonates. Martin reports looking for the old man afterward,
seeing his body blown into the street, and then musing that “[b]y the time
this war was over, I later reflected during dark moments, I was apt to have
more innocent blood on my hands. . . . Those were real people down there.
Real people with real lives” (Martin and Sasser 2010, 54 – 55). So while it is
possible to kill lightly with drones, the drone operator may face, at length
and in vivid detail, the consequences of their killing in a way that other tech-
nologies do not often demand. Another anonymous drone operator muses that,
thanks to the surveillance capabilities, “[i]n some ways drone use is more
human from the pilot’s perspective, which is kind of ironic” (Bergen and
Rothenberg 2014, 115).
For Chamayou (2015), all of this may relate to the trauma of an executioner,
rather than that of the soldier, which would require “a kind of clinic for execu-
tioners . . . to deliver them from their unease” (113). However, this “execu-
tioner” reorientation is unlikely to succeed in securing drone warfare in the
military; operators (as well as the public) continue to appeal to the straight
soldier orientation and operators definitively do not identify themselves as
assassins. In the meantime, drone operators are sensitive to their absence
from the scene of combat and the subsequent queerness that this entails.
Brian Callahan, a former drone operator, reflected that:

[i]t sounds strange but being far away and safe is kind of a bummer. The other
guys are exposing themselves [again, note the vulnerable genitalia as orienting
device], and that to me is still quite an honorable thing to do. So I feel like I’m
cheating them. (Spiegel Online, March 12, 2010)

Another operator named Ryan tells Mother Jones (June 18, 2013) that he and
his colleagues call themselves the “lost generation,” and that “[i]t’s tough
working night shifts watching your buddies do great things in the field

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cara Daggett/Drone Disorientations 373

 while you’re turning circles in the sky.” The problem is that while drone oper-
ators are “in the loop” of killing, they are not in “line” with militarized mascu-
linities. The combined effect is that drone operators remain lost, loopy with the
effort to map their activities onto obsolete coordinates.

QUEER KILLING

Drone warfare becomes in-between, both/and, queer.11 Drone killing is both

invulnerable (for some soldiers) and insidious (for bodies under surveillance).
Drone warfare appears as both hypermasculine in its technological achieve-
ments and emasculating in its removal of the US soldier’s body from mortal
danger; it is both penetrating in its flaunting of sovereign state borders and
at the same time evidence of the impotence of the United States in ultimately
securing itself against terrorism.12 The in-betweenness of drones reminds us of
Donna Haraway’s (2007) warning against seeing cyborgs with “single vision”
– either as harbingers of doom or as offering hope – as “single vision produces
worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters” (295). Likewise,
attempting to place a singular judgment upon drone warfare simply does not
make sense when faced with the queerness evident in drone narratives. We
should not dismiss the gender trouble that arises when killing with drones,
just as we should not dismiss the threat that drone warfare involves hypermas-
culine killing machines (Masters 2005; Manjikian 2014) or that it entrenches
the distinction between “our” space and “their” space (Gregory 2011), either
of which would make violence easier. Instead, Haraway’s (2007) suggested
strategy mirrors the both/and irresolution of the cyborg: “The political struggle
is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations
and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point” (295).
Haraway (2007) refers to this strategy as a “struggle” for good reason.
Disorientation can be unnerving. What a queer approach to drone warfare
offers is a reservoir of support for resisting the urge to “sink” into and
regain one’s bearings in a way that would exclude other paths and openings.
For Ahmed (2006) , queer phenomenology works “as a disorientation device; it
would not overcome the ‘disalignment’ of the horizontal and vertical axes,
allowing the oblique to open up another angle on the world” (172). Drones
are not inherently queer, but they may serve a queer politics by uprooting
the main roads of killing in war that formerly seemed so fixed. Deviance is
not enough, though, and a queer politics emerges if the “obliqueness” of
drones can “open up another angle on the world.” These are pluripotent open-
ings that may further entrench violence along the line of militarized masculi-
nities, but that may also undermine this grounding.
Toward this goal, it would help to emphasize drone disorientations by con-
tinuing to make drone things and bodies appear in public, all along the kill-
chain from civilian contractors to operators to emergent “patterns of life”
that cannot be allowed to live. For example, we can study the military’s

374 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

nascent training regimen for “18X” drone pilots, which denotes those who no
longer undergo “real” pilot training before operating drones. More broadly, are
there symptoms of disorientation in foreign policy discourses about drone
warfare? What are the experiences of bodies coded as women, or as gay, in
flying drones?13 There are signs that the drone experience is becoming more
accessible for such studies. Justin Taylor, the playwright of “Unblinking
Eye,” a one-woman play about drone warfare, observes that despite the
“myth” of drone secrecy, the Air Force was “fairly cooperative” in granting
access to those working on both his play, as well as on another one-woman
play, “Grounded,” where star Anne Hathaway must relinquish her fighter
pilot status and become a drone operator due to pregnancy (American
Theatre, April 27, 2015). “Grounded” offers a telling contrast to the World
War II film “Pearl Harbor,” where Weber (2002) observes how Kate Beckin-
sale’s pregnant body, coded as the homefront, serves as the space “in which
masculine moral struggles are staged” and ultimately resecured when the
pilot returns to a heterosexual, nuclear family (137 – 138). Hathaway’s preg-
nancy also functions as a site of masculine moral struggle, but, squeezed
behind a drone joystick, her pregnant belly no longer guarantees heteronor-
mative resolution following the confusion of combat. In drone warfare, preg-
nancy, long a defining landmark in war, loses some of its power as an orienting
device.
This is not to be naively optimistic. Drones have not completely replaced
more traditional combat and likely will not in the foreseeable future. The
“tip of the spear” remains a powerful combat orientation even while drones
continue to fly off the map. However, the very queerness of killing with
drones has commanded significant public attention, even when it remains sup-
plemental to other forms of combat, and this will only intensify. As Air Force
Chief of Staff, General Mark Welsh, said in a 13 December 2013 briefing,
“We’re not getting out of this business.” Drones have opened up an unusual
moment of vertigo in the gender – war matrix. What inspires both anxiety
and hope is that it is not yet obvious whether, and how, reorientation will
be achieved.
Cara Daggett
Department of Political Science
Johns Hopkins University
338 Mergenthaler Hall
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
Email: cdagget2@jhu.edu

Notes

1 This draws on Hutchings (2008), who argues that masculinity as a relational

concept can “provide a framework through which war can be rendered both intel-
ligible and acceptable as a social practice and institution” (389).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cara Daggett/Drone Disorientations 375

 2 See, for example, Enloe (2000), Whitworth (2004), Hutchings (2008), Cockburn
(2010), Sylvester (2013) and Sjoberg (2014).
3 The majority of autonomous military technologies are not involved in killing, but
are rather used for everything from ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnais-
sance) to searching for explosives. However, lethal drones have garnered the bulk
of critical public attention over the last decade.
4 This is a common fear; see, for example, Masters (2005); Gregory (2011);
Pugliese (2013); Benjamin (2012); Singer (2012); Coker (2013); and Chamayou
(2015).
5 The notion that moments of gender unintelligibility are especially ripe for open-
ings toward more inclusive worlds is a prominent theme for queer theorists,
most notably Haraway (2007), Butler (1990, 2004) and Ahmed (2006).
6 I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for asking whether dying by drone
might also be queer.
7 See, for example, the Stanford/NYU report, “Living under Drones” (livingunder-
drones.org), as well as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s investigation
into the civilian toll of drone strikes (http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/
category/projects/drones/).
8 See, for example, Barrett’s (1996) study of the navy, where aviators hold the
highest masculine status while noncombat roles expressed a “tone of apology
and justification” (139). See also King (2013), where rear-echelon troops in
Vietnam were “REMFs,” “rear-echelon mother-fuckers, i.e. they were not proper
men” (71).
9 These are likely different operators, but this is difficult to confirm as several oper-
ators cited remain anonymous.
10 Studies including Chappelle et al. (2014) have shown PTSD levels to be similar to
those in deployed troops (albeit at the lower range). Asaro (2013) notes that oper-
ators might focus more on quotidian stresses (long hours, promotion opportu-
nities) in these studies and avoid mentioning combat stress because admitting
weakness in combat is taboo (217).
11 This is drawn from Weber (2002), who writes that al Qaeda “is neither masculine
nor feminine, straight nor gay. It is what Roland Barthes would call the ‘both/
and’ and what I would call ‘queer’” (143).
12 Weber (2002) makes this point about the discourse of “Attack on America” follow-
ing 9/11, where “because the feminine [the neoliberal market that was attacked] is
not itself contained or containable, it harbours no promise that it can morally
contain and correct an immoral enemy” (145).
13 After all, the shame felt by some drone operators is but a faint echo of the shame
and anxiety, as well as the historical injunction to remain hidden or segregated,
experienced by bodies serving in the military but coded as women, queer or of
color. The integration of these “other” bodies into sites of combat also disrupts
militarized masculinities, and this could intensify the disorientation provoked
by “other” modes of killing in war that depart from the home –combat and dis-
tance –intimacy axes.

376 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to my anonymous reviewers, as well as to

the members of the Enloe Award Committee, for their detailed and thoughtful
engagement with this article. They inspired changes throughout the text that
significantly improved the argument.

Notes on Contributor

Cara Daggett is completing her PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity, where her current research investigates the ethical legacies of energy
physics and poses alternatives inspired by feminist and post-work politics. She
specializes in environmental politics as well as feminist approaches to science
and technology.

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