This is a well-organized and engaging volume that creates coherence across the various chapters due to the authors’ deliberate efforts to speak to one another. And in speaking to one another, they also open up spaces for the reader to ponder the various implications of the ways in which the use of drones by the United States has expanded upon the already problematic ground of preventive force. The book unfolds across three dimensions, incorporating political, legal, and ethical debates that have emerged around preventive war as a strategic security policy. It locates the deployment of drones within the preventive force framework and explores how the same logic that ushered in the Iraq War (2002–3) undergirds the U.S. deployment of drones and reliance upon targeted killing.

Kerstin Fisk and Jennifer Ramos characterize preventive force as a security strategy that operates along a continuum, and the various chapters offer the reader interventions and analyses that highlight the debates across this field. The chapters bring together the political, legal, and ethical debates in one volume and demonstrate why they are entwined and should not be considered in isolation. The distinctiveness of Preventive Force lies in this overarching design, one that identifies the fault lines in terms of the advantages and disadvantages of the use of drones, the possible consequences of this for state and global security, and the moral and ethical implications of a security strategy that embeds targeted killing into the fabric of its logic.

These political, legal, and ethical questions are raised within a security domain that is inherently ambiguous, uncertain, and characterized by terms such as “anticipatory,” “perceived,” and “potential,” and where the term “imminent” has been conceptually stretched beyond recognition. The authors attempt to steady our focus so that we can understand the present state of the debates and secure our ethical footing in this shifting sand. It is very hard to debate the future with any sense of authority or certainty, and the policy of the United States has been to keep the focus on the “what might happen” and the attendant specter of cataclysm, but these authors strive to ground us in the present by focusing on substantive debates over costs and benefits, international law, norms, and security concerns.

Jennifer Taw observes that preventive force “at best [offers] the elimination or deferral of a threat” (p. 36), which is a thin reed indeed to recommend preventive force as the best option. However, with respect to the United States, “drone strikes are affordable and . . . fairly risk free” and, therefore, “[pass] the cost-benefit analysis test” (p. 55). Miroslav Nincic highlights the domestic concerns relevant to a preventive war strategy and notes how public demands for minimizing causalities may enhance the attractiveness of drones and “may encourage the resort to force at a variety of levels” (p. 83). With respect to the challenges to state sovereignty posed by the use of preventive force, Thomas M. Nichols is even less sanguine and ends on a rather pessimistic note. Preventive force, as evidenced by Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, has the potential to embroil the world’s major powers in war (p. 106). Thus, in this first round of cost—benefit assessment, neither preventive force nor the reliance on drones has much to recommend in terms of establishing security; quite the opposite is the case.

The next section effectively lays out the points of contention between those who advocate new legal restrictions and those who claim that existing legal frameworks suffice to protect both the security of the state and the human rights of civilians. Stephan Sonnenberg’s chapter is unique in that it highlights the seductive nature of drones and illuminates how metaphors of “surgical precision” (p. 124) enhance the attractiveness and promises of drone technology. Yet this type of disruptive technology is distinctive and demands its own regulatory framework. Conversely, David Glazier asserts that “states thus already have the legal authority they need to protect their security” (p. 165). What both authors fear is the slippery slope, which in Sonnenberg’s case leads to increased risks for civilians and, for Glazier, a world made less safe for all due to “more killing, by more states” (p. 143). Daphne Eviatar disagrees with Sonnenberg and does not support the creation of any new legal frameworks, but instead calls upon the United States to demonstrate compliance with existing international human rights law (p. 189). C. Christine Fair’s chapter rounds out these debates with a cautionary note regarding the accuracy of reports on civilian causalities resulting from drone strikes outside the theater of war in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The reliability of these data is key because, absent rigorous research standards, they are little more than thinly veiled indignation masquerading as social science. Fair’s chapter reminds us that much of the opposition to the deployment of drones rests on specific claims, such as the impacts on civilians and why this information (although challenging to substantiate) is so crucial to the ongoing debates.

It is the final chapters that speak most directly to one another and effectively engage the larger questions related to the use of drones within the preventive force framework, and how this squares with the entwined commitments to peacefully settle disputes and a state’s right to self-defense. Avery Plaw and João Franco Reis argue for a stylized and more nuanced approach that would be expansive enough to enable states to respond to bona fide threats from nonstate actors while ensuring that this force would be used justly (p. 251). John Emery and Daniel R. Brunstetter counter with the observation that the United States has relied upon moral and legal justifications that are too permissive (p. 258) and has exploited the slippage between a domestic law enforcement approach and justifications that draw upon just war theory. Their response to Plaw and Reis is to create a hybrid model between the two positions. Ben Jones and John M. Parrish raise the question of “dirty hands” in order to contest the focus on the in-between cases. They argue that identifying and splitting the difference between the two positions is problematic. Their advice is to “rely on the ethic of law enforcement until such time as war itself is indisputably at hand” (p. 308).

The last word in the volume is given to Deen Chatterjee, who orients us yet again to future concerns, as he challenges us to consider what lies beyond preventive force. And this broader intellectual context serves to illuminate the high stakes across these debates over strategic security policy, imploring the reader to ask: “What type of future are we envisioning and attempting to secure?” On this score, Fisk and Ramos conclude with the observation that “a more humane and ultimately more secure path to the goals that just war is trying to achieve” (p. 346) may lie, as Chaterjee contends, in our ability to deliberately choose to focus on the creation of a just peace. And this is the stark choice within which these debates unfold across the pages of this volume.

On balance, Preventive Force is critical of United States drone policy and the wide remit of its moral justifications for the use of drones. However, it is not a mere polemical series of critiques. The real value-added of this volume is that it strives for, and I think admirably achieves, a balanced and critical engagement across a thicket of moral, political, and legal issues. It does not attempt to resolve these issues but to lay out the various strands of the key arguments and to draw them together in one volume so that the reader has a more comprehensive appreciation of the nuances and complexities involved. My major criticism is the unexamined presumption of the outsized role and position of the United States on this issue. It would have been helpful if some contextualization had been provided for evaluating the basis for many of these arguments that rely upon “as goes the United States, so goes the rest of the world” justification for their lines of inquiry.