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One Nation Under Drones is an interesting and informative review of how robotic and unmanned systems are impacting every aspect of American life, from how we fight our wars; to how we play; to how we grow our food.Edited by Professor John Jackson, who holds the E.A.

\"The Drone Memos is a groundbreaking volume that collects and explains the legal documents underlying the Obama administration's hugely controversial program of remote-control assassination. Jameel Jaffer led the ACLU legal team that sued for the release of these documents. In The Drone Memos, he compiles the legal memos, white papers, and government speeches that, taken together, ratified and even expanded the Bush administration's \"war on terror.\" These documents are now key precedents, and they will be debated inside and outside the United States for years to come. In a powerful introduction, Jaffer contextualizes and explains the memos and connects the legal abstractions to the real-world violence being perpetrated in our names. The memos, he argues, place astonishingly broad power in the hands of future presidents--power that the Constitution never envisioned, and that will almost certainly be abused\"-- Provided by publisher.

In the past decade, the United States has rapidly deployed militarized drones in theaters of war for surveillance as well as targeted killing. The swiftness with which drones were created and put into service has outstripped the development of an associated framework for discussing them, with the result that basic conversations about these lethal weapons have been stymied for a lack of a shared rhetoric. Marouf Hasian’s Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age fills that critical gap. With a growing fleet of more than 7,500 drones, these emblems of what one commentary has dubbed “push-button, bloodless wars” comprise as much as a third of the US aircraft force. Their use is hotly debated, some championing air power that doesn’t risk the lives of pilots, others arguing that drone strikes encourage cycles of violence against the United States, its allies, and interests. In this landmark study, Hasian illuminates both the discursive and visual argumentative strategies that drone supporters and critics both rely on. He comprehensively reviews how advocates and detractors parse and re-contextualize drone images, casualty figures, governmental “white papers,” NGO reports, documentaries, and blogs to support their points of view. He unpacks the ideological reflexes and assumptions behind these legal, ethical, and military arguments. Visiting both formal legal language used by legislators, political leaders, and policy makers as well as public, vernacular commentaries about drones, Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age dispassionately illuminates the emotive, cognitive, and behavioral strategies partisans use to influence public and official opinion.

\"Because of the increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, also commonly known as drones) in various military and para-military (i.e., CIA) settings, there has been increasing debate in the international community as to whether it is morally and ethically permissible to allow robots (flying or otherwise) the ability to decide when and where to take human life. In addition, there has been intense debate as to the legal aspects, particularly from a humanitarian law framework. In response to this growing international debate, the United States government released the Department of Defense (DoD) 3000.09 Directive (2011), which sets a policy for if and when autonomous weapons would be used in US military and para-military engagements. This US policy asserts that only \"human-supervised autonomous weapon systems may be used to select and engage targets, with the exception of selecting humans as targets, for local defense ...\". This statement implies that outside of defensive applications, autonomous weapons will not be allowed to independently select and then fire upon targets without explicit approval from a human supervising the autonomous weapon system. Such a control architecture is known as human supervisory control, where a human remotely supervises an automated system (Sheridan 1992). The defense caveat in this policy is needed because the United States currently uses highly automated systems for defensive purposes, e.g., Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar (C-RAM) systems and Patriot anti-missile missiles. Due to the time-critical nature of such environments (e.g., soldiers sleeping in barracks within easy reach of insurgent shoulder-launched missiles), these automated defensive systems cannot rely upon a human supervisor for permission because of the short engagement times and the inherent human neuromuscular lag which means that even if a person is paying attention, there is approximately a half-second delay in hitting a firing button, which can mean the difference for life and death for the soldiers in the barracks. So as of now, no US UAV (or any robot) will be able to launch any kind of weapon in an offensive environment without human direction and approval. However, the 3000.09 Directive does contain a clause that allows for this possibility in the future. This caveat states that the development of a weapon system that independently decides to launch a weapon is possible but first must be approved by the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (USD(P)); the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (USD(AT&L)); and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not all stakeholders are happy with this policy that leaves the door open for what used to be considered science fiction. Many opponents of such uses of technologies call for either an outright ban on autonomous weaponized systems, or in some cases, autonomous systems in general (Human Rights Watch 2013, Future of Life Institute 2015, Chairperson of the Informal Meeting of Experts 2016). Such groups take the position that weapons systems should always be under \"meaningful human control,\" but do not give a precise definition of what this means. One issue in this debate that often is overlooked is that autonomy is not a discrete state, rather it is a continuum, and various weapons with different levels of autonomy have been in the US inventory for some time. Because of these ambiguities, it is often hard to draw the line between automated and autonomous systems. Present-day UAVs use the very same guidance, navigation and control technology flown on commercial aircraft. Tomahawk missiles, which have been in the US inventory for more than 30 years, are highly automated weapons with accuracies of less than a meter. These offensive missiles can navigate by themselves with no GPS, thus exhibiting some autonomy by today's definitions. Global Hawk UAVs can find their way home and land on their own without any human intervention in the case

Sudden Justice explores the secretive history of the United States' use of armed drones and their key role not only on today's battlefields, but also in a covert targeted killng project that has led to the deaths of thousands.

\"Sudden Justice explores the secretive history of the United States' use of armed drones and their key role not only on today's battlefields, but also in a covert targeted killing project that has led to the deaths of thousands. Days after 9/11, a CIA Predator in Afghanistan executed the world's first lethal drone strike. The Agency's role was no accident -- it had nurtured and developed drones for almost a decade, seeking a platform from which it could monitor its targets and act lethally and instantly on what was learned. Since then remotely piloted aircraft have played a critical role in America's global counter-terrorism operations and have been deployed to devastating effect in conventional wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. But there is another, covert war -- one in which drones scour the skies of Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia in search of militant and terrorist targets. The American government insists that this secret war is legal. The CIA even claims that its armed drones are \"the most precise weapon ever invented,\" so precise that civilians are no longer killed. Sudden Justice describes the reality of the secret drone war, one in which hundreds of civilians have died, and where the long-term strategic interests of the West may have been jeopardized\"--Jacket flap.

We learned this past week about the administration's legal justifications for the use of drones, that catch-all term for an expanding family of unmanned flying military hardware. The week's revelations further fueled the public debate about the propriety of drone strikes against human targets, and their application within our own border, as we'll hear with Martha Teichner's report in the \"Sunday Morning\" cover story.