Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare

Unmanning studies the conditions that create contemporary unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes from 1936-1992. Characteristics often attributed the drone, including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness, are achieved by displacing and exchanges and connections between humans and machines through mediations that shape a theater of war. 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. Throughout the twentieth century, drone aircraft organize human, machine and media parts to organize an ostensibly not human framework for war tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures underscore unmanning’s disavowal and call attention to the significance of human action in shaping the political determinations that come to be opposed to ‘man.