Drone strikes amount tactically to the state’s version of insurgent bomb attacks.

Evidence

It is fighting by means of terror, and no attempt is made to disguise the fact. Says Dunlap, “American precision airpower is analogous (on a much larger and more effective scale) to the effect that insurgents try to impose … through the use of improvised explosive devices.” The point could not be made more clearly: at a tactical level (and setting aside technological sophistication), drone strikes are equivalent to bomb attacks. They constitute the weapons of state terrorism. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s aim of understanding the twisted moral logic and impunity of imperial combatants. — connects to: Drone strikes constitute weapons of state terrorism; Drone operators see strikes in vivid detail, overturning the distancing logic — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 403
• SEED: Strong essay/argument angle: the symmetrical terror of precision airpower and IEDs, from a serving officer’s own mouth.

Related

• Drone strikes constitute weapons of state terrorism (similarity 0.94)
• Air Force strategists redefined counterinsurgency around airpower and drones. (similarity 0.82)
• Drone war turns strategic evaluation into disconnected body counts. (similarity 0.82)
• The drone reconciles liberal security statehood with unrestricted waging of war. (similarity 0.82)
• Drone missiles have larger lethal radii than conventional infantry weapons (similarity 0.82)
• Drones resolve the guerrilla problem by depriving insurgents of any target to attack. (similarity 0.82)
• Armed drones reshape sovereignty over a state’s own subjects, not just enemies (similarity 0.82)
• Drone doctrine replaces counterinsurgency’s population politics with terror-and-eradication yield (similarity 0.82)
• Drone operators see strikes in vivid detail, overturning the distancing logic (similarity 0.82)
• Drones are nondiscriminatory because excluding combat erases the combatant-noncombatant distinction. (similarity 0.81)
• Eliminating reciprocal exposure to violence makes drones look like cowardly weapons. (similarity 0.81)
• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. (similarity 0.81)
• The drone should be judged against equivalent tactical weapons, not older bombers (similarity 0.81)
• Drone advocates came to believe their own claims of negligible collateral damage. (similarity 0.81)
• Air Force pilots were drones’ most virulent early critics, not pacifists. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Drone operators see strikes in vivid detail, overturning the distancing logic #contradicts (0.60) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 403