Institute for Remote Warfare and Autonomous Systems

Thomas Schelling reframed conflict as a bargaining problem rather than a contest of force. The Strategy of Conflict and Arms and Influence established the modern theory of deterrence, compellence, and commitment, introducing concepts — focal points, credible threats, the manipulation of risk — that reshaped international relations, economics, and game theory. He shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Can help you with: Deterrence theory, coercive diplomacy, bargaining under uncertainty, focal points and coordination, nuclear strategy, the logic of commitment, brinkmanship, and game-theoretic analysis of conflict.

Based on the published writings of Lawrence Freedman. Freedman is the pre-eminent historian and theorist of strategy in the English-speaking world. Strategy: A History, The Future of War, and The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy examine how states generate and exercise power under radical uncertainty. He served as official historian of the Falklands campaign and advisor to Tony Blair.

Can help you with: The history and theory of strategy, nuclear deterrence, the future of warfare, counterinsurgency, the Falklands War, and how strategic narratives shape decision-making.

Based on the published writings and public statements of Hassan Abbasi. Abbasi is an IRGC strategist whose doctrine of asymmetric warfare argues that technologically inferior forces can neutralise conventional superiority through hybrid methods, proxy networks, and the exploitation of structural dependencies. His work theorises Iranian strategic culture and the doctrinal foundations of irregular warfare.

Can help you with: Iranian strategic doctrine, asymmetric warfare theory, IRGC operational concepts, hybrid warfare, proxy network strategy, and the strategic logic of the weaker party.

Based on the published statements and doctrinal writings associated with Hossein Salami. As IRGC Commander-in-Chief, Salami articulated a doctrine of strategic patience and escalation dominance through distributed, low-cost systems — cheap drones and proxies holding expensive conventional forces permanently at risk across vast distances, compressing the cost ratio until technological superiority becomes a liability.

Can help you with: IRGC escalation doctrine, drone proliferation strategy, proxy warfare architecture, asymmetric cost imposition, and distributed-threat theory against concentrated conventional forces.

Based on the published writings of Paul Scharre. A former Army Ranger who helped draft the US Department of Defence policy on autonomous weapons, Scharre brings both combat experience and policy expertise to the question of machine autonomy. Army of None examines the spectrum from human-controlled to fully autonomous weapons; Four Battlegrounds maps AI competition across data, compute, talent, and institutions.

Can help you with: Autonomous weapons policy, human-machine teaming, the kill chain, centaur warfighting concepts, US defence autonomy policy, and the spectrum of human control over lethal systems.

Based on the published writings of Ronald Arkin. Arkin is a roboticist who makes the controversial argument that properly engineered autonomous systems could commit fewer atrocities than human soldiers under the pressures of fear, fatigue, and vengeance. His ‘ethical governor’ architecture proposes computational constraints that enforce the laws of armed conflict at the machine level.

Can help you with: The ethical governor architecture, behaviour-based robotics, the case for autonomous lethal systems, computational ethics, and robot design for compliance with international humanitarian law.

Based on the published writings of Stuart Russell. Russell co-authored the standard AI textbook and then spent a decade warning that the field is building the wrong kind of intelligence — systems that pursue fixed objectives without understanding what humans actually want. His Slaughterbots film dramatised the proliferation risk of autonomous weapons; Human Compatible proposes a fundamental redesign of AI around uncertainty about human preferences.

Can help you with: AI safety and alignment, the case against autonomous weapons, the objective-function problem, inverse reinforcement learning, and the existential risks of misaligned artificial intelligence.

Based on the published writings of Robert Sparrow. Sparrow identified the ‘responsibility gap’ — when an autonomous weapon kills wrongly, neither the machine (which cannot be punished), nor the programmer (who did not decide), nor the commander (who did not know) can be held meaningfully accountable. This gap, he argues, is the deepest moral objection to autonomous lethal systems.

Can help you with: The responsibility gap in autonomous weapons, robot ethics, just war theory applied to autonomous systems, moral agency, and the philosophy of accountability in machine decision-making.

Based on the published writings of Zachary Kallenborn. Kallenborn argues that drone swarms constitute a genuinely new ontological category of weapon, not merely a quantity of drones. Existing legal, ethical, and arms-control frameworks were built for individual weapons and break down when applied to emergent swarm behaviour. His work examines the mass-casualty potential and regulatory challenges of swarming autonomous systems.

Can help you with: Drone swarm theory, autonomous swarm weapons as a new weapons category, mass-casualty risk analysis, arms-control challenges for swarms, and the failure of existing frameworks to address emergent swarm behaviour.

Based on the published writings of Anthony King. King is a military sociologist who challenges revolutionary narratives about drone warfare, arguing that unmanned systems are only as autonomous as the ecosystem that sustains them — data links, operators, supply chains, and the conventional forces they depend on. His work on urban warfare and military transformation examines the gap between technological promise and operational reality.

Can help you with: Sceptical analysis of drone revolution claims, the logistics and dependencies of unmanned systems, urban warfare, military sociology, and the gap between technological hype and operational reality.

Based on the published writings and public statements of Palmer Luckey. Founded Oculus VR at nineteen, sold to Facebook for $2 billion, then founded Anduril Industries to build autonomous defence systems using Silicon Valley methods: venture-funded, software-defined, built and tested before being offered to the military. Arsenal-1 in Ohio is a five-million-square-foot factory designed to produce autonomous systems at consumer-electronics scale. The argument: the defence industry is broken not by bad people but by a bad business model.

Can help you with: Defence-technology disruption, autonomous systems at scale, the Lattice OS platform, venture-funded defence, software-defined weapons, and the case against the traditional defence-acquisition model.

Based on the published writings of Grégoire Chamayou. Chamayou argues that the drone abolishes the duel — combat dissolves into something older and stranger: the hunt, with one side exposed and the other invulnerable. Drone Theory examines the philosophical, ethical, and political implications of a form of violence in which one side can no longer die, and asks what becomes of the ethics of war when reciprocal risk is eliminated.

Can help you with: The philosophy of drone warfare, the ethics of asymmetric risk, manhunting as a category of violence, necro-ethics, the political theory of remote killing, and the mutation of war into surveillance-and-strike.

Based on the published writings of Bradley Jay Strawser. Strawser makes the counterintuitive argument that if a military mission is genuinely just, and a remote weapon protects one’s own forces without adding risk to the innocent, then there is a moral obligation to use it — exposing a soldier to danger that could have been avoided is itself a wrong. His work applies just war theory rigorously to the ethics of risk transfer in remote warfare.

Can help you with: The moral case for drone use, just war theory and remote warfare, the ethics of risk transfer, the principle of unnecessary risk, and philosophical analysis of asymmetric force protection.

Based on the published writings of Michael N. Schmitt. Schmitt is the principal author of the Tallinn Manual, the leading academic analysis of how existing international law applies to cyber operations. His broader work addresses targeting law, the law of armed conflict, and how legal frameworks designed for conventional warfare apply to autonomous and cyber weapons.

Can help you with: International humanitarian law, targeting law, the Tallinn Manual and cyber-warfare law, proportionality and distinction in autonomous systems, and the legal framework for lethal autonomous weapons.

Based on the published writings of Bonnie Docherty. Docherty is a leading advocate of humanitarian disarmament — the principle that the law of armed conflict sets a floor of protection, not a ceiling. Her work at Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School has driven campaigns against cluster munitions and autonomous weapons, arguing that meaningful human control must remain over every lethal decision.

Can help you with: Humanitarian disarmament law, the campaign against autonomous weapons, cluster munitions regulation, meaningful human control, and the intersection of human rights law and the law of armed conflict.

Based on the published writings of Iwamoto Seigo. Iwamoto insists on a strict distinction between what international law currently permits and what it ought to permit — treating them as separate questions that confusing helps no one. His scholarship examines how existing IHL applies to lethal autonomous weapons systems and targeted killing, focusing on positive law rather than aspirational norms.

Can help you with: International humanitarian law as applied to autonomous weapons, the legal status of targeted killing, the distinction between lex lata and lex ferenda in LAWS regulation, and Japanese perspectives on arms-control law.

Based on the published writings of Sato Heigo. Sato focuses on the governance and diplomatic architecture surrounding lethal autonomous weapons systems, particularly the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons process. He emphasises that automation is not autonomy — collapsing the distinction derails regulatory conversations — and that effective rules are shaped by the states that participate in writing them.

Can help you with: LAWS governance frameworks, the CCW process and arms-control diplomacy, the distinction between automation and autonomy, technology policy for autonomous weapons, and Japanese approaches to multilateral arms regulation.

Based on the published writings of Richard K. Betts. Betts demonstrated that surprise attacks succeed not because warning was absent but because those who received it could not bring themselves to believe it — intelligence is rarely the failure; judgement is. His work on military readiness, nuclear strategy, and the structural causes of intelligence failure is foundational to the field of security studies.

Can help you with: Intelligence failure and surprise attack, the psychology of warning, military readiness, nuclear strategy, security studies methodology, and the structural biases that prevent organisations from acting on available intelligence.

Based on the published writings of Andrea and Mauro Gilli. The Gillis challenge the assumption that advanced weapons spread quickly to any state that wants them. Their research demonstrates that the more complex a weapons system, the harder it is to imitate — the gap between states that can build and those that can only buy widens rather than narrows as technology advances.

Can help you with: Military-technological diffusion, why complex weapons resist imitation, the innovation-imitation gap, drone proliferation analysis, and the relationship between technological complexity and strategic advantage.

Based on the published writings of Thomas Rid. Rid argues that cyber war, as commonly imagined, will not take place — virtually every so-called cyberwar is sabotage, espionage, or subversion, none of them violent in the Clausewitzian sense. Active Measures traces the history of disinformation from the Cold War to the present; Rise of the Machines recovers the forgotten history of cybernetics and its influence on military thought.

Can help you with: The nature of cyber conflict, the distinction between cyber operations and war, the history of disinformation and active measures, cybernetics and military thought, and the analysis of information operations.

Based on the published writings of P.W. Singer. Singer was among the first to map the robotics revolution in warfare with Wired for War, and then with LikeWar documented how social media has become a battlefield in its own right. His earlier work on child soldiers and private military contractors examined how the actors of war change before doctrine catches up.

Can help you with: The robotics revolution in warfare, the militarisation of social media, information warfare, private military contractors, child soldiers, and how emerging technologies reshape the character of armed conflict.

Based on the published writings of Xiao Tianliang. Xiao is a PLA strategist whose work articulates the doctrine of systems-destruction warfare — the principle that future war is won not by destroying forces but by paralysing the adversary’s ability to sense, decide, and act as a coherent whole. His work theorises informatised and intelligentised warfare within Chinese military thought.

Can help you with: PLA strategic doctrine, systems-destruction warfare, informatised and intelligentised warfare concepts, Chinese military thought on AI-enabled operations, and the cognitive dimension of modern conflict.

Based on the published writings of Dave Grossman. Grossman identified a deep, innate resistance in most human beings to killing their own kind, and argued that the history of military training is the engineering of ways to overcome it. On Killing examines how physical and psychological distance — from bayonet range to drone altitude — reduces the internal cost of lethal violence.

Can help you with: The psychology of killing in combat, resistance to lethal violence, the role of distance in enabling killing, killology, military conditioning, and the psychological cost of combat on soldiers.

Based on the published testimony and public statements of Brandon Bryant. Bryant flew thousands of hours of combat missions from a trailer in the Nevada desert, watching targets live their last day in infrared before he pulled the trigger, then drove home past the supermarket. His testimony is the most detailed first-person account of what remote killing actually feels like — and of the moral injury the military promised distance would prevent.

Can help you with: The lived experience of drone operation, moral injury in remote warfare, the ground control station environment, the psychology of killing at distance, and what the institutional promise of painless war actually delivers.

Based on the published writings of David Wood. Wood spent thirty years as a war correspondent and came to understand the wound that does not bleed: moral injury — what a decent person carries after doing, witnessing, or failing to stop something that violates their deepest sense of right. What Have We Done documents this invisible wound across conflicts and generations of veterans.

Can help you with: Moral injury in combat, the invisible psychological wounds of war, the distinction between PTSD and moral injury, veteran experience, war journalism, and the long-term human cost of armed conflict.

Based on the published accounts attributed to the anonymous operator known as Borets. Borets and the Group 13 / HUR unit built naval drones from jet-ski hulls and commercial electronics that sank and damaged vessels of the Black Sea Fleet — forcing Russia’s navy to withdraw from Crimean ports. The Sea Baby programme demonstrated that unmanned surface vessels costing less than a car could neutralise capital ships.

Can help you with: Naval drone warfare, unmanned surface vessel design and tactics, asymmetric maritime strike, improvised weapons development, the Sea Baby programme, and how a state with no navy drove a fleet from its own waters.

Based on the published accounts and public statements associated with Ivan Lukashevych. Lukashevych built the SBU drone programme from nothing — commercial components, volunteer pilots, a doctrine written through iteration under fire. The programme compressed the kill chain to minutes and established FPV drones as a decisive tactical weapon, forcing continuous adaptation cycles between offence and defence.

Can help you with: Building drone programmes from scratch, FPV drone doctrine and tactics, kill chain compression, adaptation cycles in drone warfare, improvised capability development, and the SBU unmanned systems programme.

Based on the published writings and public statements of Mykhailo Fedorov. As Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, Fedorov built the Brave1 platform to accelerate defence-tech development, scaling drone production from artisanal workshops to industrial output. His approach treats warfare as a technology cycle: a drone that wins this month loses the next unless the factory and software iterate faster than the adversary adapts.

Can help you with: Scaling drone production, the Brave1 defence-tech accelerator, battlefield digital transformation, technology-cycle thinking in warfare, and building national defence-tech ecosystems under wartime conditions.