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.
