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...

Since the Middle Ages, belligerent leaders have taken refuge behind the seductive façade of just war theory according to which what matter above all during wartime are the intentions of the warriors, not the consequences of their actions. When leaders order their troops to drop bombs, they claim to be combating “evil” adversaries. But war culminates in indiscriminate death, destruction, maiming, and misery of both combatants (whether voluntary or conscripted) and noncombatants. When civilians are slaughtered, war supporters tend charitably to forgive and forget what they interpret to have...