“No body bags,” “a phobia of losses,” “an aversion to risk”: in the late 1990s, massive use was made of all these expressions in the United States. They all conveyed the same idea: the tendency to subordinate the use of military force to a political imperative in order to preserve American military lives. What is specific about contemporary imperial violence has less to do with the asymmetry of force and the resulting unequal distribution of vulnerability—a classic feature of all the “small wars” of history—than with the type of norms that now shape the great Western “democratic” powers’ exercise of that violence. If there is anything new about the situation, it might lie in the fact that the practical quasi-invulnerability of the dominant camp was, at the end of the twentieth century, set up as the dominant ethical and political norm.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 431