Military Glance
Imagine this: Two countries are at war. Country X sends a drone into a major industrial city in Country Y, aiming to take out two propane tanks. A routine sequence. But this time, the drone never reaches its targets. Instead, Country X’s drone accidentally strikes a wall nearby, explodes, and kills three young civilians.
When Country Y eventually retrieves the drone’s remnants for intel, it finds an AI supercomputer inside that reveals something unsettling. Instead of a human deciding what to strike — the AI did.
The truth is, you don’t have to imagine this scene — it just happened. For the first time in the Russia-Ukraine war, as reported recently in the New York Times, three Ukrainian civilians were killed by a Russian drone, developed, designed and released by humans, that, in the end, selected its target autonomously. And this new reality is shaping up to be the future of warfare.
That’s because a number of countries, including those with the world’s most consequential militaries, are rejecting the idea that human beings need always be in control of weapons in war.
A federal judge has ruled in favor of artificial intelligence company Anthropic in its legal battle against the Pentagon after the government labeled the company as a supply chain risk earlier this year.
Tennessee national guard members assigned to a federal anti-crime taskforce in Memphis fatally shot an armed 20-year-old man in the back, according to an autopsy report obtained by the Associated Press, contradicting police accounts that said the man was facing the troops when they fired.
At a virtual town hall meeting, Navy families who abruptly evacuated from Bahrain six months ago had many questions. They said they still aren't getting enough answers.
As the sight of armed, uniformed National Guard troops became ubiquitous in Washington, D.C., over the past year, one voice has been notably absent from the public discourse around the deployment: the guard members themselves.
