Drone strikes have become an everyday reality in the war on terror. Hailed by supporters as an effective and targeted tool, drones require us to rethink questions of legitimate warfare. Legal analysis is part of that inquiry; and one would hope a relevant part. As the debate of the last decade suggests, drone strikes do not neatly fit established patterns of legal argument. In a report issued in 2010, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions at the time, Professor Philip Alston, indicated that targeted killing by drones had led to a “highly problematic blurring … of the boundaries of the applicable legal frameworks” the result of which “has been the displacement of clear legal standards with a vaguely defined licence to kill.”