Drone strategy accepts enemy recruitment because strikes can outpace it
Evidence
The strategic plan of air counterinsurgency is now clear: as soon as a head grows back, cut it off. And never mind if, in a spiraling development of attacks and reprisals that is hard to control, the perverse effect of that prophylactic measure is to attract new volunteers. From this point of view, the objection that drone strikes are counterproductive because they allow the enemy, in a classic pattern of action and repression, to recruit more volunteers no longer applies. Never mind if the enemy ranks thicken, since it will always be possible to neutralize the new recruits as fast as they emerge. The cull will be repeated periodically, in a pattern of infinite eradication. Once antiterrorism overtakes counterinsurgency, we are led to understand, the sufficient aim becomes a regular elimination of emerging threats, which takes the form of a periodic reaping: “Kill enough of them and the threat goes away… . However, the ‘kill list’ … never gets shorter, the names and faces are simply replaced.” — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 287
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘infinite eradication’ logic directly evidences the reader’s core interest in how drone capacity transformed the moral and political space-time of war. — connects to: Patience can outlast an opponent’s brief advantage — , A Year of World Stories, 3392; Drone doctrine replaces counterinsurgency’s population politics with terror-and-eradication yield — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 286
- SEED: Article angle: the self-defeating logic of kill-list warfare as a permanent cull that can never finish — a mechanism-level account of why drone war has no exit.