The legal implications of last week's assasination of alleged al Qaeda operatives by a robotic, U.S. drone aircraft are the subject of an interesting analysis piece in the UK Guardian:
While defence experts said the incident could herald a new era of robotic warfare, international lawyers debated the legal implications of the surprising turn in US strategy: killing specific individuals in countries where there is no war.
"To have a drone that engages and kills people, that is quite a threshold to cross," Clifford Beal, editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, told Reuters.
"This is the beginning of robotic warfare. There is underlying tension in the military about using it. The CIA does not have any qualms. This is really the first success story of this system."
The Predator drone said to have carried out the attack has a range of 400 miles and would not necessarily have been launched in Yemen.
