It is remarkable that Walzer makes this reference to assassination the basis of a moral critique of the immunization of the national combatant in warfare at a distance. It is a thesis that relates to the ethics of assassination, not the ethics of warfare. On the surface, of course, what he is saying is that it is morally necessary to accept the principle of one's own exposure to risk in order to be able to kill in warfare. But, in truth, his palimpsest of citation is very well chosen, for how is it possible to justify homicide in a noncombat situation? For those seeking to justify such activities, there is only one place to turn: doctrines on political assassination. That is the lesson Walzer provides as a reader of Camus. On the surface, Walzer certainly does appear to make a clear misinterpretation, for he twists the nihilist maxim in order to turn it into the moral motto of classic warfare: "One cannot kill unless one is prepared to die." However, at an underlying level, he is making another point: the agents of "war without risks" are in reality like assassins who use bombs to kill their targets; unlike idealistic terrorists, they have chosen to be ready to kill only if they are certain that themselves will not die.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 509