Drone War Without Consent Is Power Without Right

Men now speak of “hundreds of drones” launched in a night, of “822” intercepted here and “600” detected there, of warehouses in one country in flames and private houses in another struck from the sky, and they speak of it as if they were describing weather. We are told that at least six persons in Russia were killed by one such vast aerial attack, and that missiles and drones from Russia in turn have killed and wounded many in Ukrainian cities, even at a book market and in a town whose very name I only learn from your reports. I am struck less by the number of machines than by the ease with which the lives beneath them are counted up, and written off.

When I sought in my Second Treatise to understand political power right, I began with men in a state of nature, free and equal, under the law of nature, which is reason teaching that no one ought to harm another in his life, liberty, or possessions. Civil government is erected, if at all, only that these natural rights may be better secured; power is a trust, not an inheritance. Here both Russia and Ukraine claim a right to wage war, to send missiles into cities and drones over borders. I ask first, and before all party consideration, whether any free people, assembling to form a commonwealth, would consent to be exposed in this manner that another may rule them.

I do not deny that war may be justly made. He who uses force without right puts himself into a state of war with those he attacks; injury repeated, unredressed, becomes that long train of abuses I once described, which dissolves the bond of obedience and leaves the injured people to an appeal to heaven. If one side here has suffered invasion, dispossession, and a standing violation of its territory, then resistance and the use of force in its defence may be not only permitted but required by the same law of nature that bids every man preserve himself and the innocent. Yet self-defence, though it allows force, does not sanctify every manner of using it. A just cause does not cleanse unjust means.

Your accounts speak of ballistic missiles striking “civilian infrastructure,” of a book market reduced to rubble, of homes and a private stall of books, of warehouses and depots far from any battlefield, burning for hours under black smoke. On the other side, they speak of drones from Ukraine killing at least six people within Russia, including, it seems, an old man in his house, and damaging homes and a railway. Where the target is plainly a soldier in arms, or a magazine feeding such arms, war judges more leniently; where the object is a market, a warehouse of wares, or a dwelling, the presumption of the law of nature runs the other way. He who destroys another’s life or livelihood must show that this ruin was necessary to prevent greater and unjust force, or he acts arbitrarily.

In all this I spy a new kind of prerogative, exercised now not by a prince stepping beyond written law, but by executives and their officers commanding legions of unmanned engines at great distance. They claim, no doubt, an emergency – to deter, to punish, to bring the war home to the other’s public – and emergencies do sometimes warrant swift action. But prerogative is tolerable only while it is plainly for the public good and always revocable; when extraordinary power hardens into a settled practice, loosed from declared rules, it becomes tyranny in the making, even if it wraps itself in legal forms. What clearer mark of arbitrary power than the ability to strike invisible from the air, while those below have no known law to tell them when, or why, or by whom?

One must also consider the consent and condition of the peoples on each side, though I have only scattered reports and will not pretend more knowledge than I have. If a government undertakes large and perilous attacks – sending hundreds of drones or volleys of missiles – with no fair consultation of those whose lives will be risked in return, or whose towns will be struck in reprisal, it abuses the trust put into its hands. For the end of political society is the preservation of everyone’s property, in that large sense of lives, liberties, and estates; a ruler who treats his people’s safety as mere instrument to frighten or grind another people sets himself above them, as if they were made for him, and not, as I hold, all made by one Maker for their own and one another’s preservation.

Some will say: in war one must do terrible things, or else be crushed by an enemy who does not scruple. I know the weight of that argument; I saw in my own age how fear of a worse power has been used to reconcile men to any power. Yet if this reasoning is allowed without limit, then the very existence of a foe becomes licence for whatever any commander pleases, and the distinction between a government and a band of robbers is lost. I argued long ago that when legislators invade property or subject the people to arbitrary power, it is they who rebel against the people. The same must be said of those who, under colour of national defence, make all lives and all homes in two countries equally exposed to mechanised ruin. A people so governed have good reason to remember that the dissolution of a government is not the dissolution of society, and to take thought, in sober time, for a rule that protects them better than the drones that now allegedly defend them.