AI and the Automation of Warfare

ABSTRACT

Packer and Reeves also collaborated on the forthcoming co-authored book Prison House of the Circuit Politics of Control from Analog to Digital (Packer, Nuñez de Villavicencio, Monea, Oswald, Maddalena, & Reeves, in press). [...]just two or three weeks ago, the U.N. released a report explaining that it's likely that the first instance of autonomous drones making their own decision to kill soldiers occurred in a skirmish in Libya in March 2020 (United Nations Security Council, 2021). [...]I think there's a general recognition by folks in the military, by journalists writing about this issue, by intellectuals, that there has been a shift in the past half century, 75 years, to a different kind of warfare. In terms of a paradigm, too, I'm also just interested because the American military, post-Vietnam, has described itself as subscribing to the idea of information warfare-using embedded journalists, managing the flows of information surrounding conflicts. Media doot only manipulate soldiers to fight better and citizens to support various military efforts but rather, the scale of warfare has reached a level of complication that without a vast logistical apparatus, war is going to be lost-that logistical terrain of war is going to be lost-and the "logistically dominant" force, nation, (or) group of allies will prevail.