Shifting Soldiers and the Social Logic of Drone Warfare

MADELEINE C. ELISH, then a student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in April 2013 to aid research on 'Shifting Soldiers and the Social Logic of Drone Warfare,' supervised by Dr. Paul Kockelman. Based on fieldwork in the northeastern United States with military communities, defense industry contractors, academic scientists, and engineers, this dissertation investigates how the socio-material configurations at stake in US-based drone operations are implicated in a variety of shifting boundaries: between human and machine, between home and battlefield, and between citizen and soldier. What are the limits and conditions of possibility that emerge within new constructions of individual and institutional accountability with respect to military action as well as new moral imaginaries of citizenship, honor, and patriotism? Historically, new divisions of labor have produced radically new social relationships and new conditions of possibility for the constitution of power and subjectivity. In this context, this research considers drone warfare as a new and consequential reconfiguration of labor. Although drones are termed 'unmanned' aerial vehicles, every operation requires a team of at least three humans and sometimes a team of fifteen or more. Examining the material and social practices that constitute drone operations demonstrates that advances in automation and robotics do not so much do away with the human but rather obscure the ways in which human labor and social relations are reconfigured.