Automating Violence: A History of United States Drone Warfare, 1900-1970

Drones may appear a recent technology whose future may have just barely started. But drone technology’s development and the rationales for their adoption extend back over a century ago to weapons called “pilotless airplanes” during World War I. Historians have examined the deployment of drones in military campaigns, the history of drones as technical systems, science fiction as a cultural inspiration for engineers, and the institutional machinations required to fund new war machines. Philosophers and jurists debate the ethics and legality of conducting violence through remote control. Peace activists, whistleblowing drone operators, and interfaith coalitions have formed a burgeoning anti-machine war movement. Yet, amongst the dynamic discussions surrounding drones, the fantasies and anxieties that animated the technology’s adoption during the twentieth century remain largely unexamined.

My dissertation offers a cultural history of U.S. drone warfare during the twentieth century. Cultural discourses and practices proved key to the policy formations, military planning, and political economy of the American way of war’s increasing turn to mechanization. I present the military use of drones as a key, yet understudied, part of the larger history of U.S. machine warfare that relied on superior productive power to overwhelm enemies with technological means. Airpower became central to U.S. war-making during the era of the world wars, the Cold War, and beyond. Drones, in turn, developed into an ever-more important “asset” in the U.S. aerial arsenal before reaching a central place in present day pursuits of war.

Drone technology’s ascent owes less to its utility in war than to the cultural projections and fears that surrounded pilots in air war. Technical bugs often rendered drones less than mechanically stellar. Despite functional flaws, replacing pilot with machine in war became attractive precisely because human agents consistently seemed limited instruments of war in popular and policy discourse. Soldiers always died in war. Many became security risks when captured and tortured for information. Some turned against the war they were supposed to fight. Grieving families politicized their personal loss. War made U.S. audiences anxious their men were not “man enough” to achieve victory. Remote-controllable drones seemed to solve these problems, by sparing American lives, by rendering war less visible, and by removing men deemed incapable of war from the site of combat, thereby ‘depoliticizing’ war and saving armed conflict as an instrument of policy.

The history of drone adoption is not a teleological story of linear technological progression, but rather a narrative of fits and starts, with differing actors operating in differing contexts imagining war machines to accomplish differing goals. Current claims to a “humane” form of war through “surgical strike” capabilities and effective surveillance do not sum up the history of the drone. The drone has long been used as a means of mass destruction including chemical war, nuclear war, and multitudes of missile strikes.