Garrett McKinnon

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Bio

Garrett McKinnon is an Assistant Teaching Professor of History at North Carolina State University. He is a historian of militarism, technology, gender, and economics, with a focus on the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. McKinnon earned his Ph.D. in History from Duke University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Aerospace History at the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology. He previously taught for several years in Duke University’s History Department.

McKinnon’s article “The 1960 U-2 Crisis Reconsidered: Technology, Masculinity, and U.S. Airpower’s ‘Unmanning,'” was recently published in Diplomatic History, the official journal of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). The article examines how the Soviet military’s downing and capture of CIA U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1960 sparked a global scandal about U.S. covert operations and military masculinity. American journalists and policy makers debated the vulnerabilities of “manned” airpower centering blame for the crisis upon pilot Powers who had refused to kill himself with a CIA-provided lethal injection. The “unmanning” of pilot Powers for his supposed failures as a military man in public and policy discourse emerge as a central part of the rationale for the “unmanning” of U.S. airpower through the adoption of drones and satellites.

McKinnon’s current book project, “Automating Violence: A History of United States Drone Warfare,” offers a genealogy of United States drone warfare by analyzing over 100 years of Americans’ pursuits of “aerial torpedoes,” “pilotless airplanes,” “drones,” “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” “Remotely Piloted Vehicles,” and similar types of devices. Weaving together cultural, technological, military, gender, and economic history, it explores how Americans have imagined, constructed, deployed, and found meaning in devices such as World War I’s “Kettering Bug” and the contemporary “Predator” drone flown during the U.S. War on Terror. Fantasized as more than just a means of bombing, the drone, I argue, emerged in the imaginations of U.S. war planners as a do-it-all war machine. American strategists substituted drones for flawed human agents hoping to execute all sorts of military actions with mechanical efficiency. Drones promised to distance soldiers deemed incapable of war from the site of combat, seemingly saving American lives while rendering violence upon enemy others less visible, thereby de-politicizing war, and preserving armed conflict as an instrument of policy.

McKinnon’s research has won fellowship and grant support from funding institutions including the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the Eisenhower Foundation, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, and the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology.

His writing and reviews have appeared in Diplomatic History, the Civil War Book Review, and the Linda Hall Library’s Hedgehog magazine.