The Pentagon’s sword missile isn’t an endless war feel-good story
Kelsey Atherton has written a critical and insightful article for Responsible Statecraft on why media coverage of new developments in drone weapons, like the US drone “sword missile”, can be seen as a kind of anti-news:
“Focusing on the missile specifically misses everything that puts a missile in the sky, ready to be used against a human being. It constrains the moral debate to one about relative collateral damage within a targeted killing program, instead of questioning the accuracy of the intelligence that informs the targeting in the first place. It concedes that the practice, now in its third decade, of remotely operating drones with cameras and weapons attached is a way of providing security for anybody.”