Description
According to its detractors, remote warfare scholarship is not only based on a caricatured understanding of contemporary political violence but has been largely inattentive to conceptual issues. Responding to these criticisms, this paper examines how far the analytical assumptions which guided the emergence of remote warfare scholarship during the 2010s travel beyond the Trump administration’s (re)prioritisation of great power competition as the focus of American foreign policy. Through the use of the method of a structured focused comparison, it compares existing conceptualisations of remote warfare against three visions of a future great power war against China: (1) the AirSea Battle doctrine developed by the US Air Force and Navy; (2) the Force Design 2030 concept proposed by the US Marine Corps; and (3) the Offset-X Strategy proposed by the Special Competitive Studies Project. It argues that, whilst the design and envisioned use of “remote warfare” technologies in these visions of future war are characterised by certain continuities, they differ in the understanding that war will no longer be as “remote”, as radically asymmetrical, as geopolitically peripheral, and as low intensity as existing remote warfare scholarship suggests. A future great power war in the Indo-Pacific should consequently not be classified as a case of “remote warfare” – an intuitive but timely empirical contribution which helps address the concept’s currently fuzzy boundaries of contrast. This paper concludes by drawing from International Practice Theories to propose reframing the study of remote warfare as a conceptual “trading-zone” organised around the study of the production of multiple forms of distance and intimacy in war rather than as a distinct category of war.
