Killing by Remote Control

Bradley Jay Strawser’s edited volume Killing by Remote Control arrived in 2013 at a moment when the ethical conversation around armed drones was shifting from a specialist concern into a mainstream public argument. The United States had by then spent more than a decade conducting strikes with the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; the Obama administration’s Terror Tuesday meetings and the kill-list reporting of that period had made the mechanics of remote targeting unavoidably visible. Oxford University Press published the collection into a field that had, until then, been dominated by legal commentary and journalism rather than sustained philosophical treatment. Strawser, a philosopher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and a former Air Force officer, pulled together ten essays — his own included — that treated the drone as a problem for moral theory rather than only for policy, and that insisted the problem could be reasoned through with the same tools used on earlier questions in the ethics of war.

The thesis Strawser himself argues for, and which organises the collection even though several contributors push against it, is that the use of unmanned systems is not merely permissible in a just war but can be morally required. He builds this on what he calls the principle of unnecessary risk: if a state can achieve a legitimate military objective without exposing its own combatants to greater risk than is necessary, it is obliged to do so. A drone, on this reading, is simply a technology that lowers risk for one’s own side while not increasing the risk to anyone else beyond what a manned platform would entail. The provocative move is to flip the direction of moral pressure: critics have tended to put the burden of justification on the operator who sits in a trailer in Nevada; Strawser puts the burden on the commander who sends a pilot into airspace that a drone could have patrolled. The rest of the volume is best read as the field testing that claim.

The book is organised in three loose movements rather than crisp parts. The opening chapters set out the just-war apparatus and apply it to the drone. Strawser’s own contribution lays down the principle of unnecessary risk in its sharpest form. Jeff McMahan, whose work on the morality of killing in war has reshaped the discipline, contributes a careful essay teasing apart which objections to drones are objections to the technology itself and which are objections to the particular wars in which the technology is being used. Daniel Statman argues that drones can be seen as the moral descendants of practices like sniping and precision bombing — part of a long trend toward more discriminate violence rather than a rupture with it. These essays share a willingness to concede that drones look troubling at first glance and a determination to show that the trouble, when inspected, often turns out to lie elsewhere.

The middle of the book takes up the operational and empirical questions that the opening essays had bracketed. Avery Plaw works through the civilian casualty estimates coming out of Pakistan, comparing figures from the New America Foundation, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the Long War Journal, and tries to measure what proportion of those killed can plausibly be called combatants under international humanitarian law. His conclusion, carefully hedged, is that strike precision has been better than critics claim but worse than official US statements imply, and that the honest moral verdict depends on which baseline one chooses — strikes compared to doing nothing, strikes compared to a manned bombing campaign, or strikes compared to a Pakistani ground operation. Marcus Schulzke takes up the related question of whether distance to the target erodes the moral agency of the operator. He argues, against the common intuition, that remote operation can actually improve ethical performance: the operator has time, imagery, a second set of eyes, and the ability to abort in a way a pilot under anti-aircraft fire does not. The idea of the drone operator as a video-gamer dulled to killing is, on his reading, a cliché that the evidence from operator interviews does not support.

John Kaag and Sarah Kreps bring in the political-theoretical worry that is probably the most durable objection in the book, and the one Strawser’s principle has the hardest time absorbing. If drones reduce the human cost of war to the striking side almost to zero, they also reduce the political cost of starting and continuing wars. Elected leaders face less domestic resistance to a campaign that produces no flag-draped coffins; legislatures find it easier to tolerate campaigns they never formally authorised; the public, no longer sharing in the sacrifice, loses the moral stake that war traditionally imposed. This is not an argument against the technology on grounds of what it does in any particular strike, but on grounds of what its availability does to the democratic restraint on war itself. Several contributors return to this worry from different angles — including the suggestion that the normalisation of targeted killing is quietly expanding the geographic and temporal boundaries of what counts as armed conflict.

The closing chapters widen the lens. There is a treatment of the symmetry and reciprocity problems that arise when drone-strike capability spreads — a conversation that has only grown more pressing in the years since, as Turkey, Iran, Israel, and now Russia have fielded armed systems that would have been considered advanced in 2013. The volume touches on the question of autonomous weapons, though it predates the sharpest phase of that debate; where the authors write about autonomy they are mostly cautious, flagging the moral importance of a human in or on the loop without pretending the line between remote operation and autonomous engagement is as crisp as the Pentagon’s directives suggested. The final essays return to the first-person moral psychology of the operator — the long shifts of surveillance, the intimacy of watching a target for weeks before a strike, the reported incidence of operational stress and moral injury among remote crews, which complicates the easy image of the detached joystick-killer.

The examples that run through the book anchor these arguments in cases a reader can picture. The targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011 appears repeatedly, as a test case for whether a citizen can be targeted without judicial process in a declared theatre of hostilities. The signature-strike pattern — targeting individuals on the basis of behavioural signatures rather than confirmed identity — is dissected as a quietly radical innovation that most of the just-war tradition is poorly equipped to assess. The CIA’s parallel programme is contrasted with the uniformed Air Force operations, raising the question of whether civilian intelligence officers conducting lethal strikes meet the combatant criteria the laws of war assume. Specific platforms — the Predator, the Reaper, the smaller hand-launched systems used by ground forces — are described well enough that a reader without technical background can follow why their different endurance, payloads, and sensor fits produce different ethical profiles. The Hellfire missile and its small, more selective variants are discussed in relation to the proportionality calculation. The book predates the mass deployment of loitering munitions and the kind of first-person-view quadcopter now familiar from Ukraine, so the systems in view are the strategic reconnaissance-strike platforms rather than the tactical disposable drones that have come to define contemporary battlefields.

The reception has been mixed in the way serious volumes of applied ethics tend to be. Within academic philosophy, Strawser’s principle of unnecessary risk became a reference point that defenders and critics both had to engage. McMahan’s chapter is routinely cited in the literature as the clearest statement of the position that the ethical status of a drone campaign depends almost entirely on whether the war it serves is just, not on the technology. The humanitarian and legal community, particularly scholars affiliated with the International Committee of the Red Cross, pushed back against what they saw as the collection’s willingness to grant too much to just-war framing at the expense of international humanitarian law, which does not care whether a conflict is just and asks only whether a given strike is discriminate and proportionate. From the political-theory side the Kaag and Kreps worry about democratic restraint has aged particularly well; the subsequent decade’s expansion of drone operations to Africa, the drift of the US authorisation for use of military force into contexts remote from 2001, and the quieter normalisation of targeted killing across other democracies have given their argument more purchase than it had on publication. Journalists covering the beat — Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, Spencer Ackerman, Chris Woods at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism — produced reporting in parallel that fed back into the academic debate the book had helped frame.

Where the collection sits in the contemporary literature on AI and warfare is a particular place rather than a universal starting point. For a reader coming to the field now it is a foundational text for the ethics of remote operation but not, on its own, sufficient. It pairs usefully with Peter Singer’s Wired for War, which is journalistic rather than philosophical and covers the technology and industry in a way Killing by Remote Control deliberately does not; with Paul Scharre’s Army of None, which takes up the autonomy question the Strawser volume could only glimpse; and with the more recent legal work of Rosa Brooks and Charlie Dunlap on the drift of the laws of armed conflict. On the operator-psychology side it reads alongside the testimony collected in Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars and the work of psychologists studying remote-crew stress. For someone interested specifically in whether AI-enabled targeting changes the moral picture, the book is only an opening move — it reasons about remote operation, where a human still identifies and authorises each engagement, and the central questions about machine learning in the kill chain are elsewhere.

What is likely to age well in the collection is the methodological commitment. The contributors insist that the ethics of a new weapon has to be worked out carefully, with specific cases and clear principles, and not by reflex. The principle of unnecessary risk, whether one accepts it or not, has turned out to be the kind of claim that forces an opponent to say exactly what they object to and why. The empirical chapters on civilian casualties have been overtaken by better data and a very different operational environment, but their insistence that moral verdicts about strike campaigns depend on choosing a defensible baseline has only become more important as drone warfare has spread. What dates fastest is the operational picture: a 2013 book cannot help assuming that armed drones are mostly a tool of a technologically dominant power striking a non-state adversary who cannot shoot back. The war in Ukraine has made that assumption obsolete. Both sides fly, both sides are struck, and the cheap first-person-view quadcopter that costs a few hundred dollars has displaced the million-dollar Reaper as the drone most relevant to the modern battlefield. The Strawser volume does not anticipate this, and a reader looking for the ethics of attritable, swarming, partially autonomous systems will need to go elsewhere. What they will take away from this book is a vocabulary — unnecessary risk, moral asymmetry, operator agency, democratic restraint — that is still being used to argue about weapons the authors never saw coming.