WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
It is almost inevitable that the future of warfare will be autonomous, the real question is when.
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In a startling admission, a senior defense official is laying bare the Pentagon’s accelerating interest in autonomous killer robots – something that for a long time militaries around the world have denied wanting to adopt and embrace, but that eventually will inevitably be a part of warfare. Speaking to Defense One, which didn’t print the official’s name so that they could speak freely, that official said that the Pentagon is looking to move away from funding research on the topic and investing in actual Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered weaponry instead.
“We’re not going to be investing in ‘AI’ because I don’t know what that means,” the official told the website. “We’re going to invest in autonomous killer robots. This administration cares about weapon systems and business systems,” they added, “and not ‘technologies.’”
That kind of big talk is perfectly fine for policy wonk types, but when it comes to the dollars and cents, another official said that there’s an incoming shift that offloads costs onto the private sector.
“We’re trying to change a business model from ‘the government pays $100 million for research and [the company] builds a prototype’ to more of ‘us paying a couple million dollars and industry pays $98 million and then they build a prototype,’” the second Pentagon official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, told Defense One.
“As the [Department of Defense] looks ahead toward accelerating the delivery of the most lethal, advanced technologies and capabilities to our warfighters,” they continued, “we are examining our current structure to best determine how to align our efforts to achieve maximum effect and efficiency.”
Translation: the DOD wants to streamline its acquisitions so it can get autonomous killer robots as fast as possible. While the military has quietly commissioned research and some ground testing with these so-called “Lethal Autonomous Weapons” or LAWs, the Pentagon has been slow to fully embrace killer robots because, basically, they freak everyone out.
According to the first official, this new acquisition process will be overseen by a new office they characterized as the “commercial-engineering version of DARPA” that will siphon workers from other research and development departments within the Pentagon.
Though the Trump administration is obviously opening the door for the DOD to do what it wants with killer robots, we have Joe Biden’s administration to thank for paving the road to this decision.
Back in 2023, the Pentagon updated its then-decade-old rule about LAWs as it raced to embrace AI, and set up a chain of custody for the development and deployment that essentially just requires the signatures of increasingly senior officials. Notably, it did so in defiance of the United Nations’ years-long push to ban LAWs outright, and as such we may well see the US military commissioning and deploying killer robots within the next four years.
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