The Human is the Object of War: Drones & Autonomy w/ Kelsey D. Atherton
Kelsey joins Gregk to discuss his ten-year beat covering military tech, drones and autonomous weapons and talk about emergent modes of war in the 2020s.
For more from Kelsey D. Atherton:
– Follow him on Bluesky
– Preorder A World For All: New Visions of US Foreign Policy, out this October with OR Books
– Check out the Center for International Policy (CIP)
Image: The remnants of a commercial quadcopter drone manufactured by Da-Jiang Innovations (DJI) shot down with an anti-drone laser produced by Raytheon. (Courtesy of Kelsey D. Atherton)
Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production
This episode was produced by Thomas O’Mahony
Our theme song is ‘Dream Weapon’ by Genghis Tron
Our artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel
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THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: The Road Not Taken
ALSO AVAILABLE IN AUDIO
This week, some thoughts on Ansar Allah’s rapid advance down Yemen’s western coast as they prepare to exact further costs on the US for its war of choice against Iran, followed by some brief meditations on September 11th and its consequences.
Sources:
Kelsey D. Atherton (Nov. 2018), ‘Are Killer Robots the Future of War? Parsing the Facts on Autonomous Weapons’ in The New York Times Magazine
Kelsey D. Atherton (Sep. 2019), ‘Can the Army secure an American-made quadcopter?’ in C4ISR
Kelsey D. Atherton (Oct. 2022), ‘What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser’ in Popular Science
Kelsey D. Atherton (Mar. 2023), ‘The War on Terror and the everyday infrastructure of oblivion’ in Wars of Future Past
Comments (5)
Finished listening to this episode today, and two things stood out for me. The first is the apparent inability to *actually win* a drone-based war. If humans occupying space are necessary, and drones kill-zones push humans out of ever larger areas, how do you achieve strategic military objectives? The second is the merging of politics and violence, violence as the object of politics rather than another means. Which, of course, is very fascist, but the way drones film their operations massively expands the spectacle of violence. And connecting the two: fascism actually cannot solve the problems it claims to be addressing; its use of spectacular violence has not actually defeated Iran (or Ukraine), reduced problems with drugs in the US, etc.. (It also reminds me of an almost throwaway comment by Adam Tooze that in the 30s the Nazis suppressed consumption to enable military spending - but could you consider their military as a kind of consumer good, enjoyed by people for its spectacle and the feelings it engendered?)
Let it be known here for all. If I die here eating foraged mushrooms. I died a good death listening to Blood Work
Regarding the desire for elite control, it's surreal to watch things with policing and the broader surveillance state, this great machine of control ever increasing it's reach, as there's not really some big political movement in the US, and crime is at its lowest point of my life, yet we're still having this crackdown on crimes that's not happening and a resistance that largely doesn't exist
I feel like the AI issue and how the tech elites talk about it accidentally reveals the culmination of their desires largely as a world without people, both in terms of preferring a chatbot to real humans and fantasies of everyone being killed by it, but likewise in people like Zuckerberg building high walls with guards surrounding them and blasting music to drown out his also rich neighbors. It's not even class solidarity so much as a desire to escape the world it seems. Idk where I'm going with this, i guess it's weird to see a combination of desiring ultimate control and a desire to be done with the whole world. Maybe we're all going insane even the rich and powerful idk
Regarding the fear of the banal, I think the grand summation of this past episodes is Iran, we are doing this war after 2 separate political solution, deals that we now broadly know Iran was following, and this meets the necropolitics episode with "well if Iran isn't building a nuclear weapon why can't I stop thinking about it"