Describing drone programs as a network of interacting and interdependent factors including the contemporary technological capacities of drones, law and military strategy is one of the main aspects of this study. All chapters identify where and how these factors converge or diverge and examine the result of this interaction. This description shows that combat drone technology facilitates anticipatory warfare – the scope of which is indefinite in time and space – and that the law is rearranged around anticipation. Further examining the socio-techno-legal phenomena produced by drone programs, the book explores the long-term effects produced by drone programs over populations living under drones as well as the international legal order. This book can be thought of as an act of compiling the textual, bureaucratic, and material traces of these programs in order to lay bare the infrastructure that is extending warfare in time and space and exacerbating state power.

The goal of detecting future events has several implications and two of them are explored in this chapter. First, the objective of detecting future events means that whoever poses a threat has to be targeted and if the threat is posed by a number of individuals that increases over time, enmity is extended to those individuals. This is true even if they act in the name of a terrorist group that did not exist when the conflict started. From a legal perspective, this practice is facilitated by the uncertainties related to the temporal delineation of conflicts. Second, the objective of addressing future threats entails to act against individuals who are not presently perpetrating hostile acts. This practice requires that the traditional interpretation of direct participation in hostilities be subjected to a temporal change. Instead of suspending the protection of civilians solely when ‒ and only for such time as ‒ they engage in acts that reach a certain threshold of harm, targeting enemies because of the threat they pose for the future means extending direct participation in hostilities not only to preparatory acts, but also to signs revealing membership to an enemy group. This shift is facilitated by the insufficiently defined notion of “continuous combat function.”