Our future of ‘autonomous’ warfare
Let’s spend a few minutes with people who actually know what they’re talking about: David Petraeus, who commanded the surge in Iraq and was director of the CIA, and Isaac Flanagan, co-founder of Zero Line, a nonprofit that works with international donors to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Here are some excerpts of what they write in Foreign Affairs: “The era of autonomous warfare will not announce itself with robotic armies marching across battlefields. Instead, it is already emerging, quietly and inexorably, in the skies and fields of eastern Ukraine (and to a lesser degree in the Middle East), where missions are increasingly executed by machines at speeds no human can match and electronic warfare is severing the links between operators and their machines. Very soon, autonomous systems will no longer operate individually; over time, they will form platoon- or even battalion-sized units that share information and coordinate without human intervention. And the side that waits for human approval before acting will lose.”
"History repeatedly shows that failing to identify and execute the right big ideas — the right strategy — as the nature of warfare changes exacts terrible costs," they say, citing the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
China is “already investing heavily in what it calls ‘intelligentized warfare,’” they say.
"If Washington recognizes the shifts it must make now, autonomous formations will enable a new operational reality: coordinated and synchronized machine-tempo execution in which commanders delegate preprogrammed and carefully bounded algorithms to synchronize sensors and weapons into formations that maneuver independently while commanders retain responsibility for intent, limits, and accountability.
"If Washington fails to grasp the stakes, it will field increasingly capable unmanned systems (although likely in insufficient numbers) without any of the concepts, doctrine, organizations, and educated leaders needed to employ them effectively. It will have autonomous trinkets instead of autonomous warfare.
"And it will lose to adversaries who solve the command-design problem first.”
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