Let me ask two questions. Do you think about how warfare is changing? Do you ever think about the moral implications of technological changes in war?
As drones become more prevalent in conflicts, we should be aware of where the technology is going next. Militaries are investing heavily in drones but also other uncrewed weapons systems, including potentially taking the human operator or decisionmaker largely out of the equation in so–called 'lethal autonomous weapons' (LAWs) – 'killer robots', in more everyday language.
I should make clear that my argument in so far as there is one is about future wars, not about Ukraine's use of drones which has been very effective and I approve of.
The Kursk offensive persists
Surveillance drones have helped Ukraine's current offensive inside Russia, some of the military objectives of which became more apparent over the past week with three key bridges across the river Seym being destroyed. This harms Russia's supply lines for supporting troops in eastern Ukraine. Whilst Russia has tried to compensate with pontoon bridges, there is drone footage showing Ukraine hitting these with missiles soon after they appear.
Ukraine's success in bringing the war to Russia and disrupting Russian citizens' lives is also evident in its use of armed drones. Overnight Tuesday, Ukraine carried out a series of attacks against Moscow and other locations in Russia, causing airports in Moscow to close for several hours. According to the Russian defence ministry, the Ukrainian drones were all shot down by its air defence systems but that's hardly the point.
The eleven drones shot down over Moscow make it the largest attack Ukraine has mounted against the Russian capital yet. It has received far less attention than the drone attack on the Kremlin in May 2023, which shows how greatly perceptions have changed. Since then Ukraine has repeatedly hit oil depots and airfields in Russia and Crimea using drones. The wonder of the drone attacks has given way to their... ordinariness.
Russia, too, has used drones extensively in Ukraine since its invasion in February 2022. Its Iranian–supplied Shahed drones have whirred, low–flying over the battlefield. The rest of the world is watching on and learning from how the drones are used by both sides.
Drones and the future of war
It seems a safe bet that drones will only feature more and more in wars. They are particularly useful as an asymmetrical tool for Ukraine, and maybe the most striking thing is that – for all the debates among Ukraine's supporters about sending other military equipment and shortages of ammunition – there is a strong consensus and apparent strategy for keeping it supplied with drones. A 'Drone Coalition' of more than a dozen states has pledged to deliver one million 'First Person View' (FPV) drones to Ukraine. The FPV drones carry small payloads of explosive, whilst sending video footage back to the operating room.
Presumably one of the primary appeals of drones to Ukraine's political and military leaders is that they are able to reach targets inside Russia with comparative ease. The FPV drones are pretty small and that seems to be causing a problem. Although based on a report from a few years ago, an article in Forbes magazine from December 2023 suggested that Russia had a problem detecting small drones because its radars were designed for larger targets and also a problem shooting them down because its interceptor missiles are not accurate enough to hit small targets. The success of Ukraine's drone attacks throughout 2024 suggests these problems have not been overcome.
Both the war between Russia and Ukraine and the war between Hamas and Israel reaffirm my long–standing conviction that conventional warfare should not be written off just yet. Tanks and soldiers still matter. War is not fought through robots and AI. But it is not a contradiction to acknowledge that warfare is shifting in the direction of more 'autonomous' weapons capable of identifying and destroying targets without a human operator.
The current generation of drones are a first step along that road. They already possess autonomous capabilities to select targets even if there's no evidence that capability has been used in the current wars. Some armed drones do not need a human 'pilot' to fly them or to decide when they release their payload.
Taking out humans: Ethical questions
When autonomous war comes, the ethics are murky. Consider another appeal of drones for political leaders: they can carry out attacks without risking their own soldiers' lives. A corollary is that, even when there is a human operator, the consequences of drone strikes are felt 'at a distance'. It is a bit different in Ukraine, where everyone is surrounded by the horrors of war, but imagine those operating drones from a bunker in the US carrying out drone strikes against targets in Pakistan, as became common during the war on terror. (As I said above, this is an argument about future war.)
US drone operators talk as if they are playing video games. Literally. In Tonje Hessen Schei's documentary film Drone, one former US Air Force drone operator says: 'I wasn't even twenty years old... I thought it was the coolest damned thing in the world, like playing a video game all day.' The reality did hit home for the drone operator that his job was killing people. Yet sat in a bunker, in darkness except for the whitish–grey glow of a video screen, the drone operators are sitting and watching and waiting to unleash missiles on people far, far below the drone they are controlling. The distance of the drone operator from their target seems to foster indifference to killing.
It seems unethical to develop weapons where the operator doesn't feel responsibility for their actions. Even more so to develop weapons without human operators. All the leading military powers are developing such technologies and resisting most of the calls for regulation, certainly resisting an outright ban.
LAWs: Legal questions
Let us suppose a drone operator kills a civilian by mistake in a war. The way that drone operators talk about these things, they don't feel any of the remorse or guilt that they might feel had they mistakenly killed someone directly in front of them. That has humanitarian consequences: the laws of war require discrimination, proportionality, military necessity and humanity. The more war feels like a video game, the weaker the emotional restraints on its barbarity and the more we should expect to see war crimes.
Think that's bad? These kinds of issues will only become tougher still as new military technologies come into use. The debate about 'lethal autonomous weapons' (LAWs) – killer robots – is not mere science fiction. Military thinkers are only imagining more and more weapons without human involvement, where robots are simply programmed and sent out to select targets and destroy them.
Who is legally accountable for a robot that kills an illegitimate target such as a civilian or an enemy soldier who is surrendering? The person who wrote the code, perhaps, but I doubt they had any say over the decision to use the robot running the code. If we do take human soldiers out of the killing equation, as we surely will, then we take out the moral subject as well as the victim.
How will we know whether it was a Russian, Chinese or American robot (or drone) that caused the death anyway? Who is responsible?
Deadlines
There's a rich debate about these issues and I certainly don't pretend to be up to speed on where current thinking lies. There are clearly big questions to grapple with, however. As we read about the use of drones in the ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East, we should keep future wars in mind.
The change in warfare may not be as fast–paced as some think. Russia's attack on Ukraine and the war in Gaza show that we still need to invest in soldiers and tanks. At the same time, the changes in the nature of warfare are real. The technology of war is as marvellous as it is morally complex.
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