Air Force pilots were drones’ most virulent early critics, not pacifists.

Evidence

A revealing symptom of this is the fact that initially the most virulent criticisms of the drones came not from hopeless pacifists but from Air Force pilots, in the name of the preservation of their traditional warrior values. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 351

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts the ‘toppled knights of the sky’ with later normative acceptance of drone killing; relevant to the reader’s impunity question. — connects to: Air Force pilots resisted drones partly because unmanning threatened their virility.; Air Force strategists redefined counterinsurgency around airpower and drones. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 257

Related

• Air Force pilots resisted drones partly because unmanning threatened their virility. (similarity 0.91)
• Air Force strategists redefined counterinsurgency around airpower and drones. (similarity 0.84)
• Pilot resistance to drones inscribed a threat to masculine virility through risk-taking. (similarity 0.83)
• Eliminating reciprocal exposure to violence makes drones look like cowardly weapons. (similarity 0.81)
• Drones create a crisis in military ethos by contradicting traditional warrior values. (similarity 0.81)
• Drone strikes amount tactically to the state’s version of insurgent bomb attacks. (similarity 0.81)
• Counterinsurgency doctrine marginalized airpower for strategic rather than moral reasons. (similarity 0.81)
• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. (similarity 0.80)
• Drone war turns strategic evaluation into disconnected body counts. (similarity 0.80)
• Drone advocates came to believe their own claims of negligible collateral damage. (similarity 0.80)
• Drones abolish the condition of combat that makes combatants identifiable. (similarity 0.79)
• Armed drone projects were framed as solving Vietnam’s political contradictions (similarity 0.79)
• Drone doctrine replaces counterinsurgency’s population politics with terror-and-eradication yield (similarity 0.79)
• Media emphasis on drone pilot trauma legitimizes them as classic soldiers (similarity 0.79)
• Drones are nondiscriminatory because excluding combat erases the combatant-noncombatant distinction. (similarity 0.79)