Asymmetric killing : risk avoidance, just war, and the warrior ethos /

Renic (Univ. of Hamburg, Germany) offers a theoretically and historically grounded framework for determining when violence in war is no longer moral. He contextualizes the current debate around unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by examining historical precedents of sniping and aerial bombardments. Once considered controversial, both sniping and aerial bombardments have been normalized within the ethics and laws of warfare. Should asymmetrical killing using UAVs be any different? Renic presents the case that unlike those historical precedents, remote killing by drone aircraft fundamentally transformed and challenged the shared conception of war. The use of one-directional violence by one party that can kill without risk poses an ethical dilemma to norms of the warrior ethos and the just-war tradition. Renic cautions that UAV-centered warfare introduces a serious ambiguity between the morality of war and the law of war, and between the spirit of warfare and the letter of the law. His conclusion is powerful and cautionary: the norms of UAV warfare must be codified before the technology becomes widespread. The danger exists for nations to use UAVs not against terrorists or other combatants but against legitimate dissidents. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals. --Ronald Paul Lorenzo, Prairie View A&M University