In a Reddit video posted this year under “r/combatfootage,” a Reddit forum dedicated to proliferating battlefield war footage, a Russian soldier immediately commits suicide using his own rifle after his comrades are wounded by an exploding first-person view (FPV) drone. A scroll through the comments reveals an apolitical, amoral stance of cynical awe at the video’s gore and depiction of human suffering. One comment mockingly reads, “Hey man, scoot over. I’m trying to kill myself here.”
FPV drones, short-range and cheaply mass-produced, have become a dominant presence on the Ukrainian battlefield, with most estimates naming them as responsible for around 70 percent of battlefield casualties. Watching the footage they capture becomes an embodied act of violence—seeing a representation of war and fighting in the war are visually identical. The spectacle of human suffering trumps the politics and state narratives of war.
FPV drones have redefined how the public both sees and discusses war. They mark a stark contrast to the sanitized displays of war in previous decades, where the enemy was nothing more than heat signatures from the view of an aircraft’s head-up display. The gory, first-person view offered by these drones has become ubiquitous across mainstream, moderated social media. The eyes of the drone capture the dismemberment and brutal killing of soldiers in high definition and color comparable to how the naked human eye views the world. Previously, the gaze from the American couch upon the TV showed a bloodless, bodiless war, organized and narrated by news anchors and media-trained military officials. The TV showed the “good guys” with missiles and planes taking off without ever seeing them strike the target. The camera showed only thermal views of planes from hundreds of feet off the ground or bomb explosions as flashes on the horizon.
FPV drone footage makes no room for state political narratives, as the blunt visibility and spectacle of violence upon a body drowns out all else. Sometimes, it is difficult to tell if the drone’s victims are Ukrainian or Russian—nationalism becomes impossible when people cannot agree whose side the mutilated body was on. It becomes clear that the dominant forces within FPV drone footage are gore and the spectacle of suffering. In many cases, video game gameplay is circulated online as combat drone footage.
This novel media landscape—where the eyes of the soldier double as the eyes of the weapon and in turn the collective gaze of countless online viewers of the footage—is especially noticeable when comparing it to the scripted, televised nature of the Gulf War. Many media theorists, including Jean Baudrillard, have remarked on how the US invasion of Iraq during the first Gulf War led to a highly structured, state-controlled affair on America’s 24-hour cable news networks. TV crews were provided footage and guided access by US forces, and military personnel were media-trained. Channels shared the view of heat signatures from an airplane and flashes on the horizon depicting “targeted killings” executed by Hellfire missiles without any display of bodily suffering. The result was televised war footage depicting a precise, predictable war that cleanly neutralized the enemy without bloodshed, visible suffering, or unwanted casualties. This state-influenced media narrative projected a certain form of unity and a shared imperial vision, contributing to the war’s popularity with the American public. On the day of the ground assault in Kuwait, a Gallup poll showed that 84 percent of Americans supported the invasion.
With the use of FPV drones, what the drone sees, what the operator sees, and what a viewer sees become identical. The resolution and frame rate of the drone camera roughly match what is perceived by the human eye. At the same time, the pilotable nature of the controls makes the footage appear almost video game-like. This layered confusion between spectating violence and committing violence exemplifies how FPV drone footage is blurring the boundaries of battlefields. To complicate the spectator-perpetrator divide even further, most of these drone operators train on video games that are available to anyone on platforms like Steam.
The media landscape is becoming far more cacophonous and unwieldy due to a particular state power. As Baudrillard notes in War Porn, the gratuity of visualized bodily harm and the image of suffering become the focus rather than any discernible political purpose held by one party. Modern FPV drone footage fascinates people with images of physical harm regardless of their state affiliation, apolitically pornographizing the hypervisible flesh, wounds, and suffering of a victim. The political questions of who they are, whether they deserved to die, and who killed them fade away. States also have very little capacity to remedy this situation, as media is distributed through decentralized social media channels rather than through authoritative news outlets.
The circulation of FPV drone footage from Ukraine defies all claims of a clean or politically coherent war. One can see only gratuitous human suffering from the cacophonous spread of the footage with no clear institutional or state-sponsored political agenda attached to it. The shared war porn viewing pleasure of FPV drone footage trumps its ability to garner support for war or empower resistance against it. Especially when actual war footage and video game gameplay are indistinguishable, this footage becomes a spectacle that we cannot discern the authenticity of, making it impossible to weaponize for political action. Ukrainian drone vision presents its violence as anything but clean. The visual logic of FPV drone footage defaces the enemy’s life and body not through obscuring its destruction but by making it appear as rawly unmediated, unsimulated violence that is graphic and pornographized.