During Obama's presidency foreign policy aimed to maximize the protection of military personnel through the use of drones (Chamayou, 2015). Rather than maintain a costly military presence in the Middle East, the Obama administration used surrogate warfare as a means of preserving national interests (Krieg, 2016). The drone-killing programme was stepped up and targeted killing was normalized in noboots battlefields. During his presidency over 3,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in airstrikes. The death toll doubled in 2014, going from nearly 10,000 in 2013 to over 20,000, remaining high in 2015 and 2016, as Table 5.1 shows, finally dropping to just over 13,000 in 2017, when ‘the battle for Mosul’ ended and ISIS in Iraq was declared defeated. As the War on Terror and the Arab Spring continued to claim victims, in Iraq through the brutality of ISIS and the coalition airstrikes, which resumed at the start of summer 2014, we were celebrating the triumph of our technology. ‘Advancements in technology, improved capabilities for target discrimination, and limited risk of collateral damage made RPAs the weapon of choice for targeting High Value Individuals (HVI)’ (Fowler, 2014, p 109).

Limited risk of collateral damage? As the British Parliament began to debate further intervention in Syria in September 2014, to ‘dismantle and ultimately destroy what President Obama has rightly called “this network of death” ’ (House of Commons, 2014), the question of precision bombing could not be ignored. While the House did not yet endorse air strikes in Syria (that would come the following year), it did endorse the resuming of air strikes in Iraq: