'Eye In The Sky'

Ethical Guilt

My good friend GS from my AFTRS days got tickets to see a screening of 'Eye in the Sky'. It came via the Ethics Centre, which is an interesting body that advises the ADF and their personnel ("except the Special Forces", they said cheerily). Naturally it's a movie that covers the ground of the ethics of drone strikes.

Yes, I know, it's a contentious topic and my own views are probably totally counter to those people who want ethics front and centre of military operations. Still, it is an interesting area for the sake of arguing things and pointing at the culpable like it is a game going out of fashion, so the film does intrigue us greatly.

Here is the obligatory spoiler alert.



What's Good About It

It's a pretty simply film and the style doesn't stretch to anything we might call artistic. Stylistically, it is a very meat-and-potatoes sort of film making. It's a little bit like directing by numbers - and believe me, that's not necessarily the good bit, but the unadorned style allowed the story to be told simply. That is good because the topic has layers of complexity that needs explaining and the film does a fairly good job of going through those angles.

The performances are a bit cheesy, but in most part it sort of looks like an ensemble cast. In reality none of the big names have a chance to interact in the same space, so there is an even more disjointed quality to the scenes being cut together. The best that could be said about it is that it sort of hangs together.

What's Bad About It

It's a very hamfisted sort of script. The third or fourth time a minister or a department secretary seeks a higher authority to okay a drone strike, you find yourself losing patience with the due process and due diligence in striking with a drone. It's not exactly a thriller as the film is billed. It's more like an ethics workshop for military and government people.

Also, the headline cast are a bit unbelievable. Helen Mirren - as good as she is - is way too old to be playing a colonel. Alan Rickman sort of resorts to his schtick at several points, and Aaron Paul reprises his teary-eyed acting we're so familiar from 'Breaking Bad'. Because we're overly familiar with these actors, it's hard to see the characters for the actors playing them. It happens with a lot of films anyway, but it's worse in this film because these actors are confined to their spaces for most of the film. It really becomes noticeable that you're watching a very stagey sort of thing instead a work of cinema.

It comes in second best to Season 4 of 'Homeland' which tackles exactly this kind of problem, but they have more time to go into the ins and outs of why they might try a drone strike, and how it is contextualised into the rest of the war on terror. This film really only wants to talk about drone strikes, in the absence of anything else or any other options or parameters for prosecuting a war.

What's Interesting About It

The drone strike issue has been percolating for some time. The most vociferous argument against it is that the collateral damage these strikes creates andengenders the next wave of terror that needs to be fought, so it is uneconomical as well as unethical. The film posits the classical "what about the little girl" argument front and centre to the story so there is no mistaking the filmmakers were champion at the bit to argue something about the ethics of drone strikes. At the end of the film, you're not sure if they've really made a case in favour of them or not. Maybe it's very British, it's quite noncommittal about its subject matter even though the drone strike does happen.

The film would have us believe there are a lot of procedural things they go through to authorise a strike and so many boxes need to be ticked before they can launch a drone strike. It spends a good deal of time going back and forth between different levels of the bureaucracy as well as the elected officials and military hierarchy. In the case presented by the film, it boils down to a fairly utilitarian argument of if it is ever okay to kill a little girl in order to save a hypothetical 80 or 100 other people.

A good deal of hyperventilating argumentation is made about the nature of the utility of striking the target as part of the strategy against terrorism as well as the simply numerical comparison of potential victims. What the film understates is that by the time you have to decide on whether a drone strike is appropriate, you've had to discard all other options to get to that point of consternation.

Consider this chain of possibilities. If you could simply arrest a British citizen, you'd send the police. If they were leaving, you can use customs to stop them. If they are holed up with guns, you'd still send a SWAT team rather than a drone strike. If they were in a foreign country, you might lean on that country to do the arresting. And if they have access to guns to shoot back, you might have to send in the local military. It's really when the high value targets are in one place that is inaccessible to friendly ground forces that a drone strike becomes a necessity.

Avoiding Collateral Damage

Collateral Damage is a recent term. They didn't exactly worry about collateral damage too much in the Vietnam War and not a whole lot of wars were fought by Americans in the 80s except an expedition to Granada and Panama. It was during the Gulf War that the term came into public consciousness as people started to worry about the effects of carpet bombing whole cities.

Yes, carpet bombing was a big feature of American military operations during the Twentieth Century. By 1990, public opinion had shifted greatly towards the innocent civilians who were killed or injured in war, that levelling cities with carpet bombing became less desirable. And so it is on this extension line where the Americans began championing and exhibiting the accuracy of smart bombs. As technology developed, they devised unmanned aviation with smart bombs, controlled remotely, and this is your basic recipe for a drone strike.

The cutting edge of military technology exercised by the greatest state on the planet (at least for military strikes) is capable of dropping a bomb on any part of the planet through remote means. This is an extraordinary capacity. It totally leaves behind the kind of indiscriminate tactic of carpet bombings. It reduces the collateral damage and casualty of bystanders from the order of hundreds thousands to ten or twenty. Yet the film is somehow really worried about the casualty of one.

It's alarming, actually, that the political office holders in the film prevaricate the most. They claim it would hand a propaganda victory to the terrorists if the little girl is killed. One after the other they exhibit a lack of resolve and failure to understand just how they got to where they are. The hypocrisy on display is quite unnerving. One would think that people who climb to high offie would understand that things that come into their purview would be military operations, and military operations would involve death and destruction and collateral damage.

The issue shouldn't be do we not proceed because there is an innocent bystander, but should we really be exercising war machines that make responsibility more vague than what is on a battlefield. It appears, the higher up the chain of command one goes, the lower the intellectual courage to tangle with the meaning of military options becomes. In this film's context, the bravest people are not the ones giving orders but those who carry out the orders entrusting the system to protect them from liability. It's a little like a game of bureaucratic chicken more than a thriller.

The Commitment To Hypocrisy

This then might be the worst aspect of western governments that the film captures. The constant need to be seen to be doing the right thing in the right way outweighs the objectives as defined by the same people. The moral and ethical dilemma presented in the film isn't a product of a difficult choice foisted upon the leadership by the enemy. It is all a result of their own choosing.

When people say asymmetric warfare, they often talk about the terrorists working in dastardly terrorist ways as opposed to proper state militaries that are bound by things like the Geneva Convention and protocols like rules of engagement. What it overlooks is that the people most bound by the Geneva Convention and protocols for rules of engagement are those states with the greatest capacity for military destruction.

It's a bit like the terrorists are marathon runners in a race, front running the race. The Western governments enter the race, but they want to do it in a Formula One car. The self-imposed condition is that they have to start last at the end of the running group, and have to pass all the runners without running anybody over or breaking the speed limit. If you are the front runner, the Formula One car coming up from behind you is a joke. Even with the self-imposed rules that limit it to certain actions and a gross under-utilisation of its true capacity, the competition is asymmetric in the extreme. There is nothing admirable about the self-imposed conditions of the West to the other runners. They're strictly there to make it look a little more like a fair race when it is eminently not. Yet this is the kind of conditional hypocrisy we enjoy so much in the West. And that's where the central drama of this film lies.

The logical, and utilitarian argument for processes is built into the drone strike option. That is to say, the Mr. Spock credo of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" is built into the entire edifice that allows the drones to operate. We have military organisations and military treaties and coalitions to ensure collective security of most citizens; we have a trained force that can apply state sanctioned violence to this end; we have weapons that an do great damage, but opt to build weapons systems with ever greater accuracy to ensure ever smaller collateral damage; we have unmanned vehicles to limit the damage to our personnel; we have intelligence systems to pinpoint targets as accurately as possible. All along the way, the utilitarian argument has been made and put into use to build the steps that leads to a drone in the sky with a guided missile ready to hit its target. We simply don't get there without a long chain of utilitarian decisions.

To then argue that perhaps utilitarianism isn't the right way to go about things is not only infuriating to watch on screen, it strains credulity. Is it that the writers and directors and producers of this film are somehow ignorant and stupid, or is it an accurate reflection of our political classes, in which case we must ask if we are governed by ignorant idiots? It's vexing and perplexing. Nonetheless it is made worse by the continuous commitment to hypocrisy as the highest calling in western politics.
It's really not thrilling. It's excruciatingly tedious.