It is difficult to describe a drone strike accurately.
On October 24, 2012, Bibi Mamana and her grandchildren were gathering firewood or picking okra outside their home. They may have been in a field. Perhaps it was a militant compound with a weapons depot. 2 missiles were fired, killing Mamana and up to 5 other people, injuring 6 to 8 of the children. Some other men, maybe 3, maybe militants, may have been caught in the blast. A house and a car may or may not have been destroyed. Either 3 cows or 1 buffalo and 2 goats were also killed. The drones remained overhead and 5 to 7 minutes after the first strike more missiles fell.
This moment—the drones, the missiles, the people, the livestock—is a node in a vast network. It spans the globe, connecting villages to secret installations to office parks to seats of government. It reaches backwards for millenia and will resonate forwards for untold centuries. To trace it out completely is impossible. We are hampered by its size and by the fact that much of it is hidden behind classified protections and some of the rest is barely recorded at all.
This is an attempt to understand the geography of a drone strike.
(…)
Like his predecessors, Petraeus used ‘signature’ strikes to select and destroy targets. Unlike ‘personality’ strikes, where the target is a positively identified terrorist leader or some other high value individual, signature strikes involve looking for behaviour patterns to identify groups of men who appear to be behaving like terrorists, whether or not their identities are definitively known.
One of the claimed benefits of this approach is that it makes militants more reluctant to congregate, for fear of being droned, which in turn makes it harder for them to train, or plot against the United States. This is a remarkable approach to counter-insurgency. It’s an attempt to identify and control the enemy in a frontless war by making targetting determinations based solely on how people move through the landscape. Invisible panoptical sky gods rain HELLFIRE down upon the possibly guilty, to scare the rest into submission. Dominance through terror.
OB298 — A Preliminary Atlas of Drone Strike Landscapes
Even remotely — pun intended? — it is not entirely unrelated with this or even this posts.