In the past decade, the United States has rapidly deployed militarized drones in theaters of war for surveillance as well as targeted killing. The swiftness with which drones were created and put into service has outstripped the development of an associated framework for discussing them, with the result that basic conversations about these lethal weapons have been stymied for a lack of a shared rhetoric. Marouf Hasian’s Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age fills that critical gap.
 
With a growing fleet of more than 7,500 drones, these emblems of what one commentary has dubbed “push-button, bloodless wars” comprise as much as a third of the US aircraft force. Their use is hotly debated, some championing air power that doesn’t risk the lives of pilots, others arguing that drone strikes encourage cycles of violence against the United States, its allies, and interests.
 
In this landmark study, Hasian illuminates both the discursive and visual argumentative strategies that drone supporters and critics both rely on. He comprehensively reviews how advocates and detractors parse and re-contextualize drone images, casualty figures, governmental “white papers,” NGO reports, documentaries, and blogs to support their points of view. He unpacks the ideological reflexes and assumptions behind these legal, ethical, and military arguments.
 
Visiting both formal legal language used by legislators, political leaders, and policy makers as well as public, vernacular commentaries about drones, Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age dispassionately illuminates the emotive, cognitive, and behavioral strategies partisans use to influence public and official opinion.

Marouf Hasian Jr. is a professor of communication at the University of Utah. He is the author of Restorative Justice, Humanitarian Rhetorics, and Public Memories of Colonial Camp Cultures; Cultural Rhetorics of American Exceptionalism and the bin Laden Raid; Rhetorical Vectors of Memory in National and International Holocaust Trials; and In the Name of Necessity: Military Tribunals and the Loss of American Civil Liberties.

“Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age contributes fresh and insightful observations that aim to promote a healthy public debate of a policy that is presently steeped in secrecy and legitimized by legalisms and by a rhetorical discourse that plays on notions of national innocence and fantasies of clean technological warfare. The book’s analysis is especially strong and critically significant in that its genealogy of drone warfare establishes the groundwork needed to promote reflection and debate, and the genealogy itself performs a readable and convincing critique of an otherwise largely reified discourse.”
—Robert L. Ivie, author of Democracy and America’s War on Terror and coauthor of Hunt the Devil: A Demonology of US War Culture

“Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age is a touchstone study for a nascent but growing scholarly literature that explores how drone warfare has achieved its own brand of public legitimacy and exceptionalism, not simply through the clever discovery of legal loopholes, but through arguments that resonate with the US public. Marouf Hasian has created a guidebook that untangles the complex issue of drone warfare and maps the terrain of argumentation and common themes as they repeatedly arise.”
—Roger Stahl, author of Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture