The Case for Drones
With President Obama's big speech tomorrow on counterterrorism policy at National Defense University in mind, Commentary Magazine has been nice enough to post today my June cover essay, "The Case for Drones." (It's free; no subscriber wall.) Lawfare readers will probably immediately understand it as a mixture of the arguments Ben and I made at the Oxford Union debate and arguments spelled out in more detail in our new book, Speaking the Law</
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With President Obama's big speech tomorrow on counterterrorism policy at National Defense University in mind, Commentary Magazine has been nice enough to post today my June cover essay, "The Case for Drones." (It's free; no subscriber wall.) Lawfare readers will probably immediately understand it as a mixture of the arguments Ben and I made at the Oxford Union debate and arguments spelled out in more detail in our new book, Speaking the Law; but offered as a specifically conservative political argument in a conservative magazine, and directed to Republican members of Congress particularly. It's a call for institutional settlement as we have often made it here at Lawfare, and as Ben and I make it as a neutral, centrist policy in Speaking the Law, but this time in a specifically political form. That said, it offers a list of arguments, objections and replies, around drone warfare and targeted killing, that I hope would be broadly useful in the debate, whatever side one is on. (I discuss the article more at Volokh; also, as things stand now, I will be on To The Point on NPR tomorrow discussing the President's speech.)
Kenneth Anderson is a professor at Washington College of Law, American University; a visiting fellow of the Hoover Institution; and a non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution. He writes on international law, the laws of war, weapons and technology, and national security; his most recent book, with Benjamin Wittes, is "Speaking the Law: The Obama Administration's Addresses on National Security Law."
