Abstract

In their book The Hand Behind Unmanned, Jacquelyn Schneider and Jackie MacDonald tackle the critical questions of what explains the current U.S. arsenal of unmanned systems and why the contemporary arsenal is dominated by these aerial systems rather than the munitions that dominated earlier developments. Challenging traditional explanations for the proliferation of unmanned systems that focus on capacity or structure, the authors assert that beliefs and identities shape the structures and capacities chosen when the U.S. invests in weapon systems. The book traces beliefs about technological determinism and military revolutions, force protection and casualty aversion, and service identities to explain why the U.S. has invested so heavily in remote-controlled unmanned aerial platforms over the last three decades. In doing so, it illustrates how ideas become influential enough to ultimately manifest in budget lines, detailing the policy entrepreneurs, critical junctures, and path dependencies that shape the lifecycle of beliefs about unmanned weapon systems.

Biography

Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider is the Hargrove Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, and an affiliate with Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology, national security, and political psychology, with special interest in cybersecurity, autonomous technologies, wargames, and Northeast Asia. She is a coauthor of Hand Behind Unmanned (Oxford University Press) and a frequent contributor to scholarly journals and policy outlets. She was previously an assistant professor at the Naval War College as well as a senior policy advisor to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Before beginning her academic career she spent six years as an Air Force officer in South Korea and Japan, and she is currently a reservist assigned to U.S. Space Systems Command. She has a BA from Columbia University, an MA from Arizona State University, and a PhD from George Washington University.