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Digital warfighting temporalities and drone discourse

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Abstract

As drones have emerged as icons of contemporary warfare so too have drone operators become symbols of contemporary warfighting. While drone scholarship to date has predominantly centred upon exploring the drone’s “functioning” and “implications”, including interrogating the ‘in-theatre’ experiences of operators, this article responds to calls for further attentiveness to the “making of” the drone (Klauser and Pedrozo in Geogr Helv 70:285-293, 2015). In empirically examining the ‘making of’ the drone operator, it turns to their training, and in particular the use of simulators therein. This focus, it argues, offers an alternative accounting of the drone operator, one that both revisits and complicates existing and enduring narratives of drone operation and/as videogaming, and one that offers an alternative temporality and ‘site’ through which to explore how drones come to ‘function’.

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Notes

  1. This article draws upon fieldwork at military conferences and through the completion of industry-afforded online training. The military conferences attended were UAS Training and Simulation 2014 (8–10 December 2014, London Park Plaza, UK) and UAS 2015 (1–2 December 2015, Twickenham Stadium, London UK). Held over several days, they were billed as “leading events” for members of international military drone operating forces to gather, with industry partners, to discuss agenda-setting items. The online training completed was hosted by Unmanned Experts, and included the completion of six courses (UAS Introduction course ICI, UAS Completion course CC1, UAS Market and Careers course MC and CI, 3ic Remote pilot authorisation course, An introduction to UAS: the good, the bad, the ugly INT1, UAS rules and guidance update SR1A1). While formal military training courses sat by recruited operators of course remains closed to civilians, I approached the aforementioned online courses as a form of adjacent and accessible, albeit distinct, training authored by drone consultants. The company Unmanned Experts, for example, describes itself as a “world-leading provider of subject matter expertise in unmanned aircraft systems”, and has a Chief Executive Officer with extensive experience flying military drones. Following the forging of connections at one of the aforementioned military conferences, I was kindly gifted and completed six online Unmanned Experts courses.

  2. When using the term “drone operator”, I refer to the wider operational team of both pilot, sensor operator, and Mission Intelligence Coordinators. This is not to conflate the distinct roles (see Ouma et al. 2011; Asaro 2013), but essentially to avoid repeatedly stating “both pilots, sensor operators and Mission Intelligence Coordinators”. Where distinctions are particularly pertinent they are made.

  3. Here, I refer to the US Air Force hosting, 2012–2013, a game in which members of the public could “play” drone operator, using a simulator-style game. Here, users were tasked with the mission of “locat[ing] and destroy[ing] enemy targets using AGM-114 Hellfire missiles launched rom a MQ-9 Reaper” (Download 2016: n.p). Once you had “armed” your platform, with the click of a mouse you could fire your simulated Hellfire missile, being rewarded with different numbers of points, depending on the “level” of target destroyed. After using your four missiles, you were given a total scope and tips on how to improve it. While no longer available, this game was previously located at https://www.airforce.com/interactive/uav/index.html.

  4. In this section, the article explores aspects of the training process as an alternative temporality informing and constituting in theatre drone operations. In so doing, it focuses upon pre-operational or pre-live training—though it should also be noted that training provision does extend beyond this, for example the ongoing provision of “follow-on” or continuation training.

  5. “Live simulation” refers to instances in which a scenario is simulated by people/equipment “in a setting where they would operate for real”, and “constructive simulation” refers to that which involves no human, and seeks to model natural phenomena, such as the path of a hurricane (University of central Florida 2014: n.p).

  6. While of course pertinent to note that while simulators can be understood as a form of videogame, in the case of drone operator simulations, their usage informs subsequent overwatch and lethal striking operations—those associated with serious violence for the populations below them (Shaw and Akhter 2012).

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  1. Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK

    Anna Jackman

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  1. Anna Jackman
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Correspondence to Anna Jackman.

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Jackman, A. Digital warfighting temporalities and drone discourse. Digi War 1, 93–105 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-020-00003-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-020-00003-0

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