To understand drones, you have to understand the history of the most recent military developments. There are two key developments, and the first one dates back to the First World War, when they realised they could put cameras on planes. It might be hard for us to understand nowadays what a revolution that was to understanding the nature of war and how a war was to be fought. Though the technology wasn’t great in the First World War, it started to gain momentum in the Second World War, and it gave the Allies a great advantage just to have that bird’s-eye view. But we see it gaining technological development in the Cold War, with America and the USSR trying to engage in surveillance of each other without ever coming to direct conflict. As they joined the Vietnam War, they started testing out the use of aeroplanes that had pre-programmed flights, to look at prisoner of war camps, to look at communication and movement of troops throughout Vietnam.

This development of the military, of the ability to see, then culminated in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Desert Shield where we see them using aeroplanes and drones to surveil the battlefront. It’s the first instance we see people surrendering to an unmanned vehicle. Post-9/11 and the War on Terror, we see a move from surveillance to an offensive use of these drones. That’s the contemporary turn; if the initial turn is having eyes in the sky, the contemporary turn is having the ability to then find, fix and finish, or shoot, your target, from quite a removed point of view.

In ethics, this raises a couple of questions. For some people, these are just smarter weapons – there are no new ethical problems. But what I would argue is that drones do alter the nature of war quite dramatically. It’s not just being further away from the battlefield. It’s a level of being removed from the battlefield that we have yet to really understand, and this raises lots of ethical problems around the entry to war and it lowers the boundary of what it takes for someone to initiate or carry out acts of war. It lowers the cost to your own troops –this is always a huge consideration for states, putting your soldiers on the front line, the danger that they may face.

This is an ethical question, and for politicians it’s a political question. What they don’t want is the body bag effect, the CNN effect, dead troops being brought home in a body bag, being caught on camera. Drones take that away. You don’t have that very physical cost to your own people. They’re also cheaper. The cost of a Reaper drone is around £13 million, whereas a fighter plane is around £252 million. There’s a big difference there, and it makes it much more accessible for a greater number of states.

[On the personal experience of drone operators depicted in National Bird]: I think the illusion of distance is really important, especially when you start thinking about authorising military political elites and the people who actually have to carry out orders on the ground. The illusion of distance is very much held by those who are developing and authorising these sorts of weapons and these sorts of missions. It feeds into what they call the ‘PlayStation mentality’, that kids are growing up playing computer games, so our soldiers should have no problem doing this, it’s a sanitized version of war, it’s a more digitized and cleaner version of war. That’s how Obama upped the number of drone strikes compared to previous administrations exponentially. It feeds into the rhetoric of distance; ‘we’re not actually interfering with another nation. We’re not occupying another nation.’

In the documentary, they mentioned [former imagery analyst Heather Linebaugh] would go home and she would cry. The expectation is that when she left the pod she was in, that was it – turn off, go back to civilian life. And that idea that you can go between military and civilian life in the space of a day is highly problematic. When you’re overseas and you’re in the military space for six months at a time, and then you come back and you have that debrief phase, that’s problematic, it’s incredibly psychologically torturous for individuals. But now, to do that within a 24-hour window, to go back to civilian life, to go back to a normal environment with your family and your friends… That intimacy juxtaposed with being stuck in your normal world almost amplifies the fact that you’ve really got no home at that point, I think.

Our thanks to Ross Bellaby, and to Mahwish Chishty and Tomas van Houtryve for participating in this discussion and sharing their artwork, as well as to our funder, the British Academy.