Hot Docs 2015 Review: DRONE And The Terror Of "Point And Click" Warfare

Tonje Hessen Schei documents the many facets of Unmanned Combat Arial Vehicles, UCAVs more popularly known as drones, used in the War on Terror. In fact, it is the defining weapon in the War on Terror: From PTSD suffering pilots flying 12 hour shifts, a half a world away with the power to kill, to the families in Waziristan -- the region with the highest number of drone strikes -- whose population have grown to fear sunny days, because only on the cloudy days, is there no drone activity.

From the post 9/11 reaction arming drones to kill Al Qaida leaders, to secret wars fought in Pakistan and Yemen. And from activists seeking legal recourse to the collateral damage of innocent lives lost, to the co-opting of gamer culture as a recruiting tool for more pilots, there is a lot to chew on in under 80 minutes. But the information is handled with elegance and empathy. This is as if to compensate for the utter lack of empathy when war is fought with technology from such great distances, the targets small blurry figures on monitors from aircraft cameras 3000 meters above.

There are bad men in the world, and other bad men intent on profiting from the stopping of these bad men. And a nearly endless supply of young men waiting to be turned into bad men. The remote, compartmentalizing of war by technology, and the young gamers being forced into their very own Milgram Experiment is troubling. Cue the applause by the US congress.

And, yet, the cost benefit ratio of drones is a difficult, if not impossible, calculus. Was Guantanamo Bay prison shuttered simply because it was easier to just assassinate terrorists on their own soil than to detain them? Are drones a (relatively) lower cost method of making America safer, or just sprouting more heads on the terrorist hydra, ad infinitum, from ISIL to Boko Haram. Perhaps the scariest fact is in the attrition and commerce of drone warfare, where 87 countries have now access to armed drones. Given the willy-nilly precedent set by America in how to eliminate all borders in remote-warfare, how long before the chickens come home to roost?

And despite being 15 years or so in, we are at the beginning of this; early days in a permanent state of affairs with no more boundaries. It's a brave new world of algorithms dictating kill lists and the CIA running the Air Force and the President of the United States watching assassinations on live video feed. This scares the living shit out of me, and it probably should scare you too.

And all this from a technology that was invented to help fishermen to better locate tuna. That's right, tunafish. What an absurd and asymmetrical world in which we live.