Drone ecology and AI war

This project theme builds upon my 20 years of studying the relationship between war and media as an ecology.

My work on ecologies draws upon an established tradition in media studies of ‘media ecologies’. Elements of this work can be found in the work of Mumford (2010), Ellul (1973), Innis (1986) and Postman (1970). However, it is in Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) work that we find the constellation of ideas that form the basis for a theory of media ecology.

These include an emphasis upon technological form; a discussion of media as both natural, organic extensions and as evolving life-forms; an interest in their specific properties and creation of sensory balances; and a discussion of the dominant media’s creation of an invisible, surrounding ‘environment’.

War has always been an ecology, forged through a complex set of relationships with technology and perception as part of a balanced environment. For instance Ford and I in Radical War define a ‘new war ecology’ as the rapid emergence of a hyperconnected environment in which datafication implodes the traditionally discernible separation between actors, representations and acts of war.

Today this interconnected whole of war has not only been disrupted but displaced by a new ecology of war, a drone ecology in which drones and AI have seized and imploded the battlefield, wrenching it from its former forms and experience of control, perception, and speed.

One way to illuminate this revolution is through the theory of ecology. As Merrin (2021) argues:

Ecological theory includes the concept of the ‘trophic cascade’, understood as the knock-on effect of changes in the food-web of one trophic level. So, for example, the loss of wolves might allow a deer population to grow, impacting on the plants they eat and hence also on species dependent on those plants. With each ecological system being carefully-balanced and formed through a complex web of interconnections and dependencies, then any change to key species can potentially cause an ‘extinction cascade’ – a series of secondary or subsidiary extinctions impacting the whole network.

Today’s extinction cascade is war itself. With the meeting and merger of drone technology with artificial intelligence, this is not simply some kind of symbiosis, extension or augmentation, but rather a substitution of the technologies of war and perception.

My work interrogates the drone ecology through the following themes:

1. Betawar
   How live and vast archival battlefield data is shared and deployed to constantly feed a rapid and permanent state of experimentation and evolution of drone and AI war.
2. High Definition War
   Fibre optic drone vision is feeding the fourth drone revolution in the drone-fed hypervisible, hypergranular vision of war on Telegram (a new kind of war feed: digital war in plain sight). What impact does the new horror image of war in plain sight have on all actors in war?
3. Drone Economy
   The fourth revolution in drones has driven new forms of participation in war, start ups and major companies, as well as the investment of external partners, in the accelerating war economy in Ukraine that transforms the business of warfare.
4. Predator Memories
   How do drones remember? How does AI agentic memory fusion with LLM reasoning create newly automated and intelligent drones? How do drones transform how war is remembered and forgotten and shape the emergent condition of the radicalisation of memory?
5. Drone Trauma
   How does the sound as well as sight of drones perpetually traumatise populations, including across generational memory? (See also Inaccessible War).