William Arkin talked about his book, Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare, on BookTV (C-SPAN), October 21, 2015.
His first work of fiction, History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11, will be out in 2021. Here are some reviews & praise for William Arkin’s Unmanned…
“ … a personal meditation … This well-informed but quirky analysis of the development of drone warfare and its ongoing effect on the nation’s military strategy is the latest lament for the disappearance of personal honor and valor from warfare that began in 1914.”
“Arkin insists that we must contemplates the ‘cost to society and humanity for even operating in this seemingly near-perfect way.’ Readers will have to navigate a minefield of technical details, acronyms, and political and military infighting, but Arkin makes worthwhile the effort of understanding both the extensive transformations modern militaries are experiencing and their far-from-perfect consequences.”
Read the full review at Publishers Weekly
“Unmanned attempts to explain these views in a first-person narrative that is alternatively informative and quirky. The quirkiness derives from Arkin’s insistence that “to understand drones you have to understand Gilgamesh,” the main character in The Epic of Gilgamesh, a 5,000-year-old literary work. Arkin devotes a chapter to the topic and then returns to it from time to time throughout the book. The connections remain obscure, however, and the story he tells of the life of the drone program is not enhanced by his references to Gilgamesh. … Whether Unmanned’s forecast of an excessively automated future, as implied in the final chapter of the science fiction example, is a dilemma left to the reader. The facts of the drone program presented, however, are worth attention.”
Read the full article on CIA.gov
“Arkin makes clear that the sheer amount of data being collected ‘masks the intelligence’ …
Drones—and the ‘Data Machine’—give the illusion of being able to know, understand and control what is happening on the ground thousands of miles away via remote armed systems. The reality, as we shall no doubt continue to see, is just the opposite.”