In The Remote Revolution, Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of international security—but not in ways one would expect.
Emerging technologies like drones are often believed to increase the likelihood of crises and war. By lowering the potential risks and human costs of military operations, they encourage decisionmakers to deploy military force. Yet as Lin-Greenberg contends, operations involving drones are in fact less likely to evolve into broader, more intense conflicts than similar operations involving traditionally crewed assets. Even as they increase the frequency of conflict, the decreased costs of drone operations also reduce the likelihood of conflict escalation.
Leveraging diverse evidence from original wargames, survey experiments, and cases of US and Israel drone operations, Lin-Greenberg explores how drone operations lower risks of escalation. First, drones enable states to gather more or better intelligence—intelligence that may avert or reduce the chances of high-stakes conflict. Drone attacks are also less likely to affront a target state's honor, and so less likely to provoke aggressive responses. Lastly, leaders are less likely to take escalatory actions when drones are attacked compared to incidents involving inhabited assets.
Lin-Greenberg's findings conclusively prove that drones are far less destabilizing than commonly argued. Drones add rungs to the proverbial "escalation ladder" and in doing so, have brought about a fundamental change—a revolution—to the character of statecraft. With the use of unmanned technologies only set to grow in coming times, The Remote Revolution is critical reading on its possibilities and politics.
