We Kill Because We Can - From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age

Aug 27, 2026

Uploaded by Riley

Critical review text discusses Laurie Calhoun’s book We Kill Because We Can, linking US drone “targeted killings” to mafia-style assassinations through an ethical and moral lens. It highlights how drone warfare expanded under Obama, with later admissions of civilian deaths, and contrasts civilian tolls with far fewer authorized strikes under Bush. The review examines legal doubt, irrevocability, media transparency failures, industry contracting incentives, and the risks of exporting drone killing technology and fueling revenge violence.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages3

Reading Time8 min

AccessFree to download

Review of We Kill Because We Can

Drone warfare transparency and civilian death tolls

Ethical framing, legal uncertainty, and irrevocability

Media role and military-industrial incentives

Exporting drone technology and blowback risks

DR DAVID ROBIE is editor of Pacific Journalism Review. Drone killings on a par with mafia hitmen We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age , by Laurie Calhoun. London: Zed Books. 2016. 400pp. ISBN 978-1-78360- 547-7 pbk. ONofEeiogfhtthyeerrosnoiesf Boarfathke legaObamca’ys presidency is that under the leadership of the man who was elected to bring amore peaceful world into play following George W. Bush’s warmongering, the ‘global war on terror’(GWOT) has grown enormously. Remote control warfare by drones with virtually no transparency is deeply disturbing. After years of demands for statistics about the drone killing programme, Obama was finally forced to admit in April 2013 that an American, Dr Warren Weistein, and an Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto, had been ‘tragically killed’in a counter-terrorism operation by drone strike three months earlier in Pakistan (Ackerman, 2016) . This rare admission of guilt over the drone programme confirmed suspicions about a climbing death toll among civilians. While the US target is claimed tobe al-Qaeda and Daesh (the self-styled Islamic State, ISIS or ISIL) suspects, research by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has demonstrated that during Obama's tenure more than 7000 people have been killed with impunity by drone controllers far from any battlefield. About a seventh of these deaths are estimated to be civilians, including up to 110 children. This death toll contrasts greatly with a mere 54 drone strikes authorised by President Bush in his entire term of office. And undoubtedly the billionaire businessman and reality television tycoon President, Donald Trump, will entrench the use of drones even further. This timely book, provocatively entitled We Kill Because We Can (adapted from a quote by a drone operative), has exposed the ethical and moral bankruptcy and shortsighted objectives of the Predator drone programme. PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 22 (2) 2016 207 Author Laurie Calhoun, a philosopher and cultural critic, has penned a robustly argued and disturbing work that presents an analogy between the US government’s ‘targeted killings’ and the mafia’s hitmen murders, lumping the Bush and Obama drone killings together as ‘simply assassinations’. Calhoun likens suspects chosen for the growing weekly ‘killing lists’ to a stay on death row, with no provision for an appeal or re-examination of the evidence that led to the ‘conviction’. Yet it is well known that suspects charged with capital crimes within civil society are often acquitted, asthe evidence proves unconvincing to a jury of their peers. Jurors in US criminal trials are sternly instructed by the court that a verdict of guilty must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. (p. 120) Calhoun argues that the ‘slick technological apparatus’ enabling drone strikes serves as a red herring that diverts attention from the crucial question – is it actually true that people about to die by remote control via a Hellfire missile are guilty of some capital crime and ‘deserve to die’? As the author stresses, drone strikes are irrevocable. Yet even in countries where the US is not officially at war and there are no ground troops‘to protect’, the state emphasis is on killing the target. The killings are treated as ‘acts of war’, but they are ‘indistinguishable from unlawful assassination’, says Calhoun, and they overlap with warfare actions only in the ‘effective impunity of the killers’(p. 120) . Calhoun also offers a scathing critique of the military-industrial complex and its phenomenal growth since former US Vice-President Dick Cheney began privatising and outsourcing to contractors during the occupation of Iraq. The military machine virtually guarantees the continued use of dronesand the self-justifying killings as part of a burgeoning ‘terror factory’(p. 245) . The number of new Predator operators trained in the US quadrupled between 2008 and 2013 and this fig

FAQs

What central ethical comparison does Laurie Calhoun make in We Kill Because We Can?

The book draws an analogy between US government “targeted killings” and mafia hitmen murders, treating them as simply assassinations rather than lawful acts of war.

How does the review describe evidence and uncertainty regarding drone killings?

It emphasizes that remote-control strikes are irreversible and questions whether people killed remotely are guilty of capital crimes, noting the role of standards of proof and weak evidentiary grounding.

What criticisms does the review raise about media and transparency?

It argues that news media failed to expose the mythology of “just war” and did not provide enough transparency on the drone industry, conflicts of interest, and the dangers of exporting killing technology.

Aug 27, 2026

Uploaded by Riley