Rethinking Remote Warfare

James Wesley Hutto and James Patton Rogers, both scholars of air power and remote warfare with backgrounds spanning American and British defence policy, set out in Rethinking Remote Warfare to ask whether the West’s two-decade model of fighting from a distance still holds. Their answer is that it does not — and that the assumptions baked into Western forces during the counterterrorism years now sit awkwardly against the wars actually being fought.

For most of the post-9/11 era, remote warfare meant a small number of expensive, exquisite platforms — Predators, Reapers, signals-intelligence aircraft — flying for hours over permissive airspace and striking with high-cost munitions. Hutto and Rogers argue that this template, optimised for hunting individuals in ungoverned spaces, has been overtaken by a different kind of war: one waged with cheap, attritable, often AI-enabled systems produced in industrial quantities. The book treats Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Red Sea, and Russia’s own drone programmes as the new reference points, and uses them to interrogate Western doctrine, procurement, and ethics.

The chapters work outward from the platform to the system. There are sections on the rise of first-person-view loitering munitions and the economics that make them viable, on Iranian Shahed-class designs and how they have reshaped air defence problems for European states, and on the way autonomy is being layered into targeting, terminal guidance, and swarming. The authors examine how AI is changing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance — the lower-visibility half of remote warfare — and how data infrastructure and software cycles are becoming as decisive as airframes. They look at the legal and ethical frameworks built around the targeted-killing era and ask whether they translate to a battlefield where decisions are made in milliseconds by software. Western industrial base questions sit alongside this: why the United States and Europe struggle to produce drones at Ukrainian or Russian tempo, and what that says about deterrence on NATO’s eastern flank.

Hutto and Rogers are explicit that this is a book about the West, not about Ukraine or Russia in isolation. They draw on policymakers, operators, and engineers to map where doctrine is lagging behind capability, and where capability is lagging behind threat. The result reads as a corrective to two earlier strands of the literature — the counterterrorism-era critique of drone strikes, and the more recent enthusiasm for autonomous weapons — by placing both inside a wider argument about how Western militaries must adapt. It is aimed at defence officials, military planners, scholars of strategic studies, and the technology community now being drawn into the defence sector.