Military technology: Death by remote control

drone is a good way to kill someone. A pilotless aeroplane watches from above, targets and shoots with precision, and disappears into the sky. The killer is never in danger. Drones can fly at 160–300 kilometres per hour at altitudes of up to 15,000 metres, hover over a target for hours, 'see' people and objects (clearly enough to read a car number plate from 3 kilometres up), and detect mobile-phone signals. At one-tenth to one-hundredth of the price of fighter planes, drones are practically disposable. Little surprise, then, that by 2012, one-third of the US Air Force's aircraft were drones, and half of the pilots in the Air Force were being trained to fly them. The US military has used drones for fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan and the Phil-ippines. This has " remixed " warfare, anthropologist Hugh Gusterson argues in Drone, an overview of the implications and ethics. If war is a duel in which both sides are vulnerable , then drone warfare may not even be war. It is so asymmetrical that it resembles hunting , he writes — a " new form of state violence " , harder to define and control with national and international laws. As such, he argues, " the drone is an inherently colonialist technology that makes it easier for the United States to engage in casualty-free and therefore debate-free intervention ". Drone operation is bizarre. US pilots sit in grubby trailers in front of computers somewhere in the depths of the Nevada desert; Gusterson calls them " stick monkeys ". The screens show live videos of roads, compounds , people — views also seen by intelligence analysts, commanders and military lawyers, all of whom inform the decision to fire. Then a 'sensor operator' aims a laser at the person or vehicle targeted, the drone pilot triggers a missile that follows the laser, and 15–30 seconds later, they watch the infrared flash, the flames and the incineration of the enemy. Some might imagine that this precision makes drones more humane compared to, say, the bloodbath of the Second World War's Battle of the Bulge. But it does not prevent civilians from being killed: if someone wanders within screen view at the last second, or a targeted soldier passes his phone to a relative, it can happen. Those who live under circling drones — interviewed by foreign correspondents or aid workers …