Bell might well have added that the desire to take out one’s enemies from a safe distance was never better satisfied than in the “glorious” episodes of colonial wars, in which natives were felled en masse while the armies of the whites were hardly scratched. On the evening following the “battle” of Omdurman, in Sudan, on September 2, 1898, there were forty-eight dead on the side of the Anglo-Egyptian forces under Kitchener’s command, as against the nearly ten thousand dervishes cut down by the bursts of bullets from Maxim machine guns.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 338