دانلود کتاب بازاندیشی در جنگ از راه دور: هوش مصنوعی، پهپادها و جنگ‌های آینده

When the special issue on which this edited volume is based was put together (2018–2021), the United States (aided by its closest allies) had a monopoly on ‘remote warfare’. The international security agenda of the previous two decades had been dominated by the legacies of the Bush administration’s ‘Global War on Terror’ and Obama-era foreign policy (Rogers 2017). Combined they left an approach to counter-terrorism that was focused on localized TSA agents at airports, FBI agents domestically, CIA agents internationally, and a host of targeted killing and signature strike missions—primarily performed by large armed uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones)—to disrupt, degrade, and ultimately defeat a host of often faceless international terrorist organizations. In addi-tion, distance, a light-footprint, and remoteness where local actors were supported by high-tech weapons, special operations forces, and targeted training answered the American publics’ demand to ‘do something’ about international terrorism while satisfying its intolerance for American casu-alties abroad and a repeat of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. The realities of the Global War on Terror had stripped us of any illusion of a century that would shun violence, revere international law, and outshine the darkness of the Cold War (Rengger 2013). Yet, remote warfare was meant to be something different—politically less risky to the U.S, but still effective in support of US interests and key allies on the ground. Up until just a couple of years ago, it was still uncertain as to the extent such ambi-tions would unravel. Would international law be neglected, indiscriminate violence restored, and long-simmering cold wars turn hot? (Buzan 2024). Yet, as we passed through the early years of the 2020s, it became clear that remote warfare, or at least the component parts, had begun to fracture, deployed towards divergent political ends.
Since the Rethinking Remote Warfare special issue was published in International Politics, much has changed and much has remained the same. The US contribution to the character of twenty-first century war continues to impress both politically and militarily. While the 1990s vision of ‘perfect and rapid wars’ remains elusive (Kennedy-Pipe et al. 2016),1 the US was able to engage with little cost to itself in conflicts in Somalia, the Philippines, Yemen, Libya, and Pakistan, due to its leveraging of remote operations, often spearheaded by drones. The relative lack of human cost to the US, paired with the meager monetary cost of its partic-ipation, was such that the US public remained uninformed or ambivalent regarding US military actions abroad.2 In short, the use of remote warfare distributes the societal costs of war in ways that are politically valuable to leaders, yet weigh on democratic norms and values in perhaps unhealthy ways.
Militarily, the use of remote warfare—especially, technologies of remote warfare—as a means of casualty avoidance has dramatically changed the practice of war in the twenty-first century. The US fight against the Islamic State (IS), and its retaking of Iraq—in particular the battle of Ramadi in 2015—provided a road map for the use of armed Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) drones in conventional-style conflicts (Fox 2019). Drones defined the American-led military opera-tion in two ways as they worked in concert with ground forces to reclaim and hold territory. First, remotely piloted aircraft performed ‘deliberate and dynamic precision airstrikes’ targeting IS’ infrastructure—more than 15,000 strikes over the course of the campaign (DOD n.d.). Second, remotely piloted aircraft assisted US partners in the dangerous busi-ness of ‘on the ground’ warfighting, aiding in maneuver over the desert and urban battlefields (DOD n.d.). The US-led coalition, for example, dedicated nearly 44 percent of airstrikes to Ramadi during the ground offensive to retake the city (Wasser et al. 2021, p. 162). Procedurally, Iraqi forces would call in requests for air support, which would then be vetted by ISR—typically MALE UAVs with full motion video (FMV) capability—before being attacked with precision guided weaponry. The Ramadi success story was made possible by on the ground forces to take and hold territory, aided by remote uninhabited aerial technologies to lessen the incursion of casualties to Coalition forces and civilians (Taylor 2024).
Since the turn of the decade and the new drone wars of the 2020s, however, our understanding of ‘Remote Warfare’ has begun to change, if not become skewed. No longer focused on the US and Western allies waging wars at arm’s length by remote control, while supporting local forces on the ground, it is the remote control (and increasingly autonomous) technologies, deployed by a range of international actors, that have come to define war in the 2020s. Perhaps the first significant case of these remote technologies and strategies playing a large part in a war without US participation was the 2020 Second Nagorno Karabakh War, in which Azerbaijan made rapid and unprecedented gains on terri-tory to which it claimed ownership, but had not held in the region since the early 1990s. The role of uninhabited aerial vehicles in Azer-baijan’s political victory is still debated, but it is beyond question that the use of remote technologies (supported by Türkiye) worked with ground forces to generate significant battlefield gains both by facilitating indirect fires with intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance capabilities (in lieu of access to satellites) and identifying and attacking outdated Armenian defense systems (Dixon 2020). The second significant case of remote technologies and strategies in conventional war is playing out before our eyes in Russia’s illegal invasion and war against Ukraine. The advantage wielded by Azer-baijan has been found wanting on Ukrainian battlefields, echoing the predictions of Ash Rossiter in Chapter 7 of this volume: ‘[c] ompar-ative advantages derived from this ‘remote warfare’ are waning due to competitors’ partial adoption of precision weapon systems and the devel-opment of countermeasures. As a result, selected remote warfare methods have been subsumed under a broader war of attrition in Ukraine. As Michael J. Williams writes in Chapter 8 of this volume, remote tech-nologies in Ukraine have been matched to ground operations to form ‘an evolving symbiotic relationship, with human operators and conven-tional ground forces indispensable to the operation.’ Russia uses similar remote technologies from the tactical level to the strategic, with the one-way pejoratively termed ‘kamikaze’ drones terrorizing civilian populations and dominating headlines in the West. Ukraine’s use of technologies and strategies on the other hand, has garnered attention most recently for the capabilities it has replaced. Wars of attrition require large amounts of artillery and human power—two capabilities that Ukraine sorely lacked. Small uninhabited aircraft (such as First Person View Quadcopters) have served as artillery on the battlefield, and, in turn, help make up for a deficit in Ukrainian frontline soldiers.
This brief discussion suggests that remote warfare (or at least selected weapons systems, strategies and tactics that were pioneered by remote warfare approaches) has shifted from a tool of hegemons’ regulating and shaping the international environment to their liking, to a relatively new and integral skill to conducting conventional war in the twenty-first century. The mission set of uninhabited aerial vehicles has exploded, including traditional missions like intelligence, surveillance, and recon-naissance (ISR), close air support (CAS), air interdiction, long-range strike, and nontraditional mission sets like armed overwatch, key to Williams’ assessment in Chapter 8. It is this variability that makes these remote technologies so valuable on contemporary battlefields, not so much as increasing the distance of the shooter from the target, but of surveilling battlefields in a way previously unrealized, providing states that would otherwise lack an air force the means of wielding air power, and replacing human capability on the battlefield to free up soldiers for soldiering. Presaging this development, James Rogers and Delina Goxho in Chapter 6 use drone activity in Niger to suggest that remote warfare is no longer the light footprint enterprise it once was, since its ‘means and mechanisms’ wielded by multiple state actors now ‘saturate zones of conflict’ combined with significant numbers of local ground forces.
It is not just states that are deploying these means of remote warfare, however. Since IS’ use of remote-controlled quadcopters in defending its territorial acquisitions in Iraq, other non-state actors have enhanced their drone capabilities. The Houthis are a good example of this, harnessing a more traditional approach to remote warfare to achieve their political ends. Between 2017 and 2023, the Houthis conducted approximately 1000 rocket or missile attacks and over 350 distinct drone strikes against Saudi Arabia (many of them concentrated against strategic targets deep in Saudi territory) to coerce an end to the Kingdom’s involvement in the Yemen Civil War. It worked—in 2023, Saudi Arabia sought rapproche-ment with Iran largely in exchange for Iranian guarantees that Houthi strikes against Saudi targets would cease (Baker 2023). This astonishing outcome is beyond the explanation of Kelly Grieco and Wesley Hutto in Chapter 5 of this volume, who argue against the coercive capabilities of drones in counterterrorism. The authors’ do not address the coercive potential of non-state organizations who promise to ‘shoot forever’ at state actors responsible for the protection of individuals and activities within their borders (Zegart 2018). The Houthi success makes this a worthy research topic for future work on non-state adaptations of remote warfare.
Nevertheless, questions around international law and the use of tradi-tional U.S./Western interpretations of remote warfare against non-state actors—the focus of the original special edition—remain as relevant as ever. One needs only to consider the quick uptick in the first weeks of the second Trump administration’s use of targeted killing across the Middle East and North Africa combined with the elimination of orga-nizations within the Department of Defense dedicated to the reduction of civilian harm in airstrikes (Horton et al. 2025). With the US aban-doning its commitment to limit civilian casualties in remote warfare, one wonders whether this is a function of contemporary American politics or a negative externality of the normalized subversion of remote warfare. Read in this context, Aditi Gupta’s warning in Chapter 2 of this volume which today seems prophetic: the distance of remote warfare and the reduced capacity for counting casualties risks ‘devastating and eroding’ the visibility of civilians in ‘fluid states of war,’ and in turn degrades the ‘worthiness’ of civilian protection.