The Ukraine and Israel wars have renewed worries over the emergence of advanced military technologies. Ukrainians have used naval drones to inflict staggering losses on Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and aerial drones to destroy armor and personnel with unprecedented precision and speed. In Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces have used drones to kill individual Hamas leaders, and robots to penetrate Hamas’ dense network of underground tunnels. A network of surveillance robots, space-based communications, and even artificial intelligence analysis helps human decision-makers on tactics and strategy.
The success of high-tech weapons in Ukraine and Israel seems to make manifest the prophecies of a revolution in military affairs. “The future of war will be dictated and waged by drones,” warns Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and a science advisor to the White House and the U.S. military. To some, the rise of warfare by robots, computer networks, and AI spells the end for conventional weapons such as tanks, manned aircraft, and capital ships, and demands the embrace of radical new approaches. To others, these developments demand unprecedented legal and political regulation. UN experts have warned that drone strikes will be abused because “they make it easier to kill without risk to a state’s forces.” If intervention is too easy, these critics argue, states will be tempted to turn too quickly to force as a solution and to wage war too easily upon civilians. They urge us to negotiate new treaties or to extend existing treaties, even though the latter were developed for the technologies and strategic challenges of a half-century ago. Elon Musk has called for a ban on “killer robots” because AI is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”
Rushing to judgment on military technology would be a serious mistake. It is undeniable that new technologies are changing daily life. Robotics, the internet, and space-based communications have increased economic productivity. These same advances are generating new kinds of weapons, from robotic drones to attacks on computer networks. While nations will still use force to defend themselves, to compete for power and influence, and to respond to humanitarian crises, these weapons offer the potential to change armed conflict. Advanced GPS-guided missiles can strike advancing armor or capital ships with great precision, based on intelligence gathered only minutes before by robotic aircraft and communicated through networks based in space or the internet.
Nevertheless, robotics, cyber, and space may not trigger a wholesale change in the nature of warfare. Indeed, the current stage of the conflict in Ukraine suggests that these new technologies have not fundamentally altered century-old methods of warfare. In Ukraine, World War I-style trenches, massive artillery, and combat by attrition seem to have stalemated campaigns seeking rapid breakthroughs with combined-arms maneuvering units. In Israel, terrorists used unconventional means to defeat Israel’s high-tech border wall with Gaza, but then unleashed a murderous rampage upon civilians using tools of terror that resembled the pogroms of centuries past.
Rather than transform warfare, the precision and speed of new technologies may help reduce the destructiveness of harm from war and help spare civilians. Better intelligence and greater precision in targeting should lead to less loss of civilian life; robotic drones and swift intelligence and communications could increase a nation’s deterrent power. These evolutionary—not revolutionary—benefits of advanced weapons technology render the replacement of conventional weapons premature or even quixotic.
It also means that calls for legal regulation will not only fail, but also could be counterproductive. Early regulation of military technology has rarely, if ever, succeeded when nations are still learning the costs and benefits of new weapons. At the turn of the last century, for example, nations refused to apply old concepts of the laws of war to the innovations of the airplane and submarine. Agreement is especially unlikely today because nations would find it difficult, if not impossible, to verify compliance with limits on computer programs or miniaturized, robotic attack vehicles. The strategic implications of WMD on warfare and international politics, by contrast, are better understood, and stockpiles are less difficult to verify. Even so, the United States and the Soviet Union did not enter into the first strategic arms limit agreements (SALT) until the Nixon administration, almost three decades after the dropping of the atomic bomb.
Instead of formal treaties, however, nations relied on nuclear deterrence to enforce a principle of restraint. Nor do robotics, cyber, and space weapons threaten the massive, indiscriminate destruction that supports the special dynamics that govern WMD agreements. But that does not address the nub of the concern for many critics. They worry that gaining the ability to strike more precisely at lower cost will lower the threshold for war. New technologies may give nations the confidence to resort to force too readily because they trust too much in their capacity to wage easy wars. Or great powers may use force too often because technology allows them to avoid the costs of war and instead concentrate them on the enemy.
There are two reasons to resist premature bans on advanced military technology. First, as Ukraine and Gaza show, the world is becoming more chaotic. Western nations still need to defend against territorial aggression and terrorist attacks. The costs of conventional conflicts, particularly casualties from ground combat, may discourage nations from confronting these problems. But if the costs of war decline, while the effectiveness of force improves, nations may be able to wage a more effective defense: advanced technology can act as a force multiplier that will enhance our resolve to prevent threats to our security. The challenge of our era is not a world where defenders of international order are too quick to act, but too hesitant. We should welcome technologies that make intervention more precise and less costly.
Second, these new weapons may allow nations to coerce others to stop these greater threats to international order more effectively. We should reconsider whether it makes sense to hold civilian infrastructure and resources immune from attack, merely because they do not provide direct support to military operations. Attacks of this kind may provide more effective, less lethal, and less destructive means of coercing states that threaten the international order, compared with direct military engagements. Rather than carry out attacks that could kill thousands, western nations could use advanced technologies to paralyze, for example, Iran’s banking system or stock market. To recognize a broader scope for attack would not necessarily imply a dramatic change in actual tactics. Current U.S. military manuals authorize attacks on anything that “sustains” an enemy’s “war-fighting capacity.”
This formula, however, is so vague that, as critics complain, it might extend to almost anything. Such evasive formulations may invite misunderstanding regarding actual U.S. commitments. Academic commentators and NGO advocates have rushed in with confident pronouncements on what international law must be understood to prohibit. The United States will be better off if it does not allow such abstract legal reasoning to limit the way it uses new weapons technologies. We should, of course, try to ensure our militaries use new technology carefully to avoid direct physical injury to human beings other than enemy combatants. But we should not take into account notions of harm devised in earlier times when weapons inflicted broader, more indiscriminate civilian loss. Today’s more focused weapons should cause us to rethink the aim and purpose of attacks.
We should expand the range of options that nations may use to defend themselves and to stop serious international challenges. Technological change creates new possibilities for abuse. Social media allow people to reconnect with distant friends and relatives, to organize political movements, to spur academic research—or to engage in cyberbullying or recruitment for terror networks. But technologies can also enable solutions. More permissive legal standards could open a Pandora’s box of new threats. But we also need to remember that adversaries do not necessarily follow legal restraints just because the U.S. demands that they should. The threat of meaningful retaliation, rather than mere legal argument, has restrained enemies. What we cannot do is pretend that the new technologies make no difference. We cannot ignore their potential for enhancing security, even as we grapple with the challenges.
