Objective Troy
A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone

Buy the Book Now

Now out in paperback!

Objective Troy has won the Lionel Gelber Prize, awarded each year to "the world's best nonfiction book in English on foreign affairs." The jury of scholars and writers from five countries wrote:

"Shane’s masterpiece is a rarity among foreign affairs titles, flowing dramatically like a novel, carrying the academic weight of a thesis, and laying out enough policy dilemmas to fill a month of Sunday talk shows."

Featured Review

"Authoritative, nuanced chronicle of Mr. Awlaki’s life and the Obama administration’s decision to end it.....engagingly detailed." Steve Coll in The New York Times

Featured Reviews

"Authoritative, nuanced chronicle of Mr. Awlaki’s life and the Obama administration’s decision to end it.....engagingly detailed." Steve Coll in The New York Times
"Scott Shane’s “Objective Troy” (the title refers to the military’s code name for Awlaki) is a lucid and richly informed account of how these two men came to occupy their respective places in the history of the drone age." Paul Pillar in the New York Times Sunday Book Review
"A gripping, deeply reported tale of sex, religion, radicalization, and betrayal. " Nick Baumann in Commonweal magazine
"Anyone interested in understanding the allure of radical Islam, and thinking about ways to counter it both on and off the battlefield, would do well to study this work." Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Weekly Standard
"Scott Shane has done a masterful job of fleshing out the missing link in the evolution of Al Qaeda." Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower
"The writing is riveting, the intelligence sources are impeccable and the book is quietly elegant—echoing the human story told in Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower." Kai Bird, author of The Good Spy
"Scott Shane has written a bracing story about America's most notorious extra-judicial killing." Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and The Finish
"No one has written a better book about Obama's war against terrorists. Shane is a superb reporter and a wonderful story teller." Peter Bergen, author of Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden
"Scott Shane is unsurpassed in shedding clear light on America's darkest secrets, including the gripping human drama behind a drone strike that changed history." Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side

For a study guide to Objective Troy for professors assigning the book and students reading it, click here. Professors: For information on how to order a desk/examination copy of the book, send an email here.

Click here to see a collection of the government documents that Scott Shane used in the reporting of Objective Troy, posted by The National Security Archive.

Excerpts from Objective Troy

A President

The Rise of the Drone

...By 1981, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems was a decade old and had the money and clout to draw as keynote speaker the famous Hungarian-born physicist known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller. At a press conference, the seventy-three-year-old Teller declared that “the unmanned vehicle today is a technology akin to the importance of radars and computers in 1935.”....Teller said that in addition to being small, cheap, and expendable, “unmanned vehicles become really useful when they are intelligent"; they could carry “every extra sensory organ that you can dream of”; they could “be used for reconnaissance, for attack or for defense—for anything you please.”...

Scott Shane - New York Times Journalist and Author of Objective Troy