American Studies

A Google search for "anti-drone clothing" mostly and predictably yields an array of t-shirts printed with slogans protesting drone warfare. But the results also include something far more interesting: Adam Harvey's Stealth Wear line, garments "fabricated with silver-plated fabric that reflects thermal radiation, enabling the wearer to avert overhead thermal surveillance."¹ These shirts, burqas, hijabs, and hoodies muffle the heat signature of the human body, presumably making it undetectable to the drones loitering above. This apparel is designed to foil drone operators by rendering the wearer unidentifiable as a human, and consequently invisible as a target, thereby breaking the circuit of recognizability on which drone surveillance and warfare fundamentally depend. Within this circuit, to be recognizable as a living human is to be recognizable as a target, and hence to be endangered.

While Stealth Wear operates on the assumption that a human rendered unrecognizable as such will be protected by this type of invisibility, much antidrone activism presumes that humans who are recognizable as such will be protected by their visibility. Anti-drone activists often seek to emphasize the humanness of the people who are killed by drone strikes and call for drone operators, as well as the states and militaries who prosecute drone warfare, to recognize that humanness. The anti-drone faith in recognition is grounded in two conceits. The first is that drone technologies—with their remoteness, mediation, and putative similarity to video games—dehumanize their targets and thus encourage and facilitate wanton violence on the part of their operators. The second, and corollary, notion follows: if drone operators recognized the [End Page 93] beings on their displays as human, they would be unable or unwilling to kill them. Both of these premises, I suggest, are faulty. Indeed, there is increasing evidence against them, including the high rate of PTSD among drone operators, which suggests they are keenly aware of the consequences of their actions. But the figure of the oblivious drone operator who needs only to be enlightened persists in popular culture, as well as in activist and scholarly critiques of drone warfare. Consequently, anti-drone work often proceeds as an attempt to disabuse drone operators of their supposed ignorance through an emphasis the humanness of their targets.

According to a March 2019 BBC count, the Trump administration approved 2243 strikes during its first two years, while working steadily to relax reporting requirements about drone casualties.² Critics were already dismayed by the Obama administration's embrace of drone warfare, and this form of violence persists, sprawls, and sometimes intensifies, with no sign that it will abate (or that the American public will lose the appetite for it). In short, the durability and entrenched nature of drone warfare suggest a need to rethink prevailing critical frameworks for opposing it. In this article, I query the limits of recognition as a strategy of anti-drone resistance. I begin with a consideration of the politics of recognition and humanity in drone warfare. This overview serves as the foundation for my subsequent exploration of approaches to recognition operative in three artifacts of drone warfare: a 2014 report from the Stimson Center Task Force on US Drone Policy; a public art installation in Pakistan called Not a Bug Splat; and the playful photographic meditation on drone subjectivity by the IOCOSE collective, "Drone Selfies." I conclude with a consideration of the emerging awareness of PTSD in drone operators and the economies and politics of recognition operative within it. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the emphasis on recognition amounts to a misidentification of the conditions by which drone warfare proceeds and, moreover, of the means by which it might be resisted.