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The Reaper Is Watching

Yesterday, when I went to last.fm, I was confronted by this:

A combat controller peeks out from the left; he looks serious. The top banner gives us some relevant info on the MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle:

IT SEES ALL.
IT KNOWS ALL.
IT NEVER SLEEPS.
THE REAPER IS WATCHING.
IT’S NOT SCIENCE FICTION.

How sweet. I feel so much better knowing that the Reaper is watching out for American interests on what I can only assume is Mars, as the sky looks sort of funny and the landscape is totally devoid of interrupted wedding parties.

It’s this bad: military recruitment ads can now make these sort of claims and, we can assume, they’ve been focus-grouped to confirm their effectiveness. Who knew—if you can watch Starship Troopers without understanding that it’s satire, you’re the sort of person our country wants running some of its most sophisticated technology.

No, “it’s not science fiction,” but it is a worrying fusion of warfare and entertainment that works on three fronts: sanitizing military violence, dehumanizing the targets of that violence, and promoting the idea that joining up is a natural next step for video gamers who have just reached recruitment age. From this propaganda, we are to understand that going to war is something fun. In fact, clicking on the drone ad brings me to a web site that conveys none of the seriousness of joining the Air Force: that I might be maimed or killed, or, more likely, take part in maiming or killing someone who may or may not deserve it. Instead, I am invited to do a cool 360° viewing of the Reaper and then to play a dated drone missile strike game:

David Sirota’s excellent Back to Our Future speaks to this militarism creep both from and into video games:

In that capstone event of eighties militarism, the Gulf War, much of the American combat was waged electronically through Patriot missiles and smart bombs. Today, one of the military’s strongest growth sectors is drone warfare, a form of combat that has soldiers sitting in Las Vegas at glorified arcade machines attacking targets in Afghanistan via video-game-style consoles that control unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

This gets to the deeper figurative truth of Reagan’s prophecy about video games: While most of the gaming generation that came of age in the 1980s and beyond will never literally enlist and remote-control bomb Afghan villages, the games we’ve been playing for the last three decades have prepared us in the same way they’ve prepared those drone pilots.

Grounded in electronic simulation, video games decontaminate and dehumanize their subject matter. Viscera such as pain, injury, death, and “collateral damage”—i.e., the brutal consequences of war that might make us question militarism—are reduced to pixels if they are even depicted at all, and most times they aren’t. Most often a game’s player is killed only to instantly reappear unscathed.

Writing as someone younger than Sirota, I’d like to think that I’m a little more hip when it comes to games—no offense intended, it’s just that I was in America’s Army’s target demographic at its release. America’s Army, at least, portrays your opponents as human beings. Yes, they’re ‘othered’ as either evil Arabs or evil Slavs, but when you click your mouse to fire a simulated bullet into a simulated combatant, you understand that you’re attempting to ‘kill’ him, even if its only until the next round. This is still dangerous stuff, but it has nothing on drone warfare—real warfare— in which pilots might move from target to target without viscerally understanding what destruction they’ve wrought on the ground. I’ve read interviews with drone pilots where they express some conception of the seriousness of their work: that when they fire a missile at someone or something, they know they are doing real damage. Intellectually, I’m sure there’s some truth to that. No amount of training, however, can make this:

Make you understand that pressing a joystick button might cause something akin to this:

It’s outrageously gauche stuff. There’s a necessary disconnect being exploited from both drone pilots and the American public; our militarized entertainment enables it. Pilots, now more than ever, have been conditioned by years of militainment to see other human beings as targets—something that the military considers an important part of training in overcoming a natural reluctance to kill. The public, meanwhile, is treated to a ridiculously sanitized version of modern warfare that can be broadcast on the evening news without breaking a TV-PG rating. That news media can then pull the zeitgeist in a pro-military direction, which, both consciously and unconsciously, results in the creation of entertainment that shifts that spirit further still. Then, a new Call of Duty comes out. War is a force that both gives us meaning and becomes progressively 'easier' to use as a tool of policy the further the window of discussion is pushed.

War must never be seen as a game; it is not fun and it is not simple. This is in contrast to what military recruiters and PR specialists would have you believe. Theirs is a prominent view in popular entertainment— here are some quotes in response to a video of a drone killing several insurgents in Afghanistan:

This might disturb you. It might not. If the former, I’m sorry, but it’s only going to get worse.

If the latter, well, I tried. Say cheese.

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