Cian Westmoreland

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Twitter: @CianMW

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About Me

I served in the United States Air Force from 2006- 2010 as an RF Transmission Systems/ SATCOM Technician. I was deployed to Kandahar Air Field, Afghanistan in 2009. I helped build a signal relay station called the 73rd Expeditionary Air Control Squadron for analysts and operators around the world to order airstrikes throughout Afghanistan. At the end of my tour I recieved a performance report stating that I assisted in 13,000 sorties, 2,400 Close Air Support Missions and 200+ enemy kills over 240,000 square miles of Afghanistan as well as a Meritorious Unit Award. Months after, a report was published by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan stating that there were 359 civilians killed as a result of coalition airstrikes, most of whom were targetting using equipment my team had built.

Instead of accepting a re-enlistment bonus of $40k annually or a contracting job that was offered with one of three defense contracting agencies for upwards of $90k per year at 22 years old, I decided to separate in April 2010.

From Spangdahlem Germany I spent one year hitchhiking with no guidebook to Beijing through Central Asia. I wanted to experience these countries without the mediation of other western worldviews. I witnessed incredible kindness and generosity, helping me understand that otherness is socially constructed, and that I have more in common with a fisherman on drying sea in Kazakhstan than I did with the CEOs of the companies I almost found myself working for. In the course of this, I ended up witnessing some of the instability that bled over from the war in Afghanistan in Osh, Kyrgyzstan where upwards of 2000 Uzbeks were killed in an ethnic cleansing. Only 400 were ever reported. Then I saw it again throughout Xinjiang Province, China with Beijing's forced relocation of Uyger Muslim minorities. In the towns off the tourist trails, I saw doors being kicked in and people being marched off into trucks. In Xian, I bought a bicycle, and rode it for 3000 km to Vientiene crossing the foothills of the Himalayas into the bomb ridden jungles of Laos.

After this journey I went home to Defuniak Springs, Florida for several months before applying to study International Relations in Brussels, Belgium.

I had resolved that I wanted to study the thoughts of people who make decisions for people like me to travel halfway around the world to kill and die. It was my objective to understand war, with the naive belief that I might one day have a solution to get rid of it. Over the course of my studies, I gave up on the notion of being able to change things from within because I found the contributing factors to be too great and the established discourse to be too self reinforcing to be honest with what I knew to be true. It became apparent to me that we could not solve war until we could adequately address the underlying causes of state and group violence. I have devoted my life toward understanding these things, and finding systems level approaches to building communities where violence is not the logical course of action for any party.

In November of 2015, after years of dwelling on the lives I helped take with what I did in Afghanistan I began speaking out about the problems with Network Centric Warfare and remotely controlled killings through Unmanned Aircraft Systems aka "drones". Drones took a part in my overall mission in Afghanistan which involved communications for everything from C-17s to British Tornadoes, to Special Forces raids in remote villages. But unmanned weapons platforms are the future and to understand them, it is imperative to understand that these are highly networked weapons within a greater sensor grid which pervades our every day reality. I speak about the political, social, psychological, legal, ethical and technical problems that these new ways of fighting entail. At the same time, I advocate for a radical shift in our behavior, to embrace the externalities our daily decisions create, and to localize them in a sustainable way. I advocate for the innocent victims of these technologies, and for reconciliation with the populations we are at war with. Ultimately they are our fellow human beings, and we cannot be apathetic to their suffering while we continue living off the spoils of our geographic lottery. Though I will never stop trying, I concede that there is probably no solution to automated warfare, it's a technological approach that will continue to be used to kill people in an increasingly greater scope by an increasingly greater number of actors. It will continue until we are all destroyed or until the underlying motivations for it's use in killing, is outweighed by the percieved consequences. International legal norms cannot be achieved without the radical restructuring of our global societies to obtain a state where they can be kept. This is where my interest lies. This is where my energy is directed when I criticize the existing norms. I do not want to stand alone, but with others. I don't not want to resist war forever, I want us to win. Join me, include me, let's do this.

Cian M. Westmoreland

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