There is a large and growing body of work exploring the history, capabilities, challenges, and future of drones, both armed and unarmed. Only some of these books, however, are approachable to the non-expert, being both clearly written and without excessive jargon. Even fewer advance the debate over the opportunities and perils of the drone in a meaningful way by blending exhaustive detail with nuanced insight. Michael J. Boyle’s book, The Drone Age, is one such book. It offers a comprehensive, historically grounded overview of a technology that is increasingly shaping our conception of and approach to both war and peace.
This review summarizes Boyle’s main arguments before highlighting its contribution to the field. It concludes with a critical analysis of the “risk” dimensions of the drone and argues for greater consideration of the second-order effects of its reduction in war.
When confronted by a new technology, particularly a controversial one, it is useful to ask what exactly is new and, if new, what if anything is problematic. Boyle locates the novelty of drones primarily in the strategic realm. Drone technologies, he argues, influence the strategic choices of those empowered in two ways. First, they radically transform risk calculations: “the most salient fact about drones is that they enable their users to get into the sky without risking the life of a pilot” (p. 16). Second, drones incentivize “goal displacement,” a modification and expansion of mission priorities in response to the technical capacity of the weapon.
Boyle dedicates eight chapters to unpacking, in forensic detail, the strategic implications of this risk and goal displacement and the consequences for war and peace in the modern age. Chapter 2 historically grounds the drone, tracing its evolution from pre–World War I through to its coming of age in the post-9/11 world. Chapters 3–5 clarify the role of drones in war, examining the US drone program, information-centric warfare, and the embrace of this technology by nonstate actors. Chapters 6 and 7 shift tone to analyze the potential of drones to transform surveillance methods in democratic and authoritarian regimes while also helping enhance humanitarianism. Chapter 8 evaluates the strategic implications of the drone, and Chapter 9 predicts the future trajectory of this technology.
The debate over the moral and legal status of drones has long struggled with balance. On one end of the spectrum are those who regard the drone as an entirely neutral tool, with no impact within or outside the battlefield beyond the precise way it is employed. For others, this technology is malum in se: posing an inherent challenge to the accepted rules and standards of war. The Drone Age provides a welcome corrective to this excessively stark binary. Indulging in neither minimization nor exaggeration, Boyle provides a detailed analysis of what drones can and cannot (or, at least, cannot yet) do in both a military and non-military setting. What we are left with is a technology that, although neither inherently immoral nor illegal, “goes beyond a mere tool,” possessing “distinct political qualities that shape how we act” toward war and peace (p. 22).
Boyle’s commitment to balance is aided by his solid grasp of history. The book dedicates an entire early chapter to tracing the historical development of the drone, and most subsequent chapters begin with a historical contextualization of the topic under discussion. Debate is ongoing over whether drones are merely the latest in a long line of comparable innovations in distanced warfare or something qualitatively distinct. As Boyle’s historical analysis helps clarify, the answer is somewhere in the middle. Remote killing and technologically enhanced surveillance are long-standing features of war. The drone, however, by fusing together and enhancing these capabilities, does represent a profound disjuncture from the past, both in terms of the opportunities it provides and the challenges it generates. In regard to the latter, The Drone Age does well to show how the mitigation of risk enabled by this technology “produces a danger of moral hazard” (p. 19)—incentivizing irresponsible state conduct, reducing the threshold for entry into war, and eroding targeting standards on the battlefield itself.
In addition to its historical reflections, The Drone Age makes a decent effort to look forward. The early beneficiaries of drone technology have been the strong, with powers such as the United States able to fight on multiple fronts at radically reduced risk to its pilots. This monopoly is already under threat, however, and is likely to fully end in the near future. “Latecomers to the drone age,” Boyle assures us, “will catch up. In time, we will see weak states use drones to strike against stronger ones, and other equally matched states begin to deploy drones against each other in a war of nerves” (pp. 14–15). These latecomers will acquire and use “small, commercial, off-the-shelf drones for battlefield reconnaissance purposes and support of artillery fire,” as well as, in rarer cases, direct attacks by groups such as the Islamic State (p. 159).
This analysis is welcome but incomplete, underemphasizing the extent to which weaker parties to a conflict will offset the advantages of their stronger adversaries in ways other than technological replication.
When outlining his theory of special relativity, Einstein observed that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be changed from one form to another. When conceptualizing the risk dimensions of the drone, it is useful to imagine something analogous to the law of conservation (as I argue in Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos, p. 54). In many circumstances, Boyle argues that the risk we assume to have been eliminated by the drone has in reality been redistributed elsewhere. One example of this is the vulnerability shift from the tactical to the strategic: “Crisis zones populated with drones may be more dangerous than those with manned aircraft. If those using drones are more risk-taking because a pilot is not in danger, a world full of drones might be one in which crises are more, rather than less, likely to escalate into a war” (pp. 260–61).
Drones have also triggered a redirection of risk from combatants to innocent civilians in and around the battlespace. As well as facing injury and death as “collateral damage” of Western drone violence, civilians in Pakistan suspected of collaborating with the CIA targeted killing program have been targeted. “These risks,” Boyle argues, “are effectively offloaded onto the local population in the favor of reducing physical risks to US drone pilots” (p. 19).
This focus on revenge attacks, although accurate, obscures the deeper effects of drone use on the strategic outlook of weaker parties to a conflict. Those exposed to drone violence are rational actors, who will modify their behavior in response to situational contingencies and imposed constraints to maximize the likelihood of achieving their goals. This modification may, in some cases, take the form of technological innovation—a replication of their adversaries’ drone programs, albeit writ small. More likely, however, is a redirection of non-drone violence to more accessible targets, including the citizenry of the stronger party.
Risk is difficult to quantify in war, as is causality in relation to risk transfer. We cannot know how much violence deliberately inflicted against Western and non-Western civilians by nonstate actors over the last two decades was motivated, at least in part, by the ever-diminishing accessibility of combatant targets among the strong. Some portion of such violence clearly was, it seems reasonable to conclude. The failure of Boyle (and others) to properly interrogate this point leaves an important moral question unanswered: What, if any, responsibility do Western powers have for military practices that unintentionally but foreseeably—and in some cases, inevitably— lead the adversary to prioritize the targeting of noncombatants?
Drone scholarship should better account for these second-order effects of drone use. Doing so would help reinforce a point otherwise made expertly by Boyle—that these weapons are no silver bullet. Drone technology unquestionably enhances the surveillance capacity and lethality of those who use it. It cannot, however, win a war for you and may, in fact, help you lose one if its downsides are not properly managed.
