ABSTRACT
In recent decades, the world’s most advanced militaries have largely avoided engaging in massive industrial-scale military operations in favor of “light” or “no” footprint interventions like kill/capture raids and unmanned aerial drone strikes. While the spatial and temporal extents of this violence are quite fluid and ambiguous, one of the chief facilitators of this humane killing is the paradoxical centrality of automated precision weaponry. This chapter seeks to outline the tensions at this nexus of humanitarian care and precision military lethality. In highlighting a 2020 drone strike in Libya, it sets out to frame the ethical stakes of warfare in which digital algorithms potentially enact the decision to kill human beings and the technical accuracy of lethal tools serves to substantiate claims to their humanity. The chapter then explores the foundational imprecisions that sit at the core of this form of humane killing, first in the history of international humanitarian law and next in the pages of military doctrine.
