It is worth noting that the position that Walzer defines here traps the war leaders in a kind of double bind: on one hand, they are morally bound to minimize the risks to their own soldiers, but on the other, they are morally prohibited from eliminating that risk altogether. As soon as one succeeds in fully satisfying the first imperative by achieving zero risk, one hits bottom, in every sense of the term, since that virtuous minimization turns into its contrary and becomes the most extreme of moral scandals. This would be reaching a forbidden limit. However, that is not exactly what Walzer says. For him, this applies less to what soldiers do in an effort to eliminate risk for themselves than to the way their leaders declare that they will not put their soldiers in harm's way—which leaves open the question of whether doing so without declaring it would be more allowable. Anyhow, as he sees it, the problem consists in setting up the principle of "zero casualty warfare" in one's own camp as a moral norm. But why? It boils down to considering "that those lives are expendable and these are not." Therein lies the root of the scandal: by suggesting that the lives of the enemy are completely dispensable while ours are absolutely sacrosanct, one introduces a radical inequality in the value of lives, and this breaks with the inviolable principle of the equal dignity of all human lives.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 504