{"id":17852,"date":"2018-08-02T16:25:46","date_gmt":"2018-08-02T16:25:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/uncategorized\/2018\/08\/02\/oxford-report-warns-of-limitations-of-remote-warfare\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T18:02:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T18:02:11","slug":"oxford-report-warns-of-limitations-of-remote-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/unmanned\/2018\/08\/02\/oxford-report-warns-of-limitations-of-remote-warfare\/","title":{"rendered":"The 5 hard truths of drone warfare"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Drone war is a proximate war. In the way that Model-T stands in for the full scale industrialization and automation of the early 20th century, so to do the long, gray, winged matchstick-bodied uncrewed planes of the early 21st century serve as a placeholder for an entire style of warfare. These wars are waged by advanced industrial nations in places far from their borders, entailing a long chain of logistics and supply, all oriented towards securing an advantage in small-scale skirmishes and counter-insurgency fights waged in mountains and valleys abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the United States, we call it drone war, or maybe even light footprint operations, but in the United Kingdom they have a more precise catch-all: remote warfare. A report by the Oxford Research Group\u2019s Remote Warfare Programme, published in June 2018, details what lessons a country can possibly learn from fighting in this manner for the better part of two decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Study authors Emily Knowles, director of the remote warfare programme, and Abigail Watson, a research officer at the same, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk\/remote-warfare-lessons-learned-from-contemporary-theatres\">open the report<\/a> with the contradiction at the heart of the matter. While nation state building is an unlikely future mission for the armed forces of the United Kingdom, remote warfare against \u201cwill perhaps remain the \u201cmost likely\u201d form of British military engagement overseas for the foreseeable future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With that in mind, it\u2019s worth looking specifically at how the study authors frame technology in the context of remote warfare. From the report:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThe last point to emphasise is that remote warfare is not necessarily carried out via remote weapons systems. While drone strikes, air strikes, cyber attacks or autonomous weapons no doubt have the potential to increase the physical distance between operator and target, they can be used to support any sort of operation. In short, the \u2018remote\u2019 in \u2018remote warfare\u2019 speaks more to strategic than physical distance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This parallels the recent report from the Center For New American Security published in July 2018, about policymakers and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.c4isrnet.com\/unmanned\/2018\/07\/31\/what-can-the-white-house-learn-from-how-obama-managed-drones\/\">magical thinking<\/a> guiding their relationship to drones. That CNAS report used drones as a centerpiece but is explicitly written to be about light footprint warfare broadly, and the way in which a partial understanding of the technologies and risks involved in light footprint warfare allowed policy makers to take action and find uses for force that they would have have otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If remote warfare is to be the way of the future, what is to be learned from past mistakes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The authors offer five hard truths for policymakers: it is not possible to fight like this is secret, or cleanly, or cheaply, or with a military optimized for peer-to-peer conflict, and finally, it may not even be possible for remote warfare to achieve its objectives at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The report notes that fighting war by drone strike or special forces means even less transparency than traditional military options. That not only means less public oversight, it means less internal analysis about whether or not the missions themselves are effective at achieving their stated objectives. Having only the people with direct involvement in the operations report back on them to the people who asked that the operation be done can create feedback loop of uncritical praise of the missions, detached from criticism and reinforcing a belief that remote warfare is doing what it\u2019s supposed to. This, too, was a problem the Stimson Center found in its report on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.c4isrnet.com\/unmanned\/2018\/06\/07\/uncovering-the-new-administrations-drone-war-policy\/\">US drone war policy<\/a> in the Trump administration, as a lack of transparency makes independent verification of success of failure near-impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cAbove all, there is a need to see remote warfare as a limited tool for limited aims,\u201d the authors write. \u201cWithout a wider strategy for the security in the areas in which it is being employed, there is a risk that British and allied actions empower groups and hasten outcomes that are not in their long-term interests.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For observers in the United States and elsewhere, understanding the limitations of the strategies enabled by drones and remote warfare is at least as important as understanding the capabilities of those same tools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite the perceived low cost and ease of tools, remote warfare with special forces and remotely piloted vehicles is a much more limited tool for achieving military and political ends than policy makers assume.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":36056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":21,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[106,29,32,21,111],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3021],"class_list":["post-17852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-newsletters","category-unmanned","category-unmanned-systems"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"TDUBBLH5ZBGMBMKJVNPVJ34IRI","arc_canonical_url":"\/unmanned\/2018\/08\/02\/oxford-report-warns-of-limitations-of-remote-warfare\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.0 (Yoast SEO v28.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The 5 hard truths of drone warfare - C4ISRNet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Despite the perceived low cost and ease of tools, remote warfare with special forces and remotely piloted vehicles is a much more limited tool for achieving military and political ends than policy makers assume.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The 5 hard truths of drone warfare\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Despite the perceived low cost and ease of tools, remote warfare with special forces and remotely piloted vehicles is a much more limited tool for achieving military and political ends than policy makers assume.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/unmanned\/2018\/08\/02\/oxford-report-warns-of-limitations-of-remote-warfare\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"C4ISRNet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-08-02T16:25:46+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-08-08T18:02:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Kelsey D. 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