Description
This paper redefines the conceptual and empirical boundaries of remote warfare scholarship by exploring its relationship to the US Department of Defense's (DoD) evolving strategic focus on great power competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Existing remote warfare literature has almost entirely drawn from the empirical study of post-9/11 Western counterterrorism and stabilization operations. It has faced criticism for oversimplifying the character of contemporary warfare and for lacking conceptual clarity. This paper builds on these critiques by identifying another important gap in remote warfare scholarship: the failure to critically interrogate the shift in the DoD’s defense planning priorities from irregular warfare toward preparing for high-intensity conflict in the Indo-Pacific.
To address this gap, this paper examines three recent DoD initiatives—AirSea Battle, the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030, and the Replicator Initiative—highlighting how they challenge many of the assumptions underpinning existing remote warfare scholarship. These initiatives suggest that the future of war is likely to be less “remote,” less asymmetrical, and more geopolitically significant than existing remote warfare scholarship implies. On this basis, this paper argues that a hypothetical US-China war fought in the Indo-Pacific cannot be classified as remote warfare, providing an intuitive but important empirical contribution that sharpens the concept’s currently fuzzy boundaries of contrast.
This paper makes a wider contribution to security studies scholarship by arguing that the study of remote warfare should be reconceptualized as a "trading zone" for understanding the production and effects of different forms of distance in war. This move would not only help revive the currently dwindling interest in the concept but also better situate it within the broader debates on the changing character of warfare.
