However, those two criteria, direct participation in the hostilities and posing an imminent threat, are rendered completely ineffective by the exclusive use of drones. How can there be any direct participation in hostilities if there is no longer any fighting? How can there be any imminent threat if there are no longer any troops on the ground? By depriving the enemy of any possibility of participating directly in hostilities, one also deprives oneself of the surest means of recognizing an enemy as such. The paradox is that the drone, so highly praised for its great ability to make out the difference between combatants and noncombatants, in practice abolishes the very condition for that differentiation, namely combat. It is rather as if one were using an extremely powerful microscope whose visualization techniques deactivate the phenomenon it is supposed to be observing.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 477