“In laymen’s terms, “kill boxes” sound like torture devices. In military jargon, they are almost incomprehensible; as defined in the Department of Defense Dictionary, they are “a three-dimensional area reference that enables timely, effective coordination and control and facilitates rapid attacks.””
“They are three-dimensional cubes of space on a battlefield in which members and allies of the United States military are completely free to open fire.”
“As the American military started using kill boxes in conjunction with drones in targeted killings, it effectively grafted a strategy from the past onto the present, a la Frankenstein. The military began using kill boxes in the so-called war on terror as a technique to exert force in “ungoverned spaces,” territories that are not controlled by a state and are populated by people who might not share American cultural values.”
“Kill boxes are only used in places that are very different from the United States; military forces would never initiate a kill box Manchester or Ann Arbor, for example, even if a suspected terrorist lived there. Too many innocent people would be killed. The innocent people living in Afghanistan or Yemen, however, are apparently judged by a different standard.”
“And this is the moral cost of the kill box: When used widely and indiscriminately, the tactic devalues human life.”
“Western militaries have an ignoble history of using abstract battlefield metaphors to justify killing people. According to Nicholas Blomley, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, European militaries in colonial territories saw maps as “‘metaphors for both the process of scientific research and the ideal of the ordered state of nature,’” In other words, they wanted to reduce the land where many people lived down to the simplicity and order of a map, which represented both a cultural ideal and a military goal.”
“Its very existence represented a kind of control over the territory. Relying on kill boxes, together with other high-tech tools of warfare such as drones, is just the newest and most sophisticated way in which Western military powers mistake a strategic tool for a literal description of reality.”
“The French therorist Grégoire Chamayou has compared the new use of kill boxes to target individuals or small groups, rather than enemy militaries, to the difference between hunting and combat. “While warfare is defined … by combat, hunting is essentially defined by pursuit. Two distinct types of geography correspond to the two activities,” he writes. “Combat bursts out wherever opposing forces clash. Hunting, on the other hand, takes place wherever the prey goes. As a hunter-state sees it, armed violence is no longer defined within the boundaries of a demarcated zone but simply by the presence of an enemy-prey who, so to speak, carries with it its own little mobile zone of hostility.””
“Kill boxes have freed American military pursuits from the limitations of time and space—and, importantly, strict scrutiny.”
“As the blog Understanding Empire argues, “During the Clinton cabinet, officials worried and debated fiercely whether or not eliminating bin Laden was legal (and ethical), as Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars captures excellently. Now, targeted killing has become [so] routine that the Obama administration is seeking ways to codify and streamline it.””
“During his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Obama said, “War is justified only when certain conditions were met; if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used in proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.” The military’s current use of kill boxes in tandem with kill lists defies each of those criteria.”
“These tools are now used in the pursuit of something that only superficially resembles war. In practice, these tactics have more in common with expensive and reckless high-tech hunting.”
“They are unethical, and as terrorism and militancy proliferate in the regions where they are being implemented, they also appear to be ineffective.”