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Erik Lin-Greenberg, "The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft" (Cornell UP, 2025)
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A
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C
Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I am your host, Eleonora Matiacci, an associate professor of Political science at Amherst College. Today I'm speaking with Professor Eric Lynn Greenberg, who is in the Political Science department at mit. Professor Lynn Greenberg's new book is the Remote Drones and Modern Statecraft. The book was published in 2025 by Cornell University Press as part of its series, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs. Professor Lynn Greenberg, thank you for joining us and welcome.
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B
Thanks so much for having me.
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C
Let's start with the remote revolution itself. You argue in your book that drones provide decision Makers with a low risk tool that changes their calculus about using military force. What sparked your interest in this idea, and what type of conventional wisdom about drones or military technology are you challenging with this book?
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B
Sure. So the book grew out of my dissertation, and as I think with most academics, the dissertation I ended up writing was very, very different from the dissertation that I thought I was going to write when I started graduate school. So I went into graduate school thinking that I was going to write about the strategies that rising powers use to project and signal military power. But I kept thinking about my work prior to graduate school. And so before starting my PhD, I was an active duty officer in the US Air Force, and I spent much of that time working with drone operations. And so for most of my time in the Air Force, we were focused on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. But it really became clear to me that potential drone use cases were going to expand well beyond those relatively asymmetric conflict settings. And so I thought that drones were really going to become this permanent fixture on the international stage. So I remember this one specific moment in, I think, fall of 2012, when I showed up at work and I learned that Iran had attempted to shoot down a US Air Force Predator drone. And it struck me that states were really going to start using drones as a form of currency, so to speak, in international competition. So fast forward a few years to when I started working on my dissertation prospectus. There was a lot of writing about whether drones were effective counterterrorism tools, and significant debate about the ethics of drone use, but far less about the use of drones in interstate conflict and competition. And so that's really what set me off on this project. And so in terms of the conventional wisdom that the book challenges is that there's this idea that drones are, you know, inherently destabilizing or escalatory. And so there's a lot of research and policy writing from the height of the wars in Afghanistan that suggested that drones were going to lower the cost and risk of military operations just so much that leaders were going to dispatch drones all the time. And I think this speaks to this broader set of arguments in international relations theory about the role of technology in international security. And again, again, there's this notion that technology that lowers the cost of military operations increases the likelihood of conflict. And so the remote revolution challenges this and argues that the increased deployment of military technologies doesn't always seem to escalate across the threshold into conventional conflict. Great.
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C
You explained that very, very clearly. And I remember that that's how we used to think about those debates. In the book, you describe a dual dynamic, the moral hazard effect and the escalation control effect. And you argue that together these two elements produce what you define as more but milder conflicts. Can you walk us through a specific case that illustrates how these two effects work together?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. So that divergent but simultaneous effects that you describe are really at the core of the remote revolution. Right? So on one hand, you have this moral hazard effect that leads national security makers to dispatch drones more frequently than inhabited assets or ground troops and to use force more readily against their adversaries, drones. And then pulling in the other direction, you have this escalation control effect, which is when decision makers end up taking much more restrained retaliation when their own drones are lost. So in the book, I use a mix of real world examples and then also war games and experiments to study this phenomenon. And I think there's this one set of cases that really highlights this dual dynamic pretty well, and that's the US Government's use of drones over China the height of the Cold War. And so I think we often think about drones as this relatively recent addition to military arsenals. And of course, right, modern drones are far more widely proliferated and more capable than those of earlier generations. But as I was working on the project, I discovered that militaries have been experimenting with and using drones really for nearly as long as we've had powered flight. And the US Was this relatively early drone adapter. And so early in the Vietnam War, the US Is sending these reconnaissance drones over Vietnam to gather intelligence. And intelligence officials soon realize that they can also use the same exact drones to collect intelligence and spy on China. And so the US Government had been searching for ways to collect intelligence on China and of other communist states without putting U.S. forces in harm's way. And they attempted to use balloons, which wasn't really effective. They tried to outsource operations, so having, you know, allies and partners fly these missions. But they quickly realized that drones are offered this alternative. And so in the archival record, we see senior decision makers suggesting that drones should be used to gather intelligence over over China rather than inhabited assets. So evidence that this moral hazard effect is at play. And so all these drones are flying over China. And the Chinese government actually shoots several of these drones down. The Chinese government has news reports of these. So it's not a secret. The Chinese government is saying, look, our valiant PLA pilots were defending Chinese airspace and shot these things down. They have this huge display, Tiananmen Square, where they Put drones on display and the US effectively ignores it. And so this is really evidence of this escalation control effect at play. And I think one of my favorite findings from the archival research is this one U.S. air Force Colonel who's involved in the drone program at the time is quoted as saying something like, well, don't sweat it if they shoot it down. Doesn't matter if the part say made in the US on it. There's not a US pilot in a Chinese prison, so just sit it out and let it play out. And so I think that really highlights this tension of doing more but then holding off on retaliation when assets are lost.
- [08:24]
C
I think that's a great case. And it really illustrates the double effects, the dual dynamic very well. So by now, sort of, you explained to us what kind of conventional wisdom you challenge. You walked us through an example of this dual dynamic between moral hazard and escalation control effect. But before we dive even deeper, I want to ask, why should our listeners care about this? Drones are often discussed in terms of targeted strikes or civilian casualties. But if you're making a broader argument about statecraft and international security, then why does understanding the remote revolution matter for non policymakers or non scholars?
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B
Yeah, so I think understanding how drones affect politics matters because drones are becoming just increasingly more common in ways that affect the average citizen. So if we look back at just the last few weeks and months, for instance, you see these massive delays at major airports across Europe after drones potentially operated by Russian backed groups were spotted operating in ways that could endanger commercial flights. If we go back, you know, a few more months, we see Iran and its proxies using drones to attack civilian targets in Israel and elsewhere in the broader Middle East. And so these are ways that affected major Israeli cities and commercial shipping. Things that are really affecting, you know, everyday citizens and really expanding what we think of as the traditional battlefield. So I suppose, you know, in short, drones are just now very much part of everyday life for everyday people. And the book sets out to explain the impact drones have.
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A
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C
Why we should care. I remember very well those airport disruptions just a few weeks ago in the fall of 2025. One of your more striking findings is that decision makers are more likely to shoot down a rival's drone than an uninhabited aircraft because they assumed that the response would be less escalatory. As you explained to us, were there surprising turns in your thinking as you developed this argument? Were there moments in which the evidence pushed you in a different direction?
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B
Yes, that's a really great question. I think one of the most surprising findings for me was how leaders who were considering deploying drones thought about and navigated this potential for, you know, what I refer to in the book as a surge in shootdowns. So leaders often tried to think what it might mean for their credibility if an adversary continually shot down drones and took no response. So there's this fascinating set of records from the Johnson administration where the national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, and the Undersecretary of State have this back and forth where they're discussing how Cuba would, you know, undoubtedly attack spy planes if they realized the US Was flying drones and not manned aircraft. And then the Secretary of Defense chimes in and says, well, even if we keep shooting these down, we can keep flying these for several weeks in the face of shoot downs. Then he stops himself and says, well, maybe the Cubans think, well, we lack resolve if we don't do anything. And he starts thinking aloud and says, well, we have to do something. But never in the notes do we find out what he was thinking that they would have to do. And so, you know, I think that led me to say, well, how do we think about resolve when you have these assets that are designed not to put skin in the game? And I think this is a debate that policymakers and scholars still wrestle with today. Scholars like Amy Zegert out of the Hoover Institution have made the argument, right, that just by continuing missions of drones in the face of losses, that is in itself a signal of resolve or demonstration of resolve. And I think that's an argument that I largely agree with.
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C
Yes, I did not see that coming. That's very interesting. And you just talked about the records from the Johnson administration, which leads me to my next question, which is on your research design. Your research design is very creative. The book is empirically very rich. And so you combine original war games with national security practitioners, survey experiments with military officers and foreign policy experts, and also historical case studies. How did you approach building this multimedia design? What does it allow you to see that a single method wouldn't?
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B
So I think the research design really emerged in part out of necessity. There's a unique set of challenges that arise when you're studying emerging military technologies. First, there's often limited data about use cases. And this makes sense, right? The operational history of these things is often relatively short, and governments want to keep information hidden behind the veil of secrecy to avoid giving adversaries information about their capabilities. So I had to find ways to test the argument using a mix of real world data when it was available, and then ways to generate synthetic data when it wasn't available. So first, in the real world data we referenced already in my earlier responses, some of these historical case studies. And I think these allowed us to look backwards in order to look forward, if that makes sense. So to trying to look at these historical cases when drones were used. And as we said earlier, drones have this much longer operational history than we actually think. And many of the debates that policymakers were having during the Cold War, the 1990s, were very similar to the types of debates that we have today. So that allowed us, I think, to do some of this hypothesis testing in a real world context. And then I needed some more recent data, more or less right that wasn't in the Cold War. And so that's when I had these synthetic data generating processes using survey experiments fielded on elite samples of military officers and foreign policy practitioners, and these war games that had embedded experiments in them. And so both the war games and the experiments allowed me to construct these hypothetical but really plausible scenarios where I was able to collect data about the decisions of national security practitioners, but in an environment where I could really control things. And so I think each element of that research design hopefully provides evidence that tells a compelling story. So the survey experiments allow for a degree of statistical inference. The war games have these debates between national security practitioners. They argue about the right course of action. And this qualitative evidence allows me to try to unpack some of the micro foundations of the remote revolution. And then the case studies, you know, allow us to look at how the remote revolution unfolds in complex real world settings that are a bit less sterile and controlled than the scenarios in the experiments in war games.
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C
Yes, it's masterfully done. It enriches our debates on drones immensely. So thank you you argue that a shared understanding has emerged globally among policymakers that drone interactions fall on relatively long rungs of the escalation. Sorry, low rungs of the escalation ladder. Where do you expect scholars or practitioners to push back?
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B
So I guess there's two common pushbacks that I've heard in earlier conversations of the work, both with scholars and also policymakers themselves. And the first is this challenge to the escalation control effect that we talked about a little bit earlier. So critics of the argument often say, look, if there's more militarized interactions that it's when the moral hazard is playing out, there's always the risk of escalation. Right. And you know that militarized interactions are a bit like the lottery. At some point something's going to spiral out of control. But I think it's important to argue that my argument's probabilistic, like, like any theory. Right. It has to be falsifiable. I'm not trying to say that escalation will never happen when you have remote war fighting technologies, but instead, you know, on average, operations and signaling involving drones and other remote war fighting technologies are likely to stay at these relatively low rungs on the escalation ladder. Right. There's always a chance that something will escalate. That's always the case when you have states interacting and disagreeing over things. You know, a second point that I've had people raise is that drones are really not revolutionizing statecraft because there's lots of other technologies that provide similar capabilities without putting service members at risk. So for instance, satellites can collect intelligence information without putting a human in harm's way, and cruise missiles can strike targets from vast distances without endangering friendly forces. But at the end of the day, I think drones are fundamentally different. First off, they're far more prevalent. The barrier to entry to acquiring a drone is arguably far less than launching one's own satellite. And these are often, you know, a multi role asset for, for states. Right. They, they can use them to gather intelligence and to carry out strikes. And so they enable states to, to do things that they wouldn't otherwise have been able to do in the past. So at the end of the day, I think they, they do revolutionize statecrafts.
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C
Makes sense. And the argument comes off very clearly in the book that like you said, it's a probabilistic statement and that you compare the escalation risk with drones versus sending a pilot somewhere. Let's talk a little bit about the practical implications of your argument. You Point to increased drone proliferation and the enabling of tailored precision strikes as key consequences of this remote revolution. If policymakers took your research seriously, how should it inform their thinking about drone use?
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B
Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's a few big potential implications. The first is I think the proliferation of drones and other remote war fighting technologies should lead us to reassess international norms and laws that govern military operations. So under international law, inhabited aircraft, so manned aircraft, and uninhabited ones, unmanned assets, are equivalent under international law. But we've seen in practice that states use these assets in very, very different ways. So there might be value in thinking about how do we codify things under international law and under international agreements, how do we think about deconfliction in the event that there's an accident and preventing, you know, accidents from being necessarily interpreted as deliberate events. And I think this is increasingly important as we start seeing more and more autonomous systems built in. Right. So systems that aren't just unmanned, but are AI enabled and are operating in an autonomous manner. And so how do we think about a world in which the technologies associated with conflict are very, very different? Second, I think there's probably value in thinking about the second and third order consequences of drone proliferation. I think one of the things that we've seen over the past few years is that drones are now this weapon of choice for states around the world. And we've seen states that are not traditional arms exporters taking on a much, much larger role in selling drones. So Turkey, for instance, Iran, is now exporting large numbers of drones. And this gives states a large amount of power and influence over, you know, potential patrons that are buying these systems. And so we need to think about how do we counter that influence, for instance, as these states that are not always allies and partners of the United States start exporting more drones. And then the third is maybe a simple thing to think about, but one that's technically complex, and that's how do we do air defense against drones in a cost effective manner? I think one of the things that we've seen in the war in, in Ukraine is that the Ukrainians are using very, very expensive systems to shoot down relatively inexpensive drones. And so how do we change that cost exchange ratio so it's in the favor of the defenders, because as we see more and more drones operating, this is only going to pose a greater risk to military operations around the world.
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C
Makes sense. Looking, looking back at your research and your writing process, what was one of the most intellectually rewarding aspects of creating this work?
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B
So I guess if I had to pick a single favorite, it would have to be the War Games, right? I had a lot of fun trying to integrate elements of experimental research design into War Games, this traditional military tool. So first getting to create these hypothetical worlds was really fun and trying to figure out just how much realism to put in without, you know, forcing people to have biases about real world countries. And then getting to see how seriously participants took the War Games was really fascinating and it allowed me, I think, to generate really interesting data. People had these emotional responses that you might not necessarily think that they would have in a entirely fictional setting. And I think one of the other reasons why the War Games were intellectually stimulating was it really helped to set the stage for a collaboration with a bunch of other great friends and colleagues, people like Andrew Reddy, Reid Pauley, Jackie Schneider, who are also working on wargaming as a research tool. So it opened up again, just room for collaboration and learning from them. And then I think the experience of working on the War Games really helped set the foundation for MIT's Wargaming Lab, which I co direct and we run a large, large scale game. Every year we have these academic and scholarly workshops and an annual wargaming institute. So it's been really fun to see the spread of wargaming as a tool of scholarly research. And so I continue to learn from really smart people when I talk to them about how they're using wargaming. And that's been super, super fun.
- [23:15]
C
That sounds like it was a lot of fun. That's great. We've taken a lot of your time today. So we have one last question. What are you working on right now?
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B
Yeah, so I'm working on a second book project with a co author, Theo Milianopoulos, who, who's a professor at the Naval War College. And the book looks at essentially what we call the transparency trade off. And that's how international politics operates in a world where secrecy is eroding. Right. In the past, states used to be able to control secrecy around their military operations and covert action. But a host of new technologies today, whether it's commercial satellites, smartphones, or Fitbits that we wear, are revealing really detailed information about states, foreign policy and military activity. And the book tries to explore how states are navigating these complex sets of challenges that at sometimes are helpful for states and other times are harmful.
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C
That sounds like a great second book. You must come back when it's done and tell us all about it.
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B
Thanks. Thanks so much.
- [24:16]
C
Thank you, Professor Lynn Greenberg, for taking the time to talk with us today. My guest has been Professor Eric Lynn Greenberg from the Department of Political Science at mit. Professor Lynn Greenberg's new book is the Remote Drones and Modern Statecraft. The book was published in 2025 by Cornell University Press as part of its Cornell Studies in Security affairs series. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci. Until next time.