Scripting the Frontier: Drone Intruders and the Racial Politics of Unmanning Available to Purchase

Settler colonial imaginaries were integral to the development of airpower in the early twentieth century. Military officials and technicians drew from these imaginaries during the Cold War as they designed and made sense of remotely piloted vehicles used in military training exercises. The Firebee drone by Ryan Aeronautical, this chapter argues, helped institute a new unmanned aerial technopolitical regime in the borderlands—a regime that disavowed human intervention through remote control and push-button warfare. Actors interpreted unmanned technopolitics through technoscientific scenes where humans, science, and technology were written to play clear roles. These scenes rehearsed frontier fantasies whereby non-white populations were pre-scripted as foreign intruder entities to be excluded from the nation.