Drones centralize kill authority upward into hierarchy rather than handing control to machines

Evidence

Instead of “man” in general losing control to the “machine,” here it is the lower-ranking operators who lose their relative autonomy to the higher echelons of the hierarchy. Integral robotization would further strengthen this tendency to centralize decision making, although in a manner different and certainly more discreet, but no less overdeveloped. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 675

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does this documented centralization contradict the ‘network-centric’ decentralization promise in ways that shape the new ethics the reader is tracking?
• XREF: connects to: Each drone strike involves a distributed network of human watchers and deciders — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 24; The Pentagon aims for drones to exert lethal force without human control — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 652; Anti-O.A.S. units were designed as autonomous forces outside normal hierarchy — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1497

Related

• The Pentagon aims for drones to exert lethal force without human control (similarity 0.86)
• Each drone strike involves a distributed network of human watchers and deciders (similarity 0.84)
• Present-day drones combine remote control and autonomous piloting. (similarity 0.83)
• Remote-controlled machines were proposed as a third option beyond protected men or autonomous machines (similarity 0.82)
• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. (similarity 0.82)
• Drones add the remote control’s range to the weapon’s range. (similarity 0.81)
• Drones evolved from surveillance eyes into lethal hunter-killer weapons. (similarity 0.81)
• Drones transformed from surveillance eyes into weapons almost by chance. (similarity 0.81)
• Drones resolve the guerrilla problem by depriving insurgents of any target to attack. (similarity 0.80)
• Drone war turns strategic evaluation into disconnected body counts. (similarity 0.80)
• Drones are nondiscriminatory because excluding combat erases the combatant-noncombatant distinction. (similarity 0.80)
• Eliminating reciprocal exposure to violence makes drones look like cowardly weapons. (similarity 0.80)
• A few hundred drone operators’ moral feelings can be dismissed as irrelevant (similarity 0.80)
• Drone technology severs visual discrimination from physical proximity to targets. (similarity 0.80)
• Drones abolish the condition of combat that makes combatants identifiable. (similarity 0.79)