Drone war turns strategic evaluation into disconnected body counts.

Evidence

Dronized manhunting represents the triumph, both practical and doctrinal, of antiterrorism over counterinsurgency. According to this logic, the total body count and a list of hunting trophies take the place of a strategic evaluation of the political effects of armed violence. Successes become statistics. Their evaluation is totally disconnected from their real effects on the ground. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 282

Categorization

• XREF: Bears on how success metrics in drone warfare disconnect from political reality, echoing the reader’s concerns about impunity. — connects to: Drones lower political, economic, and ethical costs of war; Drone-weaponized remote control radicalizes war into one-sided killing from safe zones; Drone targeting hinged on remote visual guesses about sex and combatant status (+10 more)

Related

• Eliminating reciprocal exposure to violence makes drones look like cowardly weapons. (similarity 0.88)
• Drone warfare creates a new ethical-political norm neither war nor peace (similarity 0.87)
• Drone warfare pits unburdened machines against bodies bound by physical limits. (similarity 0.87)
• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. (similarity 0.87)
• Drones lower political, economic, and ethical costs of war (similarity 0.87)
• Drones deactivate democratic war critique by removing citizens’ exposure to death. (similarity 0.86)
• Unilateral drone warfare collapses war into a one-sided putting-to-death (similarity 0.85)
• Faceless blurry drone imagery reduces moral resistance to killing (similarity 0.85)
• The drone state aims to replace mobilized citizen bodies with mechanical agents. (similarity 0.85)
• Drone warfare creates a new configuration that is neither war nor peace (similarity 0.85)
• Drone warfare deactivates the democratic critique rooted in exposable lives (similarity 0.85)
• Drones add the remote control’s range to the weapon’s range. (similarity 0.85)
• Armed drones reshape sovereignty over a state’s own subjects, not just enemies (similarity 0.85)
• The drone reconciles liberal security statehood with unrestricted waging of war. (similarity 0.84)
• Drones resolve the guerrilla problem by depriving insurgents of any target to attack. (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Drone warfare pits unburdened machines against bodies bound by physical limits. #expands (0.75) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 705
• Drones deactivate democratic war critique by removing citizens’ exposure to death. #expands (0.70) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 575
• Drone warfare creates a new ethical-political norm neither war nor peace #corroborates (0.45)