In the discourse of "applied military ethics," the whole discussion is reduced to the question of whether or not the use of armed drones can conform to the principles of the law of armed conflicts: is the use of this weapon potentially in conformity with the principles of distinction and proportionality? But what is forgotten is that because this weapon rules out combat and because it transforms war from being possibly asymmetrical into a unilateral relationship of death-dealing in which the enemy is deprived of the very possibility of fighting back, it surreptitiously slips out of the normative framework initially designed for armed conflicts. To apply norms designed for a conflict to slaughtering practices, and to be willing to pursue the discussion without questioning the presupposition that these practices still stem from within that normative framework, ratifies a fatal confusion of genres. As a result, the ethic of combat shifts and becomes an ethic of putting to death, a necroethic that makes use of the principles of jus in bello in order to convert them into criteria of acceptable murder: an ethic for butchers or executioners, but not for combatants.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 525