However, "projection of power" is also a euphemism that obscures the facts of wounding, killing, destroying. And to do this "without projecting vulnerability" implies that the only vulnerability will be that of the enemy, reduced to the status of a mere target. Underlying the palliative military rhetoric, as Elaine Scarry detects, the real claim is that the "successful strategy is one in which the injuring occurs only in one direction. . . . Thus, the original definition, which seems to posit noninjuring against injuring, instead posits one-directional injuring against two-directional injuring." By prolonging and radicalizing preexisting tendencies, the armed drone goes to the very limit: for whoever uses such a weapon, it becomes a priori impossible to die as one kills. Warfare, from being possibly asymmetrical, becomes absolutely unilateral. What could still claim to be combat is converted into a campaign of what is, quite simply, slaughter.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 111