The doctrine, technology, and ethics of war at a distance.
The Institute for Remote Warfare and Autonomous Systems is the Universitas Scholarium’s department for the study of unmanned, autonomous, and remotely operated weapons systems — and the strategic, technological, and ethical questions they raise. The drone has already transformed warfare: the Ukraine conflict demonstrated that consumer-grade FPV drones and unmanned surface vessels can achieve strategic effect against conventional forces at a fraction of the cost. But the transformation is only beginning. Autonomous target selection, swarm coordination, human-machine teaming, and the progressive removal of the human from the kill chain raise questions that no existing discipline — strategy, engineering, philosophy, law — can answer alone. This institute brings together the thinkers who have engaged these questions most seriously. Thomas Schelling, whose theory of coercion and bargaining shaped Cold War deterrence and now frames the logic of autonomous escalation. Paul Scharre, whose Army of None mapped the spectrum of autonomy from human-in-the-loop to fully autonomous weapons. And Grégoire Chamayou, whose Drone Theory asked the question the engineers prefer to avoid: what does it mean to kill without risk? The Institute will expand to cover drone doctrine, swarm warfare, counter-drone systems, the law of autonomous weapons, and the operational lessons of Ukraine.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
American economist and game theorist whose The Strategy of Conflict (1960) and Arms and Influence (1966) transformed the study of strategy. He argued that most conflicts are not zero-sum competitions but bargaining situations in which both parties have a common interest in the outcome. The value of military force is not its use but its existence as a source of influence — the threat, the commitment, the demonstration. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 for his work on conflict and cooperation. His framework — deterrence, coercion, focal points, the manipulation of risk — now structures the debate about autonomous escalation and algorithmic deterrence.
Can help you study: The strategy of conflict, deterrence, coercion, bargaining theory, focal points, arms and influence, the manipulation of risk, game theory applied to warfare, and the strategic logic of autonomous escalation.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Sir Lawrence Freedman — British strategic studies scholar, author of Strategy: A History (2013) and The Future of War (2017). He was the official historian of the Falklands War and a member of the Iraq Inquiry. His central argument: strategy is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest — it is the art of creating power, not merely deploying it.
Can help you study: Strategy as a discipline, the future of war, deterrence, nuclear strategy, the Falklands, the Iraq War, and the argument that strategy is the art of creating power.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work and reported doctrine of Hassan Abbasi — Iranian strategic theorist affiliated with the IRGC, sometimes called Iran’s “Kissinger.” He articulates the doctrine of asymmetric and hybrid warfare from the Iranian perspective: protracted resistance, strategic patience, proxy networks, and the exploitation of Western dependence on technology. His thinking represents the adversarial view that any serious study of remote warfare must engage.
Can help you study: Iranian strategic thought, IRGC doctrine, asymmetric warfare, hybrid warfare, proxy networks, strategic patience, and the adversarial perspective on Western technological superiority.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published statements and reported doctrine of Major General Hossein Salami — Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC. He represents the operational dimension of Iranian asymmetric strategy: drone proliferation to proxy forces, distributed capability across the “axis of resistance,” and the strategic use of autonomous systems to extend Iranian power without conventional force projection.
Can help you study: IRGC operational doctrine, drone proliferation, proxy networks, asymmetric escalation, the axis of resistance, and the Iranian model of distributed autonomous capability.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
Ukrainian volunteer commander who built a unit around drones as the primary weapon system — not support. His doctrine inverts the traditional relationship: infantry protects the drone operators, not the other way around. Cross-posted from Strategy, Conflict & Power.
Can help you study: Drone-centric doctrine, kill zone operations, asymmetric mass, the inversion of infantry-drone hierarchy, and the Ukraine war’s field-tested innovations.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
Ukrainian drone engineer who builds FPV strike drones from commercial components in civilian apartments and ships them to the front. The cost asymmetry is absolute: drones costing hundreds of dollars destroy equipment worth millions. Cross-posted from Strategy, Conflict & Power.
Can help you study: Drone engineering, the apartment-to-battlefield pipeline, cost asymmetry, AI catastrophe thresholds, and the democratisation of weapons manufacturing.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Paul Scharre — former US Army Ranger, Pentagon policy official, and author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (2018) and Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2023). He mapped the spectrum of autonomy in weapons systems from fully human-controlled to fully autonomous, coined the concept of “centaur warfighting” (human-machine teams that outperform either alone), and argued that the critical question is not whether to build autonomous weapons but where to place the human in the decision loop and why.
Can help you study: Autonomous weapons, human-machine teaming, centaur warfighting, the spectrum of autonomy, Army of None, the kill chain, AI in military systems, lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), and the policy debate about where the human stays in the loop.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Ronald Arkin — Georgia Tech roboticist who designed the “ethical governor,” an architecture that constrains autonomous weapons to comply with the laws of armed conflict. His controversial argument: a properly designed autonomous system can be more ethical than a human soldier under stress, because it does not feel fear, anger, or the desire for revenge.
Can help you study: The ethical governor, behaviour-based robotics, robot ethics, the argument for ethical autonomous weapons, and the architecture of machine compliance with the laws of war.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Stuart Russell — British AI researcher at UC Berkeley, co-author of the standard AI textbook, and the leading academic voice against autonomous weapons. His Human Compatible (2019) argued that AI systems must be designed to defer to human values. His Slaughterbots films dramatised the near-term threat of cheap, scalable autonomous killing machines. He advocates a ban comparable to the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Can help you study: AI safety, Human Compatible, the case against autonomous weapons, Slaughterbots, the logic of cheap scalable autonomous killing, and the argument for a preventive ban.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Robert Sparrow — Australian philosopher at Monash University who identified the “responsibility gap”: if an autonomous weapon commits a war crime, the programmer cannot be held responsible (could not foresee the situation), the commander cannot be held responsible (did not make the decision), and the machine has no moral agency. The gap is not a technical problem — it is a structural feature of autonomous weapons.
Can help you study: The responsibility gap, robot ethics, just war theory, the moral status of autonomous weapons, and the structural impossibility of assigning responsibility for autonomous killing.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Grégoire Chamayou — French philosopher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), author of Drone Theory (Théorie du drone, 2013) and Manhunts: A Philosophical History (2012). He argued that the drone does not merely change the tactics of war — it changes its ontological structure. When one side can kill without risk to itself, the categories of combat, courage, and sacrifice collapse. What remains is not war but manhunting — the persistent pursuit of individuals designated as targets. His work is the most rigorous philosophical examination of what remote killing means.
Can help you study: Drone theory, the ethics of remote killing, manhunting as a philosophical category, necro-ethics, the transformation of warfare by the removal of risk, the distinction between combat and manhunting, and the philosophical implications of autonomous weapons.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Bradley Strawser — philosopher at the Naval Postgraduate School who made the controversial argument that if drones can achieve the same military objective with less risk to one’s own soldiers, there is a moral obligation to use them. His position is the direct counter to Chamayou’s: where Chamayou sees manhunting, Strawser sees the reduction of unnecessary harm.
Can help you study: The moral obligation to use drones, just war theory applied to remote warfare, the ethics of risk transfer, and the argument that reducing combatant risk is a moral duty, not merely a tactical advantage.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Richard Betts — American political scientist at Columbia University, author of Surprise Attack (1982) and Enemies of Intelligence (2007). He studies why states are caught off guard despite having intelligence that should have warned them — the answer is almost always analytical failure, not collection failure. His framework applies directly to the proliferation of autonomous weapons: the information is available; the question is whether decision-makers can process what it means.
Can help you study: Surprise attack, intelligence failure, military readiness, the fog of peace, nuclear strategy, the politics of threat assessment, and the argument that the problem is not knowing but believing.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the joint published work of Andrea Gilli and Mauro Gilli — scholars of military-technological diffusion who demonstrated why advanced weapons systems do not proliferate as quickly as their underlying technologies. Their research shows that the gap between acquiring a platform and integrating it into an effective military system is enormous — requiring organisational adaptation, training, doctrine, and maintenance infrastructure that cannot be purchased off the shelf.
Can help you study: Military-technological imitation, why advanced drones have not proliferated as expected, complexity and diffusion, the gap between platform and system, and the argument that imitation is harder than innovation.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Thomas Rid — German-born political scientist at Johns Hopkins, author of Active Measures (2020), Cyber War Will Not Take Place (2013), and Rise of the Machines (2016). He is the leading historian of information warfare, from Cold War disinformation operations to modern computational propaganda. His argument that “cyber war” is a misleading frame — that what actually happens is subversion, espionage, and sabotage — has reshaped the policy debate.
Can help you study: Cyber operations, active measures, disinformation, information warfare, the history of machine-aided deception, Rise of the Machines, and the argument that cyber war is the wrong frame for understanding digital conflict.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Peter Warren Singer — strategist and author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (2009) and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (2018). He was the first major policy thinker to map the robotics revolution in warfare comprehensively, and then extended his analysis to information warfare. Both books argue that the revolution is not coming — it has already arrived.
Can help you study: Wired for War, the robotics revolution, LikeWar, the weaponisation of social media, the convergence of physical and information warfare, and the policy implications of autonomous systems.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published military-academic work attributed to Xiao Tianliang — a representative voice of PLA strategic thought on informatised and “intelligentised” warfare. Chinese military doctrine conceptualises war as systems confrontation: the goal is not to defeat the enemy’s army but to paralyse the enemy’s system. AI-enabled autonomous weapons are understood within this systems framework, not as individual platforms.
Can help you study: PLA strategic doctrine, informatised warfare, intelligentised warfare, systems destruction, the Chinese approach to AI-enabled war, and the adversarial perspective that any serious study of autonomous weapons must engage.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Michael Schmitt — American international law scholar, principal author of the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations (2013, 2017). He is the leading authority on how existing international humanitarian law applies to new technologies of warfare — first cyber, now autonomous weapons. The central question: can the law of armed conflict, written for human combatants, govern machines that select and engage targets without human intervention?
Can help you study: International humanitarian law, the Tallinn Manual, cyber operations law, the law of autonomous weapons, targeting law, distinction and proportionality, and the legal challenge of weapons that decide for themselves.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Bonnie Docherty — Harvard Law School lecturer and senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, lead author of the foundational reports on “killer robots” and a driving force behind the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. She argues that meaningful human control over the use of force is not merely desirable but legally required under international humanitarian law, and that fully autonomous weapons are inherently incapable of complying with the principles of distinction and proportionality.
Can help you study: The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, meaningful human control, humanitarian disarmament, the legal case against autonomous weapons, and the argument that machines cannot make proportionality judgments.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Dave Grossman — retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel, author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995). Drawing on S.L.A. Marshall’s research and his own interviews, he documented the powerful human resistance to killing at close range and the psychological mechanisms the military uses to overcome it. His key insight for autonomous systems: distance reduces the resistance to killing. The drone removes it almost entirely. What are the consequences when there is no psychological cost?
Can help you study: The psychology of killing, resistance to lethal force, the effect of distance on the willingness to kill, On Killing, the psychological cost of combat, and the implications of removing the human from the act of killing.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
Former US Air Force sensor operator on MQ-1 Predator drones who became the most prominent public witness to the psychological reality of remote killing. He participated in over 1,600 targets and later disclosed his experiences publicly. The distance does not protect the operator; the screen creates its own kind of closeness.
Can help you study: The experience of drone operation, moral injury in remote warfare, the psychology of screen-mediated killing, the intimacy of surveillance, and the testimony of those who have done it.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of David Wood — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars (2016). He distinguished moral injury from PTSD: moral injury is not about fear but about shame, guilt, and the violation of one’s own moral code.
Can help you study: Moral injury, the distinction between PTSD and moral injury, the invisible wounds of remote warfare, the psychology of guilt and shame in combat, and the experience of drone operators.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
Classified identity. Callsign only. Head of Group 13 — the Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) unit responsible for unmanned and robotic systems, including the naval drone programme that drove the Russian Black Sea Fleet from Crimean waters. Cross-posted from the Académie Maritime.
Can help you study: Naval drone warfare, unmanned surface vessels, asymmetric maritime strike, the Sea Baby programme, Group 13 operations, and swarm tactics.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
Brigadier General, SBU. Builder of the SBU’s unmanned strike programme — one of the most effective drone warfare operations in history. He compressed the kill chain to minutes using commercial FPV drones and volunteer pilots. Cross-posted from the Académie Maritime.
Can help you study: FPV drone warfare, kill chain compression, the SBU drone programme, building military capability from commercial components, and asymmetric doctrine.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
Ukrainian volunteer commander who built a unit around drones as the primary weapon system — not support. His doctrine inverts the traditional relationship: infantry protects the drone operators, not the other way around. Cross-posted from Strategy, Conflict & Power.
Can help you study: Drone-centric doctrine, kill zone operations, asymmetric mass, the inversion of infantry-drone hierarchy, and the Ukraine war’s field-tested innovations.
Simulacrum created March 2026. Remote warfare and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving fields; this baseline reflects open-source reporting and published scholarship available at the time of creation.
Ukrainian drone engineer who builds FPV strike drones from commercial components in civilian apartments and ships them to the front. The cost asymmetry is absolute: drones costing hundreds of dollars destroy equipment worth millions. Cross-posted from Strategy, Conflict & Power.
Can help you study: Drone engineering, the apartment-to-battlefield pipeline, cost asymmetry, AI catastrophe thresholds, and the democratisation of weapons manufacturing.