The Hand Behind Unmanned: Origins of the U.S. Autonomous Military Arsenal

The Hand Behind Unmanned: Origins of the U.S. Autonomous Military Arsenal by Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia MacDonald. Oxford University Press, 2025, 280 pp.

Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia MacDonald’s The Hand Behind Unmanned traces the development of the US investment in uninhabited weapon systems. Having published both peer-reviewed articles and an edited volume on drones and artificial intelligence in war, I was naturally interested in this topic.1

In asking how the US autonomous military arsenal has come to look the way it does, Schneider, the Hargrove Hoover fellow at Stanford University and director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, and MacDonald, director of research at the Asia New Zealand Foundation, unearth and explore several roads not taken in the innovation of uninhabited autonomous weapons systems. The book challenges the conventional wisdom of technological development, introducing the reader to the social, political, bureaucratic, and personal forces that push and pull technological military innovation.

Traditional studies on military innovation fall into competing schools of thought that provide independent explanations of the causes of military innovation; examples include a president or member of the political elite placing their thumb on the lever of innovation (civil-military relations), an inter- or intra-service competition fueling innovative practices, organizational mavericks bucking massive and slow-to-change bureaucracies, or organizational cultural milieus that respond in innovative ways to exogenous shocks.2 Schneider and MacDonald take their place among a growing literature in the military innovation studies subfield that, rather than choose one school over another, emphasizes the role of each. Institutions, organizations, and personalities all play a part in the social creation of the US autonomous military arsenal.

For Schneider and MacDonald, the key causal variable in the social construction of technology is the role of belief. As it relates to drones specifically, beliefs in technological determinism and military revolutions, and casualty aversion and force protection dwarf all others. In their retelling, exogenous shocks created by Vietnam, the end of the Cold War, and the events of September 11 and the wars that followed interacted with pre-existing service cultural identities and beliefs in technological determinism and military revolutions and casualty aversion and force protection to increase the likelihood of adoption of particular types of uninhabited technologies. The competition that emerges in the book’s narrative is between military revolution advocates and force protection advocates—who spar over technological investments intended to primarily decrease the time it takes to find, fix, and finish a target—and investments that favor a continuation of casualty avoidance and the limiting of danger to fielded forces. While believers in and advocates of the military revolution’s impact on kill chains gained the upper hand with the use of cruise missiles and ballistic missiles in the First Gulf War, the events of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and the US invasion of Iraq yielded a tidal shift toward uninhabited drones that prioritize precision and casualty avoidance. As the authors point out, the wars of the last two decades bear heavy responsibility for the character of the US drone arsenal.

The causal process traced by the authors is somewhat ambiguous, and makes for a difficult answer to the question, Who is the “hand behind unmanned?” Schneider and MacDonald argue, somewhat unconvincingly, that it is the hand of policy entrepreneurs who seize certain moments to usher in their uninhabited technology of choice. These “champions” guide investments in certain technologies through military organizations and congressional budgetary meetings like skilled marionettists, grafting their positions “onto existing understandings about war, international relations, or technology” through the use of compelling analogies (219). After all, the authors note, technological effectiveness is not a given but a social construct propagated “by those who have an interest in using, developing and sustaining that technology” (67).

Yet as much as individuals take center stage in the book, especially the inimitable Andrew Marshall and his Office of Net Assessment (ONA)—may they both rest in peace—this often appears as a story in which the movement of history overwhelms and drives the decision-making of bureaucracies and organizations alike. Entrepreneurs are constrained by the exogenous events happening around them—if their chosen technologies do not fit the moment, they stagnate. As noted above, the authors identify that “the trajectories of these unmanned systems reflected the [causal] power of external catalysts”—that is, the wars in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Middle East (217). Everything that shapes the characteristics of the US autonomous military arsenal occurs within the political contexts of these conflicts.

These contexts are powerful enough to convince individuals on the ground that the technologies of the future are predetermined to solve the problems of the present. Early in the book, an exasperated Marine explains to a room of service members concerned about the future of battlefield interdiction that “it doesn’t matter if we think manned or unmanned is better. Unmanned is the future” (6). In this way, belief in the inevitability of a technology is substituted for technological determinism through the creation of a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”3 Additionally, in answering the question why the development of drone technologies falls largely onto a US Air Force dominated by fighter generals, the authors provide a cultural explanation; the Air Force’s insecurity as an independent service drives it to gobble up uninhabited systems and missions being directed against international terrorist organizations with links to al-Qaeda. In other words, the counterintuitive decision of a pilot-centric organization to invest in pilotless aircraft is driven not from individual or organizational interest but by cultural impulse.

Nevertheless, the authors succeed in detailing the bounded choices made by individuals and organizations regarding the characteristics of uninhabited weapons systems. The Marine on the ground likely cares less about whether a crewed A-10 or an uninhabited MQ-9 will support them on the battlefield—only that one or the other is there when troops make contact with the enemy. For its part, the Air Force, while “gobbling up” uninhabited missions in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), did this only to a point and intentionally invested in platforms that also could fulfill more traditional strategic airpower roles and campaigns typical of Air Force culture. Marshall and the ONA do not fade into obscurity during the US wars in the Middle East but instead are viewed as trailblazers in early theorizing of the precision-strike capabilities so familiar to the GWOT.

Schneider and MacDonald, however, wish to reclaim the original intentions of ONA’s work, a reconnaissance strike complex that is tailored to a peer competitor. The progression of the US autonomous military arsenal over the last two decades, they argue, eroded American capabilities to perform this type of operation. GWOT investments in high-tech, extremely precise uninhabited aerial systems have come at the cost of “munitions better suited for a peer competitor in the information revolution era,” “ground-based and shipborne conventional strike, robust and resilient communications, and strategic early warning,” as well as “cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and mines” (121–122). But is this the fault of the hand behind unmanned or the contingency of history? The authors do not say.

Ultimately, the hand behind unmanned is not a single marionettist pulling the budgetary strings on uninhabited weapons system acquisition but a cast of characters with competing beliefs whose decisions are immediate responses to the constraints of specific political contexts. The authors unpack and detail the contingencies of this history with deftness and clarity. The importance of this should not be understated—the insights generated from the book’s narrative are not isolated to “a rote inventory of unmanned systems,” but instead, Schneider and MacDonald shed light on the “circuitous paths” taken by beliefs as they are translated “into lines within a congressional budget … [and] how they diverge and intersect based on chance meetings and belief chaperones” until they meet success in shaping “the budgets and technologies of military arsenals” or fade into distant memories (63). In so doing, the authors have crafted a valuable contribution to military innovation studies.

Dr. Wes Hutto