Becoming Unmanned

Abstract

Forty-nine nations currently have UAV (unmanned autonomous vehicle, or unmanned aerial vehicle) technology. Autonomous technology could potentially alter both the conduct of warfighting itself as well as our understanding of war as a gendered activity. Using drones or ‘robots’ could affect the activities of war through outsourcing killing to technology and removing the aggressors’ physical bodies from the battlefield. Drones could also affect the gendered construct of war as the traditional dyad of protector/protected is altered: a system in which men have traditionally protected women and children is replaced by a new system in which machines protect humans. Analysts like Haraway might interpret these developments as an important step towards posthumanity where man-machine as well as gender distinctions are overcome. However, traditional gendered concepts of warfare have a long history and it is not inevitable that new technologies will change gendered activities, relations and views of war. Instead, the discourse of new technologies as expressed by US military planners and technology developers currently reinforces rather than downplays gender distinctions. Robots themselves have been constructed as subordinate, as a new type of nature which is dominated or feminized, while ‘cyborg soldiers’ with technological implants are constructed as hypermasculine.

Keywords:

• technology
• conflict
• gender
• military
• masculinities
• drone

Notes on contributor

Mary Manjikian is an Assistant Professor at the Robertson School of Government at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Her research interests include the politics and discourse of security threats, as well as the politics of cyberspace. Her books include Apocalypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End (Lexington Books, 2012); Threat Talk: The Comparative Politics of Internet Addiction (Ashgate Publishers, 2012); and The Securitization of Property Squatting in Europe (Routledge, 2013).

Notes

1 Thus, in a recent radio interview, Singer (2011) quotes a leading newspaper editor in Lebanon who is complaining about unmanned Israeli Ghost drones patrolling over Lebanese air space. The Lebanese official notes that: ‘This is just another sign of the cold-hearted cruel Israelis and Americans who are also cowards, because they send out machines to fight us. They don't want to fight us like real men’.

2 I am indebted to several of the active duty military students from the Army, Navy and Marines who participated in my terrorism seminar last year for sharing these observations as well as additional anecdotes and experiences related to women's roles in military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. These individuals have asked not to be identified by name or unit. My thanks go as well to the three anonymous reviewers who read this work in its initial form and pushed me to go beyond merely raising these issues to putting forth an argument about their effects.

3 Here, either ‘warrior’ or ‘warfighter’ appear to be the military's own gender neutral pronoun of choice, since neither explicitly names the individual who fights as male. This can be contrasted with the term ‘soldier’ which is more often used by feminist analysts. One can argue that while all of these terms are technically gender-neutral, each in fact calls to mind other intertextual referents which are not, since historically soldiers, warriors and warfighters have all been male. Furthermore, the term ‘warrior’ invokes images of rescue and protection, therefore causing the hearer to think of the duality between the active rescuer and the passive victim, thus rendering it the least gender neutral of all three supposedly gender neutral terms. (Further, a ‘soldier’ can engage in a variety of duties whereas a warrior is presumably engaged in combat. A Request for Proposals sent out to engineering firms, asking them to develop new forms of military equipment, might thus speak of ‘equipping the warrior’ or ‘equipping the warfighter’ through developing new combat equipment.) Nevertheless, it is the term I will use in this work, since it is the term used in most current military writing and since for the most part I am speaking of those who engage in combat.

4 Here there is precedent for suggesting that gender constructs can change as a result of changes in the mission of the military. For example, Khalili (2011) argues that there is a gender dichotomy created between the kinetic activities of war which are gendered as male, and the ‘softer’ counterinsurgency (DIME) activities which may be coded as feminine.

5 British academics, for example, find the naming of the drone as a type of ‘unmanned weaponry’ to be humorous, since in British English, to be unmanned means to be castrated rather than to be without a pilot. (I am indebted to Noel Sharkey for this observation.)

6 Similarly, Cristina Masters (2005: 118) notes the ways in which Saddam Hussein was portrayed as feminine in caricatures during the Gulf War – emphasizing the notion that it is not merely the soldier but America itself which is masculine, in contrast to its feminine opponent.

7 Available at http://www.army.mil/

8 Here one can consider the ways in which the availability of internet technologies provides women with the freedom to combine careers with family through the ability to work from home, while at the same time supporting the objectification of women through providing new forms of pornography and new technologies for viewing them more frequently and in more settings. Dempsey (2009) describes this new technology divide.

9 Carol Cohn (2000) describes the ways in which the discourse of differences in physical abilities still provides soldiers a justification for supporting or practicing gender discrimination.