Remote warfare and the legitimacy of military capabilities

Jack McDonald

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Military power relies upon military capabilities, generated by organisations, infrastructure, and defence establishments. This paper highlights the importance of remote warfare to research on the transformation of military power in the contemporary world. It draws attention to the relationship between military capabilities that enable states to intervene in physically distant conflicts and their political legitimacy. It argues that remote warfare is best understood as a family resemblance of legitimacy problems associated with military capabilities, rather than a category of warfare, set of tactics, or strategy. It then identifies a framework for understanding the varied types of legitimacy problems associated with remote warfare: remote warfare consists of a set of problems that examine how military capabilities affect the ability of states to act without violating international norms, governments to act without violating domestic constraints, the ability of governments to control their exposure to interventions at distance, and their ability to avoid responsibility for the consequences. The importance of this approach is highlighted by the way that it helps to explain the importance of controversies over military infrastructure used to support interventions and therefore highlights the importance of work on remote warfare for the wider study of military transformation and military power.

Introduction

Remote warfare is a concept that scholars and analysts use to make sense of contemporary military power (Adelman and Kieran 2018) and the “new newness” of contemporary methods of military intervention (Demmers and Gould 2018, 365). Research on remote warfare offers a variety of critical engagements with the legitimacy of military power in the contemporary world. It seeks to explain both the novelty of, and perceived issues of legitimacy associated with, contemporary forms of military intervention. What types and methods of intervention count as legitimate is inherently flexible, since legitimacy is a socially ascribed quality, relating to either an “actor’s identity, interests, or practices, or to an institution’s norms, rules, and principles” (Reus-Smit 2007, 44). Remote warfare examines the way in which states and governments seek to define a range of means and types of military intervention as legitimate in both international and domestic politics. As Shane Mulligan notes, legitimacy plays a dual role in international relations: “it serves to solidify a notion of ‘right’ in international rule, while at the same time standing as the test in each particular case” (Mulligan 2006, 375). Since political actors seek legitimacy, they engage in practices of legitimation and “legitimation is a normative process, it is characterized by actors seeking to justify their identities, interests, practices, or institutional designs” (Reus-Smit 2007, 44).

This paper argues that the literature on remote warfare is best understood as a reaction to military transformation since the cold war. During this period states have sought to transform their militaries in the face of changing strategic threat perceptions and technological change (Osinga 2010). The “military transformation” in the US sought to deliver a “very high-tech American military, far more able to globally project power in a discriminate and agile way to overpower conventional opponents” (Farrell et al. 2013, 3–4). One of the goals of NATO’s military transformation was to make NATO forces – and therefore the militaries of NATO states – usable in expeditionary operations working together as joint military forces (Cornish 2004, 64–65). For some states, such at the US, military transformation has generated a range of new military capabilities that enable multiple forms of unilateral intervention, as well as new methods of working with both partner states and non-state actors. For other states, such as Sweden, the alterations to its military forces have made unilateral independent foreign intervention impossible, necessitating working with alliances such as NATO and coalition frameworks (Petersson 2011, 717).

As such, military transformation altered the options available to political decision-makers for military intervention in distant conflicts. Research on remote warfare critiques a range of these options, and their use in contemporary conflicts. According to Emily Knowles, remote warfare “describes approaches to combat that do not require the deployment of large numbers of your own ground troops” (Knowles and Watson 2018, 2), but work on the topic covers a wide variety of ways in which states are now able to intervene with force, or enable its use. Scholars have analysed the use of drones and asymmetric killing (Renic 2019), the contemporary use of special forces (Knowles and Watson 2017), private military security companies (Krieg 2018; Kinsey and Olsen 2020), proxies (Mumford 2013; Rauta 2020, 42), and surrogates used by states to wage war at arm’s length from the state in question (Biegon and Watts 2017).

What distinguishes work on remote warfare is its specific concern with the legitimacy of military capabilities that enable small-scale intervention in conflicts, or partnerships between states that do not rely upon the deployment of a significant number of troops. Remote warfare therefore highlights the range of ways in which militaries are now able to work with foreign partners to produce joint military capabilities. Commenting upon the UK MoD’s definition of military capabilities – “the enduring ability to generate a desired operational outcome or effect, and is relative to the threat, physical environment and the contributions of coalition partners” – Yue and Henshaw note that military capabilities are context dependent (Yue and Henshaw 2009, 55). This combination of legitimacy, capability, and context explains the scope of the literature on remote warfare. It also highlights the wider importance of work on remote warfare – military capabilities used for remote warfare are also used in other contexts and some are important elements of military power. Leading scholars of military power are now examining topics that fall under the heading of remote warfare (Biddle et al. 2018). As such, we can expect the issues of legitimacy associated with remote warfare to be of importance to the study of military power more generally.

The field of remote warfare has not yet been able to develop a framework for integrating the full range of legitimacy problems identified under the heading of remote warfare. This paper, therefore, seeks to clarify and explain the relationship in remote warfare between legitimacy problems and military capabilities. This paper makes two contributions to research on remote warfare. First, it highlights the importance of military capabilities as a distinct unit of analysis, rather than military power or military force more generally. Second, rather than seek to define remote warfare as a category of warfare or intervention, it approaches remote warfare as a set of legitimacy problems that share a “family resemblance” in that they feature “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (Wittgenstein 2010, 36). A capability-centric approach enables us to examine the literature on remote warfare as a set of problems of political legitimacy arising from the evolution of military capabilities that enable selective military interventions at a distance. As such, this paper provides a means of drawing together a range of apparently incommensurable legitimacy issues at a variety of levels in international relations (state, government, organisational, individual, technological). In turn, this highlights the utility of research on remote warfare in helping us to draw together and understand the varied legitimacy problems arising from novel ways of generating military force via cooperation. This paper demonstrates the utility of this approach by examining infrastructures that support remote warfare. This way of engaging with the concept of remote warfare demonstrates the concept’s wider importance to the study of contemporary military power and power projection.

Remote warfare and the legitimacy of joint military capabilities

This paper examines remote warfare as a group of legitimacy problems associated with joint military capabilities, rather than as a type of warfare. As Demmers and Gould have noted, there is a “coining contest” that aims to “define the ‘new newness’ of interventionist warfare” (Demmers and Gould 2018, 365). In their view, remote warfare is but one term among many that seeks to explain the novelty of contemporary forms of distant military intervention. This paper does not seek to partake in the coining contest identified by Demmers and Gould. This is because defining and examining remote warfare as a type or category of warfare presents four major problems: differentiation, empirical divergence, problem divergence, and novelty. The concept of remote warfare is difficult to successfully differentiate and distinguish from like concepts, it covers a variety of diverging phenomena, which are problematised for diverging reasons, and its novelty is unclear. Taking military capability instead of categories of warfare as the core unit of analysis highlights that the underlying and unifying concern of remote warfare is the legitimacy of military capabilities. By providing a means of analysing these issues in a coherent way, this approach demonstrates the wider importance of research on remote warfare to scholars of military power and military transformation.

Remote warfare cannot be readily distinguished from contrasting concepts (e.g. “non-remote warfare”) and this poses a problem if one is trying to define it as a category or type. As John Gerring points out “A concept cannot be internally coherent unless it is distinguishable from other concepts” (Gerring 2011, 127). Key to this, Gerring writes, is how a concept fits within a larger “semantic field” that provides the “background context or contrast-space of a concept.” Jon Moran writes that remote warfare “is not a strategy it is a tactic which has become an end in itself. Its aim however fits in to a strategic concept – the idea that Western states are to an extent ‘losing control’ of international affairs and either do not possess – or will not deploy – the proper tools to respond to this” (Moran 2015, 2). In this framing, remote warfare is a coercive tool of control, but if remote warfare is a coercive tool of control-at-distance, then this definition arguably includes all the coercive tools of Western states. For the Remote Control Project, which defined remote warfare to cover physically distant interventions “fought through a combination of drone strikes and air strikes from above, knitted together by the deployment of special forces, intelligence operatives, private contractors, and military training teams on the ground” (ORG 2015, 11), the problem is that these are general military capabilities in the contemporary world. Given that most forms of remote warfare require elements of a state’s conventional military forces in either an active role or as an interface, this present the problem of distinguishing between conventional/non-conventional interventions, and where to draw the line between small-scale and large-scale deployments.

As a category, remote warfare currently draws together a wide variety of empirically divergent means by which states intervene in distant conflicts that fall below an (undefined) threshold of large-scale intervention. As it is usually resource-intensive to intervene across large physical distances, the “problem” of remote warfare in this sense is that states have developed efficient capabilities to do so with “light footprint” approaches to intervention that would otherwise require the commitment of large-scale ground forces and potentially public pushback on the use of force by the state (Knowles and Watson 2018, 30). This category covers the use of security contractors (Kinsey and Olsen 2020), the provision of security force training and assistance (Watling and Shabibi 2018), the use of special forces (Knowles and Watson 2017), and the use of cyberattacks (VERTIC 2018), as examples of remote warfare, but these topics are so different that it is not clear what unites them.

This divergence of empirical phenomena leads to the issue of problem divergence. The literature on remote warfare problematises a significant range of military activities for different reasons. Notably, a central problematisation of physical distance does not unify the field. Work on drone strikes problematises killing at a distance without the possibility of being harmed in turn. Emily Knowles and Abigail Watson position the use of special forces within the frame of remote warfare to draw attention to the political distancing of secrecy (Knowles and Watson 2017). Tom Watts and Rubrick Biegon’s work on American security cooperation highlights the way that small-scale non-lethal means of intervention meant to distance US troops from combat entangles it in the politics of local conflicts (Biegon and Watts 2017). In general, “remoteness” features as a proxy for discomfort regarding an aspect of warfare or intervention that authors consider should be normatively “close”. Part of the problem with defining remote warfare appears to be that scholars problematise different forms of distance, but also that the relationship between forms of distance and associated forms of political connection or integration has been under-explained.

This leads to the problem of novelty: why is remote warfare now a problem? Why should researchers address this group of apparently different phenomena and problems under one heading? Some authors identify the onset of remote warfare in the era of European empires, and there are those who argue that these techniques developed during the cold war or later. Jon Moran, for example, argues that remote warfare in the contemporary world follows the techniques and methods of colonial governance (Moran 2015, 2–3). This is in line with arguments that the contemporary use of drones by America resembles the inter-war uses of airpower to control restive populations resisting the control of European empires (Satia 2014). The problem is that the use of force to produce and reinforce hierarchical governance structures is perhaps as old as the state itself. This approach often fails to adequately address the implied novelty of remote warfare in the present day, and why the problems of remote warfare are invariably framed as emerging issues.

This paper argues that these four problems are collectively insurmountable if we treat remote warfare as a form or category of warfare. Instead of defining remote warfare in those terms, this paper focuses upon military capabilities. The various interventions that constitute remote warfare involve the use of military capabilities that depend upon, or enable, political integration between different actors in international politics. Engaging with the varied conceptualisations of military capability provides a means for responding to the four challenges of defining remote warfare. Analysis of remote warfare at the level of military capability is a means of addressing both the problem of empirical divergence, as well as defining what differentiates remote warfare as a field. What differentiates remote warfare from contrasting concepts (e.g. “non-remote warfare”) is its focus upon the consequences of integrating military capabilities at a systems level in order to generate military effects. What is “new” about remote warfare in the present day is the degree to which political elites are able to direct and control the use of military capabilities in distant conflicts.

Jukka Anteroinen has noted that the definition of military capability changes from state to state, and it lacks an agreed scholarly definition (Anteroinen 2012, 1). According to Anteroinen, there are five different ways of defining and examining military capability that differ in terms of scope. Military capability can mirror the concept of military power at state level as an instrument of foreign policy (Biddle 2004, 4), or alternately conceptualise it in terms of weapon systems and platforms, or be used to describe the raw fighting power of military units. The importance of Anteroinen’s review is that he observes at least two ways of defining military capabilities that sit between individual platforms and military power. First, there is a level of systems which depicts “capability as a system of interlocking and interdependent components” which in turn “shift attention away from traditional platforms and technical-systems-focused approaches to the non-material aspects of capabilities” such as training and infrastructure. Secondly, there are functional capability models where “required capabilities are first considered as effects or functions of armed forces rather than as specific solutions” thus conceptualising military capability in functional terms such as command and control or building partnerships (Anteroinen 2012, 2). The importance of these two intermediary levels or scopes of military capability is that they allow us to examine the range of ways in which political actors can work together to achieve common goals in an armed conflict.

Understanding remote warfare in terms of military capabilities explains the empirical divergence of remote warfare, and how it differs from other fields of research. Remote warfare differs from the study of coalitions and alliances in general because of its focus upon means of working together at a systems level (in terms of military capability) so as to achieve effects that would be impossible without joint military capabilities. Remote warfare is about military capabilities that depend upon (or enable) integrated operations at a systems level in order to produce effects that would otherwise be impossible without political partnerships. In this sense, remote warfare is about political integration at both the level of the state and in terms of military capabilities, and the politics of such integration.

This paper uses political integration to denote close working partnerships at both the level of states and systems that generate military capabilities. There is a distinction between military capabilities that depend upon such partnerships, and those that seek to generate them. For example, the US use of drones depends upon a range of international partnerships, both with intermediary states such as Germany (home to Ramstein Air Base used for satellite uplinks) and with states that host bases proximate to US targets in places such as Niger. Bases do not have to be self-sufficient US installations, tiny “cooperative security locations” or “lily pad” bases “frequently house drones, surveillance aircraft, or pre-positioned weaponry for the use of troops deploying from elsewhere … giving U.S. forces access to new parts of the globe” (Vine 2015, Chapter 2). Although US drone use can rely upon local partnerships for the purposes of intelligence collection and base protection, the core use of drones can operate in an isolated fashion at a systems level. Conversely, both security cooperation and security assistance depend upon close working partnerships at the systems level. Security assistance – “the training and equipping of foreign forces, whether this assistance is gifted, sold or leased” – differs from security cooperation in that security cooperation aims to build partner capacity and capabilities in a wider sense (Biegon and Watts 2017, 2). Advice and support operations seek to generate effects via the close-coupling of political actors via military capabilities (trainers) at the systems level. The effects that these operations generate depend upon integration at the systems level, but they also have a generative effect in political terms – their continued use implies the generation of political and social ties between states and military organisations. If we were to drill down into the force structure of a military that provides this kind of support, we would find a military capability designed to enable this kind of political integration. This perspective also highlights why cyberattacks sit uneasily within the framework of remote warfare, since cyber capabilities enable unilateral action by states and non-state actors. However, the important issues of state cooperation in cyber attacks (e.g. the Stuxnet attack) and the use of criminal groups or other non-state agents to commit cyber attacks raise many of the same questions tackled in this article.

Examining remote warfare in terms of joint military capabilities also points to two features that can explain the relative novelty of remote warfare in the contemporary world: an increased range of modes and levels of interoperability at the platform, system, and state level, as well as the ability of domestic political elites to control and direct these capabilities. What separates remote warfare from older forms of violence and war-at-a-distance is the fact that the current ability of states to direct and calibrate the use of military force in expeditionary contexts is very new. Central to this is the development of communications technologies that enable real-time monitoring and direction of battlefield events by both military leaders and politicians. Senior officers in the Pentagon could witness live battlefield footage in the mid-1990s (Whittle 2014, 114–115), and less than two decades later President Barack Obama was able to watch the progress of the mission that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011. As the Commander-in-Chief he was personally involved in authorising otherwise tactical decisions regularly throughout his terms in the White House (Savage 2012). Political leaders may have once led their forces onto battlefields and directed combat, but they could not make such granular decisions. Nor did they have military lawyers at hand, ready to shape the use of military capabilities (Jones 2016). Leaders are now able to ensure the primacy of political choices and policy decisions through the use of targeting directives and “red card” systems that prevent the use of national assets for operations that extend beyond domestic constraints (Jacobsen and Saugmann 2019). It is this degree of selective control over the use of force, and the wider institutional contexts that enable it, which differentiates contemporary remote warfare from like activities in the past. This centralised control even enables coordination between competing governments intervening in the same conflict in order to prevent military incidents from escalating (Weiss and Ng 2019).

The core legitimacy problems of remote warfare

As this paper has explained, there are a significant range of legitimacy problems associated with remote warfare. What ties these problems together is that they all arise as a consequence of the development and use of military capabilities reliant upon political partnerships. Taking military capabilities as the central object of concern provides clarity because it allows us to consider and compare legitimacy problems associated with different conceptualizations, or models, of military capability. The difference in conceptualising military capability matters as the type of political actor, and their social context, provides the fundamental structure for examining legitimacy issues. Military capability conceptualised at state level would imply a social context of other states, international organisations, and other actors in international relations with international legitimation practices. This would engage the core issues of legitimacy and the use of force in international politics. Conversely, military capability defined in terms of organisational abilities would imply a domestic social context of government, domestic institutions, and the public at large. Military capabilities are tied to legitimation practices, and also evaluated according to shifts in the legitimacy of war more widely. Research on the “individualization” of war has highlighted the changing expectations of legitimate conduct in war, notably “the increase in the importance of norms for the regulation of war that focus on the interests, rights, and duties of individuals” (Dill 2019, 4).

The specific legitimacy problems of remote warfare can be defined as four sets of problems related to the use of joint military capabilities: selective control, state agency, government agency relative to domestic institutions that constrain the decision to use force, and finally responsibility for the use of force. This paper explains these as a family resemblance of problems, following Wittgenstein (2010, 36) concept of family resemblances, because despite the fact that these problems resemble one another, no single definition of remote warfare, or problematisation found in the remote warfare literature, accurately describes them all, nor does the generalised problem of legitimacy and the use of force address their particular features adequately.

Selective control

Control, as a legitimacy problem in remote warfare, is twofold in nature. Many of the capabilities defined as remote warfare enable far greater centralised control of intervention at a distance than was previously possible. Where states distribute agency to others, it does so in ways that limit the risk of escalation that would significantly affect the intervening state (we should always be mindful that escalation can occur in local settings). Selective control, therefore, raises two separate legitimacy issues: what forms of intervention beyond direct military assistance are legitimate for states to engage in, and what is the legitimate distribution of risks between partnered states, militaries, and societies, in the course of intervention?

Military capabilities engage both questions, as they both enable different kinds of intervention (at a platform, system, and effects level), as well as inherently shifting the balance of risks in a conflict depending upon their use or purpose. The legitimate distribution of risk in conflict can be viewed in adversarial terms – how armed forces minimise their own risk of death and injury at the expense of their counterparties (Shaw 2005). A second way of considering risk in conflict is the way in which all parties to the conflict shift the burden of conflict to civilians as they seek to protect their own forces. What research on remote warfare has demonstrated is the development of careful delineations of risk between erstwhile partners. As working “by, with, and through partners in military operations has become a preferred approach in U.S. security policy” (Dalton et al. 2018, 1), this literature highlights the fact that the development of military capabilities that enable such cooperation also increases the range of options to policymakers in balancing risk between intervening states and their local partners.

Which of these capabilities, then, are legitimate for states to use? Remote warfare has drawn attention to the importance of analysing subtle graduations in engagement, as distinct from, but related to, the legitimacy of the use of force in general. Many of the capabilities that remote warfare concerns itself with can be used in all forms of armed conflict, but their purpose in the context of remote warfare is often to manage or delineate the involvement of a state in a distant conflict. Escalation of conflict, both in intensity (vertical escalation), brutality, or geographical reach (horizontal escalation) is one of the most significant strategic issues in war (Posen 2014). Its relative absence in the literature on remote warfare signals these capabilites are implicitly assumed not to risk escalation, either by design or by their deployment. We should note that throughout the cold war states intervened in conflicts to signal resolve without seeking to deploy troops that might escalate a conflict (Carson 2018). What is different in the contemporary world is that these interventions come complete with detailed cooperation mechanisms like deconfliction agreements in Syria where parties to the conflict communicate to ensure that military incidents are avoided, and escalation is strictly controlled (Weiss and Ng 2019). The development of military capabilities that enable states to achieve effects that would otherwise require large-scale military operations by working with partners enables states to participate in armed conflicts while shielding themselves from some consequences.

State agency

The legitimacy of selective control relates to the problem of legitimate state agency. This addresses the relationship between military capabilities and the ability of states to use force, or enable the use of force, without breaking international norms. This problem has been highlighted in the use of special forces (Knowles and Watson 2017), security assistance to partner states, and also in non-lethal forms of assistance to partnered military forces. The transformation of military forces allows them to partner with other states at a technical level, enabling states to cooperate with other states without using force directly themselves. This means that military forces are able to generate effects without direct involvement in a conflict that might violate norms against the use of force. At the level of state capability, this entails states developing the capability to engage with the use of force by other actors without directly contravening international norms in the process.

The first reason that state agency constitutes a legitimacy problem concerns the ability of states to circumvent the constraining rules on the use of force in international politics. The kinds of military capability this paper is concerned with enable states to use, or enable, the use of force without breaking these rules directly. These can generate significant effects, for example, the support of proxies – such as support to the SDF – was a means of generating land power versus IS without deploying conventional forces to Syria.

Second, these military capabilities can be used in a clandestine manner, thus minimising open breaches of international rules on the use of force. Work on remote warfare highlights the relationship between military capabilities and attribution. At a state level, some remote warfare capabilities give a state a greater range of means to intervene without breaking the rules and also limit the ability of other states and international institutions to hold them to account. Such “open secrets” as Austin Carson (2018, 39) defines them were a means by which some states could intervene in the Syrian civil war without deploying the kinds of land forces that would be viewed as occupying forces. The issue with such “non-obvious” forms of warfare that blend ambiguity and secrecy is that they are, according to Martin Libicki, “a poor fit for democratic states and a far better fit for authoritarian or failing states” (Libicki 2012). This is exacerbated by the changes to underlying expectations of state conduct, as the individualization of war means that traditional state explanations for secrecy come under increasing pressure from civil society.

Lastly, there is the legitimacy of intermediary assistance by states. Here, work on remote warfare has drawn attention to the integral role of states as intermediaries in the use of force (Moynihan 2016). This is particularly apparent at the systems level of military capability. One can argue that a state allowing another state to build a base for the use of drones on its territory is directly responsible for the use of force by that state, but what about non-lethal ISR missions that enter a third party state’s airspace, or aerial ISR more generally that examines the neighbouring state’s territory while staying within the confines of the state that it is operated from? This is a particular issue with remote vehicles, such as UAVs, which can be controlled via key pieces of infrastructure located in friendly states.

Government agency

Research on remote warfare has demonstrated the huge variety of ways in which military capabilities can enable governments to aid political partners abroad despite domestic opposition. Governments seeking to intervene abroad face a series of domestic constitutional hurdles and political negotiations (with the legislature, security and military organisations, and the public). Military capabilities enhance the free-agency of governments in domestic war powers debates by presenting them with options to intervene that may bypass constitutional or political constraints on doing so. As such, military capabilities alter the relationship of governments to domestic actors and institutions that collectively legitimise the use of force on behalf of the state. This substantially alters the effectiveness of what Reus-Smit defines as legitimation practices at a domestic level. As an example, in the UK the government has relatively free agency to authorise the use of force using prerogative powers. Still, as Rosara Joseph notes, the House of Commons performs a range of key functions – actively legitimating government action by passing motions of support, mobilising the consent of the population for the policy, scrutinising government policy, and also voicing public concerns to the government (Joseph 2013, 107–108). Some military capabilities are fundamentally difficult for Parliament to constrain. In the UK, the fact that special forces are not commented upon by the government reduces the ability of Parliament to both scrutinise their use, and to voice concerns to the government. Emily Knowles and Abigail Wilson refer to the fact that special forces are treated differently from ground forces in general as an “interesting quirk”, but secrecy is integral to the nature of special forces, and the use of special forces in countries where the UK is not at war, without public approval or at least Parliamentary debate is a feature, not a bug (Knowles and Watson 2017, 21). Even where Parliament objects to the use of force, notably when the UK’s government was prevented from bombing Syria by Parliamentary vote in August 2013, military capabilities that enable partnerships can sidestep such constraints. Parliament’s vote did not stop the government from flying drones into Syria to collect intelligence to share with Coalition partners that could use lethal force in Syria (Fallon 2015).

By defining troops as performing advice and support missions, governments can provide significant military contributions without triggering domestic barriers that relate to war powers. This draws attention to the fact that many domestic constraints on intervention centre upon the use of physical force, whereas contemporary military capabilities enable governments to support partner states (and non-state groups) with non-lethal or non-kinetic assistance that enables physical violence. In this sense, the increased reliance of contemporary military operations upon timely information and intelligence makes some forms of non-lethal assistance vital to the conduct of operations, but without requiring governments to consult Parliaments prior to assisting in the use of force.

Responsibility

Responsibility relates to the legitimate use of force in two ways: responsibility in terms of reasoned rational intent, and responsibility in the sense of an agent’s responsibility for their actions, or the consequences of a chain of events. Research on remote warfare has highlighted novel problems with assigning responsibility. For example, in remote-split operations, the control of armed drones can be transferred between operators and states mid-flight raising questions about the responsibility of both states and pilots for consequent uses of military force (Elish 2017). In addition, research has highlighted “responsibility gaps” where governments do not see themselves as responsible for individual events, or no mechanism exists for holding governments to account (Klamberg 2017). In theory, joint military capabilities entail equal responsibility for the consequences of their use. In practice, the outcome is that there are many perceived responsibility gaps associated with these capabilities.

Responsibility raises three key legitimacy issues: the way that military capabilities are seen to externalise responsibility for the use of force, the way that they can create “many hands” problems related to the use of force, and the way that they can prevent (by their nature) third parties from determining the responsibility for combat incidents.

The first two problems are related because some perceive the use of proxies or surrogates as a means of externalising responsibility for the use of force. Proxy wars themselves are a “strategic enterprise involving at least two parties negotiating over the delegation, management and pursuit of indirect war against a target adversary” (Rauta 2020, 42). Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli view the reason for this as the “externalization, partially or wholly, of the strategic, operational, and tactical burden of war to human or technological surrogates with the principal intent of minimizing the patron’s own burden of war” (Krieg and Rickli 2019, 58). Krieg and Rickli’s view of offloading responsibility to surrogates may be an aspiration, but in practice, states do not externalise responsibility: they seek to create an image of non-responsibility. Moreover, some forms of engagement, such as security force assistance, only appear to work with significant engagement by the supporting state (Biddle 2017). In this sense, military capabilities associated with proxy/surrogate warfare generate open secrets regarding responsibility – it appears plain that a state is ultimately responsible, but the chain of events is unclear to third-party observers. The greater challenge is the fact that joint military capabilities inevitably create state responsibility at a low-level. This responsibility is often shared between many agents but is also argued (often by many sides) not to rise to the level of individual state responsibility. A good example of this in practice is where states operate in coalitions, or with non-state actors, and the precise details of operational decisions and responsibility are hidden from outsiders. Since political links are integral to the military capabilities under discussion, this legitimacy problem is perhaps integral to remote warfare itself.

Some capabilities within the scope of remote warfare limit the ability of third-party observers to connect battlefield incidents to responsible persons or states. The individual combat incident is now a widespread unit of conflict analysis, driven in part by open-source investigations, NGOs, and journalists who seek to hold governments to account for their actions (Weizman 2017). Military organisations are naturally opaque, and holding them to account for battlefield incidents is difficult, both in practical and theoretical terms. Drone strikes are paradoxically the most observable and attributable of all activities classed as remote warfare, yet it is hard to attribute responsibility to all those directly involved in them. This can be for technical reasons, for example, the use of drones relies upon non-observable activities like data processing (Wilcox 2017). Nonetheless airstrikes provide NGOs and journalism groups with a wealth of evidence in this regard. This data, and advocacy work based upon it, have led to calls for the US-led Coalition to take responsibility for numerous civilian casualty events, as well as calls for governments to also admit responsibility (Oakford 2018).

Discussion: legitimacy and infrastructure

The transformation of military power since the cold war has generated a range of military capabilities that enable states to intervene at distance in joint operations. This paper has demonstrated two consequences of this: that the issue of integrating military capabilities now extends beyond inter-state partnerships, and the forms of integration at a systems level of military capability present numerous legitimacy problems for states. Importantly, the increased range of modes or degrees of working together generates significant legitimacy issues when seeking to determine who, or what, is responsible for battlefield incidents. These forms of military capability also tend to increase the number of actors who are closely associated with military activity, even if they are not actively involved. This paper points to the need to evaluate the legitimacy problems of military capabilities between state-level use of force discussions, and the tactical analysis of the legitimacy of force in armed conflict.

One such case highlighted by research on remote warfare is the politics of military infrastructure. Infrastructure has emerged as an issue in security studies in a number of domains, notably over border infrastructure and information sharing (Aradau 2010). In this context, research on remote warfare highlights an underlying strategic problem facing western states: how to maintain infrastructural ties and partnerships when its existence enables military capabilities that can call into question the legitimacy of the underlying infrastructure. Shared military infrastructure across Europe is vital for its defence (and has been since the Cold War). So, too, are the system of bases that the US relies upon for power projection worldwide. Yet the use of this infrastructure for controversial interventions, or to support controversial military capabilities, has renewed attacks upon the underlying legitimacy of this infrastructure itself. If infrastructure and legitimacy are essential aspects of military power, then we need to consider how, and why, the use of military capabilities can affect the legitimacy of underlying infrastructure. Shared infrastructure appears to be a particularly important area worthy of further research, and research on remote warfare has contributed to this by highlighting the relationship between interventions, military capabilities, and legitimacy.

One of the clearest cases of this is the use of drones in war. The legitimacy of the use of drones for lethal strikes is one of the central issues in remote warfare. It has been hard for some governments to legitimate the use of drones in the face of NGO campaigns that seek to hold governments responsible for the consequences of interventions (Columbia Law School 2017). For some authors, remote warfare is essentially the same as drone warfare and some authors use the term interchangeably (Rae 2014). As Anders Henriksen and Jens Ringmose point out, “the very feature that makes the drones so attractive to policy-makers and military commanders – their risk free deployment – is also one of the primary causes why many feel fundamentally uncomfortable with them” (Henriksen and Ringsmose 2015, 286). This “riskless warfare” appeals to policymakers due to western democracies’ aversion to military casualties (Cornish 2003; Mandel 2004). Some worry that the proliferation of drones in global politics increases the number of states – and non-state actors – able to engage in remote warfare. At a state level, this can be framed in terms of the diffusion of military power (Horowitz 2010). At the tactical – or platform – level, scholars seek to understand the variance in uses of drones in armed conflict.

Discussion of drone strikes often turns to the precision (or apparent lack thereof) of these platforms. But as Gilli and Gilli (2016) have argued, there is more to the use of drones than the platforms themselves – their use is fundamentally constrained by organisations and infrastructure. Differences in infrastructural capacity is a key constraint on the use of drones. It is what separates localised drone use (constrained to launch sites within a country) from the regional and global capabilities demonstrated by a small selection of states able to work with shared (primarily American) infrastructure. In the terms of this paper, the infrastructure that enables drone operations takes the form of a set of military systems that rely upon political integration and cooperation. The importance of this infrastructure is twofold – physical sites are essential to the generation of many different types of military capability, and they also serve as permanent material demonstrations/locations of political integration. The recent US strategy of operating from small “lily pad” bases and facilities, sometimes operated by partner countries is a good example of the political integration at the systems level (Vine 2015). This infrastructure is a deeply political space constituted by both international politics as well as domestic politics (Khalili 2018). Often these sites are focal points for peace campaigns as they are the physical embodiment of controversial inter-state military relationships (Yeo 2011, Chapter 2). Coalition operations and inter-state politics are built upon this infrastructure sharing, and security-assistance operations – however light touch – require the basing of troops, status of forces agreements, and so on (Gresh 2015).

Basing arrangements have always been key to the projection of military power – for example, the British network of coaling stations enabled the Royal Navy to police the world’s oceans in the 19th century (Gray 2017) – and are a vital element of forward-deployed global militaries (Immerwahr 2019, Chapter 21). The driving force for much of this shared infrastructure in places like Germany was the development of joint capability to defend Europe from conventional Soviet threats (Ramstein has been used by America for military operations since 1953). What drone operations highlight is the changing use of this infrastructure – advances in communications technology in the 1990s meant that the datalinks situated at Ramstein could be used to directly control the release of weapons. What differentiates this from similar American capabilities, such as sea-launched ICBMs, is that this capability is generated by, and depends upon, political partnerships and the integration of political partners at an infrastructural level. Here, the importance of this infrastructural level of evaluating drone operations is that many of the legitimacy problems related to the use of drones are inextricably bound to it.

The interesting dimension of contemporary infrastructure integration is the way in which states can carefully delineate the limits of their engagement through the agreements which underpin these base arrangements (Moynihan 2016, 41). States use these to control the use of infrastructure located on their territory, but it is hard for third parties to understand what roles are undertaken at specfic locations unless states communicate this. Tracing state engagement with the US drone programme at the infrastructural level engages all the key legitimacy problems highlighted in this paper. We might say that Ramstein was neither necessary nor sufficient for these campaigns. As important as they appear to have been for successive Presidents, it is likely that other work arounds would have been found had Germany prohibited the use of data links for that purpose. But at the same time, this is a clear example of where the evolution of military technology generated a new form of capability that enhanced the free-agency of the US President in the context of US domestic institutions. We can see similar kinds of debates related to the Libya intervention in 2011, where America’s network of foreign bases gave the US president the ability to support a coalition of intervening states without the approval of Congress (Zeisberg 2013, 1–3). Furthermore, states hosting US bases where drones were launched from were able to enable their American partners to use force, without suffering significant domestic consequences for their role.

Even where there is evidence that a location has played a significant role in the US drone programme, the distributed nature of these operations creates problems for those who seek to hold intermediary states to account. NGO campaigns have pointed to the involvement of partnered countries, but in formal terms, their behaviour has not been censured by international institutions, demonstrating that infrastructural cooperation exists as a means for states to enable their partners without directly breaking international rules. Notably, domestic litigation about Ramstein in Germany has sought to highlight that the closeness of the German state to the US use of targeted killings due to its acceptance of America using this infrastructure to support such operations. In 2019, three Yemenis and one Somali who had lost relatives to American strikes took legal action against the German government (Wagner 2019). This litigation was partly successful, in that the judgement in the Yemeni case obliged the German government to assess the legality of US strikes and work towards ensuring that they comply with international law (Beinlich 2019). However, the lack of punishment in both cases demonstrates the ability of states to avoid formal responsibility even where their close partnerships are key to the generation of military capabilities.

Military intervention, and support to states in conflict, invariably results in civilian casualties. In turn, and as can be seen with the use of drones in particular, perceptions of illegitimacy can shape public attitudes towards military capabilities with a wide variety of uses. What this paper points toward is the need to consider the relationship between the political controversies over the use of a military capability as well as its consequences for the underlying infrastructure and state partnerships that help to generate it. As such, work on remote warfare points to the need to develop ways of conceptualising and interrogating the relationship between partnerships in international politics, the infrastructure it creates, and the military capabilities that it generates. As this paper has highlighted, we cannot easily separate the use of a military capability from its latent consequences for political agency, nor can states easily separate their underlying strategic partnerships from the wider actions of their allies. Given that shared military capabilities and infrastructure are essential to European security, further research seems wise.