Experimenting with Drones: Remotely Piloted Aircraft and Security Practices in Brazil

Abstract In the past decades, remotely piloted aircraft systems, hereby referred to as military drones, have grown as a literature topic across disciplines. However, most of the debate has focused on contexts concerning major powers conducting counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns, or how drones may or not impact interstate conflicts. To emphasize that security technologies and weapons circulate and reach contexts distinctly on global and local levels, this paper analyses how drone technology has been assimilated in Brazil. Focusing on the Air Force experience from 2008 onwards, we draw from critical security studies’ mapping approach to understand different aspects concerning the process of implementing drones in the country and its effects on local practices: how they circulate on the global market, how they are de facto deployed in operations, and how they are depicted in the organization’s knowledge and expectations. We resort to different primary sources including doctrines, field manuals, military school papers, and a survey with Air Force officials. We argue that this process can be seen as experimentation, characterized by an epistemic violence embedded in drones’ design and the logic of target definition, and local sociological features of Brazil’s military ethos concerning technological imaginaries. Beyond broader processes of prototype warfare and testing at the global level, we focus on how the local forces experiment with the artifact while building their self-image and reproducing security practices that reinforce a population-centered violence.