“This changes things”: Children, targeting, and the making of precision

Avoidance of civilian casualties increasingly affects the political calculus of legitimacy in armed conflict. “Collateral damage” is a problem that can be managed through the material production of precision, but it is also the case that precision is a problem managed through the cultural production of collateral damage. Bearing decisively on popular perceptions of ethical conduct in recourse to political violence, childhood is an important site of meaning-making in this process. In pop culture, news dispatches, and social media, children, as quintessential innocents, figure prominently where the dire human consequences of imprecision are depicted. Children thus affect the practical “precision” of even the most advanced weapons, perhaps precluding a strike for their presence, potentially coloring it with their corpses. But who count as children, how, when, where, and why are not at all settled questions. Drawing insights from what the 2015 film, Eye in the Sky, reveals about a key social technology of governance we have already internalized, I explore how childhood is itself a terrain of engagement in the (un)making of precision.