The wars in Ukraine and Iran are making an unmistakable and very dangerous point. Robot wars can go on forever, in the face of total tactical and strategic failure. As long as automated weapons systems can be produced, wars will continue. This is the repeated message from those wars, and the world’s armies are following the same logic.
People are very much on the wrong end of this equation. Russian soldiers in Ukraine now have a life expectancy of 30 minutesaccording to the CIA. They are being hunted down and killed individually by AI drones, regardless of jamming technologies and evasion techniques.
This capability didn’t even exist as more than a general theory of future warfare a few years ago with FPV drones doing the job. Now there is one Practical 24/7 active combat methodology in Ukraine, and the war is being won and lost on that basis.
The big picture is getting much bigger
Now back it all up with the increased mass production of automated weapons. The large number of drones and automated systems produced in Ukraine and Russia in the last two years are metric. Both sides have moved to automation out of necessity.
It should be noted that neither Ukraine nor Russia began the war with much more than embryonic drones and other automated systems. Three generations of different classes of effective automated weapons have evolved since 2022. FPVs, interceptor drones, stray munitions AND AI combat systems have been built almost from scratch since then.
In the entire history of human warfare going back to the Stone Age, there is nothing like it. There isn’t even a psychological metric. Human wars are supposed to be based on rationales, insane or otherwise. AI wars are based on requirements, LLM and software. It’s a strange mix of priorities.
The rationale for artificial intelligence, if there is one, and there need not be one, can be as grotesque as “Mecha-Hitler” ravings, or just a series of “do this” mission requests on a purely automated level. This is barely the beginning of the general transformation of war into a new unknown and possibly uncontrollable reality.
“The Kill Factor”
“Control” of combat systems is not simple and cannot be. Autonomous AI agents are designed to operate without instructions from operators. They cannot be blocked. They are designed to fight their own wars. Networked AI can easily create highly efficient kill zones.
Offensive skills are developing exponentially. The new Chinese ATLAS systems are designed for it deploy swarms of drones as active hunter killers to hit opponents with minimal risk of casualties. Air, sea and land UAVs are proving that they can achieve success in micro and macro scale operations.
The human problem
There is a much less obvious but all too human issue here. The whole process of killing is now seen as simply low risk BECAUSE it is automated. This, in turn, means that the risks of war are now suddenly more acceptable. You can draw the line at the risk of losing a thousand troops. If you’re losing a thousand drones, you probably won’t blink at the risk.
The danger to other people, especially to anyone within range of these automated warfare systems, is a very different matter. Civilians traditionally take far more casualties than combatants. These systems can render large areas uninhabitable simply by destroying infrastructure and/or contaminating those areas. Disease, starvation and impossible logistical problems ensue.
This is a progressive collateral damage, leading to easily predictable and almost impossible to prevent human disasters. Each area can also become a war zone, making the collateral damage much worse. Entire populations can be dispossessed, displaced, and dispossessed.
The military problem
Automated warfare also creates an almost insurmountable problem for the military. How do you win? At what point is an automated army defeated? Can you actually stop production in the age of 3D printing and DIY combat systems? Asymmetry wins.
Stealth systems, such as AI agents, present another problem. They can attack and corrupt other AI systems. Can you trust your AI? Do you even have the reliable information you need to fight back? This question is becoming more pressing and militarily, it is essential to the integrity of your forces.
What do you put on the ground when boots aren’t enough? How to stop an automated war? Is it now much easier to start a war? Can non-state actors start and fight wars based solely on automation? Can you have civil wars based on automated combat systems?
This is not so much Pandora’s Box as it is Pandora’s Budget World Military Industrial Complex in a box. there are there is no real limit to what can be fitted into AI combat systems. Most of the resources for current automated combat systems are freely available worldwide. Conventional weapons are quite light. Add NBC skills for this joyous mix of options, and World War III is effectively redundant. You can have many big wars overnight.
How to defeat automated warfare?
If you cannot control your automated systems, you are a bystander in your own struggle. There is only one way to control automated warfare, even in theory. There should be a multi-layer general kill switch for these systems. A kill switch system must be fully reliable and fully tested. Must shut down all combat skills. It is possible, but only in a fragmented way.
Direct attacks on automated systems are also problematic. There are existing types of weapons such as non-nuclear EMP weapons that can do so, if and only if they can be located before being targeted themselves. That’s only if they can effectively engage their ever-expanding menagerie of weapon types and their equally expanding range of evasion techniques.
Everyone is a target. To win is to survive.
