When the drone program was created, it seemed to promise to spare soldiers from the intensity (and the danger) of close-range combat. But fighting at a remove can be unsettling in other ways. In conventional wars, soldiers fire at an enemy who has the capacity to fire back at them. They kill by putting their own lives at risk. What happens when the risks are entirely one-sided? Remote warfare erodes “the warrior ethic,” which holds that combatants must assume some measure of reciprocal risk. “If you give the warrior, on one side or the other, complete immunity, and let him go on killing, he’s a murderer. Because you’re killing people not only that you’re not necessarily sure are trying to kill you — you’re killing them with absolute impunity.”

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