Feb. 25, 2015
The downsides, though, are considerable. Drone attacks induce a “siege mentality” in the civilian population, Kilcullen suggested. One tribal leader in Pakistan told Steve Coll of the New Yorker that the amount of time a drone spends hovering above its target before it unleashes its weaponry — days, sometimes, rather than hours — has “turned people into psychiatric patients”. (Chamayou neglects this temporal aspect of drone warfare, which is surely part of what makes it so distinctive — and so distinctively unsettling.