Instead, against those, like General Stanley McChrystal, who argue that drones are simply new tools in an old activity of war, Arendt’s warning is that drones and robot soldiers may change the very dynamic of war and politics. Nor is she specifically concerned with surveillance.
Her worry has little to do with assassination, the concern of most opponents of drones today. The rise of drones matters, Arendt suggests, in ways that are not currently being seen. If we draw out the consequences from Arendt’s logic, then drone soldiers might displace the traditional limits that politics places on violence drones, in other words, make possible unprecedented levels of unlimited violence. Drones are increasingly prototypes and even embodiments of the “robot soldiers” that Arendt worried would dehumanize war and elevate violence over power. To read Arendt’s lines today, amidst the rise of drone warfare, alters the valence of her remarks. Hers was, at least in part, a hopeful voice, praising the impotence of violence in the face of power.
Her argument was that as long as robot soldiers were a thing of the future, brute violence and force like that unleashed by the United States would always succumb to collective power, of the kind exhibited by the Vietcong. Hannah Arendt wrote these lines in the midst of the United States’ defeat in Vietnam. Only the development of robot soldiers, which, as previously mentioned, would eliminate the human factor completely and, conceivably, permit one man with a push button to destroy whomever he pleased, could change this fundamental ascendancy of power over violence.
Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis-the secret police and its net of informers. No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed. The Impact of Modern Warfare on Power and Politics 04-15-2013
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