A guiding thread is a thought expressed by the philosopher Simone Weil in the 1930s: "the most defective method possible," she warned, would be to approach warfare and the phenomena of armed violence "in terms of the ends pursued and not by the nature of the means employed." On the other hand, "the very essence of the materialist method is that, in its examination of any human event whatever, it attaches much less importance to the ends pursued than to the consequences necessarily implied by the working out of the means employed." Rather than hastening to seek possible justifications—in other words, rather than moralizing—she advised doing something quite different: Begin by taking apart the mechanism of violence. Go and look at the weapons, study their specific characteristics. Become a technician, in a way. But only in a way, for the aim here is an understanding that is not so much technical as political. What is important is not so much to grasp how the actual device works but rather to discover the implications of how it works for the action that it implements. The point is that the means adopted are binding, and a combination of specific constraints is associated with each type of means adopted. Those means not only make it possible to take action but also determine the form of that action, and one must find out how they do so.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 119