Despite its definitional and conceptual ambiguities, remote warfare scholarship has invited creative thinking on many different issues connected to conflict.
The US and Israel dominated the initial wave of drone proliferation, yet others have since joined in supplying weaker states with the lethal instruments in what constitutes a second wave.
The use of remote warfare has several significant problems and there can only be progress towards resolving them through discussions between communities.
Security cooperation programmes have provided a pathway to continued intervention, the ‘remoteness’ of which applies only to the intervening actor, not local communities.
Remote warfare conducted by Western forces is shifting its focus to the Sahel and as European states try to rely less on the US security apparatus, old legal challenges.
Developers and military commanders should not merely ask which military tasks can be automated, but also ask where human judgment ought to be preserved.
Remote warfare removes war from certain privileged spaces and times, even at the price of maintaining a limitless condition of war elsewhere.
Legal questions surrounding the use of metadata in targeting means that an adequate, independent post-strike investigation is the bare minimum of what ‘feasible’ precautions should include.
The Syrian conflict is an example of global and regional powers waging remote warfare against their adversaries with minimum human and capital costs.
The risks are rising as we move through the next major revolution in military affairs, and vigilance against eroding human rights needs to keep pace.
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