Drone
Remote Control Warfare
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Drone warfare described from the perspectives of drone operators, victims of drone attacks, anti-drone activists, international law, military thinkers, and others.
"[A] thoughtful examination of the dilemmas this new weapon poses."
—Foreign Affairs
Drones are changing the conduct of war. Deployed at presidential discretion, they can be used in regular war zones or to kill people in such countries as Yemen and Somalia, where the United States is not officially at war. Advocates say that drones are more precise than conventional bombers, allowing warfare with minimal civilian deaths while keeping American pilots out of harm's way. Critics say that drones are cowardly and that they often kill innocent civilians while terrorizing entire villages on the ground. In this book, Hugh Gusterson explores the significance of drone warfare from multiple perspectives, drawing on accounts by drone operators, victims of drone attacks, anti-drone activists, human rights activists, international lawyers, journalists, military thinkers, and academic experts.
Gusterson examines the way drone warfare has created commuter warriors and redefined the space of the battlefield. He looks at the paradoxical mix of closeness and distance involved in remote killing: is it easier than killing someone on the physical battlefield if you have to watch onscreen? He suggests a new way of understanding the debate over civilian casualties of drone attacks. He maps “ethical slippage” over time in the Obama administration's targeting practices. And he contrasts Obama administration officials' legal justification of drone attacks with arguments by international lawyers and NGOs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Since the early 20th century, "advocates of air power have repeatedly prophesied the imminent obsolescence of ground forces," yet they have always been wrong, writes Gusterson, professor of international affairs at George Washington University (People of the Bomb) in this short, astute, and disapproving examination of the latest failed attempt to rule from the sky. Gusterson acknowledges that drones are more accurate than crewed aircraft but adds that they kill plenty of bystanders. Moreover, modern armies are capable of shooting drones down, revealing them to be a continuation of 19th-century colonial warfare in which soldiers with superior weapons annihilated forces possessing far less sophisticated weaponry. Given the drone's position in asymmetrical warfare, Gusterson makes an apt analogy with suicide bombers that some will find very unsettling: When people are killed by an unsuspected suicide bomber in their midst, this is considered a despicable, cowardly act. When people are killed by a drone safely piloted from 7,000 miles away, how is that to be received? Military leaders find drones irresistible because they seem to make military intervention cheap and easy, but they enable a "kind of permanent, low-level military action that threatens to erase the boundary between war and peace." Gusterson's insightful editorial shows less interest in drones' effectiveness than their dismal effect on the ethics of war.
