The Russia/Ukraine war will no doubt mark the beginning of the age of drone warfare in earnest. Reuters reports that Ukraine has orders placed for 300,000 drones of various types and 100,000 are being sent immediately into combat. Russia is set to produce 32,000 drones per year while also currently buying in bulk directly from Iran. The meme that goes around is that a slight young woman sitting in an office block somewhere uses a Nintendo joypad to kill brave men in mud hundreds of miles away, and there’s not much they can do about it. Drone warfare gives off the whiff of dishonour and underhandedness. Still, it is difficult to say exactly why. After all, is dropping bombs out of an airplane or launching ballistic missiles or machine-gunning men desperately climbing out of a trench any more honourable?
Eighty years after Dresden and Nagasaki, can we still even be shocked or depressed by the realities of industrial, mechanised warfare in which armies and entire populations are mere quanta to be erased from a spreadsheet using the “strikethrough” function?
Nevertheless, seeing the realities of drone warfare via the grainy footage on social media left me at least with an uneasy feeling, but one that I could not pinpoint or explain sufficiently or adequately. Typically, such footage consists of soldiers of either side milling about in the oddly featureless Ukrainian landscape and then being hit from a distance or up close by drones or explosives fired from drones. In May 2023, footage was taken of a Russian soldier surrendering to a drone; we bore witness to the fear, dread, and utter helplessness of the man in the face of a remote-controlled gadget the size of a football.
Hellbound and Down 