GrŽgoire  Chamayou

The Parisian research scholar and author of Manhunts offers a philosophical perspective on the role of drone technology in today's changing military environments and the implications of drone capabilities in enabling democratic choices. 12,500 first printing.

A Theory of the Drone

Katherine Kenny

In an article entitled "The Paradox of Riskless Warfare," Paul Kahn has warned that this form of warfare threatens to erode the traditional basis of the right to kill. He explains that as soon as one leaves behind a "relationship of mutual risks" and the "requirement of reciprocity" is broken, war is no longer war: it turns into a kind of police action. Kahn adds that, quite apart from that reciprocal relationship, the right to kill with impunity in war stemmed from an original right to legitimate defense. If one has the right to kill without crime, it is--according to him by reason of a right to self-defense in the face of imminent peril. If all physical dangers to oneself disappear, that right disappears too.

an ethic for butchers or executioners, but not for combatants.

Once the detection of direct participation in hostilities becomes almost impossible for the pure and simple reason that there is no longer any combat, it becomes necessary to mobilize other techniques of detection and also other categories to designate the enemy. The status of combatant tends to be diluted in such a way as to extend to any form of membership of, collaboration with, or presumed sympathy for some militant organization, whether or not there is any link with its armed branch. What we now have is an insidious switch from the category of "combatants" to that of "suspected militants." This combatant = militant equivalence has the effect of extending the right to kill well beyond the classic legal boundaries and conferring an indefinite elasticity on the concept of a legitimate target.

By depriving the enemy of any possibility of participating directly in hostilities, one also deprives oneself of the surest means of recognizing an enemy as such.

The fact that your weapon enables you to destroy precisely whomever you wish does not mean that you are more capable of making out who is and who is not a legitimate target. The precision of the strike has no bearing on the pertinence of the targeting in the first place. That would be tantamount to saying that the guillotine, because of the precision of its blade-which, it is true, separates the head from the trunk with remarkable precision- makes it thereby better able to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent.

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