When it comes to praise, we academics are very much in the take-what-we-can-get business. That said, it is especially nice to receive it in such volume from Michael Boyle, whose work on drones, as my own review emphasized, is exemplary. Alongside this praise, however, Boyle offered some welcome critical feedback.
He first questions “reciprocal structural risk”; specifically, whether drone violence truly destabilizes the battlefield condition in a way that is distinct from prior episodes of asymmetric killing. I argue in the affirmative; drones, when used to the exclusion of significant ground forces, represent something new—a mode of violence sufficiently one-directional as to undermine the moral coherence of existing rules. Although this does not necessarily invalidate the right of the stronger party to kill, it does call into question the moral basis for the permissiveness of their violence.
As my book clarifies, “radical asymmetry” is determined not only by weaponry but also by the intensity and scope of the violence in question. Here I agree with Boyle’s broader point regarding alternative configurations of this moral challenge. Other technologies (including nuclear weapons) and practices theoretically could, and at some point likely will, impose similar conditions of radical asymmetry. This makes it more, rather than less important, however, to properly grapple with the moral implications of the radically asymmetric drone violence we are witnessing today.
This relates to another issue raised by Boyle: the potential impermanence of radically asymmetric drone violence. As he effectively details in his own book, the US monopoly on drones is fast eroding. I am more skeptical than Boyle, however, that this will spell an end to the military conditions—and moral challenges—explored in my book. Although I concede that the embrace by terrorists of this technology represents a real threat, I am more concerned with powerful states replicating the United States and imposing their own modes of radically asymmetric violence against nonstate adversaries. In such circumstances, we would likely see the same moral tensions play out: a violence that is overpermissive in its application and an enemy that is reconceived from a threat to be fought and overcome to an obstacle to be hunted and done away with.
Boyle’s review finally references the broader implications of radical asymmetry. This mode of warfare, I argue, incentivizes the weak to redirect some portion of their violence away from the now insulated combatants of the strong toward alternative targets, including the citizens on whose behalf the stronger party fights. This form of “casualty displacement” is plausible, Boyle concedes, but hard to establish with any causal precision. It is also true, he points out, that many of those targeted by the United States need no additional incentives to target American civilians. I fully agree with both points. The best way of conceptualizing this phenomenon is with the following claim: it is a reasonably foreseeable possibility that US drone violence, of the degree we are witnessing today, incentivizes an intensification of casualty displacement. At a minimum, this should trigger greater reflection among those who favor this mode of warfare. There will be a cost to this violence that will have to be borne, if not by your combatants, then potentially by your civilians. If the cost is one you are disinclined to pay, then the best course, potentially, may be for you to renounce the use of force entirely.
