#project wingman

The "Drone Theory" is just a lens that helped me connect the concepts of "violence monopoly", "control of airspace" and "the American state apparatus" (Project Wingman is a criticism of the latter). I will give further arguments from the perspective of pilots (both real and in-game), and not the player. I do this because otherwise we get almost the same contradiction that drone operators experience. And that’s the material of Gregoire Chamayou's analysis. For ease of reading, I will divide the text into sub-paragraphs.

Distance and resistance.

Dave Grossman has formulated a hypothesis about the relationship between physical distance and resistance to kill: the closer the enemy is, the greater the resistance to killing, and vice versa – the further away, the more tolerant a person becomes to killing.

The goal of any technological breakthrough in war is the ability to kill from a distance. Artillery, aviation, drones. "It's much easier to harm a person when they are unable to observe our actions than when they can do it."

The pilot is protected from remorse by the absence of someone who looks at him, who understands what he is doing. To truly grasp the "reality" of his act, he will need some cognitive effort. Pilots receive a powerful charge of "moral shock absorbers" that allow them to carry out military violence. Obviously, none of the PW pilots think deeply about what kills people, because they too experience a gap between visual clarity and physical proximity.

To "bring them back to their senses," they need a special combatant who would establish almost psychosexual contact with them in the sky. Crimson 1, as a peacekeeper, is unique in many ways due to the fact that he imposes such contact for Monarch. He doesn't just leave the him alone in the sky, he violently imposes a cognitive analysis of his actions on him, depriving him of “heroic morality”. It doesn't matter if you feel bitterness or anger at this moment, the habitual latency of violence disappears.

2. Law enforcement.

It is interesting how Crimson 1 himself perceives his role as this overseer of justice. I have repeatedly said that he is "the embodiment of lethal police force" (Translated into English, I know that the joke will be lost, but in the original, in Russian, I used the word "летальный". It means "deadly", but shares the same root with the word "fly"). The Cascadian conflict is a war between the United States and the United States, where the Federation uses US’s the doctrine of "human hunting"/"law enforcement" against Cascadian US’s "legitimate self–defense" (in search for "jus in bello"). In the modern world of hunting warfare, war is no longer thought of as a duel where two opponents come face to face.

The English Common Law allowed villages to "hunt dangerous predators such as foxes and ferrets on foreign territory, since their destruction is of public interest."

Similar legislation exists in the Federation as part of its military doctrine in spirit of peacekeepers – special people who are given a "license to kill". Within the framework of this concept, the sovereignty of all other nations becomes relative. Doctrine is fully revealed when they (nations) allow an imperial raid on their land.

(From KVSTIK as a player: Yes, the game lacks that sense of persecution. Yes, the game is still a power fantasy, which prevents us from truly being the prey of peacekeepers. But the fact that game acknowledges their special status (in the theater of set combat) imposes on them a special role in the plot).

3. Kill boxes.

The aircraft opposes the continuity of the air to the land-based forms of sovereignty based on the enclosure of the territory. It's not about *occupying* a territory, but rather about *controlling from an altitude*, ensuring air superiority. The issue of sovereignty is acquiring an aeropolitical dimension.

The American doctrine of air superiority no longer considers operational space as a homogeneous zone. It builds a theater of operations using transparent boxes, which have their own special rules – "kill boxes". Each "kill box" is a temporary extermination zone. The most intense debates among military lawyers are not based on the interpretation of the geographical meaning of this concept, but on the localization of participants in a military conflict. Is it possible to reduce the kill box to the body of one person?

Within the Project Wingman itself, you can see how the Federation recontextualizes the size of one such kill zone by reducing it to the body of the Monarch, and then gives the authority to only one person to act in it. The problem is that by defining the conflict zone as a mobile point tied to the identity of the enemy, the battlefield goes beyond the declared combat zone. Some restrictions are needed...

How does Crimson 1 determine the radius of its target zone? What is his meaning of the definition of "accuracy"? The Presidia will make it clear that of the three interpretations of "accuracy" (i.e., "accuracy of shooting", "limited damage" and "adequate target identification"), he definitely chooses the first one – "100% target destruction" – discarding the other two.