ABSTRACT
The author's argument, however, is that air power has always been police power. 'Police' here refers not to crime prevention and law enforcement but to the more general process of administration, security and order. In Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that 'war is reduced to the status of police action', with the US acting as the 'international police power'. Thus, to turn back to the author's argument concerning air power, what we find is that a form of technology that has been understood too readily and too easily in 'military' terms is better understood through the lens of police power. The point is that, seen from the perspective of air power as police power, the use of drone technology over what some would still like to call 'civilian spaces' was highly predictable. As is well known, the air power used in the war on terror has increasingly been operated through drone technology.
