Is drone becoming the new “apparatus of domination”?: Battlefield surveillance in the twenty-first century warfare

Abstract

The paper looks at the military use of burgeoning technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in designing the visual regime of the drone as a tool for control of combat efficiency in twenty-first-century warfare. The author posits his analysis in critical theory and critical war/military studies with focus on the operationally relevant use of technical properties of the visual regime of drone observed through a wealth of video material uploaded to YouTube and related to the ongoing war in Ukraine. While many analyses delve into the combined practices of intelligence gathering, targeting, and killing aimed at the enemy, the author investigates how recent combat practices unveil the potential for an emerging role of drone surveillance: the scrutinization of combat performance of one’s own soldiers. In the age of a highly professionalized and industrialized warfare, inherent to the politics of military interventionism aimed at maintaining liberal peace across the globe, the shift towards a pervasive control over the combat “assembly line” reconstitutes technological character of the drone so that it becomes an apparatus of domination. The author concludes that the drone as mobile platform for surveillance displays hidden potentials to reinforce the existing relations of domination and cautions that the advent of nano-drones could socially constitute far more intrusive and intimate control of ground troops.

Keywords

• drone surveillance
• panopticism
• domination
• soldiering
• military technology
• critical war studies
• war in ukraine