In the representation of warfare a new point of view has entered the field: the point of view of the weapon. This is something previously unseen, something entirely strange and jarring. We can now view the field of battle, and the final moments of human lives, from the disembodied perspectives of the technologies deployed to extinguish those lives. And to see such things, as anyone can at any time – without, in fact, even necessarily intending to – is to recognise that a new front has been opened in the degradation and dehumanisation of our culture.
I am talking here about footage taken by attack drones in which the perspective is that of death itself. Online recently I came across a video posted to social media by a Ukrainian army unit that specialises in the deployment of so-called FPV drones. FPV stands for “first person view”: these are drones with on-board cameras, controlled by “pilots” using monitors or headsets along with game console-style hand-held controllers.
The video, which lasts about 80 seconds, consists of a series of clips taken by drones in the battlefield in the final moments before reaching their targets. The targets, in the case of this particular video, were individual Russian soldiers, many of whom were attempting to escape or hide from the approaching airborne bomb. In one clip a soldier is seen running for the entrance of what seems to be a derelict Orthodox church. The drone’s camera pursues him inside where he scrambles over the rubble and detritus of its wrecked interior; he trips over a fallen wooden beam, and the drone – and the viewer’s perspective – reaches him and detonates.
Another clip puts the viewer in the perspective of a drone as it floats through the open doorway of a small brick hut; once inside it swivels to reveal a soldier, wearing a helmet and heavy backpack, turned to face the corner of the room. His head is lowered, his shoulders hunched, his face entirely concealed. There is something piercingly childlike about his posture and attitude, like that of a mistreated boy who has been forced to stand in a corner and await his punishment. Although it depicts the final moments of a military combatant – and, indeed, a military combatant of an army engaged in an illegal invasion – it is among the most disturbing contemporary images of war I’ve ever seen. The soldier knows he can’t outrun what is coming for him and has stopped trying but the childlike posture, the face pressed to the wall, is suggestive of a childlike delusion of evasion and safety: if I can’t see it, it can’t see me.
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Above all else though, it’s the form of these videos that is most unsettling: the way they are edited into clips set to propulsive electronic music, intended for consumption and sharing on social media. They are, it seems to me, implicitly intended to represent the violence of the battlefield as something like a video game; they resemble, as such, nothing so much as video edits made by gamers of first-person shooter games. The distinction between games that present war as hyperrealistic entertainment and the experience of war itself has long since started to collapse. (The US military has for years now been using video game streaming platforms such as Twitch, and partnered with popular gaming influencers, to drum up recruitment. Some of the most prominent figures in the new wave of AI-driven weapons tech, meanwhile, started out in the broader field of video games: Palmer Luckey, founder of the autonomous military drone company Anduril, invented the Occulus Rift VR headset; Torsten Reil, co-founder of the German military drone company Helsing, started out as a games developer.)
It is of course relevant that these clips, unlike the footage of Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza that has saturated our screens in recent years, do not depict the killing of civilians, but of military men. As a matter of moral and legal principle, soldiers carrying out an illegal invasion or occupation have to be met with maximal opposing force, and this is what is going on in Ukraine. But what these videos reveal – beyond, that is, the intended propagandistic message of the Ukrainian army’s ruthlessness and sophistication – is the reality of human vulnerability in the face of these inhuman technologies. You can’t surrender to a drone; a machine controlled from a remote location cannot take prisoners of war, and less still can this be expected of one controlled by an artificial intelligence.
It would be a mistake I think to say these weapons are per se more inhumane than, for instance, the US Tomahawk missile that destroyed a girls’ elementary school in Iran in March of this year, killing 120 children, or the assault rifles currently being used to massacre civilians in Sudan. Death is death, whatever the methodology; and the killing of a child or other civilian belongs to a different moral category to the killing of an enemy combatant. And yet there is something undeniably sinister, something irreducibly degrading, in the combination of intimacy and detachment in the footage taken by these FPV drones of their victims’ final moments. And the aestheticisation of the act of killing, its rendering as a kind of viral entertainment, is something that feels ethically wounding to witness.
This quasi-cinematic intimacy, the preserve of FPV drones, is a new phenomenon. Until fairly recently, a major point of moral concern with respect to drone warfare was the quality of distance and detachment. The enemy was targeted from a distance, and also seen (or sighted) from a distance, allowing a kind of abstraction from the moral reality of killing. But the technology I am talking about here – this weapon that is also a camera – is the perspective of death itself. The machine sees the terror, the panic, the resignation of its human target. And to see what the machine sees, with these videos that inhabit its perspective, is to merge in some morally abhorrent way with the mechanism of violence itself.
