Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars

Investigative journalist Woods does a devastatingly effective job of illuminating the toll and potential legacy of U.S. use of drones to carry out targeted assassinations. Even readers who keep up with current events are likely to find some eye-openers here, including the assessment in a Pentagon-funded study that drone strikes in Afghanistan were “an order of magnitude more likely to result in civilian engagement,” meaning the death or injury of a civilian. Woods makes clear that reservations about the major shift in American military planning (as of 2010, more drone pilots were being trained by the U.S. Air Force than “fighter and bomber pilots combined”) do not only come from the left. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan and is an established critic of overreliance on remote weaponry, cautions that while “a drone strike seems to have very little risk and very little pain, at the receiving end, it feels like war.” Few can argue with Woods’s warning that the aggressive transition to increased reliance on drones has unknown long-term implications “not only on those personnel now fighting thousands of miles from the front but on the conduct of warfare itself.” (May)