The U.S. government has been executing suspected terrorists without indictment, much less trial, since the dawning of the Drone Age, on November 3, 2002. On that day, the George W. Bush administration used a Predator drone to dispatch six alleged terrorist suspects in a car driving down a road in Yemen, far from any battlefield. This unprecedented act of extrajudicial execution was precipitated by the attacks on U.S. soil of September 11, 2001, which set the stage for a new, sanguinary, period of military history. Officials such as John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director, and former CEO...

Back in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan famously championed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), referred to colloquially as “Star Wars.” Forty years later, in 2025, President Donald Trump has thrown his enthusiastic support behind what is tantamount to a rebranded, bright and shiny new version of SDI: the Golden Dome. It is surprising that so few commentators in the mainstream media have made the connection, apparently unaware of why the Star Wars program was abandoned. Instead, pundits, politicians, and government officials such as Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense...

The U.S. government has been using unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), or lethal drones, to dispatch terrorist suspects with impunity for most of the twenty-first century. Committees of analysts and bureaucrats determine, based on HUMINT (human intelligence, or tips from bribed informants) and SIGINT (signals intelligence, or drone video footage and cellphone data), that a person in a land far away poses a threat to U.S. interests. It matters not that there are no soldiers on the ground for him to kill, nor that he is unarmed, nor that he is surrounded by obviously innocent family...

Pentagon personnel have been aiming to increase the lethality of troops for decades now, under the assumption that this will naturally result in military victory. The latest public figure to promote lethality is President Donald Trump’s recently confirmed secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. The basic idea underlying Lethality First is that “the good guys” need to kill “the bad guys,” and the sooner and more efficiently this is done, the better. Lethality, it is believed, must be maximized in order to save the lives of allied soldiers and civilians. Commitment to this creed was not diminished...

Drones, drones, everywhere drones. For a few weeks, clusters of drones of unknown provenance were recently seen flying in the skies above New Jersey. Local, state, and federal authorities claimed that they did not know whose drones they were. The expression “baseless conspiracy theory” saw an uptick in usage once again as some in the media scoffed at the proliferating hypotheses about what was going on. Incoming U.S. president Donald Trump opined that the machines should be shot down, but the Joe Biden administration did not agree, lending significant support to the simplest hypothesis of...