Drone Theory by Chamayou

Ref: Gregoire Chamayou (2015). Drone Theory. Penguin Publishing.

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Summary

On the morality of the use of drones and robotic systems in warfare.
The drone may become the sole practicable option in warfare.
The real advantage of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to project power without projecting vulnerability.
Resources allocated to unmanned systems rose by 30% in 2012. That rapid increase reflects a strategic plan, the gradual dronization of an increasing portion of the American armed forces.
Dronized manhunting represents the triumph, both practical and doctrinal, of antiterrorism over counterinsurgency.
Because the threshold of recourse to violence is drastically lowered (when using drones), violence tends to be seen as the default option for foreign-policy.

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"Months of monotony and milliseconds of mayhem.”
Team: Pilot, Sensor Operator, Mission Intel Coordinator, Safety Observer, team of video analysts, and the ground force commander (who eventually gives the authority for the aerial strike).
Weapon: AGM-114 Hellfire with a lethal radius of 15m and a wound radius of 20m (vs a grenade with a lethal radius of 3m).
Signature strikes: Strikes authorized on the basis of traces, indications, or defining characteristics. Such strikes target individuals whose identity remains unknown but whose behavior suggests, signals, or signs membership in a terrorist organization. It depends solely on their behavior, which, seen from the sky, appears to "correspond to a signature of pre-identified behavior that the US links to militant activity." Today, strikes of this type, against unknown suspects, appear to constitute the majority of cases.

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For whoever uses such a weapon (drones), it becomes a priori impossible to die as one kills. Warfare, from being possibly asymmetrical, becomes absolutely unilateral.
In the field of Legal Theory: "Warfare without Risk," in which the drone is probably the most effective instrument, critically undermines the meta-legal principles that underpin the right to kill in war.
By suggesting that the lives of the enemy are completely dispensable while ours are absolutely Sacrosanct, one introduces a radical inequality in the value of lives, and this breaks with the inviolable principle of the equal dignity of all human lives.
The drone is in reality related to a non-discriminatory weapon of a new kind: by ruling out the possibility of combat, the drone destroys the very possibility of any clear differentiation between combatants and noncombatants.
Whereas counterinsurgency strategy implies (apart from brute force) compromise, diplomatic action, pressure, and agreements, all of which operate under constraint, antiterrorism excludes any political impact upon the conflict. "We do not negotiate with terrorists" is the key phrase in radically non-strategic thought.

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The fear was that losses, even if minimal from the point of view of the military balance of forces, would, through their supposed effect upon public opinion, carry an exorbitant political price. So they had to be avoided at all costs.
Soldiers must put themselves at greater risk to ensure zero risk to non-military.
The importance of the human experience of war.

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According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association. What exactly is PTSD? The DSM is of the opinion that the patient must have been exposed to "an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury or other threat to one's physical integrity.
The media buzz around the suffering of drone operators was without foundation. Military psychologists discovered no trace of PTSD.

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The most defective method possible would be to approach warfare and the phenomena of armed violence in terms of the ends pursued and not by the nature of the means employed.-Simone Weil, 1930’s.
Death per se does not extinguish the will to fight such opponents; rather, it is the hopelessness that arises from the inevitability of death from a source they cannot fight.-Charles Dunlap, USAF MGEN.
By driving the inhabitants of the bombarded areas from their homes in a state of exasperation, dispersing them among neighboring clans and tribes, with hatred in their hearts at what they consider "unfair methods of warfare," these attacks bring about the exact political results which it is so important, in our own interests, to avoid, viz. The permanent embitterment and alienation of the frontier tribes.-British Officer, 1923.

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