To this end, pilots were forbidden to fly below an altitude of 15,000 feet, a security distance that meant they were nearly out of reach of the enemy antiaircraft defenses and were almost untouchable. William Cohen, Bill Clinton’s defense secretary, later declared: “The paramount lesson learned from Operation Allied Force is that the well-being of our people must remain our first priority.” The NATO planes carried out 38,004 raids in seventy-eight days without sustaining a single loss among the members of their crews. The Americans had indeed managed to invent warfare that inflicted zero deaths in their own camp. However, this did not rule out contradictions. For the very altitude that ensured that the lives of the pilots were not exposed also meant a potential loss of accuracy for the air strikes. NATO officials questioned on this matter by Amnesty International acknowledged this: “An aircrew flying at 15,000 feet would be able only to identify whether the objective was the intended one according to the planning preparations, but would be unable to tell whether, for example, civilians had moved within its vicinity. The 15,000-feet rule thus effectively made it impossible for NATO aircrews to respect the obligation to suspend an attack once circumstances had changed on the ground rendering the objective no longer legitimate.”

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 433