We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age

We live in an age of drone warfare, where the attacks on targets deemed to be threatening happens remotely. The decisions to kill are made covertly in rooms far away from the target, and we can now kill without being personally present. Killing has become all too easy and convenient. As a result, argues Laurie Calhoun in this provocative book, self-defense has become conflated with outright aggression, and black ops have become the standard military operating procedure.

In this remarkable and often-shocking book, Calhoun dissects the moral, psychological, and cultural impact that these drone killings are having on modern society. In We Kill Because We Can she draws powerful, thought-provoking parallels between drone operators and mafia hitmen as well as the Trayvon Martin case and the killing of a teen in Yemen by drone. The result is a timely and provoking analysis of Western foreign policy and its disturbing use of remote-controlled death.

"The drone assassination campaign is the most extraordinary global terror campaign yet conceived and executed. This chilling and comprehensive survey more than amply demonstrates that drone strikes are war crimes, and that this new technology is not only an effective device of mass murder at a distance, but that it also eliminates barriers for commanders to 'prosecute wars at their caprice.' That the technology will sooner or later be directed against the perpetrators is hardly in doubt, as the cycle of violence takes its predictable course."–Noam Chomsky