Drone futures

Alien versus predator

Mediations of the borderlands present security as a dynamic of predator in pursuit of prey that terminates in death or defeat of the target. Defeat is retreat or capture, arrest and deportation of the migrating body. National Geographic’s Border Wars describes this dynamic succinctly. The borderlands is a “kind of battleground” where a “high stakes game of cat and mouse is played out between those who want to cross the border illegally and those whose job it is to stop them.” Drones are part of the opening credits in a montage of the various technologies employed along the border to gain advantage and leverage Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) goals. The thunderous and highly visible black hawk helicopters represent overt surveillance, while the drones, quiet and unseen, represent covert operations, all of which underscore US omnipotence and omniscience. As proxy border patrol, drones are more capable agents and predators who track, target, and capture the migrant in a cat and mouse game that might be more aptly called alien versus predator—in reference to the blockbuster Hollywood science fiction film of the same name. Popular cultural accounts of the borderlands corroborate and conspire with US state discourse about the region that poses agents of the law against migrants as invidious or violent bandits and outlaws.

The drone signals a division between hunter and hunted, where the latter is a condition of racialization and emblematic of predatory techniques and technologies that target vulnerable populations through the militarization of immigration control. Global inequity follows the drone. The division of the world into Global South and North is marked by a separation between predators and prey: those who have armed drones and those who do not. This divide is managed, in part, by Washington, apparent in the development of new laser technology capable of eviscerating rogue drones to maintain asymmetry in the field of drone warfare (Adams, 2017, n.p.).

Drone surveillance at US borders is not about discovering “patterns of life,” as it is when it seeks out alleged terrorists in war zones, but rather, it anticipates patterns of migration, and more specifically, it seeks to reshape these patterns. Along with the entire security apparatus at the border, drones shepherd migrants to dangerous and inhospitable terrain and expose them to death. Migrants are not simply rerouted, demobilized, and denatured, they are captured as image and information that is fed into an integrated tactical infrastructure. Borderland future fictions reveal the obliterating potential of information or of death by data through future plans for predictive algorithms that automate target recognition and classification.

While the current drone technology originated in Israel, it quickly migrated to the US and the latter has dominated the market and claims responsibility for setting the ethical terms of use. It is the ultimate sign of US hegemony and imperial overreach, capable of crossing borders at will and without consequence. The deployment of these robots to the US–Mexico borderlands is a logical extension of the militarization of this zone. Drones, also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) if they are armed and remotely piloted aerial vehicles (RPAs), are piloted remotely from the ground, often very far away from their flight path. Drones are the master symbol of the surveillance apparatus at the border comprised of fixed, mobile, portable, and scalable pieces within a multiagency security regime. They are one of the technologies that the CBP describe as a “force multiplier.” Moreover, the US military prefers to use variations of the term “unmanned” rather than “drone” to highlight and forecast a future of complete automation (Martin and Steuter, 2017: xi).

The paradigmatic border drone, the Predator B, is empty of features, it has no anthropomorphic elements—though its original name “albatross” indicates its animistic origins. The Predator is unarmed, though a 2010 “concept of operations” report by the CBP indicated possibilities for a “payload upgrade”—to be discussed at greater length later (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2010: 63). It is smooth and featureless, neutered, giving it the appearance of blank and anesthetic neutrality. It looks like a plane but one devoid of exposed functional parts. The Predator drone embodies the fantasy of an antiseptic machine without parts, a screen or tabula rasa.

The southwest border drone operations began in 2004 as a “pilot study” that was deemed successful and thus extended to the Caribbean, gulf, and northern border regions (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2012a: 2). Along the border UAVs are used to supplement intelligence gathering and increase “situational awareness” for border patrol agents. The Department of Homeland Security in 2012 declared that drones along the border would provide “command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability to complement crewed aircraft and watercraft and ground interdiction agents.” Drones are deemed adjuncts rather than agents of the law; they extract information and enable the tracking of bodies. Their deployment is symbolic, amplifying the image and perception of US power. Air Force officer David Deptula describes their strategic use; “the real advantage of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to project power without projecting vulnerability” (Chamayou, 2013: 12). This projection of power is abetted in media depictions, locating border surveillance in Western lore that draws on an aura and historical era of uncontested US preeminence, particularly in the documentary television shows “Border Wars,” “Border Security: USA,” and “Bordertown: Laredo.”

Drones are part of a sophisticated integration of surveillance technologies that includes watch towers, helicopters, night vision scopes, radar, and a number of other technologies under development by a conglomerate of border security companies clustered in the University of Arizona Science and Technology Park, or Tech Park. The US–Mexico border is a security laboratory for the rest of the United States and the world that represents billions of dollars in corporate investment and government contracts (Miller, 2016). Border reality shows are part of a propaganda machine for these technologies that showcase the advanced state of the art of border security. These productions are signs of the expansion of surveillance culture into everyday life in a manner that supports and justifies the consolidation of the security state. There is a counter-archive of post-drone surveillance storylines that resist or expose the violence of drone futures, including Alex Rivera’s (2008) Sleep Dealer, Ban Lethal Autonomous Weapons’ (2017) short film Slaughterbots, Black Mirror’s episode “Hated in the Nation” (Brooker, 2016). In each of these productions, the drone is a cultural node in a global security complex capable of targeting, classifying, and eviscerating dissident operations.

In the United States, the use of drones was expanded as part of overall border defense in the Secure Fence Act of 2006, itself an outcome of the rewriting of border policy in “Operation Blockade/Hold the Line” that began in 1993 and was a template for and precursor of “Operation Gatekeeper” in 1994 and “Operation Rio Grande” in 1997 (Dunn, 2009). These policies shifted from apprehension to diversion and deterrence within the logic of preemption, from agents on the ground to mediated surveillance technologies, sensors and drones, and physical barriers (Dunn, 2009: 59–61). The new strategy, officially described as “prevention through deterrence,” shuttles migrants away from urban areas and into more hostile terrain and exposes them to dangerous conditions that often result in death (Dunn, 2009: 2). Since these policies were initiated migrant deaths have increased dramatically (Nevins, 2002). Migrants are pushed into the hinterland, invisible to urban border populations and mainstream media, their deaths are attributed to the risks associated with the journey not the risks to which they are exposed by policy. The drone oversees this scenario, it is part of the machinery of the state that determines who may be admitted to the United States and who is barred entry and shepherded further into the desert to face death or defeat.

Drones mark a new era in what Timothy Dunn (2009) describes as the ideology of the low intensity warfare along the border that was designed to regulate and shape the flow of migrants, rather than prevent it. Dunn describes development of the militarization of the border region from 1979–1992 in the use of military ideology and the entire military apparatus and arsenal within an ongoing warfare that required unprecedented coordination across military and policing units.

This era of low intensity conflict created the conditions for the production of a unique surveillance cultural formation, one that is highly mediated and deeply integrated. By 1940 the INS is transferred from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice and takes on the character of other agencies under this umbrella like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), becoming more secretive, deceptive, and propagandistic. Border patrol, by World War II, is a national security issue. After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security centralized national security agencies under its aegis, linking domestic and foreign security.

Timothy Dunn (2009) describes “prevention through deterrence” as marking a major transformation in border policy and practice, one that constitutes the basis of border security, and by extension, national security. Deterrence was the basis of national security during the Cold War, which morphed into preemption after 11 September 2001. As a doctrine, aspects of deterrence were rehearsed along the border before it was reworked and deployed as foreign policy. Border policy is moving quickly toward officially enacting the logic of preemption, which it currently deploys in unauthorized rogue attacks or the preemptive strikes of individual CBP agents who, following their Texas Ranger predecessors, shoot first and ask questions later.

The border is deemed a frontline and staging ground of the “war on terror.” For Cato (2007), former Senior Counsel at the US Department of Justice, terrorists “weaponize” immigration, targeting the US–Mexico border:

In the end, illegal immigration and terrorism, like water, seek the path of least resistance. The Southwest border, with its vast openness and proximity to transnational crime groups, hostile nation-states, and powerful highways, is the singular approach of a terrorist into America. Illegal entry—once perceived as the least threatening means of terrorist infiltration—now presents the greatest threat in the universe of risks. (Cato, 2007: 6)

All forms of immigration are deemed part of the “universe of risks” since, in a specious argument, “immigration, secure borders, and terrorism are linked, not because all immigrants are terrorists, but because nearly all terrorists in the West have been immigrants” (Cato, 2007: 2). In this logic, immigration itself is the risk that demands greater surveillance through more rigidly defined borders, tighter information management, and preemptive control measures.

The Border Patrol Strategic plan for the years of 2012–2016 adds a new dimension to the logic of preemptive action at the border through big data or integrated information regimes. This plan identifies three core pillars, “information, integration, and rapid response,” that mark a rhetorical turn from being “risk-based” toward efforts to “get ahead” through “intelligence driven” tactics (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2012b: 4). The primary aim to “get ahead,” “be predictive and proactive” through information emerges from the policy precursors of “Operation Hold the Line” and “Operation Gatekeeper” within a post-9/11 “threat environment.”

The 2020 Border Patrol Strategic plan foregrounds preemptive principles while responding to post Great Recession concerns about economic solvency and stability and expanding the scope and focus of border security to the entire United States. The 2020 plan seeks to protect US trade interests while expanding the territory of the borderlands security plan to areas “outside the U.S. border, at the borders and into interior regions of the country.” The “zone of security” permeates all regions in a manner that transcends “the physical border of the United States” (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2016: 3). Following the shift in security priorities in the former plan, from migration control to risk management, this plan intends to “maximize the use of information and intelligence to analyze risk, prioritize threats, and anticipate emerging trends” (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2016: 10). The decisive shift to a future-oriented model through data that enables the anticipation of threats and the mapping of possible threat futures, puts these plans and their ideological orientations into the realm of the speculative. The arc of this speculative logic justifies the preemptive action of aggression. Such is the plan presented in the 2010 Customs and Border Protections report to Congress called “Concept of Operations for U.S. Customs and Border Protections (CBP) Predator B Unmanned Aircraft system.” This report outlines future and “far term” possibilities for the border drone program, one significant plan to “increase mission effectiveness” is in the plan to automate and weaponize drones, enabling them to autonomously seek, identify, and obliterate targets. The report, requested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under the Freedom of Information Act, was released, highly redacted, for public consumption in 2012. It contains the following section, titled “Payloads,” about the future plan for armed drones that bears citing at length.

Mission sensor upgrades could include improving SAR [Synthetic Aperture Radar] point target resolution to well below one foot, a simultaneous SAR-GMTI/MMTI [Ground Moving Target Indication/Maritime Moving Target Indicator] mode and advanced ATR/ATC algorithms [Automatic Target Recognition/Automatic Target Classification]. Visual and IR [Infrared] band sensors will be updated with new generation arrays. The addition of an Electronic Support Measures suite with specific emitter identification will increase mission effectiveness by enabling the UAS to independently perform the SDCIP [Surveillance, Detection, Classification, Identification, Prosecution] Identification task. Additional payload upgrades could include expendables or non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize TOIs [Targets of Interest] (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2010: 63).

The plan is clear, it includes arming the UAVs to “increase mission effectiveness,” which includes not just identifying but prosecuting the target of interest. The armed UAV in this future projection is presciently dramatized in Sleep Dealer in which a character is targeted as an “aqua-terrorist” for resisting the privatization of water resources. The wages of not just arming but equipping the drone with advanced Automatic Target Recognition (ATR)/Automatic Target Classification (ATC) algorithms is played out in the cautionary film Slaughterbots, uploaded to YouTube 12 November 2017, by Stuart Russell and the activist A.I. group at the University of California at Berkeley (Ban Lethal Autonomous Weapons, 2017), Ban Lethal Autonomous Weapons, and funded by the Future of Life Institute (FLI; The Economist , 2017: 71–72). Indeed the major difference between prevention and preemption is the main plot point of this short film in which activists are preemptively murdered through drones acting on the part of unknown and unidentifiable entities.

Brian Massumi (2015) neatly delineates the epistemic and ontological difference between prevention and preemption, according them distinct imaginaries and futurities. Prevention operates in a more stable order, threats are known and knowable their causes are identified and might be neutralized along a linear causal course. Prevention does not have an internal logic, the means to prevent are contingent upon the causes and, as a result, remedies are applied from the outside. For Massumi (2015); “[p]revention has no proper object, no operational sphere of its own, and no proprietary logic. It is derivative. It is a means toward a given end. Because of this, preventive measures are not self-sustaining. They must be applied, by an outside source. They are not an organizing force in their own right. They run on borrowed power” (p. 6). Deterrence moves in where prevention fails. It is a procedure triggered by the urgency and expedience demanded of an emergency. The threat met by deterrence is not emergent, it is fully organized and realized as danger with a “menacing futurity” that must be met with equally menacing destruction as mutually assured destruction (MAD). MAD is a “balance of terror” that creates equilibrium in equally developed systems of defense and destruction. This system has an internal logic and energetic balance. “It becomes self-propelling” (Massumi, 2015: 7). Thusly, an epistemological condition becomes a mode of being or an ontological condition and an operative logic. The future effect energizes and provides the causal mechanism in the present. It is singular and monolithic and presupposes equality between opposing forces.

Preemption goes beyond deterrence. It is a strategy deployed when deterrence cannot work because the threat is unknowable and thus cannot be overcome, remediated, or neutralized. The opponent is likewise unknowable, uncertain, and not subject to logical inference. The epistemology of preemption is defined by uncertainty and the ontology is unspecified, as is the enemy. The only certainty is the surprise attack. The logic of preemption emerges within a permanent condition and atmosphere of threat with an “ontological status of indeterminate potentiality” (Massumi, 2015: 10). There exists an imbalance between opposing sides from which asymmetrical warfare emerges, resulting in the “becoming terrorist” of each side. The operative logic of preemption traces the future arc of border policing as an exemplary practice of the security state as “becoming narcoterrorist.” The spectacular displays of violence and mayhem attributed to narcotraffickers and cultivated in borderland narcocultura is matched by CBP in the deployment of omniscient and omnipresent aerial robots and the spectacle of the multidimensional surveillance apparatus. Drones, though unarmed, are nonetheless spectacular and extravagant displays that are haunted by the specter of past carnage in foreign wars.

Migrants are targeted as enemies of war. They are exposed to death, rendered invisible and silent, denied privacy, and subject to representational slippage into a category of threat occupied by terrorists and drug traffickers. This collapse of boundaries between migrant and terrorist/trafficker emanates from war, particularly in the rhetoric in the war on drugs as it dovetails with the war against terrorism. The migrant is both criminal, as “illegal,” and enemy as “narcoterrorist.” The war was never against “drugs” but against drug source nations in the Southern hemisphere and their representatives. Drugs gained an ontology that collapsed with that of their mode of human transport so that every migrant is treated as a potential carrier of some invasive narcotic strain.

There is a slippage between mediated narcoculture and drug traffic–related violence along the border. Stories of narcotraffickers are epic and marked by unpredictability, savagery, and cold displays of sadism. Some notable examples in US media are the characters of Francisco Flores also known as Frankie Flowers in Traffic (2000), the Salamanca cousins in Breaking Bad (AMC 2008-2013), the various traffickers in Sicario (2015) and more generally in Mexican narcocultura in cine negro or cine fronterizo and in narcocorridos that mythologize drug kingpins as bloodthirsty renegades. These depictions stand in for and amplify actual events, providing justification for more extreme CBP measures against “narcoterrorists” in drone warfare.

The logic of border warfare, its unifying principles, emanates from US–Mexico borderlands history. In particular, the model of “preemptive manhunting” or what would become “targeted assassinations” of Israeli military strategy, originated in the United States involvement with the battles of the Mexican revolution. These strategies diverge from warfare as comprised battle lines and fronts. General John J. Pershing’s military objective was to capture the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, who, in US Western and popular cultural lore more generally, is the original “bandit.” The Mexican bandit persists in emblematizing lawlessness, immorality, and the disruption of Anglo US culture. The bandit also represents the evasion of law and normative methods of military application of force. The small, mobile groups of revolutionaries formed lithe and flexible units that could readily escape capture. For this reason, Villa remained elusive and Pershing failed in his objective to capture the revolutionary leader. This failure was instructive for the US military who adapted their strategies to become as mobile and flexible as the revolutionaries and later, narcoterrorists, in order to launch surprise targeted strikes. Asymmetrical warfare is premised on an imbalance of power, knowledge, and control. And this vital workshop, developed along the border, was globalized, then migrated back to the region before finding its way deeper into the US heartland. George A. Crawford in a report from the Joint Special Operations University describes this as “manhunting” in which there is a predator and the preyed upon (Chamayou, 2013: 33). This strategy of counterinsurgency through robot attacks “deprives the enemy of an enemy,” creating a new kind of asymmetrical warfare (Chamayou, 2013: 62).

Target recognition

A common refrain in border security storylines is the idea that moving bodies cannot be positively verified as either migrants or narcotraffickers/terrorists. In Border Wars the Predator B is rolled out as advanced technology, “battle-tested in Iraq and Afghanistan” and “nearly invisible to radar,” that can pick up human form on camera from 9 miles above the ground but cannot distinguish types of migrants, unlike agents on the scene. The migrants are located through a complex and integrated system of tracking and surveillance. The drone is adjunct to boots on the ground, frontier cowboy types, skilled in tracking and locating “fugitives” through their knowledge of the terrain and typical routes of transit. Each mobile body is preemptively treated as a possible narcoterrorist, often to the disappointment of CBP agents. Or as the narrator of Border Wars cynically intones; “This is what securing the border means. Using four agents, two jeeps, two ATVs, and one helicopter for approximately four hours to track down three tired and thirsty men who came to this country looking for work.”

Border Wars (2010–2015) describes the Predator B as a “silent invisible killing machine” but revises this assertion by noting that “on the border its job is only to watch and tell agents on the ground what it sees.” Yet, as the “Concept of Operations” CBP report, cited earlier, asserts, this is possibly a temporary state of affairs prior to a future “payload upgrade.” Border policing and immigration control prevention through deterrence is more accurately deterrence as a precursor to the preemption of robot warfare. Drones detect emergent threats but in the logic of preemption, detection is not sufficient as a merely defensive gesture. Defending the border does not protect it, preemption demands offense. Action as offensive brings about the nascent threat, justifying the strike.

As migrants move they are deterred through exposure to dangers that limit their survival. At the border, deterrence describes how mobility is managed in order to move migrants into ever more precarious circumstances and ultimately, through death, prevent their entry to the United States. The logic described by Massumi (2015) works in reverse or via a different attribution of meaning to each term in a rhetorical gloss. According to the policy language, deterrence precedes prevention, the latter is a sanitized alibi for the former. More plainly, deterrence along the border is death. Prevention encodes the violent process of migrant elimination through death, sickness, or defeat and retreat. Or as Jason Mark (2017), editor-in-chief of Sierra, notes; “The Border Patrol’s strategy is calculated homicide disguised as immigration policy” (p. 4).

Good drone/bad drone

Borderland drones are sublime objects invested with the fantasy of a secure and internally coherent entity whose desires for security are readily met, against a reality of the insecurity of open borders (Salter and Mutlu, 2011). In much of the literature about the ethical considerations of drone use, there is a split between good and bad drones, concisely evoked in the Facebook group “Good drone/Bad drone” devoted to diverse perspectives on UAVs. This split resonates with Melanie Klein’s (1946) similar discussion of good/bad objects that either gratify and thus nurture or frustrate and threaten to annihilate (p. 99). This schema evokes a context of conflict complicit with the war zone habitat of the drone while it evokes a moral dilemma. In the psychic developmental arc of the good/bad object, the subject successfully fends off the forces of annihilation to achieve the balance and stability of integration of good with bad. US popular culture neutralizes ambivalence about drones by privileging the entertainment and humanitarian drone over its murderous counterpart. Or if the latter appears, as in the science fiction B-movie Drone Wars (2016), the drones are ultimately defeated in the assertion of human primacy and intellectual superiority over intelligent machines. The splitting of good humanitarian, entertainment, consumer, and commercial robots from their “bad” deployment as killing machines obviates questions concerning the military origins of this technology. The entire theater of war along the border exposes the false splitting of the drone along affective and moral lines and undermines its assumed neutrality.

For Martin Heidegger (1977), if we regard technology as something “neutral” we remain unaware of the “essence of technology” (p. 288). It is not merely a tool instrumentalized to some end but a “human activity.” Technology is the entire system of thinking that generates it and the interconnected objects that comprise it; “The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance—in Latin, an instrumentum” (Heidegger, 1977: 288). It asserts dominion over human thought, replacing it with practical and mechanized forms of thinking.

The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth. Thus where enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense (Heidegger, 1977: 309).

Enframing or technological framing signals human subjugation to technology. The idea of a “lethal machine” might allude to war machines and certainly alludes to atomic power. It would not be too far afield to locate the lethal robot as the origin of the end of human thought, thus prophesying the dangers of artificial intelligence. Heidegger (1966) warns of the perils of untamed nuclear ambitions; “In what way can we tame and direct the unimaginably vast amounts of atomic energies, and so secure mankind against the danger that these gigantic energies suddenly—even without military actions—break out somewhere, ‘run away’ and destroy everything?” (p. 51). The anxiety about the nuclear age, like that of the information age, is about the automation of weaponry, that the latter might escape control through a “run away” mechanism like the cultivation of the autonomy of intelligence. This is powerfully conveyed in the recent dystopic science fiction film Ex Machina (2015) and the short film, Slaughterbots, mentioned earlier—in each robots gain autonomy and destroy humans.

Technological innovations are so dazzling that they render us unable to confront them meditatively; “we even marvel at the daring of scientific research, without thinking about it” (Heidegger, 1966: 52). Heidegger’s warning about technology follows logically from his privileging of a particularly grounded form of being, emblematized by the peasant rooted to the land that was readily co-opted by a racist ideology under the banner of “blood and soil.” His personal commitments to Nazism, though short-lived, sully his legacy as a prescient thinker of the various potentials of technology. His student, Hannah Arendt, would take his legacy in another direction in her writing on the origins and operations of totalitarianism.

There is a prophetic tone to Heidegger’s writing about technology. He suggests we shape our rapport to technology as something adjacent to being, not core to it, lest we become adjuncts of technology and subordinate to it. His essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” published in 1954, is drawn from his Bremen lectures, delivered in 1949, where he ponders a complex series of questions about the technological age. This is followed by an address in 1955 about the impact of technology on forms of meditative thinking. In this discourse on thinking, he prophecies that “the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” The remedy to this diminution of thought is “releasement toward things” and “openness to mystery” (Heidegger, 1966: 56). It is this form of human contemplation, of thinking for itself and not for some practical or instrumental end that is not common practice in models of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The extravagance of drones or Mexico must pay

Drones are an extravagant luxury, an object of consumer and professional desire that promises to enhance human ability, increasing mobility and expanding perception, or “situational awareness” in military jargon. Everyone wants drones. Legal scholar Amanda Porter (2017) notes, ironically, about the surge in drone sales at the end of 2016; “What do children, adults, photographers, farmers, utilities, agriculture, oil and manufacturing companies, and law enforcement have in common? They all asked for a drone for Christmas” (p. 351).

The drone is a sign of US extravagance, particularly along the US–Mexico border in relation to the Predator drone, a vestige and a totem of the planned disequilibrium of asymmetrical warfare as unilateral warfare (Chamayou, 2013: 13). The Predator drone has been targeted as a wasteful expenditure at the border, the squandering of the surplus of empire. A Customs and Border Patrol report found that post-drone deployment operational expenses doubled. They are deemed excessive, fallible, and unnecessary to border patrol operations. David Olive, one time chief of staff for former US representative Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark) likens the use of drones along the border to using a Humvee as a taxi cab; “You know what, it will work, it will do the job, but there are so many other things that will do the job better and cheaper” (Sledge, 2013: n.p.). In 2014, the entire drone fleet was grounded following the mechanical failure of a CBP Predator B drone, raising questions and initiating public debate about the cost benefit of the drone program.

The idea of drone excess is a useful point of entry for examining the status of these robots in the borderlands imaginary. Excess, for Bataille (1988), is profitless expenditure that disrupts the ordinary, usually as sacrifice and loss. It is, “a loss that must be as great as possible in order for that activity to take on its true meaning” (p. 118). Drones are a symbol of power for their utility but are marked much more for their excess as signs of loss of the capital invested in them. Yet power is the “power to lose” and “it is only through loss that glory and honor are linked to wealth” (p. 122). Drone utility is undermined by technological failures and the high cost of maintenance and air time. The destruction of wealth, through these highly capitalized robots, is a form of defiance that asserts the power and hegemony of the North.

In the retributive logic of war, the drone is proof of loss, one that exacts a debt from the enemy state. The cost of warfare along the border produces indebtedness born by migrants from the southern hemisphere. They are defined by the national boundary they cross and are thus totalized and collapsed under the signifier of Mexico. The refrain “Mexico must pay,” emanates from this attribution of indebtedness. The object of security, of excessive expenditure, must also bear the burden of its symbolic and actual cost. The idea that Mexico must pay to secure the United States from Mexico is ludicrous and yet falls within the logic of extravagance as waste, loss, and sacrifice that turns the drone into a promissory note. This discourse exploits the association of Mexico with debt, both debt burdens and defaults, that emanates from the Washington consensus and debt imperialism of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF) variety. This ideology of indebtedness obviates any discussion of the actual debt incurred by the United States through underpayment of migrant Mexican labor, both to the undocumented who pay taxes without receiving the subsequent entitlements and to those who are documented and enter into the bottom of the labor market or are employed below their skill level. In both cases, the United States incurs debt equal to the cost of reproductive labor not incurred by the state that receives the benefit of this labor.

Permanent war

Drones calcify the state and cement its borders as emblems of war and violence. Though currently unarmed, they are a key feature of the current reconstituted version of low intensity border warfare. They supplant outright warfare—at least that was the logic of the Obama administration that promised to scale back on troop deployment in foreign wars. They are part of a silent or disavowed war deemed, as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates intones “bloodless, painless, and odorless” (Kreps, 2016: 37). This resounds with what Derrida notes is the logic of the death penalty, which makes “cruelty disappear from the scene.” The death penalty is rendered “insensible, anesthetized” in order to “anesthetize both the condemned and the actors and spectators” (Derrida, 2013: 48–49). This anesthetic or anesthesia logic makes death appear painless and rational. Death is a consequence of the reasonable decision of an intelligent sovereign who applies a “medically refined” mode of putting the condemned to death.

The language of the “surgical strike” or “precision strike” of the Obama era rhetoric of drone killings obviates discussion of the violent cruelty of such strikes (Benjamin, 2013: 8). For Derrida (2013), the state enacts divine judgment and punishment through the death penalty, which is the foundational act of the state. Through the death penalty the “sovereign becomes sovereign” and remains so. The state is founded on this violence, the violence to enforce laws. The death penalty is the key to institutional power;

This is how the essence of sovereign power, as political but first of all theologico-political power, presents itself, represents itself as the right to decree and to execute a death penalty. Or to pardon arbitrarily, sovereignly (Derrida, 2013: 22).

The “pardon” is given arbitrarily, it is doled out as arbitrarily as the death penalty and both share in the same logic. The possibility of reprieve only enhances the violence that is the condition of the state. The pardon as a reprieve from killing may be likened to the decision to fly unarmed drones along the border, a designated zone of low intensity conflict. The unarmed drone is nonetheless defined by its potential for a payload upgrade. It remains a machine of war and instrument of violence. It signals violence, it participates in a scene and context of violence, and symbolizes the arbitrarily doled out decree of the death penalty or the pardon.

The penalty of death along the border is not the work of machines, it is embedded in policy. Punishment is doled out as “natural” even “divine” through the tribulations of desert crossing and the trials of terrain and wildlife encounter or what Jason Mark (2017), noted earlier, calls the “weaponized wilderness.” Migrant deaths are deemed “natural” and accidental through the protected “wild” that represents an entirely different space to the US citizen or resident. Mark notes; “For U.S. citizens, the wild of the United States-Mexico border offers a retreat from the cares of daily life. For the poor coming from the south, the desert wilderness serves as an escape route to a hoped for better life.” This space, deemed wild and beautiful and a natural reprieve from urban life, does not readily signify as a weapon. But, Mark (2017) describes its resignification; “The U.S. Border Patrol has figured out an altogether different function for the big, harsh, beautiful landscape of the borderlands: The terrain has been turned into a lethal weapon” (p. 4). The experience of nature divides along racialized class lines: it is either a reward and reprieve for the irksome labors of the middle class or it is natural punishment for migrants. The use of the landscape as a primitive weapon may seem to contradict the science fictional story of a future-oriented and technologized borderlands under total surveillance. Yet nature and machine work together. Drones survey the landscape allowing the wild to do the work of the death penalty.

Drones signal the extravagance of the technologies of empire, the excess and expenditure imbued with death. Along the border, drones function as an aerial control and protection of neoliberal capitalism. The security state is symbolized by and legible through the Predator drones deployed along the border. These camera ready, all-seeing, and covert recording machines fresh from Middle East war zones, frame the migrant as an enemy of the state. The hyper-mobile and omniscient drone renders the migrant a permanent target. Though it is not the primary technology of security along the border, the drone is an emblem of surveillance culture, particularly for how it combines the domains of military, commercial, entertainment, and carceral-policing cultures while it seems drawn from a science fiction universe. Daniel Greene (2015) locates the cultural work of the drone in the anthropomorphism of “drone vision” or in “seeing like a drone.” When we see what the drone sees we intuit its desires or see how it operates through the kind of “target rich” environment that it seeks. Drone vision signals the visual management of the Global South. Along the border, these robots are a technology of sovereignty, an imperial optic that conflates alien, terrorist, enemy combatant, and migrant as equal targets of drone surveillance.

Congress has sought, without success, to arm drones with missiles to strike at drug traffickers seeking to cross the border. Traffickers have instead commandeered drones to their own ends by using small drones to deliver contraband across the border. They have shifted the terms of the border drone discussion in a manner that recalibrates the power and dominion of this master symbol. Todd Kingham (2018), editor of the Border Security Report, notes that drones are a “real game changer” in the world of transborder migration and smuggling since they are widely available and “disposable” (p. 2).

A quick search on google and you can find a long-range cargo drone for less than $3,000, that is capable of carrying two kilograms of drugs up to 20 miles. With a street price of heroin at approximately $100,000 per kilo. It makes the drone a disposable item.

So just taking the capabilities of that one drone, it means that you would have to extend the control or patrol zone around the border, up to 20 miles on either side. That means for the US Canada border 5,525 miles. And of course, that’s just for that one drone, there are plenty of others out there with ever increasing capability. (Kingham, 2018: 2)

He exhorts a readership of policy makers, technology specialists, and corporate interests to remedy this situation by generating anti-drone systems to eviscerate these outlaw drug smuggling robots. The drone future is one in which everyone has drones and the war along the border escalates without end. Yet, as an Air Force recruitment video about drone warfare—albeit in other parts of the world—suggests, these speculative fictions are not mere prophesy or as the tagline of the video notes: “it’s not science fiction. It’s what we do every day.”