It was a tension that journalist Michael Ignatieff summed up as follows: “High tech warfare is governed by two constraints—avoiding civilian casualties and avoiding risks to pilots—that are in direct contradiction. To target effectively you have to fly low. If you fly low, you lose pilots. Fly high and you get civilians.” Which of those two imperatives should win out? It was a problem of priorities, a hierarchization of norms. NATO responded with little hesitation, awarding priority to the lives of pilots, even if it increased the “collateral” risk of wounding and killing civilians. In the name of preserving military lives, the risk of producing more casualties among the civilians was accepted, even though it was those very civilians whom the operation was designed to protect. This amounted to admitting that, in military-political reasoning, the life of a Kosovar civilian was of less value than that of an American service member.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 434