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Archive of the Unmanned: Between Consumerism and Militarism Shimrit Lee Bosnia, summer of 1995: tactics of drone warfare and humanitarian intervention developed in tandem as the first U.S. military drone, known as the Gnat 750, was used to monitor human rights violations from afar. CIA Director Robert James Woolsey wrote about these early test flights with wonder: “I could sit in my office, call up a classified channel and type messages to a guy in Albania asking him to zoom in on things.” By the end of 1996, U.S. drones had completed nearly 1,600 missions in support of the joint U.N-NATO mission in the former Yugoslavia. Years later, the Gnat 750 was equipped with lethal capabilities and developed into the “Predator” drone, America’s most lethal weapon in the global war on terror, responsible for countless strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. Today, there are more unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - or drones being transferred between countries than ever before. These transfers form a part of a fast-growing and increasingly privatized counterterrorism industry led by the U.K., the U.S., and Israel. Archive of the Unmanned takes the industry of war out from behind the closed doors of conference rooms and the shadowy halls of international arms expositions and into the critical gaze of the public eye. By hand-illustrating visual content found in niche journals intended only for corporate and military audiences, Serbian artist Vladimir Miladinović aims to shed light on how war is sold—as much as a commercial enterprise as a political one. At the same time he illuminates connections between today’s brand of aerial warfare and the history of humanitarian intervention that has its roots in the place that he calls home. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, catalogues of weaponry and equipment were mainly confined to illustrated manuals made by and for military enthusiasts. After the Cold War, a period marked by increased market privatization and a nascent interest in counter-terrorism, the defense publication industry burgeoned. Aviation Week & Space Technology, a weekly magazine reporting on aerospace, defense, and aviation industries, published its first issue in 1916. The numerous arms advertisements peppered throughout the journal reflect militarized fantasies, projections of how technologies could shape the ways in which war is both waged and imagined. Implicit in such fantasies is a rewriting of state violence as a mere exchange of commodities.