Masculinities and the Decline of Traditional Warfare

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Politics - Basics and General, grade: 1,0, Free University of Berlin (Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: In the following bachelor thesis I want to examine the impact of the deployment of drones on the interpretation of maleness, configuration of Gender structures and hierarchy between different masculinities within the US military. I argue that while there has always been technological advance altering how wars are fought, the introduction of drones has brought another quality to this development. It allowed the total removal of the executing soldier from the operating site and thereby erased any imminent danger to the pilot completely. With the ascent of these technological advanced methods to fight wars traditional warfare is as much in the decline as the need for heroic fighter jet pilots is. More and more missions are carried out by remotely controlled drones that are better served by a precise, calculating computer than by venturesome and sometimes reckless soldiers.

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Considering the above, I expect the removal of pilots from the battlefield to have a potential impact that exceeds the directly involved soldiers by far, as they formerly symbolized a hegemonic masculinity within military structures. It is my hope that the elaboration on the expected shifting dynamics between different masculinities helps to better understand and ultimately dismantle the patriarchal system of the military.

As outlined above I would like to conduct research to further clarify and link the decline of traditional warfare with a shift in the intra-gender matrix of different masculinities utilizing Connell's categorization and various theoretical clarifications that have been made on the field of Men Studies leading to the following question:

How does the employment of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) in the military have an impact on (hegemonic) masculinity?