Shiloh Krupar, 2022, “Introduction,” Review Forum of Katherine Chandler’s Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare Antipode, March 11 (with Alison Williams, Geoff Boyce, Craig Jones, and Kate Chandler)
Review Forum Introduction excerpt:
“Bald Eagle Wins Duel with Drone.” In summer 2020 a bald eagle attacked a drone operated by Michigan state’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE), tearing off the propeller and causing the device’s plummet 162 feet through the air into Lake Michigan (Lewis 2020). An environmental analyst and drone pilot had been using a DJI Phantom 4 – one of the most popular mass-produced, ready-to-fly drones sold in huge numbers around the world – to map shoreline erosion and collect other data helpful to communities that face rising water levels. The agency’s humorous news release about the loss of the $950 drone suggested the eagle was provoked by hunger, territoriality, or “bad spelling” – referring to the agency’s acronym “EGLE” – and was subsequently shared online several hundred thousand times within a few days (MI Environment 2020; Moore 2020). Various large raptors have been documented attacking drones. In fact, the penchant of eagles to attack drones has been appropriated in the developing field of drone defence, with several military and police programmes training eagles to dispatch with drones. The Dutch national police were the first to use birds of prey as a counter-drone measure in the “Guard From Above” programme, followed by the French military. A UK programme sought to employ raptors to guard prisons from contraband-carrying drones. A US Air Force-funded study by Oxford zoology researchers has considered ways that peregrine falcons’ approach to intercepting their targets – similar to the guidance system used by visually directed missiles – could help down rogue drones (Bachman 2017; Darack 2017; France24 2017; Moore 2020). The ultimately short-lived Dutch attack eagle squadron created a media sensation, propelling a genre of online videos of birds attacking drones.2 Amidst this celebratory mediatised standoff of animals versus drones also came harrowing news of an anti-drone golden eagle diving at and clawing the back of a five-year-old girl at a picnic by the Saint-Antoine chapel in the Pyrénées during the Spring school holidays. Forcing an official apology from the French air force, the attack error was attributed to the eagle confusing the girl with a drone because she was wearing white.
I start with this vignette to introduce Kate Chandler’s Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare because it complicates assumptions about technological dominance. The slippages and antagonisms between eagle/EGLE, animal/eagle-astechnical system, drone-target/girl, and targeted attack/deterrence underscore Chandler’s outstanding study of the error-prone, limited, and often strikingly ridiculous course of technological systems that tie machine autonomy to national protection – or, in the case of EGLE, humanitarian-oriented territorialised care that encroached on actual eagle turf and succumbed to a watery grave. Chandler’s book Unmanning focuses on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems – “drones” – as a key window onto the technologically-driven global political systems of the 20th and 21st centuries. The volume stands alone in the mounting literature on drones for illuminating the recurrent failures of drone systems yet ongoing political project of unmanning, and for dramatising the way drones in practice have diverged from the drone in ideology and theory within a much longer history of contingencies than contemporary debates on drone warfare allow. Chandler challenges not only how drone systems are interpreted as apolitical, technocratic, historically inevitable systems, but how US empire relies on “technological progress” as cover for ongoing asymmetrical colonial violence.