France and the American Drone Precedent : A Consequentialist Response to a Polemical Critique

As France contemplates arming its drones, this chapter asks the following question : What have we learned about the specific advantages of drones and their application in foreign affairs from the American precedent ? In answering this question, the chapter assesses the legitimacy of armed drones as a means, and targeted killing as a policy, duringover the past two decades. The chapter is framed as a partial response to correct some of the misconceptions about drones found in Grégoire Chamayou’s work Théorie du drone (A Theory of the Drone ; originally published in 2013, and translated into English in 2015).