Here is my piece over at Commentator on Drone Warfare, beginning with exploding the tragic George Monbiot and proceeding thusly:

Not that long ago Europe’s parents and grandparents were being blown to bits in their tens of thousands by bombs simply dropped from planes in the general direction of the target. The sheer precision of modern weapons has saved countless more innocent lives caught up in armed conflict than, alas, still get taken.

One perverse result of this development is to give new life to Stalin’s reputed infamous observation that “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”. Precisely because so few people are now killed in modern warfare, the numbers of those who die shrink to the point where individual deaths of unarmed civilians can be ‘personalised’, and attacks on specific military targets start to look more like ‘assassinations’ or common law murder than war. At what point can (or should) we start to think about war and the legal parameters of it completely differently?

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The Guardianistas’ Monbiotish pronouncements on human solidarity and existential Gaian interconnectedness in, for example, the ‘climate change’ or development aid contexts seem to evaporate when it comes to defence questions. Yet the issues are exactly the same.

Just as the planet can be seen as a single organism worthy of collective respect, so too can the technical infrastructure which supports human life these days. No country in the world can survive in any meaningful sense without some reliance on the networks of real-life equipment (power-generators, communications cables, data storage computers) by which things get done and new inventions happen. Who protects those facilities?

Classic international law tells us that, in principle, it is for each state to protect those facilities sited on its own territory. But what if a state is too weak to do that, and/or allows terrorists and sophisticated criminals to use its territory as a base for plotting attacks on key installations in other countries?

If a country and its citizens want to enjoy the manifold benefits of belonging the modern global networked space, do they in turn have to accept an implicit obligation to take responsibility for defending those networks pro-actively and vigorously against those who, for whatever reason, want to wreck it? And if they can’t or won’t take the action needed to deal with such people, can they complain if other powers acting under a new version of the doctrine of collective self-defence step in to do that job instead?

Interventions need not be anything so crass as invading with huge numbers of soldiers. Rather the best available tools can be found to neutralise these threats from afar, including swarms of hi-tech drones that identify an enemy, watch the enemy’s movements to minimise the risks of collateral injuries – and pounce.

That sort of remote-controlled intervention in principle offers the most moral, controlled, restrained and proportionate expression of legitimate military self-defence the human race has ever seen. Which, of course, does not make it perfect or fool-proof. Or wise.

Several good comments - Commentator attracts a more, shall we say, thoughtful class of commenter than Daily Telegraph blogs.