Chamayou underscores how drones are changing our conception of war in three major ways. First, the idea of a frontier or battlefield is rendered meaningless as is the idea that there are particular places--like homesteads--where the deployment of violence is considered criminal. In other words, if once the legality of killing was dependent on where the killing was carried out, today US lawyers argue that the traditional connection between geographical spaces--such as the battlefield, home, hospital, mosque--and forms of violence are out of date. Accordingly, every place becomes a potential site of drone violence.
Second, the development of "precise missiles," the kind with which most drones are currently armed led to the popular conception that drones are precise weapons. Precision, though, is a slippery concept. For one, chopping off a person's head with a machete is much more precise than any missile, but there is no political or military support for precision of this kind in the West. Indeed, "precision" turns out to be an extremely copious category. The U.S., for example, counts all military age males in a strike zone as combatants unless there is explicit intelligence proving them innocent posthumously. The real ruse, then, has to do with the relation between precision and geography. As precise weapons, drones also render geographical contours irrelevant since the ostensible precision of these weapons justifies the killing of suspected terrorists in their homes. A legal strike zone is then equated with anywhere the drone strikes. And when "legal killing" can occur anywhere, then one can execute suspects anywhere--even in zones traditionally conceived as off-limits.
Finally, drones change our conception of war because it becomes, in Chamayou's words, a priori impossible to die as one kills. One air-force officer formulated this basic benefit in the following manner: "The real advantage of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to protect power without projecting vulnerability." Consequently, drones are declared to be a humanitarian weapon in two senses: they are precise vis--vis the enemy, and ensure no human cost to the perpetrator.
From Conquest to Pursuit.
If Guantanamo was the icon of President George W. Bush's anti-terror policy, drones have become the emblem of the Obama presidency. Indeed, Chamayou maintains that President Barak Obama has adopted a totally different anti-terror doctrine from his predecessor: kill rather than capture, replace torture with targeted assassinations.
Citing a New York Times report, Chamayou describes the way in which deadly decisions are reached: "It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals... Every week or so, more than 100 members of the sprawling national security apparatus gather by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects' biographies and to recommend to the president who should be the next to die." In D.C, this is called "TerrorTuesday." Once established, the list is subsequently sent to the White House where the president gives his oral approval for each name. "With the kill list validated, the drones do the rest."
Obama's doctrine entails a change in the paradigm of warfare. In contrast to military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz, who claimed that the fundamental structure of war is a duel of two fighters facing each other, we now have, in Chamayou's parlance, a hunter closing in on its a prey. Chamayou, who also wrote Manhunts: A Philosophical History, which examines the history of hunting humans from ancient Sparta to the modern practices of chasing undocumented migrants, recounts how according to English common law one could hunt badgers and foxes in another man's land, "because destroying such creatures is said to be profitable to the Public." This is precisely the kind of law that the US would like to claim for drones, he asserts.
The strategy of militarized manhunting is essentially preemptive. It is not a matter of responding to actual attacks but rather preventing the possibility of emerging threats by the early elimination of potential adversaries. According to this new logic, war is no longer based on conquest--Obama is not interested in colonizing swaths of land in northern Pakistan--but on the right of pursuit. The right to pursue the prey wherever it may be found, in turn, transforms the way we understand the basic principles of international relations since it undermines the notion of territorial integrity as well as the idea of nonintervention and the broadly accepted definition of sovereignty as the supreme authority over a given territory.
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