Excerpt:
This confluence suggests that the core challenge of blocking terrorism is not a military one—a notion everyone from the NSC's John Brennan to Mitt Romney gives lip service to, but that our policies have strained to reflect, as time and again the available military tools take over. Drones and other forms of remote-control warfare aren't going away. The technological developments that empowered them won't be undone. The very real organizations that do seek to threaten Americans and U.S. interests aren't going to fold up on their own. But we do need, urgently, some theory around which we create legal, ethical, and practical guidelines for remote-control warfare, based on what we know about human nature, and what we have learned about human response to our efforts to date.
Do we really need a new theory specifically for "drone wars"? I think what she wants is something that explains and helps us to understand passion, reason, and chance. She might look to Chapter 1 of Book 1 of someone's great book.
V/R
Dave
Petraeus and the ‘Drone Wars’
Heather Hurlburt is the executive director of the National Security Network in Washington, D.C. Heather previously served in the Clinton administration as speechwriter to the president, and as speechwriter and policy planning staff for Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher. Follow her on Twitter at @NatSecHeather.
Washington's politics, and what passes for the city's intellectual life, are not immune from the law of gravity. What rises fast to the stratosphere comes back to earth, whether Hillary Clinton or Kenneth Starr, Madeleine Albright or Donald Rumsfeld, the Contract with America, or Obamneycare. Blink, and the Next Big Thing is that book left in the rain at the end of your neighbor's garage sale. (Though then there are those who bounce through gravity, Clinton and Gingrich in particular—but that's another column, to be titled "Why F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong.")
(Continued at link above)
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