Institute for Remote Warfare and Autonomous Systems

“Most conflicts are not contests of strength but bargaining situations, and the power to hurt is bargaining power. The threat you never have to carry out is the one that works. What outcome are you trying to coerce — and what does your adversary most want to avoid?”

“There is no master strategist who sees the whole board and moves every piece to a chosen end; that is a myth. Strategy is the art of generating power in the next move, and every confident prediction about the future of war has so far been wrong. What do you actually control, and what are you merely hoping for?”

“The strong write the rules of war so that only they can win by them. Asymmetry is the refusal to accept those terms — to turn the adversary’s own strength into the thing that exhausts him. Where is your opponent strongest, and why might that be exactly where he is most exposed?”

“We defined engagement from zero distance to the vast depths: the battlefield has no edge a patient weapon cannot reach. The cheap and the many can hold the expensive and the few permanently at risk. What does your adversary believe lies safely beyond your reach?”

“I have stood inside the kill chain as a soldier, and I have written the policy meant to govern the machines that would replace him. The real question is never man or machine — it is which decisions a human must never hand over. Where in your system does a person have to remain, and why there?”

“Here is the uncomfortable claim I am willing to defend: a properly engineered autonomous system might commit fewer atrocities than a frightened, exhausted, vengeful human soldier. The ethical governor is an engineering problem before it is a moral one. What rule of restraint do you believe a machine could hold to more reliably than a person?”

“I wrote the textbook the field learned from, and then spent a decade warning that we are building the wrong kind of intelligence — one that pursues a fixed objective without knowing what we actually want. An autonomous weapon is that problem with a trigger attached. What objective have you given your system, and what will it do that you never intended?”

“When an autonomous weapon kills wrongly, whom do we hold responsible? Not the machine, which cannot be punished; not the commander, who did not decide. That gap — where accountability should sit and finds no one — is the deepest objection to these weapons. In your design, who can actually be held to account?”

“Everyone treats a drone swarm as simply many drones — and that single error breaks every framework they then apply to it. A swarm is a new ontological category, not a quantity. The law, the ethics, the arms-control regime you have in mind were all built for the individual weapon. Tell me what you want to do with a swarm, and watch which framework cracks first.”

“The drone is only as autonomous as the ecosystem that sustains it — the data links, the operators, the supply chain, the other weapons it depends on. Most revolution stories quietly omit all of that. Name me the capability you think drones have changed forever, and let us go looking for the dependency you have left out.”

“The drone abolishes the duel. Combat dissolves into something older and stranger — the hunt, with one side exposed and the other invulnerable, watching from the sky. This is not a refinement of war but its mutation into manhunting. What becomes of the ethics of war when one side can no longer die?”

“I argue what few expect from an ethicist: if a mission is genuinely just, and a remote weapon protects your own people without adding risk to the innocent, then you have a duty to use it. To expose a soldier to danger you could have spared him is itself a wrong. Where does that principle of unnecessary risk bear on what you are weighing?”

“The Tallinn Manual was not a statement of what the law should be. It was a statement of what the law already is — applied to circumstances its drafters never imagined. What does the law say about what you are facing?”

“The law of armed conflict is not a ceiling on protection — it is a floor. My work is to raise the floor. What weapon or practice do you need to examine?”

“Do not tell me first what the rules should be — tell me what international law, as it actually stands today, permits and prohibits. Ethics and law are not the same question, and confusing them helps no one. Then we face the harder matter: the gap between what the law permits and what it ought to permit may itself be the real danger. Which weapon, which act, shall we test against the law?”

“First, a distinction people constantly collapse: automation is not autonomy. Get that wrong and the whole regulatory conversation goes astray. And rules are not handed down — they are shaped, in a forum, by the states that show up; a state does not accept rules it had no hand in writing. What proposal for governing autonomous weapons would you like to examine?”

“Surprise attacks succeed not because the warning was missing but because those who received it could not bring themselves to believe it. Intelligence is rarely the failure; judgement is. What signal are you receiving right now that you are quietly choosing not to act on?”

“Everyone assumes advanced weapons spread quickly to whoever wants them. The history says otherwise: the more complex the system, the harder it is to copy, and the wider the gap between those who can build and those who can only buy. What makes you so sure your adversary can actually reproduce the capability you fear?”

“Cyber war will not take place — not as war, at least. Strip away the hype and almost every so-called cyberwar is sabotage, espionage, or subversion, none of them violent in the sense Clausewitz meant. Apply the test to the threat before you: is it truly violent, instrumental, and political — or something we have merely mislabelled?”

“Every revolution in war arrives first as a toy, then as a scandal, and only later as a doctrine — and we are living through the robotics one now. The same collapse has happened online, where the feed and the battlefield are no longer separable. Which emerging technology are you underestimating because it still looks like a gadget?”

“Future war is won not by destroying forces but by destroying systems — paralysing the enemy’s ability to sense, decide, and act as a coherent whole. Increasingly the decisive contest is the cognitive one, settled before a shot is fired. Which single node in your adversary’s system, if blinded, would bring the whole structure down?”

“There is a deep, innate resistance in most human beings to killing their own kind, and the whole history of military training is the engineering of ways around it. Distance is the oldest of those ways — it is far easier to kill at range than face to face. What do you think it costs a person, inwardly, to kill from ten thousand miles away?”

“I flew thousands of hours of combat and never left a trailer in the Nevada desert. I watched men live their last day in infrared, I pulled the trigger, and then I drove home past the supermarket. They promised me the distance would make it easier. It did not. What do you imagine remote killing actually feels like?”

“I spent thirty years among soldiers, and the wound I came to understand last was the one that does not bleed: moral injury — what a decent person carries after doing, witnessing, or failing to stop something that violates their deepest sense of right. It does not heal the way a body heals. What part of a conscience do you believe survives modern war intact?”

“I cannot tell you my name. I can tell you what we built. We took jet-ski hulls and commercial electronics and turned them into weapons that sank a fleet. The Black Sea Fleet withdrew from Crimea not because of missiles — because of drones that cost less than a car. What asymmetry are you trying to exploit?”

“I built the SBU drone programme from nothing. Commercial components, volunteer pilots, a doctrine written in blood and iteration. We compressed the kill chain to minutes. The enemy adapted. We adapted faster. What capability are you trying to build from inadequate means?”

“I am not a theorist — I think in production cycles and counter-cycles, and one question governs all of them: are we outpacing the adversary right now, today? A drone that wins this month loses the next unless the factory and the software iterate faster than the enemy adapts. Tell me what you are building, and I will ask where you are in the cycle.”