IN 2013, a 13-year-old Pakistani boy named Zubair told the US Congress, “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.”  Though the spectacle of Donald Trump’s presidency has obscured the discussion of drone attacks, which had begun in Barack Obama’s trigger-happy tenure, remote strikes by the US military have increased since 2016.  And they have gone under the radar. In 2019, the Trump administration revoked a policy requiring intelligence officials to publish the number of civilians killed in drone strikes outside war zones.

So, with Pakistani boys afraid of clear, blue skies and the civilian death toll from remote warfare now obscured from view, it’s necessary to ask — how did we get here?

The ascendance of remote warfare, and the ubiquity with which it is utilised today, have been a long time coming. Though the modern, weaponised drone may seem a recent invention, its conceptualisation goes back more than a century.