Drones resolve the guerrilla problem by depriving insurgents of any target to attack.

Evidence

The drone seems to provide a tardy resolution to this historical problem: in a radically absolute form, it turns against the guerrillas their own long-established principle, namely, deprive the enemy of an enemy. An insurgent confronted by an army of drones no longer has any target to attack. “We pray to Allah that we have American soldiers to kill. These bombs from the sky we cannot fight,” said Maulvi Abdullah Haijazi, an Afghan villager reacting to American strikes. American officers delight in those words; they consider the statement as confirming the implacable efficacy of their new weapon. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 259

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the ‘deprive the enemy of an enemy’ logic hold up empirically, or is it strategic self-congratulation from the US side?
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the inversion of guerrilla elusiveness as the drone’s defining tactical innovation.
• XREF: connects to: Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 111; Drone warfare is a war without losses and without victory; Drones abolish the condition of combat that makes combatants identifiable. (+2 more)

Related

• The Afghanistan war instantly validated drones as central to future US military strategy. (similarity 0.87)
• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. (similarity 0.86)
• Drones transformed from surveillance eyes into weapons almost by chance. (similarity 0.86)
• Drones add the remote control’s range to the weapon’s range. (similarity 0.86)
• Drone war’s core task shifted from destroying enemies to finding and tracking them (similarity 0.86)
• Drones evolved from surveillance eyes into lethal hunter-killer weapons. (similarity 0.85)
• The drone’s impossibility of capture deliberately converts kill into the only option (similarity 0.85)
• Drone warfare pits unburdened machines against bodies bound by physical limits. (similarity 0.85)
• Drone war turns strategic evaluation into disconnected body counts. (similarity 0.84)
• Drones transform war from combat-defined zones into pursuit-defined hunting grounds. (similarity 0.84)
• Eliminating reciprocal exposure to violence makes drones look like cowardly weapons. (similarity 0.84)
• The drone reconciles liberal security statehood with unrestricted waging of war. (similarity 0.84)
• Drone warfare replaces combat’s duel with a hunter-prey hide-and-seek structure (similarity 0.84)
• Drones are nondiscriminatory because excluding combat erases the combatant-noncombatant distinction. (similarity 0.84)
• Drones abolish the condition of combat that makes combatants identifiable. (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Drone-weaponized remote control radicalizes war into one-sided killing from safe zones #expands (0.80)
• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. #expands (0.75) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 111
• Drone warfare is a war without losses and without victory #corroborates (0.60)
• Drones abolish the condition of combat that makes combatants identifiable. #expands (0.60)
• Drone war’s core task shifted from destroying enemies to finding and tracking them #complicates (0.55)