Warfare is increasingly conducted through sensors, networks, and remote platforms that keep their human operators far from danger. This distance has strategic, political, and ethical consequences that are only beginning to be understood. Erik Lin-Greenberg’s The Remote Revolution offers the clearest account to date of how uninhabited systems reshape leader behavior, crisis dynamics, and modern statecraft. His findings invite a second question. How should democracies design institutions that prevent unnecessary harm before it occurs and preserve accountability when conflict becomes remote?
Lin-Greenberg’s central insight is that remote systems introduce a predictable shift in how states initiate and manage the use of force. When leaders can act without risking their own personnel, their behavior changes. He writes that reduced risks “can lower the threshold for dispatching forces, creating a moral hazard that enables decision makers to launch military operations during interstate disputes when their state arsenals include drones.”1 His evidence spans wargames, surveys, and archival case studies. Participants accepted higher escalatory risk when uninhabited assets were involved. During the Cold War, both superpowers relied on remote reconnaissance for missions that would have been politically untenable with crews aboard. When Iran shot down a US Global Hawk drone in 2019, the absence of American casualties made it politically easier to absorb the loss and step back from escalation. These examples illustrate how distance alters strategic judgment, reducing both the barriers to initiation and, at times, the pressure to retaliate.
Lower risk expands what Lin-Greenberg calls the “menu of options.”2 Remote systems enable actions that fall between inaction and major escalation, including reconnaissance, limited strikes, and coercive signals that impose costs without creating public alarm. Azerbaijan’s reliance on drones in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war illustrates how remote tools expand operational choice while managing political exposure. Israel’s routine use of drones in cross-border operations against regional adversaries demonstrates how leaders create intermediate space between symbolic warning and high-intensity response. In episodes involving Syria and Hezbollah, remote systems have enabled calibrated signaling without the immediate risks associated with crewed aircraft.
Clankers and Casualties
One of Lin-Greenberg’s most distinctive findings concerns how states respond to attacks on uninhabited systems. Rivals often treat drone shootdowns differently from incidents involving inhabited aircraft. These losses rarely generate public pressure for retaliation. Decision-makers frequently see shooting down a drone as a low-risk signal of dissatisfaction.3 Cold War episodes show that remote-platform losses were treated as manageable setbacks rather than triggers for escalation.4 Israeli cases confirm similar restraint. These dynamics produce what Lin-Greenberg describes as “more but milder conflicts.”5 Remote systems do not eliminate escalation. They change its form, making crises more frequent but less likely to cross into major interstate war.
Public opinion plays a central role in this transformation. Lin-Greenberg notes that reduced risk “mitigates the political obstacles often associated with sending troops into harm’s way.”6 When political costs fall, strategic discretion expands. Drone campaigns in US counterterrorism operations illustrate this pattern. Casualty aversion remains a constant in democratic politics. Remote technology changes how leaders weigh those incentives.
For policymakers grappling with the expanding role of autonomous and remote systems, The Remote Revolution provides a rigorous and indispensable foundation.
Lin-Greenberg’s contribution is descriptive and theoretical. He explains how remote systems alter incentives and behavior. The next task is institutional. Democracies must translate this knowledge into preventive design. Recent analysis in the International Policy Journal has argued that compliance with the laws of war should be engineered directly into autonomous and remote systems. Embedding discrimination and proportionality requirements is a start. But engineering norms into code is insufficient without reforming the institutions that authorize and oversee lethal force.
Oversight and Operations
Oversight becomes more complex when remote operations move across statutory authorities. Military operations conducted under Title 10 are subject to armed services oversight and reporting requirements. Covert actions conducted under Title 50 are reported to intelligence committees and often operate under tighter secrecy. The migration of drone strikes between these frameworks during the post-9/11 era demonstrated how lethal authority can shift between oversight regimes with different transparency standards. Designing for prevention requires harmonizing expectations across authorities so that distance cannot exploit jurisdictional gaps.
Recent allegations of unlawful airstrikes against civilian vessels underscore the institutional stakes. When force is projected at distance against targets that are difficult for the public to visualize or verify, the risk is not only civilian harm but erosion of democratic accountability. The problem is structural rather than partisan. Any administration operating with remote tools faces incentives to lower political friction. The question is whether institutions are strong enough to resist that pressure.
A durable institutional response requires at least four changes:
Congress should require sunset provisions for semiautonomous lethal authorities, mandating explicit reauthorization every two years. This would prevent normalization of delegated force.
Agencies conducting lethal operations should submit public civilian harm prevention certifications before deploying new remote or AI-enabled systems, reviewed by an independent inspector general.
Lawmakers should codify a named human decision authority requirement for every lethal action conducted through remote or autonomous systems, with documented reasoning preserved for review.
Congress should establish automatic reporting triggers for the use of force against civilian vessels or non-state maritime actors, requiring public disclosure within a fixed timeframe.
These reforms do not prohibit remote warfare. They restore friction where political cost has diminished.
Designing for prevention also requires cultural change. Officers and analysts should be rewarded for surfacing uncertainty and slowing operations when civilian risk is ambiguous. Near-miss reporting should be protected from reprisal. Restraint must be treated as competence rather than hesitation.
Remote technologies are diffusing rapidly across state and non-state actors, normalizing distance in both surveillance and strike capabilities.7 The incentives Lin-Greenberg identifies are unlikely to remain confined to major powers. That makes institutional design more urgent, not less.
Distance changes what leaders see and what the public feels. Without institutional reform, it will erode the accountability that gives democratic uses of force their legitimacy. Democracies must build systems that prevent unnecessary harm, maintain human judgment at the center of lethal authority, and preserve moral clarity even when conflict unfolds beyond the horizon of public view. Remote systems may change the character of war. Deliberate design must determine how democracies respond.
Lucas F. Schleusener is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. You can follow him on Bluesky at @lfschleusener.bsky.social.
1 Erik Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2025), 5. 2 Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution, 25. 3 Ibid., 33. 4 Ibid., 108. 5 Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution, 5. 6 Ibid. 7 See, for example, Faine Greenwood’s reporting and analysis on the global diffusion of drone technologies and the regulatory lag surrounding remote systems.
In January, Americans became immediately and tragically familiar with the spectacle of masked and armed agents of Federal security forces shooting civilians in broad daylight. The horrific violence from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) against people in Minnesota, particularly the killings of protestors Renee Good and Alex Pretti, match the threat to everyday society seen in places abroad where security forces operate with reckless impunity. Immediate deescalation is necessary in Minneapolis, along with a commitment to avoid similar violence in other cities, but we must acknowledge that it is unlikely this administration will end their campaign to remove undocumented immigrants through seemingly any means. The systemic security force abuse that is accompanying ICE’s presence across American cities and hidden in detention centers will have lasting damage, particularly on already vulnerable immigrant communities and requires comprehensive prevention efforts by civil society and local government.
This kind of violence is not new, even in the United States where police abuse has resulted in numerous deaths, though its deliberate provocation by a Presidency against the people of a US state is unique. In the past protecting civilians from such violence was seen as a crucial part of US foreign policy, as part of a holistic effort to combat the conditions that foster violent extremism.
I have spent my career designing and managing conflict prevention, counterterrorism and security assistance policy and programs in Africa. I am not the first to remark on the striking similarities occurring on American streets with what I witnessed in multiple authoritarian African countries. I’ve sat in traffic, protected by diplomatic plates, eyes down and afraid to truly look, as police officers beat a man who was refusing, or couldn’t pay a bribe. I’ve designed security assistance programs across the Sahel that have been canceled due to massive military attacks against unarmed civilians in the name of counterterrorism. I’ve interviewed young people who defected from Boko Haram to learn why they joined, and personal or family abuse by security officials was often a primary reason.
I live in Washington DC, one of the first cities to be targeted by the Trump administration’s campaign to round up immigrants without regard for accepted standards of engagement. Like many in the community who pulled together through a patchwork system of signal chats, I drove kids to school who no longer felt comfortable walking or taking the metro. On our drives, we frequently witnessed masked agents pulling people, mostly men, from their cars and violently pressing them against the doors or shoving them to the ground, instantly handcuffed behind their back. Sometimes we drove past in silence, avoiding eye contact because it was too difficult. Other times they chatted in Spanish, identifying friends who lived in nearby buildings and texting them to make sure they knew to stay home. One day, the dreaded news came through: one of their fathers had been abducted on the street on his way to work. After being transferred from one detention facility to another, he told his family that the conditions were so terrible that he felt he had no choice but to self deport.
Although media attention is focused intently on Minneapolis now, ICE is still present in Washington and many other cities around the country, and their violent tactics have become emboldened and sanctioned by political officials. In fact, rather than simply being a tactic, ICE violence has become a policy, and a means to promote and enforce power.
Decades of research in Africa has shown that lack of trust in government, security force impunity, and general perception of marginalization are factors that can lead to recruitment by violent extremist organizations, especially when triggered by a “tipping point” event such as violent abuse by security forces. While there is no indication of increased violence among communities targeted by ICE, American civil society, and eventually the American government, should be attentive to these risks and take steps to prevent increased marginalization and risk of violent non-state groups forming in response to the abuses they have faced.
As the large-scale public response in Minneapolis and micro-level networks to protect and support neighbors across the country have shown, communities are resilient in the face of state sponsored violence. I’ve seen this personally through hundreds of community-based organizations I’ve worked with across Africa that have developed with limited resources to protect their people who face violence from both the government and non-state armed groups.
Federally sanctioned security force violence has harmed a sacred social contract between Americans and the government, but there are ways to prevent longer term damage. Although the context between the African countries where I have worked and the United States is very different, international experience and evidence suggest that states, cities and civil society could focus on the following actions to mitigate the risks of continued state violence and repression:
Strengthen hyper-local resilience networks: Protection and support that occurs closest to home such as Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), neighborhood committees, or churches/houses of worship can provide a sense of belonging that reduces real or perceived marginalization. These frontline groups may be able to help develop strategies and capacities to resist violence. Many of these networks exist organically but can be strengthened with external financial or organizational support, however it’s important not to overwhelm their authenticity.
Rebuild trust in security forces through community-engaged policing at the state and local level: This approach is not new to the American context where some law enforcement entities have spent decades building relationships and trust within immigrant communities. Rebuilding or developing positive relationships that effectively address non-immigration related crime will require redoubling these efforts and focusing on transparency and independence from immigration enforcement. Lessons can be drawn from Kenya, for example, where there has been significant challenges of police misconduct and political interference.
Ensure a gender-sensitive approach: Although many of the people impacted directly by ICE’s violence are adult men, women’s lives are also changed particularly if they must take on additional roles to support their family financially to compensate for the loss of one income if a spouse is detained or deported. A gender sensitive approach should also consider the impact on boys and young men, whose role in the family and society may also be shifting.
Provide psychosocial support and counseling to those that have suffered or witnessed security force abuses: Given the risk that security force abuses can be a tipping point towards violence, it is critical to address this trauma early and provide ongoing counseling particularly for youth. Psychosocial support has been identified as a critical aspect of peacebuilding, reintegration of former fighters, and post conflict reconstruction following many types of violent conflict in Africa.
In the near term, these actions will fall to civil society, state and local government, and private citizens. The Trump administration has decimated many federal government services that address community violence prevention and detection domestically and abroad in the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) Justice, and State, as well as the FBI, including funding for NGOs. But beyond that, as was the case in many other countries I have worked in, the use of sanctioned state sponsored violence is intentional. As opposed to many countries, where political leadership acknowledges the need to address systemic security force abuses but fails to control it in practice, in the United States, such abuse continues to be promoted as acceptable. The tragic deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the deaths of at least 53 people held in detention by DHS, are a direct result of the consistent sanctioned violence by security forces. This violence continues around the country, in neighborhoods where national media has gathered to witness it and in others where the harm is documented only by bystanders, and it is causing both short- and long-term damage to this country, and requires a holistic response.
Margot Shorey is an expert on counterterrorism and conflict prevention and previously served in the Department of State Bureaus of African Affairs and Conflict and Stabilization Operations.
As the United States prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico, and to host the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, sports diplomacy faces a critical test. Mega-events no longer function solely as platforms for projecting democratic values; they increasingly expose the gap between international rhetoric and domestic governance. The tensions between the internationalism of global sport and hardline migration and border-control policies—particularly in the U.S. context—show that debates around boycotts are not causes but symptoms of deeper governance failures. There are reputational and democratic risks at stake, but action can restore credibility to democratic sports diplomacy.
In a former contribution published in 2024, The US and EU Can Build a More Democratic World with Sports Diplomacy, I argued that sport could serve as a strategic vector for democratic cooperation and international leadership. At the time, sports diplomacy was largely framed as an opportunity: a shared platform to project values of openness, inclusion, and dialogue in an increasingly polarized world.
Today, that proposition faces a far more demanding test. As the United States prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup with Canada and Mexico, and to host the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, sports diplomacy has shifted from aspiration to accountability. Mega-events no longer merely project democratic values; they expose whether those values are sustained through policy, governance, and institutional coherence. In this new context, sport has become a stress test of democratic credibility.
The 2026 World Cup illustrates this transformation with particular clarity. As a tri-national tournament, its success depends structurally on cross-border mobility. Fans, athletes, journalists, officials, and civil society actors must be able to travel freely and safely for the event to function as a genuinely global gathering. Mobility, in this sense, is not a logistical detail. It is a democratic condition.
That condition now sits uneasily alongside increasingly hardline migration and border-control policies in the United States. Expanded enforcement mechanisms, uncertainty around visas, and the growing prominence of a deportation-first logic risk transforming a global celebration into an experience marked by fear, exclusion, and arbitrariness. The tension between the internationalism of sport and fortress-style politics is no longer abstract; it is fast becoming operational.
Mega-sporting events are built on hospitality, openness, and shared experience. Restrictive border regimes, by contrast, are built on deterrence, suspicion, and control. When these logics collide, sport becomes politically incoherent. The reputational consequences are significant. Hosting a World Cup under conditions perceived as hostile or unpredictable does not enhance soft power; it erodes it. The very visibility that once made mega-events attractive as diplomatic tools now magnifies policy contradictions.
It is in this context that discussions of boycotts have resurfaced. These debates are often treated as emotional reactions or ideological gestures. That interpretation misses the point. Boycotts are not the cause of the problem, but a symptom of governance failure. They emerge when the gap between democratic rhetoric and administrative practice becomes too visible to ignore.
The question, therefore, is not whether boycotts are effective as a tactic. It is why they become thinkable in the first place. Concerns voiced by fan groups, journalists, advocacy organizations, and sporting stakeholders point to a deeper anxiety about access, safety, and rights during the World Cup. The potential chilling effect on attendance, participation, and media coverage represents not only a logistical challenge, but a profound reputational risk. When mobility becomes conditional and enforcement overshadows hospitality, the soft-power dividend of hosting rapidly evaporates.
This dynamic highlights a broader shift in sports diplomacy. Symbolism alone is no longer sufficient. Ceremonies, slogans, and narratives cannot compensate for governance gaps. Sport has entered a post-symbolic phase, in which policy choices and institutional arrangements matter more than messaging. Mega-events now test whether democratic systems can align domestic governance with international projection.
A brief comparative glance reinforces this point. The Milano–Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics offer an imperfect but instructive European benchmark. Framed around sustainability, territorial cohesion, and long-term legacy, the Games reflect an effort to embed sport within broader governance frameworks rather than treating it as a standalone spectacle. Europe’s own contradictions—particularly on migration—are well documented. Yet the lesson is clear: credibility does not stem from flawless performance, but from coherent governance and transparent commitments.
Looking ahead, the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games represent a narrow but critical window for correction. Unlike the World Cup, they allow time for institutional learning and policy adjustment. Clear and transparent visa regimes, safeguards for freedom of expression, protections for athletes and journalists, and effective coordination across federal, state, and local authorities could transform LA 2028 into a credible demonstration of rights-based sports diplomacy. Failure to do so would have the opposite effect, amplifying perceptions of democratic inconsistency rather than leadership.
If sports diplomacy is to remain credible, values must be operationalized through policy. To that end, several concrete steps are essential.
Policy Recommendations
The U.S. federal government should establish a dedicated World Cup mobility framework guaranteeing transparent, expedited, and rights-based visa and entry procedures for fans, athletes, journalists, and civil society actors.
FIFA should condition hosting agreements on binding human-rights and mobility guarantees, including independent monitoring of border and enforcement practices during the tournament.
Host cities and states should adopt clear protocols limiting the role of immigration enforcement agencies in and around sporting venues to prevent intimidation and arbitrary detention.
The European Union and partner governments should articulate minimum democratic standards for mega-event hosting, using Milano–Cortina 2026 as a benchmark for rights-based governance.
The International Olympic Committee should treat LA 2028 as a pilot case for democratic hosting, integrating freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and independent oversight as core Olympic requirements.
Sport cannot repair democratic deficits. But it can reveal them with unmatched visibility. As the world turns its attention to the 2026 World Cup and beyond, mega-events will not simply ask whether democracies can host the world. They will ask whether democracies are prepared to govern themselves coherently under global scrutiny.
Raül Romeva i Ruedaholds two PhDs, one in International Relations and another in Sport Science and Education. He is currently Professor of Global Politics and Sport Diplomacy at Universitat Ramon Llull and EADA Business School. He is also a former Member of the European Parliament and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, Institutional Relations, and Transparency in the Catalan Government.
The first year of the second Trump administration can best be surmised as a series of crimes for which accountability remains nonexistent. His administration forcibly disappeared approximately 250 Venezuelan migrant men, rendered them to El Salvador, and detained them in a prison notorious for its brutality. Unauthorized lethal airstrikes targeted allegeddrug trafficking vessels off the coast of Venezuela as a prelude to removing the country’s leader, all under the threat of further military intrusion. Masked federal agents abducted people off the streets and bundled them into unmarked cars.
These made-for-TV displays of state violence define the second Trump administration. While certainly shocking in their brazen, even gleeful disregard for the rule of law and democratic norms, the abuses unfolding across the United States and beyond do not lack precedent. Instead, emboldened by the lack of comprehensive, meaningful accountability for similar conduct over the past decades, the Trump administration has chosen to escalate and expand preexisting abusive practices in pursuit of its authoritarian aims—with grave consequences for ordinary people and U.S. democracy.
Unaccountability as permission
Two years ago, I led a research study with the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) and the Stimson Center that investigated how the U.S. approaches accountability for civilian harm and law enforcement misconduct. The study found significant shortcomings in accountability across the U.S. security sector. In addition, the study warned that continued unaccountability risked creating a permissive environment for abuse while undermining democratic governance.
The Trump administration has repeatedly taken advantage of this permissive environment, from extraordinary renditions to illegal airstrikes to secret policing.
Extraordinary Renditions
In the spring of 2025, the Trump administration removed some 250 Venezuelan men from the United States to El Salvador. When relatives and lawyers sought to locate their loved ones and clients, U.S. officials refused to provide information. The U.S. and Salvadoran governments claimed the men were members of Tren de Agua, a Venezuelan organized crime group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration. However, the U.S. government appears to have alleged Tren de Agua membership based on inaccurate and unreliable methods.
Salvadoran authorities detained the Venezuelans incommunicado in the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), a facility notorious for inhumane conditions and violence. Men interviewed by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal following their release from CECOT and return to Venezuela described frequent beatings, sexual assault, and the denial of basic hygiene, sanitation, and medical care.
Possibly fearing international consequences for this detention, officials in El Salvador wrote to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, trying to “assign the US government sole responsibility under international law for migrants detained in CECOT.”
The extrajudicial transfer of these men to torture in a third country closely mirrors the Bush administration’s post-9/11 extraordinary rendition program. Following the attacks, the CIA transferred terrorism suspects for interrogation to countries known to practice torture. Bashar al-Assad’s Syria was one such destination. Others included Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt. As in the case of CECOT, the rendition program ensnared individuals who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or terrorism. The CIA refused to allow the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate renditions, precluding any meaningful accountability.
Illegal Airstrikes, signature precedents
Prior to January’s invasion, the U.S. conducted a series of airstrikes off the coast of Venezuela, targeting vessels allegedly involved in drug smuggling. Thirty-five strikes have killed over 100 people. The U.S. has claimed these strikes constitute part of a non-international armed conflict against drug cartels. External legal experts, however, have concluded that the strikes not only lack a legal basis, but amount toextrajudicial executions. The Pentagon has also asserted that it does not consider it important for the military to know the identities of the people killed—or even whether they had been trafficking drugs. Fishermen from Trinidad, Colombia, and likely beyond have paid the price.
Self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised to treat maritime drug traffickers, in his own words, “EXACTLY how we treated Al-Qaeda.” In fact, the administration does appear to be treating its targets exactly how the United States approached War on Terror “signature strikes.” Like their fishermen counterparts in 2025, ordinary Somalis, Yemenis, Pakistanis, and others were targeted and killed based on observed “patterns of life” thought to resemble those of terrorist operatives. With accountability for these incidents of civilian harm largely absent, the recycling and escalation of signature strikes unfortunately cannot come as a surprise.
Secret Police
Perhaps the most emblematic visual of the second Trump administration is that of masked federal agents, often not wearing insignia or refusing to identify themselves, emerging from unmarked cars to snatch immigrants—or anyone determined to “look like an immigrant”—off the streets. Excessive force is standard. In addition, agents have tear gassed, manhandled, and pointedweapons at ordinary Americans and elected representatives seeking to protect immigrant community members and constituents. On January 7, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three, as she sought to protest for the rights of her immigrant neighbors.
Congress attempted to curtail the use of unmarked agents in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which required federal law enforcement officers to wear visible identification when policing protests. However, the migration of tactics used against protesters to immigration raids and the continued deployment of masked and militarized agents at protests highlights the lack of political will to enforce non-repetition.
Envisioning Accountability
Accountable government institutions are critical to a functioning democracy. Because security agencies are uniquely empowered by the state to deprive people of their lives and liberty, ensuring they remain accountable carries heightened significance. Americans, at least as of two years ago, agreed. A joint CIVIC/YouGov poll conducted in conjunction with CIVIC and the Stimson Center’s 2023 study found that 73% of Americans agreed that the strength of our democracy depended on holding law enforcement agents accountable for their actions.
Further, participants in CIVIC and Stimson’s research emphasized the need for a comprehensive approach to accountability extending beyond a narrow focus on legal liability. Alongside legal liability, this comprehensive approach encompasses acknowledgment, explanation, and apologies; taking responsibility and making amends; disciplinary action; and non-repetition. Participants additionally made clear that any approach to accountability should be grounded in the needs and perspectives of the communities harmed by security activities.
Securing comprehensive accountability, whether for present abuses under the current Trump administration or for the past abuses that enabled them will not be an easy task. The destruction and devaluing of existingsafeguards and accountability mechanisms since last January only compounds the challenge. At the same time, the past year has also demonstrated the power of creative and relentless organizing to defend democracy and protect targeted communities. With a commitment to sustaining this energy across what was already a protracted and grueling fight, genuine accountability—and the benefits it provides—might just be achievable.
Rosie Berman is a researcher and writer based in Washington, D.C.
The Judge Advocate watched the feed from the tactical operations center alongside her commander. The screens, each attended by systems monitors, showed more than a dozen developments unfolding at once. An artificial intelligence (AI) led drone swarm was closing on the front line through the city, coordinating its movements faster than any human pilot could direct, an artificial flock of mechanical starlings like a cloud on the radar. A civilian aid convoy had stalled on the northern approach. An enemy artillery battery was repositioning south behind a residential block. In the nearby valley, friendly units were maneuvering under fire. All these pieces were in motion, lives and vehicles and weapons. The soldiers’ behavior would be determined by interactions between their commander and AI.
The challenge here is not as simple as claiming that AI cannot comply with the principle of distinction under international humanitarian law (IHL), also known as the law of armed conflict. The fog of war complicates decision-making for both humans and machines, but does so in profoundly different ways.
For a human commander, the chaos of the battlefield is filtered through layers of training, doctrine, experience, and instinct. Even when overwhelmed, a person can weigh incomplete facts against their mental map of the situation, recall comparable past events, and fall back on moral and legal anchors. This does not mean humans do not make mistakes; they do, often with serious consequences. But even in error, their reasoning is shaped by caution, hopefully empathy, and the capacity to interpret ambiguous information in light of their own individual understandings of humanitarian obligations.
AI processes that same chaos as streams of probabilities. Every sensor reading, target profile, and movement pattern is reduced to statistical likelihoods: how probable it is based on the training data that this object is hostile, how urgent its engagement appears, how likely a given action is to produce the “correct” result as defined in training. In its logic, the most probable option is the correct one. Under extreme operational pressure, the AI focuses on the statistically most plausible, while rare possibilities drop toward statistical zero, far less likely to be considered than they would by a human.
This difference in reasoning is why training environments must be built to include not just the probable, but the improbable: those outlandish, once-in-a-century battlefield events that stretch judgment to its limits. For AI, these scenarios must be constructed, repeated, and reinforced until they occupy a permanent place in the machine’s operational vocabulary.
A credible arms control position would be to prohibit or pause the development of certain autonomous capabilities. Nevertheless, this article proceeds conditionally because much of the stack is already fielded (AI-enabled intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance triage, targeting support, and navigation), and because dual-use diffusion (commercial drones, perception models, planning tools) makes a clean prohibition hard to sustain. If states continue down this path with minimal international instruments the question becomes how to embed legal restraint so that rare, high-stakes judgments are not optimized away. What follows sets minimum safeguards if development and deployment proceed.
How AI Learns
If AI’s logic is built on statistical reasoning, the way it acquires those statistics determines the boundaries of its thinking. This is true for AI in general, whether in a medical diagnostic tool, a financial trading algorithm, or a targeting system on a battlefield. The patterns an AI recognizes, the probabilities it assigns, and the priorities it sets are all downstream from its training.
In the military domain, an AI’s training determines how it operates in relation to the law of armed conflict and the unit’s rules of engagement: what it accepts as positive identification (distinction), how it trades anticipated military advantage against collateral damage estimation (proportionality), when feasible precautions require warning, delay, or abort, and when uncertainty triggers a mandatory hand-off to a human. The two dominant machine learning paradigms, imitation learning and reinforcement learning, can both produce highly capable systems. Yet without deliberate safeguards, neither inherently preserves the kind of rare, high-stakes judgments that human decision-makers sometimes make under the fog of war, moments when they choose to forego an operational advantage to prevent civilian harm. Statistically, those moments are anomalies.
Imitation Learning: The Apprentice Approach
Imitation learning (IL) is essentially training by demonstration. The AI is shown large datasets of human decision-making, each paired with the information available at the time. In a military targeting context, this might include annotated sensor feeds, mission logs, and after-action reports: strike approved, strike aborted, target reclassified, mission postponed.
The model’s task is to learn the mapping between conditions and human actions. If most commanders in the dataset abort strikes when civilian vehicles enter the target zone, and there are enough entries of this behavior in the dataset to show that, the model will learn to mirror that restraint.
IL captures the statistical distribution of decisions in the training data. Rare but important choices, such as holding fire in a high-pressure engagement to comply with proportionality, will be underrepresented unless deliberately oversampled. Left uncorrected, the AI may treat those lawful restraint decisions as statistical noise, unlikely to be repeated in practice. Additionally, because much of the data on which machine learning models reflects past military experience, many AI models will echo the implicit bias shown in the past human decisions on which they train.
Reinforcement Learning: The Trial-and-Error Arena
Reinforcement learning (RL) works differently. Instead of copying human decisions, the AI is placed in a simulated environment where it can take actions, receive rewards for desirable outcomes, and penalties for undesirable ones. Over thousands or millions of iterations, the AI learns policies, decision rules that maximize its cumulative reward. At scale, this training is highly compute– and energy-intensive. That matters because it concentrates capability in a few well-resourced programs, slows iteration and red teaming, and creates pressure to trim the very rare event scenarios that protect civilians and support compliance, while adding a nontrivial environmental footprint. Programs should, therefore, set minimum scenario coverage and doubt-protocol testing requirements that are not waivable for budgetary reasons.
In a military context, this means an RL agent might repeatedly play through simulated scenarios: neutralizing threats, protecting friendly forces, and avoiding civilian harm. The way those objectives are weighted in the reward function is decisive. If mission success is rewarded heavily and civilian harm only lightly penalized, the AI will statistically favor the course of action that maximizes mission success, even if that means accepting higher risks to civilians.
RL’s strength is adaptability. Its weakness is that low-probability events, rare civilian patterns, and unusual threat behaviors will remain statistically insignificant unless the simulation environment repeatedly forces the AI to confront them.
IL can pass down the shape of human judgment; RL can provide flexibility in novel situations. But each carries a statistical bias against rare, high-impact decisions, exactly the kinds of decisions that can determine the legality and morality of military action. Only by deliberately elevating those rare cases in training, through curated datasets and stress-test simulations, can either method hope to produce systems that behave lawfully and predictably under the fog of war. On the evidence of deployments to date, achieving this level of end-to-end compliance remains out of reach.
The Simulation Imperative
Actual combat records, produced by soldiers in logs, after-action reports, or targeting databases, are skewed toward the typical patterns of engagement that happen often enough to warrant recording after the fact. Unprecedented and chaotic situations will strain both the law and the system’s decision-making, yet they appear so rarely in historical data that, in statistical terms, they are almost invisible. An AI, left to its statistical logic, will not prepare for what it has seldom seen.
This is why simulation is the decisive safeguard1. In imitation learning, rare but critical decisions must be deliberately overrepresented in the dataset, so they carry enough statistical weight to influence the model’s behavior. In reinforcement learning, the simulated environment must be constructed so that “once-in-a-century” scenarios occur often, sometimes in clusters, forcing the system to learn how to navigate them. A humanitarian convoy crossing paths with an enemy armored column, loss of communications during a time-sensitive strike, sensor spoofing that turns friend into apparent foe, these cannot be treated as peripheral edge cases. They must be made routine in training.
The more frequently the AI encounters these manufactured crises in simulation, the more space they occupy in its decision-making horizon. If and when similar scenarios arise in operations, the system’s response should not be improvised.
This imperative has repeatedly been encoded under International Humanitarian Law. In the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions2, the obligation to take “all feasible precautions” and to cancel or suspend an attack if it becomes apparent that it would cause excessive civilian harm relative to the anticipated military advantage operationalizes the humane minimum in treaty law. Critically, however, many key decision-making states have not ratified all the precepts articulated in the Additional Protocols. Customary IHL Rule 15 similarly requires constant care to spare civilians and civilian objects, and Rule 19 codifies the requirement to cancel or suspend attacks when doubt or changing circumstances create excessive risk.
Faced with ambiguous intelligence or conflicting imperatives, human commanders can recall a doctrinal anchor and choose that privileges restraint over risk. Even when they err, that error is shaped by a human blend of caution and interpretation of context.
For AI, the same scenario unfolds differently. Without explicit design, there is no natural “humane fallback” in its logic. In the face of uncertainty, an unmodified reinforcement learning policy will still pursue the statistically most rewarding action, and an imitation learning model will default to the most common decision in its dataset.
This is where simulation and legal doctrine intersect. Embedding the humane minimum into AI means that in every training run, whether through curated historical cases or artificially generated edge scenarios, the option that aligns with humane treatment under uncertainty must be given decisive weight. In imitation learning, that means oversampling “hold fire” or “switch to non-lethal” decisions until they are no longer statistical outliers. In reinforcement learning, it means structuring the reward function so that restraint in doubtful cases earns more cumulative value than aggression, even if aggression sometimes yields short-term operational gains. The aim is not to teach machines to imitate human morality, but to hard-code a structural preference for restraint even and especially when the law is unclear.
Risks of Omission
Systematic vulnerabilities in decision-making compound in coalition or joint operations. Different states may train their AI systems with different datasets, simulation designs (if any), and legal interpretations. When such systems operate together, the seams between them can become legal blind spots. A particular AI system might abort an engagement that another proceeds with, creating conflicting operational tempos and complicating attribution if civilian harm occurs.
The danger is not limited to catastrophic, one-off mistakes. Over time, small, repeated deviations from IHL in marginal cases, where human commanders might have exercised restraint, can erode the protective function of the law. The result is a slow normalization of riskier behavior, driven not by political decision or doctrinal change, but by the statistical inertia of machine learning models. This is the core paradox: without safeguards, AI systems can become more predictable in some ways, yet less reliable in the moments when unpredictability, when acting against the statistical grain, is essential for lawful conduct.
Finally, military AI does not fail or succeed in complying with IHL by accident. Its behavior is the predictable result of how it is trained, the data it is given, the scenarios it is exposed to, and the rules embedded in its decision logic. How AI functions and the choices it takes is downstream from decisions made by humans in developing, training, and fielding it.
Governance, Audit, and Human Control
Bridging the gap from promising lab results to lawful behavior in the field requires more than good training runs. It needs an end-to-end governance spine that links data, models, code, test harnesses, deployment configurations, operators, and independent oversight into a single chain of accountability. That spine assigns clear decision rights, specifies the artifacts required at each stage, and shows how evidence of compliance is produced and preserved. It starts with curated, documented datasets and explicit problem statements; runs through model specifications, reward functions, and constraint schemas; includes scenario-coverage plans, legal reviews, and red-team evaluations; and culminates in authorization-to-operate, humane control interfaces, and post-incident audits. Every hand-off, data steward to model owner, model owner to system integrator, integrator to unit commander, should be traceable, signed, and reversible. In effect, the system deploys with its own accountability case: a living dossier that ties design choices to legal obligations and links runtime behavior to reviewable logs. Without that spine, even a technically impressive model becomes an orphan in the field, fast, capable, and difficult to supervise precisely when the fog thickens. The pathway from design to deployment rests on a few non-negotiables.
Data governance as policy, not plumbing. If models think with the statistics we give them, then data curation is a legal act as much as a technical one. Training corpora should be versioned and signed; every inclusion and exclusion choice documented; every oversampling decision for restraint labeled with a rationale. That record is what allows commanders, investigators, or courts to see how humane fallbacks were embedded by design rather than inferred after the fact.
Test what you train, and then test against what you didn’t. A system that performs well on its own distribution can still fail in the wild. Beyond standard validation, mandate distribution shift drills: deliberately swap sensor suites, degrade GPS, introduce spoofed friend/foe signals, and remix civilian movement patterns. In each drill, the system should either preserve lawful restraint or trigger a doubt protocol that defers to a human. Where it does neither, the failure should feed back into simulation design and reward shaping.
Non-overridable guardrails in code and command. Constraint layers (identification gates, collateral damage thresholds, no-strike lists) must be technically non-overridable by the model and procedurally difficult to override by humans. If escalation is necessary, require dual-key authorization with automatic logging. The goal is not to box out judgment but to ensure extraordinary actions leave extraordinary traces.
Responsibility matrices are embedded in the system. Every deployed AI component – classifier, tracker, recommender, fire-control interface – should write structured, time-synchronized logs that include model version, data slice identifiers, intermediate confidence values, triggered constraints, and who approved or halted an action. Think of this as a living annex to rules of engagement: not just “what the machine did,” but why it “thought” that was permissible, and who remained on the loop.
Human-on-the-loop that actually has leverage. Meaningful human control is not a checkbox; it is the ability to intervene in time with understanding. Interfaces must surface uncertainty (not just a single confidence score), show near-miss counterfactuals (“if civilians are within X meters, the system will abort”), and offer safe, low-latency actions (pause, shadow/track, switch to non-lethal). If the only human interaction available is “approve” under time pressure, control is nominal, not meaningful.
Coalition interoperability without legal dilution. Joint operations will mix systems trained on different data and doctrines. Interoperability standards should cover not only communications and formats but also minimum legal behaviors: shared constraint schemas, common doubt thresholds, and audit fields. The safest path is least-common-denominator legality: when systems disagree under uncertainty, the coalition default is restraint.
Pre-deployment red teaming and post-incident review. Before fielding, require adversarial evaluations by teams empowered to break things, reward hacking hunts, “blinking target” scenarios, and deception trials. After any incident with potential civilian harm, pull the synchronized logs, reconstruct the model’s decision path, and replay counterfactuals to see whether humane fallbacks would have triggered with slightly different inputs. Treat these reviews like flight-safety boards: technical, blameless, relentlessly corrective.
Make restraint measurable. What we measure, we secure. Track deferred engagements under uncertainty, rate of doubt-protocol activations, guardrail trip frequency, and time-to-human-intervention. Trend them over time and across theaters. If these metrics decay as models “improve,” it’s a warning that optimization is outpacing law.
In combination, these measures transfer human judgment (IL), secure robustness under uncertainty (RL and simulation), and institutionalize restraint via governance, constraint architectures, and independent audit, so that compliance is an engineered property rather than an assumption. The result is a verifiable accountability chain, datasets that show why restraint was learned, reward functions that make it valuable, guardrails that make it non-optional, and logs that make it reviewable. And because what we measure we secure, the system ships with metrics for doubt-protocol activations, deferred engagements, and guardrail trips, so commanders can see whether lawful caution is holding under stress. Only then does lawful behavior become the default under pressure, an engineered property of the system, rather than a hope we place in the gaps between probabilities and intent.
Growing a Governance Spine
Military AI will not “grow into” compliance with the law of armed conflict. It will do what it is trained, rewarded, permitted, and audited to do. In the fog of war, humans and machines both falter, but in different ways. Human commanders can depart from statistical expectations to privilege restraint; unmodified systems, bound to their learned probabilities, will not. That is why the humane minimum cannot sit at the margins of development. It has to be engineered into the center of learning, testing, and command.
Imitation learning can transmit judgment; reinforcement learning can build adaptability; simulation can force the improbable to be routine. Around that technical core, a governance spine, constraints that do not yield under pressure, doubt protocols that default to caution, signed datasets and reward functions, synchronized logs and metrics, turns legal aspiration into operational behavior. In coalitions, common constraint schemas and reviewable audit trails keep interoperability from becoming a legal blind spot.
At this point, two mistakes will sink this project: treating compliance as a software patch added after performance, or assuming that speed and scale will eventually smooth away edge cases. They will not. The edge cases are where the law does its most important work.
Compliance with the law of armed conflict must be an engineered property of the system: competence built through training, judgment transferred via imitation learning, robustness under uncertainty secured by simulation, and a non-derogable humane floor enforced by constraints and audit. What ultimately matters is evidence, datasets, reward functions, constraint triggers, and synchronized logs, showing that restraint prevailed when uncertainty was greatest. Only on that basis can militaries credibly claim that lawful conduct remains the default under operational pressure.
Davit Khachatryan is an international lawyer and lecturer focusing on the intersection of armed conflict, emerging technologies, and international law.
1Where states choose to pursue development and fielding, simulation is the decisive safeguard. A different policy path is to forgo development or to prohibit particular applications outright.
Peter J. Quaranto is a visiting professor of the practice and global policy fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, and served previously in senior roles at the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Ms. Chandrima Das is a Nonresident Fellow in the Protection of Civilians and Human Security Program at the Stimson Center, and served previously as director of multilateral affairs at the National Security Council.
President Trump has declared himself “the President of PEACE” and claims credit for de-escalating at least seven conflicts. His personal involvement has helped cement some important – if fragile – ceasefires. Yet with the deadly wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine raging on and escalations in the Caribbean, the broader outlook is bleak. The Peace Research Institute Oslo recently tallied 61 active conflicts across 36 countries – the highest number since 1946.
If leaders truly want to rein in global violence and lay the groundwork for peace, they must go beyond firefighting individual crises and confront the structural conditions fueling costlier, deadlier, and increasingly internationalized wars. What the world lacks are updated norms, stronger multilateral tools, and sharper incentives that can reinforce peace, anticipate and manage conflicts, limit human carnage, and raise the cost of belligerence.
Next week, when world leaders gather in New York for the UN Global Assembly, Trump will capture the spotlight on the global stage. Most will expect him to boast about his perceived achievements or defend his most controversial choices. What if, in addition, he used that platform to propose bold new initiatives that could spark international cooperation against the scourge of war? Here are five surprising moves Trump could announce that would advance the cause of future peace.
1) We will end the menace of nuclear weapons this century.
Few future scenarios are more frightening than wars involving nuclear weapons. And yet most experts agree: the risk is growing. In just five months, the U.S.-Russia New START agreement limiting strategic nuclear weapons production will expire. Several countries are moving to increase their stockpiles. This includes China, which is projected to reach over 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030. Trump has been vocal about his concerns with nuclear war and expressed openness on arms control talks with Russia and China. Bold leadership is needed now to launch those talks and secure a new global framework to safeguard, limit, and ultimately reduce nuclear arsenals.
2) We will fund and help build the best peacekeeping forces ever.
Peacekeeping is on the decline. Compared to a decade ago, the number of peacekeepers deployed worldwide is down over 20% and the UN budget for such has dropped by half. Yet, arguably, the world needs effective peacekeeping more than ever. Two decades of research demonstrates that multilateral peacekeeping – when structured properly and with accountability – can successfully save lives and help secure ceasefires. If Trump and other leaders achieve their stated goals of brokering agreements to end costly wars, peacekeeping missions can make those agreements last. Peacekeeping is also cost-effective: studies have shown UN peacekeeping can be up to eight times cheaper than deploying U.S. troops to a conflict zone. And there are promising ongoing initiatives that reimagine more effective future peacekeeping missions.
3) We will stop more wars before they begin.
Copious research has reinforced the value of investing more in prevention. Early warning and quick action to de-escalate tensions before wars start and become entrenched can save billions of dollars over the long run. This is an area where the UN system can add substantially more value to its core mission of maintaining peace and security. And yet, the international community has not moved from admiring the need for prevention to operationalizing it. With more political and financial support, the UN could enhance its systems for identifying potential and emergent conflicts and strengthen its mechanisms for preventative diplomacy and mediation, including through the UN’s Mediation Unit.
4) We will rally the world to ban killer robots.
The use of lethal unmanned aerial vehicles is making wars deadlier and more difficult to stop. Data shows widening use of these drones by both state and non-state actors. Some 91 non-state actors reportedly launched drone strikes in 2023, a 1400 percent increase from five years before. Imagine these drones operating with less and less human control. And drones are likely a harbinger of more autonomous technologies that will become part of future wars. The “Stop Killer Robots” Campaign highlights the risks of weapon technologies that are able to operate without human control. The future of world peace depends on setting limits on how these new technologies are used, controlled, and transferred. It is a fallacy for global powers to just think they can manage these risks by seeking competitive advantages.
5) We will fix the broken UN Security Council.
The Security Council’s inability to marshal collective action toward the crises in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine has exposed its fundamental brokenness as an institution. At last year’s Summit of the Future, world leaders pledged to reform the Council. Past U.S. Administrations have expressed support for expanding the Council’s membership, including to add permanent seats for African and small island developing states. However, needed reform goes beyond the Council’s membership to addressing how the Council operates. While formal amendments to the UN Charter are likely too difficult to contemplate, experts have identified creative “non-amendment reforms” that could make a difference. Some of these ideas build upon the model of the Uniting Peace Resolution of 1950, applied during the Council’s inaction amid emerging Cold War rivalry and during Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.
We would be as surprised as you if these announcements were made next week. Unfortunately, so far, the Trump administration seems more intent on limiting the UN than using it as a platform. Trump has called for the UN to go back to its core mission of maintaining international peace and security, but undermines the UN’s ability to respond to related ongoing crises. The recent rescissions package cut more than $1 billion across UN agencies and essentially zeroed out U.S. contributions to UN peacekeeping. With the U.S. stepping back, other countries – especially China – are now gaining more influence over the UN’s workings.
Eighty years ago, in the wake of the last world war, U.S. leaders led the charge in sparking global cooperation to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The need for that cooperation is even greater today. In a future marked by more nuclear proliferation, killer robots, a changing planet, and regular shocks, our collective fates as humanity are intertwined. The sooner our leaders acknowledge that and get to work on building the future of peace, the better for all of us.
Davit Khachatryan is an international lawyer and lecturer focusing on the intersection of armed conflict, emerging technologies, and international law.
Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to code-stained labs or military contractors’ slideshows: it has become a regular presence on modern battlefields. In 2024, as Israeli analysts relied on tools like Gospel and Lavender to generate targeting lists, the Pentagon set out to deploy swarms of autonomous drones through its Replicator Initiative. Targeting algorithms (AI systems analyzing data to identify and prioritize military targets) now compress the decision cycle from days to minutes, sometimes seconds, fundamentally challenging the way law, ethics, and accountability operate in armed conflict. It was in response to these realities that, on December 24, 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 79/239, affirming that international humanitarian law (IHL) applies “throughout all stages of the life-cycle of artificial intelligence in the military domain” and calling for appropriate safeguards to keep human judgment and control at the heart of military decision-making.
But resolutions and declarations, while necessary, do not themselves restrain machines. The responsibility for lawful conduct must remain anchored in human actors: commanders, engineers, and political authorities. Algorithms, after all, have no legal personality; they cannot form intent, stand before a court, or bear the weight of tragedy or blame. This is why the real task for military commanders, policymakers, and legal advisers is about translating the timeless obligations of the laws of war into practices and workflows that keep the chain of accountability intact, even as machines accelerate the tempo of armed conflict beyond anything imagined by those who first wrote those rules.
The question, then, is whether states are willing and able to build safeguards so that, even as decisions speed up and control becomes diffuse, a human being remains at the end of every algorithmic chain of action.
What is a Military AI?
Ask three officers to describe what counts as AI in uniform, and you will likely hear three different answers. One will mention software that sorts satellite imagery, another will point to a drone that selects its flight path, and a third may describe a logistics program that determines which convoy moves first. All of them are correct because military AI is a broad spectrum of software-enabled capabilities that touch nearly every corner of modern operations.
At one end of this spectrum are decision-support algorithms. These tools sift through immense volumes of data and present patterns or anomalies for a human to review. They normally remain firmly subordinate to human choice; nothing happens until a commander or operator approves the recommendation. Further along are autonomous platforms that can steer themselves, prioritize targets, and in some cases, use weapons or make lethal decisions without direct oversight. Both adapt and learn from experience.
This capacity for continual learning is why military leaders are drawn to AI and also why lawyers are cautious. As these systems become more complex and more adaptive, it becomes significantly harder to demonstrate that every use of force still complies with IHL. The capacity to process information at machine speed promises new efficiencies and tactical advantages. It also threatens to outpace the ability of humans to scrutinize and override what the machine proposes. The more sophisticated the system, the greater the challenge of ensuring that its operation does not slip beyond the reach of law or human conscience.
Distinction, Proportionality, Precaution, and Indiscriminate Attack
At the heart of International Humanitarian Law are a handful of principles that every commander must observe in the conduct of hostilities, regardless of the technology at their disposal. The rule of distinction requires that attacks be directed at combatants and military objectives. This obligation reaches back to the design and validation of algorithms. If the data used to train a targeting model is biased, incomplete, or outdated, there is a real risk that the system will misclassify a school as an ammunition depot or mistake a civilian vehicle for a military convoy. Effective distinction, then, depends not only on rigorous data hygiene, continual red-team testing, and the capacity for the system to express its confidence in a way that human commanders can understand and question. When an algorithm cannot explain its reasoning, or when its output cannot be interrogated by a human, the legal requirement of distinction is at risk.
Proportionality is the next pillar. Even when a target is lawful, an attack is forbidden if the expected harm to civilians would be excessive compared to the anticipated military advantage. AI magnifies the challenge: it can process immense quantities of data and recommend actions at speeds that compress human decision-making to mere seconds. The speed can encourage a dangerous automation bias, where commanders are inclined to trust the machine’s judgment without fully weighing the consequences. To meet the proportionality requirement, there must be a clear, understandable record of what information the system used, what options were considered or rejected, and how the balance was struck between expected military advantage and potential civilian harm.
Precaution demands that every feasible step be taken to spare civilians and civilian objects before, during, and after an attack. In the context of AI, this means not only reviewing weapons before their use, but also conducting continual reassessment as software evolves or as new data and sensors are incorporated. This kind of legal review is often called an “Article 36 review,” referring to the provision of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. That article requires states to determine whether any new weapon, means, or method of warfare they develop can be used consistently with international law. Even countries that are not parties to Additional Protocol I often conduct similar reviews. Effective precautions also require tamper-resistant records of every input and decision, so that when failures occur, they can be reconstructed and learned from. In uncertain conditions, systems must default to conservative modes, such as surveillance only, rather than risk unintended harm through automated action based on outdated or corrupted data.
Finally, IHL prohibits indiscriminate attacks. Any use of force that cannot be reliably confined to military objectives or that is likely to strike civilians and civilian objects without distinction is forbidden. AI promises new levels of precision, but it also presents new risks if boundaries are not clearly defined and tested. The only way to prevent this is through hard-wired limits on where and when systems may operate, relentless stress-testing under a wide variety of conditions, and the retention of a genuine human veto at every stage.
In sum, IHL principles remain in force, but their practical application now depends on embedding those rules into the very architecture and operation of AI.
Speed, Opacity, and Proliferation
AI exposes points of friction that IHL rules were never designed to anticipate. When AI is integrated into the targeting cycle or command and control networks, it can compress the decision-making process from hours to seconds. Early warning systems may communicate directly with automated defenses, and predictive algorithms can recommend preemptive action before any human has fully grasped the situation. The space for reflection, deliberation, and legal review narrows dramatically, and the traditional safeguards built around time for human intervention may vanish.
Opacity presents an equally serious challenge. Unlike conventional weapons or even most traditional software, AI often operates as a black box, producing outputs that even its creators cannot fully explain. When models are trained on synthetic or computer-generated data, or proprietary protections prevent independent scrutiny, the ability of lawyers and commanders to review, test, or question the system is severely limited. Under such conditions, the concept of a one-time weapons review loses much of its meaning, and the burden shifts to continuous, in-depth monitoring and oversight, tasks that are often difficult to sustain.
Proliferation is the third critical fault line. The trained neural weights, code, and the operating concepts of many military AI systems can be transmitted anywhere in the world in seconds. A commercial drone can be upgraded into a strike or reconnaissance platform with a software patch delivered by email, by repurposing its mission, or, if heavy enough, by using it as a primitive weapon, such as crashing it into a target. Thinking more creatively, these drones can be launched in coordinated swarms to overwhelm air defenses. As these technologies spread, and as militaries operate alongside coalition partners using different systems trained on different data and following different logic, the risk grows that the seams between systems will become legal blind spots.
Keeping Humans in Command
The purpose of IHL is to protect people and limit suffering during armed conflict. To achieve this, the law is written to make sure that responsibility for the use of force rests with human beings, not with machines. This cannot be maintained with the promise of meaningful human control as an abstract principle.
First, every new AI system deployed for military purposes must be subject to a recurring legal review. A record of these reviews, maintained transparently and with clear signatures from legal, technical, and operational authorities, would ensure that no system enters the field without documented human oversight and an unbroken chain of responsibility.
Second, the architecture of responsibility must run through the entire life cycle of each system. From the earliest stage of data collection and model training, through to deployment, field use, and after-action review, every layer should be linked to identifiable individuals or teams who are empowered to act and accountable for their choices. Embedding this kind of responsibility matrix within the metadata and operational logs of each system makes it possible to trace every decision and intervention back to its source, even years later, if a failure must be investigated.
Third, no AI tool should be fielded until it has been subjected to rigorous adversarial testing. Red-team exercises, designed to probe for bias, vulnerabilities, and failure modes, must become a routine part of military procurement and certification. Where deficiencies are found, the system should be withheld from deployment until those risks are resolved. This process must be a core responsibility of states and their armed forces.
Finally, safeguards must be built not only into the technology but into the very doctrine and organizational culture that guide its use. Preauthorized defensive systems can be kept within tightly defined geographic and temporal boundaries, while time-critical operations should still require streamlined but explicit human approval. Strategic or high-consequence strikes must always retain full deliberative review. Coalition operations and multinational partnerships need common standards and protocols so that interoperability does not become a backdoor for legal evasion. These measures are the living expression of the law’s demand that there is always a human face and a human name at the end of the chain of action.
Governing machines
AI is already changing the face of war. Its speed, scale, and adaptability have the potential to transform the conduct and the ethics of armed conflict, presenting risks as profound as its promised advantages. Yet, it is people, political leaders, military personnel, engineers, and lawyers who remain responsible for the choices that machines enable.
Resolution 79/239 is a clear assertion that IHL foundations must not be surrendered to the logic of the algorithm. The task ahead is not to demonize artificial intelligence, nor to place our hopes in technical fixes alone, but to ensure that the rules of war are translated into new domains and that the structures of oversight are robust enough to keep responsibility where it belongs.
If we succeed, AI may yet deliver on its promise of greater precision and restraint. If we fail, we risk allowing the tempo of technology to outrun the reach of law. In the end, the most important question is not what our machines can do, but whether we have the resolve and imagination to govern them, so that, even as the future unfolds at the speed of code, the chain of accountability remains unbroken.
Kelsey Coolidge (she/her) is the Director of the War Prevention Initiative of the Jubitz Family Foundation. Her work focuses on the intersection of peace and security, climate change, and the environment.
Mass deportations, the terrorizing of immigrant communities, and the illegal detention of immigrants—whether documented or not—are a defining feature of the second Trump Administration. It was a campaign promise delivered at stunning (and illegal) speed, and one now set to be bolstered by $170 billion in the “Big, Beautiful Bill”. These deportations are underpinned by erroneous claims of disproportionate migrant crime rates1, white supremacist and nationalist narratives, and the scapegoating immigrants as the driver of social ills.
The national security infrastructure in the U.S. appears uncomfortably primed to engage in mass violence against civilians on its own soil (putting aside, for this paper, the gross violations of civilian rights as part of military operations beyond our borders). Astronomical sums of money are proposed to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to thoroughly militarize U.S. immigration policy, while humanitarian and aid programs are totally gutted. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” is ugly for immigrants—Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) is now the largest federal law enforcement agency (with a budget larger than most of the world’s militaries2) with $45 billion for new “detention centers” to “double immigrant detention capacity” with extremely limited Congressional oversight, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.3 How has the country of “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” come to embrace such an anti-immigrant stance?
There is an unexplored driver of a militarized approach to immigration. Mass deportations and border militarization is a national security priority not only because of President Trump’s racist claims—but also because our country’s national security leaders have deemed it a consequence of a warming world. Climate change, and specifically the Pentagon’s strategic planning for climate change, has justified mass deportations as a national security issue. By securitizing climate change, we have (perhaps unintentionally) securitized migrants, naming people as a security threat of climate change, and thereby undermining their human rights and dignity.
Academics write about securitization theory as a framework to explain how policy issues become urgent, necessitating extraordinary action beyond what is considered normal.4 A policy becomes securitized in part by how political elites frame and understand the issue. Immigration has been securitized by military and political elites’ narrative framing of mass immigration as key national security threat of climate change. Rather than pursue strategies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions or increasing collaboration among regional partners, the U.S. has set itself on a crash course of violent, costly, and inefficient responses to both immigration and climate change. An alternative approach is available, grounded in our common humanity with immigrants and a belief that global warming can proactively address through meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
SECURITIZING CLIMATE CHANGE
Climate change has been effectively framed as a security threat by epistemic and national security communities. There were good intentions behind this effort—elevating the risks of climate change as “hard” security was thought to facilitate more urgent action. However, this approach fails to account for the role of militarism in U.S. national security and foreign policy, and the massive environmental toll of military operations. Militarism elevates military solutions as the means to attain safety and security; and with it, an adherence to the use of force, domination, and lethal violence. Climate change cannot be bombed away.
The very system that produces bombs, ships them, and drops them around the globe is wildly exacerbating the climate crisis through its massive consumption of fossil fuels and GHG emissions. According to the Conflict and Environment Observatory, military GHG emissions are estimated to be around 5.5% of the world’s total emissions making it the fourth largest “country” in terms of total carbon emissions.5 As the largest military spender in the world, the U.S. military emits an extraordinary amount of GHG. According to new estimates by Neta Crawford, “from 1979 to 2023, the Pentagon generated almost 4,000 [metric tons of] CO2e – about the same as the entire 2023 emissions reported by India, a country of 1.4 billion people.”6 The U.S. military is also reported as the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil (and correspondingly the highest institutional emitter of GHG).7
The unintended consequence of this security framing has diverted away from actions that meaningfully mitigate GHG emissions, increase resilience against climate-related natural disasters, or invest in the necessary green economic transition. Ironically, a security framing of climate change has reaffirmed the centrality of fossil fuels to our national security policy by situating the military as an actor to protect the country against the effects of climate change instead of addressing how military activities themselves contribute to the crisis.
THE PENTAGON’S APPROACH TO CLIMATE CHANGE AND MIGRATION
For decades, the Pentagon has advanced the idea of climate change as a national security threat and detailed plans for an anticipated military response. Corey Payne and Ori Swed conducted a review of Pentagon strategy documents finding that overall, “the military does not see saving the planet from a climate catastrophe as a goal that falls within its mandate,”8 and, “views its job [as] to ensure that the United States will be among the “winners” of the unfolding climate catastrophe.”9 While the majority of these strategy documents detail the ways in which the effects of climate change effect operational readiness and scenario-planning, it is impossible to ignore the frequency of dehumanizing, anti-immigrant language that directly names migrants as a security threat.
Climate migrants are to be, “approached as a security issue and [met] with a militarized response.”10 In his book All Hell Breaking Loose, Michael T. Klare provides a deeply uncritical but comprehensive review of the Pentagon’s approach to climate change, detailing to extent to which migration has been named and blamed as the security threat stemming from climate change.11 It is almost comical how badly migrants are portrayed in this book, writing about the likelihood of, “massive waves of human migration and help spread infectious disease, producing disarray across the planet,”12 or how, “more privileged states [will be] besieged by waves of desperate “climate refugees.”13
Throughout the book, Klare references the security threat of migration as a persistent concern emanating from the Pentagon’s plan to address climate change. “Whenever U.S security analysts have considered the risks of climate change, a perpetual concern has been that extreme events and prolonged droughts could trigger a massive flight of desperate people seeking refuge in other locales, provoking chaos and hostility wherever they travel…and it has remained a major theme to the present day.”14 Some references include:
A 2007 CNA Corporation report warned that climate change, “can fuel migrations in less develop countries, and these migrations can lead to international political conflict.”15 Klare writes that the CNA report suggests “the primary security threats to the U.S. arise from the potential demand for humanitarian aid and a likely increase in immigration from neighbor states.”16
A 2015 National Security Implications of Climate-Related Risks and Changing Climate report17 which pulled insights from the military’s six geographic combatant commend centers (Northern, Southern, European, Africa, Central, and IndoPacific) and found “the threat of mass migrations arising from extreme drought, coastal flooding, food scarcity, and state collapse was a recurring theme in several of these reports.”18
In a 2014 report to the Senate Armed Services Committee, General John F. Kelly, “emphasized the importance of taking steps to prevent future climate refugees from entering the United States,” detailing how SouthCom’s exercises modeling the military’s response to a mass migration event used, “Guantanamo Bay to oversee a mock crisis-response mission.”19
The underlying logic of the Pentagon’s approach to climate change is based off an assumption that climate change will create clear and predictable “winners” and “losers” on a global scale.20 An early commissioned report from 2003 suggests that “the United State could likely survive shortened growing cycles and harsh weather conditions without catastrophic losses. Borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.”21 While it is not egregious to suggest that wealthier countries are best suited to withstand the shocks of climate change, it is also naïve to underplay the fundamental ways in which the U.S economy is reliant on imported food and migrant labor.22 Further, the defining feature of climate change is unpredictability. “Unchecked global climate change will disrupt a dynamic ecological equilibrium in ways that are difficult to predict. The new ecosystem is likely to be unstable and in continual flux for decades of longer. Today’s “winner” could be tomorrow’s big-time loser.”23 To create a response based on an assumed, predictable outcome on continued dominance is short-sighted, at best, and at worst wholly underestimates the possible severity of catastrophic outcomes.
POLICY PROPOSALS
We have, during the second Trump administration, watched Pentagon hypotheticals and training exercises move into actual practice. There was no guarantee that the Pentagon’s preparations for a “mass migration event”, meant enacting such a response at Guantanamo Bay, yet now the base is holding site for mass deportations.24 As the War on Terror transformed the imperial spoils from naval base to infamous extralegal prison, the militarized response to immigration is expanding it yet again into the front line of an undeclared war on refugees. Even if the military’s assistance in Trump’s mass deportation scheme is not directly linked to its views on climate change, it is certainly the vision of the future that the Pentagon is preparing for as climate change accelerates. If anything, the Pentagon is actively refining its approach in front of our eyes.
Personally, I cannot subscribe to that vision as the only path forward. Ever the optimist, I believe that we can still mitigate the effects of climate change, bring an end to the era of fossil fuels, and orient our national security, foreign, and immigration policies on shared values of human rights and dignity. A 2007 joint report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security summed on the national security implications of climate change summarized it nicely: “In order to emerge form a period of severe climate change as a civilization with hopes for a better future and with prospects for further human development, the very model of what constitutes happiness must change. Globalization will have to be redirected…This can occur either as the result of the collapse of the present system, or by its purposeful reconfiguration.”25
Let us detail what a “purposeful reconfiguration” may look like.
A 2021 White House report on climate migration offers a few useful starting points.26 It outlines a dual strategy of supporting the human security of migrants to the U.S. while supporting would-be migrants to “who desire to stay as long and safely as possible in their home areas” through investments in U.S. foreign assistance, humanitarian aid, and legal support services. It states, “the foreign assistance infrastructure brings together a powerful combination of tools [and] partnerships to address many elements of the complex issues of climate change and migration. However, current funding levels, structure, and coordination of U.S. foreign assistance is inadequate to meet the challenge…”27 It is safe to say that current funding levels in 2025 are even more inadequate to address the challenge of climate migrants. The hollowing out of USAID and the State Department is a heavy-handed gut-punch to the possibility of a more humane and dignified migration policy. An easy policy recommendation is to reinstate USAID and State funding at least to the previous level and absolutely oppose a reconciliation package that would revoke $8.3 billion in foreign aid from fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
That budget, likely inadequate, is several orders of magnitude smaller than the Pentagon’s outrageous budget of $1 trillion.28 When considering the climate impact of military emissions, we simply cannot expect to mitigate climate change while increasing the military’s budget. Instead of building up the war machine to fight people fleeing drought, starvation, and unlivable heat, the United States could scale down its military, in turn reducing production of greenhouse gases. There are available policy proposals that reduce Pentagon spending and lower the climate impact of the military, actually making the world a much safer place for people and the natural environment.
It is possible to create compassionate immigration policies29 paired with robust humanitarian and peacebuilding programs that aim to prevent the disasters that drive people to flee their homes in the first place. These kinds of proposals are inherently less climate-intensive and more dignified than a militarized response to immigration. A starting point is a complete abolition on dehumanizing language about migrants. They are not unwanted “hordes” spreading “disease” and “conflict” wherever they go—they are humans. Centering their humanity should compel us to consider our own complicity in exaggerating the climate crisis and funneling exorbitant amounts of money into a military industrial complex that harms people and the planet. There are a range of policy responses that limit the military’s GHG emissions and reduce harm, namely through military spending cuts and reducing the military’s global footprint. Closing unnecessary global military bases reduces the fossil fuels needed to support such infrastructure while offering the bonus of making it more difficult to carry-out clandestine, climate-intensive, and offensive military activities.30
We are not alone. All these efforts are amplified and improved through global cooperation and diplomacy, especially with neighboring states and international governance organizations. The investment in the military has eroded diplomatic channels that cultivated a peaceful world—we must claw back and reaffirm global relationships to see a sustainable, peaceful future.
End Notes
Brianna Seid, Rosemary Nidiry, and Ram Subramanian, “Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave,’” Brennan Center for Justice, September 26, 2024, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/debunking-myth-migrant-crime-wave.
“ICE Budget Now Bigger than Most of the World’s Militaries,” Newsweek, July 2, 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-ice-bill-trump-2093456.
Lauren-Brooke Eisen, “Budget Bill Massively Increases Funding for Immigration Detention,” Brennan Center for Justice, March 12, 2025, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/budget-bill-massively-increases-funding-immigration-detention.
“New Estimate: Global Military Is Responsible for More Emissions than Russia,” CEOBS (blog), November 10, 2022, https://ceobs.org/new-estimate-global-military-is-responsible-for-more-emissions-than-russia/.
Nina Lakhani, “How the US Became the Biggest Military Emitter and Stopped Everyone Finding Out,” The Guardian, May 30, 2025, sec. Environment, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/30/donald-trump-geopolitics-could-deepen-planetary-catastrophe-expert-warns.
Crawford, Neta C., “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War” (Costs of War, November 13, 2019), https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use%2C%20Climate%20Change%20and%20the%20Costs%20of%20War%20Revised%20November%202019%20Crawford.pdf.
Corey R. Payne and Ori Swed, “Disentangling the US Military’s Climate Change Paradox: An Institutional Approach,” Sociology Compass 18, no. 1 (2024): 3, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13127.
Payne and Swed, 7.
Paul J. Smith, “Climate Change, Mass Migration and the Military Response,” Orbis 51, no. 4 (January 1, 2007): 617–33, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2007.08.006.
Michael T. Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019).
Klare, 33. Emphasis added.
Klare, 34. Emphasis added.
Klare, 112. Emphasis added.
“National Security and the Threat of Climate Change” (CNA Corporation, 2007), 18, https://www.cna.org/archive/CNA_Files/pdf/national%20security%20and%20the%20threat%20of%20climate%20change.pdf.
Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose, 115.
“Findings from Select Federal Reports: The National Security Implications of a Changing Climate” (The White House, May 2015), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/National_Security_Implications_of_Changing_Climate_Final_051915.pdf.
Klare, All Hell Breaking Loose, 27.
Klare, 115–16. Emphasis added.
Payne and Swed, “Disentangling the US Military’s Climate Change Paradox.”
Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” n.d. Emphasis added.
“Mass Deportation,” American Immigration Council (blog), accessed June 24, 2025, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation/.
Kurt M Campbell et al., “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,” n.d., 8.
“Trump Preparing to Send Thousands of Immigrants Including Europeans to Guantanamo Military Prison: Reports | The Independent,” accessed June 26, 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-immigrants-guantanamo-bay-prison-b2767628.html.
Campbell et al., “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,” 78.
“Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration” (The White House, October 2021), https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Report-on-the-Impact-of-Climate-Change-on-Migration.pdf.
“Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration” (The White House, October 2021), https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Report-on-the-Impact-of-Climate-Change-on-Migration.pdf.
Valerie Insinna, “Trump Administration to Request $1T Defense Budget Using Reconciliation Funds,” Breaking Defense (blog), May 2, 2025, https://breakingdefense.com/2025/05/trump-administration-to-request-1t-defense-budget-using-reconciliation-funds/.
“Compassionate Migration Policies Are Also the Right Call Politically,” CIP (blog), April 12, 2022, https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/compassionate-migration-policies-are-also-the-right-call-politically/.
“Drawdown: Improving U.S. and Global Security Through Military Base Closures Abroad,” Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (blog), September 20, 2021, https://quincyinst.org/research/drawdown-improving-u-s-and-global-security-through-military-base-closures-abroad/.
Cole Donovan is an associate director at the Federation of American Scientists. He previously had international S&T roles in the Biden White House, State Department, and Office of Space Commerce.
On May 29, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a Congressional Notification to Congress outlining his proposed changes to the U.S. Department of State as part of President Trump’s chaotic redesign of the U.S. government. This planned reorganization of state alienates foreign diplomats, further undermines foreign assistance, and leaves the State less capable.
There are major issues with the Secretary’s proposal. To foreign partners, the redesign looks like a manifestation of the United States’ worst instincts, focused primarily on telling others how to run their countries while emphasizing our supreme military and economic power. Humanitarians are justifiably shocked at the wholesale demolition of foreign assistance mechanisms, whose remnants are being shifted to regional offices with neither the manpower nor contracting experience to responsibly manage those funds. Anyone familiar with the work necessary to effectively manage the myriad issues State has to tackle is likely to notice the demolition of coordinating mechanisms throughout the Department, which served bureau leadership by sorting through the multitude of disparate and disconnected issues that they might encounter in a single meeting with a foreign principal.
While many of these changes are set to diminish how State functions, there is positive potential in a reorganization designed with the long-term prospects of US diplomacy, rather than the short-term whims of an administration, in mind. The status quo, as well as the general operating model of the Department for the last several decades, is not ideal. The desire for improvement is such that some of Rubio’s changes may well be welcomed, including by officers serving in offices whose responsibilities are being merged or consolidated.
Over time, the Government has added numerous offices and functions to State with the intent to signal that specific issues are important to the sitting government. Consider State’s technical offices. In addition to an Office of Science and Technology Cooperation (which dates back to the Cold War), you also had an Office of the Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary of State (established in the early 2000s), a Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology, and a Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy (established under Secretary Blinken).
Which of these offices manages the International Science and Technology Center? That would be the Office of Cooperative Threat Reduction in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation (created in 2005 out of the merger of two other offices). If I were to ask a foreign service officer from one of those four organizations about the Center, I’d likely receive a blank stare (inevitably followed by a flurry of activity as that officer attempts to make sure they are as involved in the Center as they can possibly be). They wouldn’t need to worry for long, though. Soon that officer will rotate to their next assignment and the cycle can begin anew.
Retooling diplomacy for the long haul
That rotational churn creates other issues for American diplomacy. Foreign Service Officers rotate through two-year assignments, making frequent moves and retraining a constant part of their careers. A foreign service officer spends their first six months of a rotation learning how to do their new job and an additional four to five months trying to do the best job that they can. The next five are devoted to finding their next assignment, and the next few are spent trying to maximize their performance reviews before they begin preparations for their next job. One of my deputy directors on the EU desk once told me that he didn’t realize when he joined the government that he would spend the rest of his life searching for a job. This incentivizes managers to wait for foreign service rotations to avoid challenging performance management conversations, creating the risk that poor performers or toxic managers may be able to survive the next promotion cycle.
Increasing the assignment term to five years (so that American diplomats can demonstrate a similar level of competence in a particular job as their counterparts in other foreign ministries and focus on delivering longer-term results) would be a good place to start. This is particularly important for officers working on issues that have inherently long lead times, like managing U.S. interests related to the EU or China’s seven- and five-year legislative program cycles, respectively. At the very least, it would help the Department spend its language training and relocation dollars more effectively.
Politicizing the workforce, as this Administration is doing, through actions like Schedule Policy/Career and its free response questions as part of the hiring process, inherently cuts against this capability. If this administration fires its experienced workforce, particularly those performing newly-relocated statutory responsibilities, the Administration will deprive consolidated offices of the experience and expertise necessary to maximize their productivity. The real value lost through consolidating isn’t the name of the office, but pushing out the people who deeply understand the history, context, and nuance of diplomatic interactions. These are not skills that can be easily or responsibly replicated by AI tools. As interesting as a large language model might be, it is less likely to proactively identify key points that might be missing from a foreign partner’s remarks or isolate bloviating on behalf of one’s own government from that person’s in-private, in-person ability to get things done.
Long Timelines Versus Short Headlines
The biggest problem that any reorganization of State needs to address is the fundamental misalignment between what the Department is good at doing with the jobs that it is assigned by its political leadership. As the government’s foreign ministry, State works best when assisting other agencies in accomplishing their objectives overseas or advocating on behalf of U.S. interests in particular domains, like intellectual property or agricultural regulations. Some bureaucratic tension between offices with similar missions is even helpful, allowing the Department to predict tension between promoting and protecting American interests.
Not all offices are as successful, like the recently-formed Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology. The intent of this office was to address the increasing relevance of emerging technology issues in global competition. Among the many activities that the office proposed included the creation of an alliance of like-minded countries on quantum science and technology. There was just one problem: another office at the State Department already organized such a partnership with the White House National Quantum Coordination Office. That group held their first meeting almost a year before the Special Envoy had even been named, leading to an extended back and forth between the White House and competing offices at State on how to manage a new political demand signal that had just been answered
Such follies are a likely predictor of what will happen with Secretary Rubio’s new Bureau of Emerging Threats. It’s not clear exactly what value-add this bureau will provide the U.S. government, especially given the numerous offices throughout the government dealing with dangerous critical and emerging technologies, especially within the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community (let alone those that already exist within the Department). This can cause problems.
In 2011, Secretary Clinton created the Bureau of Energy and Natural Resources (ENR) given a broad recognition of energy policy’s relevance to international stability and achieving the United State’s broader international objectives. A 2016 OIG Inspection found that the Bureau had great relationships with the rest of the Government–just not the Department of Energy (DOE) with which it most needed to work. The OIG reported numerous problems in ENR reported by foreign service officers in Embassies as well as their DOE colleagues, including competing missions, inadequate communication and coordination, and difficulty promulgating a single U.S. energy message to foreign governments. Similar dynamics are captured in the 2015 documentary “The Diplomat”, which described the struggles between the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan with other parts of the U.S. government, each of which thought itself primarily responsible for Afghan and Pakistan Policy.
Invariably, if new offices struggle to identify opportunities in their defined mission space, they begin to move into areas long-occupied by others (or they discover that other offices have already been working in their assumed domains all along and may even have statutory responsibilities in that space), including in other government agencies. Knowing the lay of the land should be essential before starting any reorganization of State aimed at the long-term viability of the diplomatic apparatus of the United States.
Any future attempt to reorganize the Department should ask itself the following questions before creating any new body, including the appointment of a new special representative:
Does another government agency or office have the legislative mandate and capability to do this work?
Is this work distributed across many agencies who are in tension with one another, where the Department could negotiate a consolidated U.S. position on the subject (and perhaps in doing so help expedite the resolution of domestic policy disputes)?
Is it better if a foreign policy expert speaks to this subject, or should the face that the United States presents to the world be a recognized expert speaking from a position of authority elsewhere in the government? ie; should negotiations on nuclear enrichment be carried out primarily through State or the Department of Energy?
Is there another coordinating body on the subject in the U.S. government?
What are people in this bureau or office going to do when they show up on the job? Who are they likely to clash with?
Can this body follow through with any promises that it might make to foreign governments?
Are the people who State expects to share their resources willing to provide them to this new body, and for what purposes?
What will the organization’s primary leverage be in achieving whatever goals it sets out to accomplish on behalf of a given administration?
When a new body forms and doesn’t have a clear mission, the answer is usually to schedule as many meetings with foreign governments as possible and try to bend the arms of other government agencies to come forward with major commitments. It drains time and resources available to other government agencies, making it harder for them to accomplish their domestic missions. U.S. efforts are placed in stark relief against those of our allies and competitors, alike.
Well-resourced offices that create value, like PEPFAR, have clearly made substantial progress in their respective domains and moved the needle on important global issues. This makes the loss of bureaus like Education and Cultural Affairs, which ran the Fulbright program and numerous visitor programs that exposed foreign audiences to the best elements of America’s people and culture, all the more tragic. When a bureau lacks resources, it is often forced to try to trip up international competitors in order to accomplish a goal, or coax foreign partners to use resources that the U.S. government does not have. Such efforts are usually transparent to foreign partners, who do not always appreciate being caught between the United States and one of its many foreign policy objectives. They may question why the richest and most powerful country in the world isn’t willing to put its own resources behind the effort.
I cannot predict what the State Department will actually look like in 10 months given the current chaos, let alone at the end of this government’s term. Other government bodies–particularly the NSC and other White House Policy Councils–would also do well to embrace these recommendations. What I can say is that future governments will need to do a much better job aligning the resources of the Department with its ability to execute its lofty goals–all of which are critical for ensuring the future of American security.
At MSNBC, Chief Editor Kelsey D. Atherton walks through how Trump’s recent announcement of a “Golden Dome” missile defense system is an expensive investment in insecurity.
“If missile defense works as promised,” writes Atherton, “it creates an opportunity for the leadership of the protected country to launch nuclear strikes without fear of suffering nuclear retaliation in return. This is true even if missile defense does not actually work as a defense, because overcoming planned defenses means building a larger arsenal and possibly taking a gamble on launching a nuclear first strike, rather than forever losing that deterrent effect.”
