Note: Most Thursdays, I take readers on a deep dive into a topic I hope you'll find interesting, important, or at least amusing. These essays are made possible by — and are exclusive to — our VIP supporters. If you'd like to join us, take advantage of our 60% off promotion.
"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." —Robert E. Lee
Let me cut to the chase and tell you right up front what happens when you remove the human from the AI killbot chain: You get dead enemy soldiers requiring zero human intervention. That was demonstrated in a real-world combat test we'll discuss below. But the big issue is even bigger than battlefield Terminators, and it's also the real subject of this week's essay.
So strap on your Kevlar, wrap your car in a cope cage, and let's get to it.
New Scientist reported late last week that fully autonomous drones "killed human soldiers for the first time," in a test conducted by Ukrainian forces near the Russian-occupied cities of Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar. According to the report, ordinary-looking quadcopters with fairly simple onboard AI units "were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometers over around 10 minutes and then engage 'Terminator' mode," enabling them to hunt and strike without further human input.
And Another Thing: "Will" isn't really the right word for a set of programmed metrics triggering an onboard target-recognition AI to kamikaze an enemy soldier, but it's easy to anthropomorphize whenever almost human-seeming AIs are involved. But never forget that they are not and cannot be either human, or truly intelligent.
“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy told the magazine. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”
Maybe not everything. According to the claims, reconnaissance drones later examined the battlefield and found found two dead Russian soldiers and one destroyed truck, attributable to the 10 drones taking part. For a first-time effort, though, the results were impressive enough. If the claims are true, and they certainly fall well within what's possible, some soldiers launched some drones, walked away like nothing had happened, and a little while later, some robots racked up two KIAs.
But I buried the lede — er, the sub-story lede.
Ukraine's combat test actually took place two years ago in 2024, and while successful, hasn't been repeated.
"The Ukrainian government currently bans the use of AI at the final stage of intercepting targets," New Scientist reported, even after two years of slow but near-constant retreats. “We tried it [once],” Kokhanovskyy added. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].”
As much as I hope Ukraine is able to survive Russia's years-long aggression, I admire the restraint shown here. But before getting to that, let's take a look at the brighter side of fully automated killbots.
If the entire point of drone warfare is to reduce the human cost, maybe we should think of "Terminator mode" as nothing more than its next logical extension. Drone operators in the Russo-Ukraine War are for good reasons prime targets for both sides. AI reduces a drone's manpower requirements, and also greatly reduces the amount of time a drone operator risks exposure to enemy counterfire.
Consider how a drone operator works out in the field. After launching a first-person-view (FPV) drone — by hand, slingshot, or other means — the soldier then has to sit at his terminal and use the drone's built-in camera to find, target, and engage the enemy. While hard to find, he is a sitting duck for as long as it takes to guide the drone to target.
Radio-controlled drones are often jammed by the very enemy they're supposed to attack. The solution is control wires that spin out behind the quadcopter, keeping it physically connected to the operator's computer — at least until the line is cut or becomes hopelessly entangled in the woods. The downsides are extra weight, extra expense, and control wire is scarce, with demand so high in Ukraine.
Terminator mode is much easier and safer. Punch in the area to be searched, program the parameters (kill a soldier, destroy a tank, blow up a hidey-hole, etc.), launch it... and forget it. The onboard AI does the rest, right up to and including killing the enemy.
A fair-minded critic might ask, "Don't we already have plenty of fire-and-forget weapons that use onboard processing to keep the target locked?" And while that's true, we're still talking about two different beasts.
A Navy submarine skipper orders an enemy submarine destroyed, and the crew programs the correct coordinates into one of our shockingly capable torpedoes. The torpedo launches, and if needed, the appropriate crewmember makes course adjustments via the trailing wire. But if the wire breaks or is cut for evasive maneuvers, the torpedo's own seeker keeps it hunting down the enemy.
It's much the same for smart bombs, and any kind of missile with the technology for tracking and course correction.
But that isn't even close to telling a dozen drones to fly to a particular map grid and kill anything that fits its mission parameters — and I'm not even talking about the very real danger of rogue drones or hallucinating AIs deciding that a school bus is a tank.
War is hell. Soldiers make mistakes that get people killed. But it seems wrong in a way that claws at my guts, to shirk the terrible responsibility of waging war, and put it on the virtual shoulders of automatons incapable of understanding what they do. Taking the human out of the kill chain is literally dehumanizing, which is why we can’t afford to treat Terminator drones as merely the next logical extension of existing weapons systems.
Let me give you a real-world example.
An old friend recently retired from the Air Force after 32 years, and with a couple of stars on each shoulder. Between flying F-16s in combat, various commands, and putting his fingerprints all over near-clockwork operations like Absolute Resolve earlier this year, Julian had pretty much done and seen it all.
Following an educational tour or two — he has more degrees at this point than a thermometer — that took him out of the pilot's seat, the natural progression would have been to return to flying jets until aging out. Instead, Julian chose to go with drones, figuring (perhaps more correctly than he knew in 2009) that's where the future was.
So for two years, he served as an MQ-9 Reaper Instructor Pilot, Director of Operations, and Director of Combat Operations for the 42nd Attack Squadron at Creech AFB outside of Las Vegas.
Over dinner with our wives a few years later, Julian shared the unspoken price paid by drone pilots.
Imagine you're a young Air Force officer assigned to fly Reapers for the 42nd. You work the day shift, commute no differently from thousands of southern Nevada civilians, show up well before your 8 a.m. start time, grab a cup of coffee, sit in a comfortable chair in an air-conditioned room, and do nothing more dangerous than stare at a TV screen. But sometimes you kill people. By remote control. From 7,500 miles away. In perfect comfort and safety.
I mean, you get to perform vital service to your country in time of war, and you aren't even at risk of a sunburn on the flight line.
And yet, Julian noticed his operators suffering from combat stress.
One cause Julian found is that aiming a Reaper camera at somebody's face before getting the KILL! order is much more personal than dropping a GPS-guided bomb from hundreds of feet up while passing briefly over the target at several hundred miles per hour. Another was the lack of post-action camaraderie. Fighter pilots finish a deadly mission, go out and get drunk together, bond and try to put it behind them. Reaper pilots commute home at 5 p.m., then sit at the dinner table with their families and try to pretend they didn't just kill someone today.
It wasn't just that the Reaper operators didn't have anyone to talk to, it's that they didn't believe they should.
Julian discovered his pilots felt guilty about their combat stress because, unlike their comrades in F-16s flying combat missions out of Bagram, nobody was in any danger at Creech. Call it a species of survivor guilt. Compounding the issue, it felt shameful for these tough men and women to even admit there was anything wrong. Eventually, however, a sharp commander will notice these things — and the best ones take action.
So my old friend developed and deployed support systems for his Reaper pilots.
It's a helluva thing, and one of the most fascinating dinner table conversations I've had in a lifetime filled with some genuine whoppers. Also, there was bourbon, followed by wine, followed by brandy. Which makes everything more interesting. But I digress.
That does bring us to the core issue, though.
Filling the battlespace — air, sea, and land — with drones puts fewer of our troops in danger, and that isn't just a strategic necessity, it's a moral imperative. Yet I can't help but think back to 15 years ago and the men and women at Creech AFB. It would be a mercy to remove the humans from the loop, which we could largely accomplish over the next several years. But is there a moral imperative underscoring human decision-making in one of humanity's oldest and darkest activities?
I hold that stress is a necessary function of war. Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, and Yours Truly hashed this out on a Very Special Extended Edition of Right Angle that will go live on YouTube in the next few days. The discussion went deep and with lots of back and forth, but we did reach something like a consensus that I'll try to do justice to without Bill or Scott.
In the 1991 Gulf War, by the time Coalition land forces advanced, the Iraqis had been hammered so hard from the air that some tried to surrender to Army helicopters. That's just one of those grimly comic wartime absurdities, but what about typical surrender scenarios? Usually, as Bill mentioned, a soldier drops his rifle, puts his hands in the air, and submits to getting benched as a POW.
But you can't wave a white flag at a quadcopter — which really has no abilities aside from seeking and killing — and expect to get anything but blown up. Surrendering soldiers do sometimes still get shot or blown up in the heat of the moment (or during particularly vicious wars like WWII's Eastern Front), but Terminators risk turning it into policy.
During our Pacific campaign against Japan, Imperial soldiers earned nasty reputations for killing our medics out on the battlefield, the kind of war crime that boils the blood. So consider the drone that sees two soldiers mostly hidden in the trees, incapable of determining that one is a medic, the other is bleeding out. Lacking human context, it drops a grenade on them because its orders are to kill anything soldier-like in those woods.
Who pays for that crime? The operator who launched the drone? The commander who approved the mission? The team of programmers at Palantir? Somebody in between? Maybe the software will eventually distinguish medic from rifleman, but once the drone is airborne on a hunter-killer mission, accountability scatters into the wind.
Flawed human beings — probably precisely because we're flawed — bring conscience, context, empathy, and most importantly, accountability to lethal actions. And, yes, that means even the victors of the most righteous wars suffer the psychic scars of combat.
People far wiser than I am still grapple with real-world applications of Saint Thomas Aquinas's Just War theory, and for good reason. The decision to go to war, the way a nation wages war, and the individual responsibility that comes from seeing another human being in the crosshairs of a rifle scope or on a TV screen from thousands of miles away, then squeezing the trigger...
...those things do not boil down to ones and zeros.
At least not yet. Hopefully not ever.
Ukraine proved two years ago that humanity possesses the means to make war un-terrible. Will we grow too fond of it?
Last Thursday: Solo-Maxxing Your Way Out of Dating, Marriage, and Kids
