Remote Warfare Research Articles

War mediated by satellites. US drone warfare and its socio-political consequences

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: Analysis of the mediation phenomenon in US drone warfare and its consequences for drone operators and for global politics. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The primary issue is how the physical separation from the battlefield affects soldiers controlling unmanned vehicles and how technological dominance associated with drones impacts international law and perception of the enemy. The paper analyzes a broad range of sources, including academic literature, NGO reports, journalistic investigations, military textbooks, and personal accounts from drone operators. The theoretical framework draws from Carl Schmitt’s books, “Nomos of the Earth” and “Theory of the Partisan”. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: In the first part, the study examines the mechanics of drone warfare and analyzes the personal experiences of drone operators. In the second part, the focus shifts to the realm of geopolitics, exploring the transformations it undergoes due to the impact of remote warfare. RESEARCH RESULTS: Workers in the unmanned warfare program exhibit symptoms similar to those experienced by soldiers on the battlefield. The precise and “humanitarian” elimination of enemies can be counterproductive, potentially leading to the dehumanization of the enemy and radicalization on both sides of the conflict. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS: The fact of separation from the battlefield does not necessarily guarantee safety, precision, or humanitarian outcomes. On the contrary, in some instances, it can lead to soldiers’ suffering, civilian casualties, and escalation of conflict intensity.

Intimacy-Geopolitics, Remote Warfare and Domestic Violence: Disrupting Hierarchies of Violence

ABSTRACT Using intimacy-geopolitics as its framework, this paper examines multi-sited violences enabled by digital technologies as interwoven forms of remote warfare. As political geographers have highlighted the ‘trickling down’ of digital weapons technologies from military to police practice, this analysis has tended to stop at the scale of the state. We extend this work by examining technology-enabled coercive control (TECC) within the context of domestic violence through the lens of remote warfare. TECC includes the way abusers use digital technologies to surveil, track, monitor, harass and terrorise their intimate partners. In examining TECC through the lens of remote warfare, this paper contributes to geographic literature by illustrating the common tools and tactics that the military, police and domestic violence abusers use to engage in political violence across sites and scales. We also emphasise the way survivors feel and experience TECC in order to illustrate the intimate emotional dynamics of political violence enabled by digital technologies. We argue that centring intimacy in this way helps to expose how control and domination work within remote warfare – at all scales.

Remote Warfare with Intimate Consequences: Psychological Stress in Service Member and Veteran Remotely-Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Personnel

The use of remote piloted aircraft (RPAs) has been a part of military operations for decades and this type of service can present its own unique constellation of combat experiences and psychological consequences. The RPA crewmember experience has typically involved surveillance, targeting, striking, and after-battle assessments of individuals of interest to a host country or agency from a distance that can span several thousand miles. These operators are engaged in physically remote activities that carry a significant degree of intimacy due to the live, high-resolution, high-fidelity images and sounds that are available to the combatants in real-time. The potential psychological consequences of this type of military occupational specialty can include the symptoms of depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as well as moral injury, mental exhaustion or burnout, and disturbed sleep. The following narrative review examines the current state of RPA warfare from a psychological trauma perspective with an emphasis on the evolution of the inherent technology, the operator force, the psychological experiences and consequences of this type of service, and potential preventative interventions for servicemembers. A key objective of this narrative review is to integrate the available peer-reviewed empirical data, experiential military perspectives and analyses, clinician observations from this unique population, and exemplar reports from those with lived experience on an RPA crew regarding psychological consequences of this military occupational specialty.

Tackling Terrorism in Africa: US Remote Interventionism and the Fight against Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab in Kenya

ABSTRACT In the last two decades, the US has provided African governments with increasing assistance to fight terrorism. Kenya has been a major recipient of US support. Drawing on research on remote warfare and the principal-agent theory, this article explores the effects of US security policies in the country. It shows how the remote form of intervention adopted by the US against terrorism in Africa has increased the vulnerability of US policies to the interests and perceptions of local actors. In Kenya, such dynamics have favoured the abuse of US assistance for the implementation of repressive measures against suspect groups.

Vertical interference: video, drone witnessing, and the myth of precision targeting

Artists and filmmakers frequently problematize drone warfare through their creative practices, contesting military surveillance and violence by appropriating, parodying, and turning the drone’s gaze back at itself. Challenging and subverting the myth of ‘precision targeting’ – the military’s claim to perfect accuracy in aiming their weapons only at ‘bad guys’ – is central to artists’ engagement with drone warfare. By looking at recent work by Nicolas Brynolfson, George Barber, and eteam, the author argues that these artists pose drone vision – how and what drones see and look at – as a site of compromised looking, where the indexical and objective is rarely just that, but always layered by and interpreted through discourse, ideology, compression, and noise. By performing ‘drone witnessing’, these artists tease out the connective tissue between state surveillance and remote warfare, raising key questions about sovereignty and autonomy in the age of operational images.

Photography and Remote Warfare: An Inquiry into the Visual Representation of Cyber in News Images

While the importance of new technologies for warfare has only grown, the images used to represent them have remained static. Online image searches of ‘cyber attacks’, ‘cyber security’ or ‘cyber warfare’ pull up image after image that all look the same: rows of 1’s and 0’s, a hooded man in front of a computer, a padlock. To date, little attention has been given to the ways emerging technology is visualized and therefore image-makers have little research to go on when they are considering making images on these topics. Similarly, journalists, campaigners and policymakers have little evidence on which to base decisions they are having to make regularly when selecting images. This paper looks at the importance of news images for shaping our political realities and how remote warfare – that centers on less visible warfare – poses new challenges to photojournalists. This shift in warfare coincided in the early 2000s with both the “visual turn” in security studies and the “postphotographic” age. Through a series of qualitative interviews with cyber experts from Europe, the US, and Russia, this paper sheds light on how current cyber images are interpreted, offering a first step to understanding what current cyber visual discourse is saying, how, and why.

Rethinking remote warfare

Remote Warfare is a product of the bellicose twenty-first century in which we live. Promises of a century, that would shun violence, revere international law, and outshine the darkness of the Cold War, have long since fallen by the wayside. Instead, the tragic events of 9/11, 2001, led the USA and its allies down the path to war and to the unforeseen consequences that transpired. As Sir Michael Howard argued back in 2006, ‘President Bush’s declaration of a “War Against Terror” was a war for which the United States claimed a hunter’s licence to use force anywhere in the world and the right to dispense with all the restraints of international law that they had done so much to create’ (Howard, 2006). This special issue analyses the legacies and emerging international implications of this ‘hunter’s licence’ and the remote military technologies/remote practices of Western warfare that were pioneered to fulfil it.

Rebecca Adelman and David Kieran eds. Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence, reviewed by Rimona Afana

Rebecca Adelman and David Kieran eds. Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence, reviewed by Rimona Afana

The Invisible Enemy: From Metaphor to Concept

The problem, the solution of which this article is devoted to, is related to the lack of special studies of the concept of “invisible enemy” in political philosophy. Existing theoretical works do not pay enough attention to this concept. Its metaphorical use fails to make explicit all of its potential and importance for political philosophy. As “invisible enemies” only in the metaphorical sense of this term can be regarded objects that have a non-anthropogenic nature (viruses, bacteria, sources of disease), as well as extraneous elements of the political body that have destructive potential. The analysis carried out revealed two semantic areas of using the concept of “invisible enemies”, relevant to political philosophy, and namely physical and symbolic invisibility. The physical invisibility, which is regarded in the works by Сarl von Clausewitz, Сarl Schmitt, Zygmunt Bauman, Grégoire Chamayou and others, belongs to enemies on the battlefield or to remote warfare. Russian philosophers look at this concept from an ethical perspective (Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Karsavin, Nikolai Berdyaev, Fyodor Stepun). The author of the article substantiates the thesis about the situational and relative nature of the phenomenon of the invisible enemy, associated with reaching the limit of perceptual indistinguishability. The physical invisibility of the enemy is caused by the appropriation of new war spaces in which vertical dimensions are established. Arguing with the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the author uses this concept not only in relation to the irregular fighters (partisans), but also in relation to modern combatants. The ways of acquisition of the symbolic invisibility are revealed in the works of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt. It is based on the transfer of the war actor to a different semantic field, in which it is depoliticized and re-symbolized as a civilian object.

Russia’s and America’s 21st-century wars: Mirror images?

In this article, we look at 21st-century warfare in the context of two great powers: Russia and America. Russian and American invasions and subsequent wars are evaluated in terms of why and how they are fought, legal and moral considerations, impact, outcomes, and consequences. The article examines similarities and differences in strategy and methods, expanding on the increasingly popular remote warfare. Finally, we assess the decisive role of science and technology in war, raising questions about the future of AI warfare.

How to witness a drone strike

Witnessing is crucial to public engagement with war, but the remote violence of drones presents distinct challenges: its victims are largely invisible to Western publics; operations are cloaked in secrecy; and promises of precision targeting, accurate surveillance, and legal monitoring obscure the brutalities of the system. With so many barriers to witnessing, remote warfare tends to remain on the periphery of political debate and has not occasioned widespread resistance. Yet the means for witnessing drone warfare exist; the question is how they might be leveraged to make remote war more accessible and contestable. This article analyses the high-profile drone strike that killed 10 civilians in Kabul on 29 August 2021 to consider the limits and possibilities of witnessing drone strikes, alongside the database of conflict monitor Airwars and the aesthetic practice of the research agency Forensic Architecture. It argues that witnessing drone strikes requires assembling new conceptual techniques with long-standing practices of media witnessing and human rights testimony. It is not a manual or primer but rather maps four critical, analytical, and ethico-political trajectories demanded by the problem of how to witness a drone strike: lived experiences, violent mediations, infrastructural scales, and aesthetics.

An Investigation into Trevor Paglen’s Drones Photographs, Military Targeting, and Looking Slowly

The technology of unilateral remote warfare develops continuously, and with it, an ever-rising threat to human lives and freedom from an array of actors, mostly state powers, that seek to use oppressive force against civilian populations. Trevor Paglen is a political visual artist, whose project Drones represents military operations and resources in ways that recontextualize the processes of visual targeting enacted by military drones. Paglen’s work highlights the differences between human and machine vision and creates deliberate obfuscation that renders his photographs visually abstract. Following work by TJ Clark, Ariella Azoulay and Arden Reed, I approach Paglen’s photograph Untitled (Reaper Drone) in the form of a slow investigation that highlights durational viewing. Slowness in this form creates a conversation between myself and the image that acknowledges the temporal dimension of art-viewing and resists the unilateral gaze of the drone.

The Art of Drone Warfare

The increasing prevalence of drone strikes, and the expanding applications of drones in different industries, are dissolving the boundaries between military and civilian realms. This special issue considers 'the art of drone warfare' by surveying the field of scholarship on drone warfare and drone art to date. It addresses the affective, discursive, technopolitical, and colonial histories underpinning drone systems, through essays discussing various cultural works encompassing marketing video, film, literature, and the visual arts. Despite the unresolved controversies surrounding the ethics of remote warfare, military drone use has become normalised. Examining the art and aesthetics of drone warfare helps to make its politics perceptible at a time when the logic behind autonomous military systems is becoming entrenched.

Drone trauma: violent mediation and remote warfare

For people subject to drone war in Gaza, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, the violence and trauma inflicted by remotely piloted aerial systems such as the MQ-9 Reaper takes place at a remove from the sensors, networks, algorithms and interfaces that launch Hellfire and other missiles from the air. Brutal death and wounding bely the precision rhetoric, technocratic discourses and technoscientific imaginaries that shroud drone warfare in popular and political debate over its merits. Much has been said about the traumas of drone operators, but less about the traumas produced by drone warfare in those individuals and communities subject to it. In this short article, I pursue the question of how those traumas on the ground are bound up with the media-technological entities, processes and affects that compose the military drone apparatus: sensors, networks, algorithms, interfaces, atmospheres and missiles. My core contention is that the trauma of drone warfare is characterised by the violent mediation of drone systems, which produce an intensive relation between the not-yet of traumatic violence having commenced before it is felt and the already-too-late of that experience.

Light footprint—heavy destabilising impact in Niger: why the Western understanding of remote warfare needs to be reconsidered

Light footprint—heavy destabilising impact in Niger: why the Western understanding of remote warfare needs to be reconsidered

Emerging Technologies: Innovation, Demassification, Effectiveness, Revolutions In Military Affairs

Abstract While emerging technologies are generally incipient technologies, still under development, whose competitive impact is expected to be quite high and may have long-term strategic significance, by replacing current technologies with the potential to become key technologies, “emerging destructive technologies”designates the set of emerging technologies that are meant to be destructive and be used as methods, systems and techniques specific to war. And, since the great powers do not seem too willing to bury the hatchett of war, but use it in all geopolitical discourses, the destructive component of emerging technologies has become a catalyst for the innovative efforts of companies and states, which leave open great prospects for success in the lucrative business. The practice of emerging technologies so far has led to a change in the paradigm of warfare for many countries, to the conduct of remote warfare, to simultaneous and rather complicated hybrid actions, to the transformation of radio and television into modern instruments of psychological warfare. Emerging technologies with a destructive role are in the process of triggering new revolutions in the field of military affairs, resulting in the privatization of quality ideas incorporated in the means of combat, but also to dominate the market competition. Emerging technologies with a destructive effect propose for political decision makers: the decrease of human density on the battlefield, a modular articulated army with the possibility of ad-hoc summoning, a modern vision of the super-soldier, robotization and miniaturization of combat technique.

Strategic ignorance and the legitimation of remote warfare: The Hawija bombardments

How must we understand and conceptualize the rationales and repercussions of remote warfare? This article contributes to scholarship on the ontology of remote war by analysing how Dutch officials engage with responsibility for the bombardment of an Islamic State weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq in 2015 under Operation Inherent Resolve. It observes that the main feature of Dutch officials’ accounts of Hawija is their diverse claims to not knowing about civilian casualties. Official narratives shifted from denial to secrecy to strategic ignorance. Bridging work on secrecy from the field of critical security studies with work on strategic ‘unknowing’ from ignorance studies, we propose a new take on the Foucauldian notion of ‘regimes of truth’. The regimes of truth that emerge to justify shifts to remote warfare – that it is riskless, precise and caring for civilian others – rely not merely on secrecy and denial but on feigned and imposed ignorance about casualties. Whereas denial can be disproven and secrecy has an expiration date, ignorance is more elusive and open-ended and hence politically convenient in different ways. Deliberate unknowing does not just postpone investigation and accountability but fundamentally and indefinitely obstructs it and thus sustains the regimes of truth for future remote wars.

Correction to: Phenomenon and experience: searching for the civilian in an age of remote warfare

Correction to: Phenomenon and experience: searching for the civilian in an age of remote warfare

Phenomenon and experience: searching for the civilian in an age of remote warfare

Phenomenon and experience: searching for the civilian in an age of remote warfare

A conceptual critique of remote warfare

ABSTRACT This paper presents a conceptual critique of “remote warfare.” It argues that “remote warfare” is more of a trendy term than a robust concept. In support of this assessment, this paper makes two arguments. First, that there is a lack of clarity in the debate over what “remote warfare” is: namely, the literature is yet to explain what it entails. Second, that because of this lack of definitional specificity, we also lack an account of its analytical value: what intellectual leverage does it hold over existing terms making similar claims? The article discusses these points by expanding on the notion of “semantic field,” which it uses to assess how “remote warfare” contributes and is shaped by the broader conceptual confusion in the study of contemporary war and warfare.