The drone is a wonder of technology.
Ever since Linden Blue at General Atomics brought out an early prototype of the Predator drone, they have advanced quickly as mainstream fighting machines.
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They are tempting to use because they remove the human from immediate harm, are relatively inexpensive compared to a manned fighter, and can “swarm” in ways traditional fighters cannot.
From a pilot training perspective, drone “pilots” do not require complex airmanship skills, or even physical fitness. Drone operators work in an enclosed, often mobile shelter where the computer is their cockpit. Drones are also able to operate on “autopilot” with programmable instructions, or can be operated by other drones, or even satellites. They are relatively simple as a flying machine, and can be readily produced, or assembled, in mass quantities.
But they create a serious problem in warfare: it is too easy to launch one. Normal decision tradeoffs are muted, and killing is made abstract. There is no problem to solve between attack and counterattack in a personal dimension. There are also no drone war heroes or aces. There is no drone soldier or “centurion” class of fighter: the drone is about as “anti-Roman” as you can get in classic military culture.
Drones intermediate or remove human-to-human confrontation, and human performance. They also weaken command discipline and command killing because there is no combat strategy to consider, except launching a single attack, and if they get shot down or disabled, there is no real price to pay.
The drone works as effectively in terror operations as it does in the delivery of limited explosive ordinance.
In a military attack, the drone is otherwise a “kamikaze” tool, and hence its added dimension of terror.
Their ability to inflict real damage to industrial sites is limited, however. They terrorize civilians. They intimidate opponents — sometimes. Other times they merely annoy and anger them, and they are not a true substitute for face-to-face fighting, artillery, diplomacy, or negotiation.
The drone is also used in police work and surveillance. The drone can be used to deliver a chemical agent to subdue a criminal or suspect. They can disperse chemical or biological weapons with relative pinpoint accuracy.
All of this raises a number of interesting questions in law: the drone can be a judge and jury with no due process or Miranda rights; it cannot face war crime accusations. Confirming who may have actually ordered them can be difficult to prove, and drone instructions can be coded, “ghosted,” or even deleted, making traditional evidence hard or impossible to secure. Intelligence agencies have embraced the drone as they are a natural irregular warfare tool, with built-in covert behavior.
For Star Trek fans, the episode “A Taste of Armageddon” involved two societies who fought their wars by anonymous computer (which is behind modern drone operations). It wasn’t until they faced actual direct war that they arrived at a peaceful settlement, due to the sudden realization of the cost of an actual war.
The drone is insidiously moving global combat into faceless, nameless, abstraction where many of the risks of actual war are removed. AI is quickly adding to the drone as a total system. Drones are not only enabled by software logic, but eventually by AI “agentic logic,” or self-acting AI agents (think nanobots), which results in a “drone-within-a-drone” from the software itself (see David Heinemeir Hansson on Fridman podcast 501 concerning agent logic potential).
But AI logic is unregulated and autonomous. There is potentially no chain of command or discipline. This removes or lowers human accountability. Law itself is removed from the doctrine of harm and liability. AI drones cannot create torts or crimes, or if they do, the agents are subject to a curious form of liability waiver.
Satellite weapons are effective drones also, and there is much value to automated flight in space operations, and in drone and robot deployment in future lunar commercialization.
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But what does this mean about the biology of humans? The inexorable logic of drones, robots, AI and other intelligent systems is that a large human “depopulation dividend” is implied.
For the progressive Left, whose ideological center of gravity is framed by climate and carbon removal, the acceleration of human self-obsolescence intersects with an ideology of drone warfare that is mutually reinforcing as a tool of biological suppression.
When combined with the progressive Left’s medical model of euthanasia and planned life-spans, a drone “value triad” is created: war machine, human replacement, and carbon neutrality. If the UN GEO-7 Report, arguing for radical depopulation, represents credible intentions, then non-human automation is part of its human replacement assumptions. I don’t take the UN seriously, but its sponsors do.
In the future, your airline flight otherwise will be piloted by drones, reducing crew costs to almost zero. Drone pilots can also work 24/7, and require no rest, no bathroom breaks, make no small talk in the cockpit involving diversity and hiring, or have a seniority system or labor union. Of course there is a question involving the logic of synthetic robotic drones operating a flying machine that burns kerosene for propulsion, and that is filled with human flesh sitting in cramped seats eating peanuts, drinking beer and using restrooms. At some point the logic of such automation intersects the ultimate logic of progressive ideology: select human obsolescence. Their dystopian world has no planes, no passengers, and nowhere to fly.
The drone is seductive in this regard because it is “green” compared to traditional human-centered machines, and keeps humans on the ground, moving around less, and using less carbon. Or as Anthony Fauci put it in his NIH white paper, the future requires the limiting of human movement and “human behaviors that perturb the environment” (“Where is Anthony Fauci?” American Thinker, June 11)
The drone also represents “clean” warfare where man can kill without spilling his own blood (only someone elses), and can do so without a carbon footprint.
But what happens when there are no humans left to kill? The drone’s future AI agentic logic suggests that drones will kill drones. In that scenario, the long human history of war poses a fascinating challenge to traditional human violence: once begun, human killing usually ends when the reason for it ends.
Since killing, with some exceptions, has no logical reason per se, it ends otherwise by depletion of resources to sustain it. The AI agent, however, never runs out of resources, and has no reasons, making perpetual war its logical code. Without overusing the Star Trek analogy, the Nomad drone in “The Changeling” followed an extermination logic against “inferior” biological forms. When it finds out that a human created it, Nomad self-terminates.
That is the problem with drones and AI: they solve certain human limitations only insofar as they are able to operate within them.
It has been said that civilization has always been at war; peace is only a temporary pause due to human exhaustion. Drones and larger automated war make that natural pause unnecessary. War therefore can become conveniently permanent. That is the problem with drones.
I confess my preference for the Roman warrior with sword and shield; for Thor’s hammer, and hand-to-hand combat. Those get at the bottom of war’s cause, and its end: human passon, and its satisfaction. The drone knows neither.
Matthew G. Andersson is a former CEO, aerospace and defense advisor and jet command pilot. He has testified before the US senate on new aircraft technology in the National Airspace System and is a graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the University of Texas at Austin.
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Image: Google ai-generated illustration