The drone’s impossibility of capture deliberately converts kill into the only option

Evidence

Some supporters claim that drones are analogous to the bulletproof vests worn by the police. They are efficient means of protecting the agents of the state police force, and such protection is legitimate. That may be so, but they are forgetting an essential difference: the wearing of a bulletproof vest does not prevent the taking of prisoners. With a hunter-killer drone, however, such an option is impossible. It is all or nothing: either shoot to kill or take no action at all. Lethal force is the only option available. This loss of operational capacity incidentally highlights the affinity between this weapon and the doctrine “kill rather than capture,” which today is official policy in the White House: “Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive.” In this respect, the drone is a dream of a weapon. One can always claim afterward that capture with these means was “infeasible”—failing to acknowledge that this technical incapacity was deliberately organized further up the line. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 544

Categorization

• XREF: Directly answers the reader’s interest in how drone technology transformed moral space — the design precedent to ‘kill rather than capture’. — connects to: Unilateral drone warfare collapses war into a one-sided putting-to-death; The drone made warfare absolutely unilateral, killing without risk of being killed; Drone-weaponized remote control radicalizes war into one-sided killing from safe zones (+3 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 544

Related

• The drone made warfare absolutely unilateral, killing without risk of being killed (similarity 0.89)
• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. (similarity 0.88)
• Unilateral drone warfare collapses war into a one-sided putting-to-death (similarity 0.88)
• Drone-weaponized remote control radicalizes war into one-sided killing from safe zones (similarity 0.87)
• Drone warfare creates a new configuration that is neither war nor peace (similarity 0.86)
• Unilateral drone killing makes the legal right to kill merely formal. (similarity 0.86)
• Radical protection from death transforms war into one-sided slaughter or hunting (similarity 0.85)
• The Pentagon aims for drones to exert lethal force without human control (similarity 0.85)
• Drones resolve the guerrilla problem by depriving insurgents of any target to attack. (similarity 0.85)
• Drone warfare leaves the mutual right to kill formally intact but substantively empty. (similarity 0.84)
• The drone reconciles liberal security statehood with unrestricted waging of war. (similarity 0.84)
• Drone warfare pits unburdened machines against bodies bound by physical limits. (similarity 0.83)
• Eliminating reciprocal exposure to violence makes drones look like cowardly weapons. (similarity 0.83)
• Drone warfare creates a new ethical-political norm neither war nor peace (similarity 0.83)
• Drones transformed from surveillance eyes into weapons almost by chance. (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Armed drones make killing a priori one-directional, converting combat into slaughter. #corroborates (0.90) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 111
• Unilateral drone warfare collapses war into a one-sided putting-to-death #corroborates (0.85)
• The drone made warfare absolutely unilateral, killing without risk of being killed #corroborates (0.80)
• Drone-weaponized remote control radicalizes war into one-sided killing from safe zones #corroborates (0.80)