The War in Ukraine
- Thread starter Bruce Monkhouse
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This has been part of the plan since at least the 80s, and there's alot of OS stuff out there about this subject if you're interested in going down that rabbit hole, viz:
Countering Swarms: Strategic Considerations and Opportunities in Drone Warfare
States should plan to employ drone swarms after careful consideration of their risks and implications. Some literature acknowledges the conceptual application of drone swarms in certain strategic military contexts. For example, one strategy expert theorizes that armed fully autonomous drone swarms (AFADS), a subset of drone swarms, could be considered a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).18 A U.S. Army wargame applied methodology to demonstrate how drone swarm weapons might provide operational advantages in parallel attack.19 One of the originators of the DOD directives on the employment of autonomous systems states:
Deploying fully autonomous weapons would be a weighty risk, but it might be one that militaries decide is worth taking. Doing so would be entering uncharted waters. . . . Hostile actors are actively trying to undermine safe operations [in wartime]. And no humans would be present at the time of operation to intervene or correct problems.20
Countering Swarms: Strategic Considerations and Opportunities in Drone Warfare
The Department of Defense and the U.S. Government face a significant national security challenge in adversarial use of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS). The available technology to create swarmsndupress.ndu.edu
What is the difference between plastering a city with UAVs that have pre-determined targets and dumping an Arc Light load of Mk 82s from a great height?
Picking what you hit, and with much smaller warheads?
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So the "AI" drone swarm is an improvement over carpet bombing.
Setting LOAC aside, depends what effect you’re trying to achieve.
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Give them the missiles and permission to hit all Russias oilfields and refineries. Then hit their food production. And about 30 cruise missiles targeting the Kremlin and Putins dacha. And send as much of the Black Sea fleet as possible, to the bottom.
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Well, for one, carpet bombing is a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions, if the city has protected persons (civilians, POWs, etc)
daftandbarmy
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And drone swarms = WMD, apparently...
Symposium on Military AI and the Law of Armed Conflict: Drone Swarms as Weapons of Mass Destruction
Conclusion
Drone swarms are the newest weapons of mass destruction. Due to their scalability, they have the potential to meet any threshold in terms of mass destruction. Furthermore, the impossibility of a human operator to effectively control every action of the swarm renders them prone to be indiscriminate and disproportionate.
Thusly, their deployment during any armed conflict, whether international or not, would likely result in the commission of war crimes, and during peacetime their use would meet the threshold of a widespread attack, configurating the commission of crimes against humanity.
Conclusively, the implications of categorizing drone swarms as WMD are not minor. This classification would deter or at least caution States to approach the use of this attack method with the necessary precautions, and highlight the importance of their regulation, or ideally prohibition. In this regard, last October, the UN Secretary General and the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a landmark joint call urging States to launch negotiations of a new legally binding instrument to set clear prohibitions and restrictions on AWS by 2026. The author largely celebrates this visionary effort to protect all of humanity from these technologies, and further proposes that said negotiations aim to include a ban on drone swarms, to prevent the proliferation of yet another WMD.
Symposium on Military AI and the Law of Armed Conflict: Drone Swarms as Weapons of Mass Destruction
[Jimena Sofía Viveros Álvarez serves as the Chief of Staff and Head Legal Advisor to Justice Loretta Ortiz at the Mexican Supreme Court as well as a member of the UN Secretary General’s High-…
opiniojuris.org
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One man’s carpet bombing, another’s strategic air campaign…
WinnipegFella
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We should probably be avoiding the mass slaughter of civilians, regardless of the semantics.
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I for one, am fully onboard with mass slaughter of Russians until they leave Ukraine. I would not shed a tear…
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You can't make war PC. No matter how hard you try.
AmmoTech90
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Russian troops or PMCs? Definitely.
Random Russian civilians in Moscow or [insert city here not near the front]? I’m not so sure.
FJAG
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She has a partial and very weak point
Conceivably they could be scaled up to trigger the definition, but so could just about any weapon system. To say that a rifle bullet could be a weapon of mass destruction if you fire a billion of them at one time is equally valid and equally stupid.
That shows a naive understanding of both tactics and technology. "Prone to" connotes that something is likely to happen. One can't deny that a drone may "go rogue" but, once again, that's a possibility with any weapon system regardless of whether a human is in the loop. Failsafes can be built into drones.
She has a partial and very weak point
I wouldn't even give her this much credit.
Her argument fails because she misrepresents what a WMD even is. The defining feature of WMDs is that they are basically guaranteed to contravene the principles proportionality and distinction. WMDs are so destructive and their effects so widespread that they are fundamentally indiscriminate - if used, it will be nearly impossible to keep collateral damage within reasonable limits. Even if the operator is taking care while attacking a legitimate target, WMDs can be expected to cause massive and excessive civilian casualties.
Very few things are WMDs. Not even all nuclear weapons should be considered WMDs. A nine megaton W53 warhead on a Titan II missile is a WMD, but a 1.5 kiloton Genie air-to-air missile is not.
Drones can distinguish and selectively strike their targets, and each individual drone in a swam has only a limited destructive capacity. They could be misused like any other weapon, but unlike a true WMD, their use does not automatically imply a violation of LOAC.
QV
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Yeah sure. Until the other side is not civil and you find yourself losing for your restraint.
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I’m not suggesting firebombing Moscow (though I’m not overly opposed to it), but their industrial and energy sectors have civilians - and those need to be targeted.
When it comes to conflict I’m a big fan of overwhelming force - they out one of yours in the hospital, you put two of theirs in the morgue. So while I wouldn’t start a civilian terror campaign, I also wouldn’t shy away from it if I felt that it could end the war sooner. Given Russia’s actions to date in their invasion, I have not seen a lot of reasons not to take the war to Russian citizens.
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Some folks are just of the opinion that war is criminal and that all deaths are crimes against humanity.
With respect to what is a legitimate target
Infanteer with bayonet
Gunner loading cannon
Trucker delivering shell
Labourer manufacturing shell
Cook feeding labourer
Landlord supplying bed and board for labourer
Hospital fixing up injured infanteers, gunners, truckers, labourers, cooks and landlords?
They are all part of the total war effort.
It is why Coventry, Dresden and Hiroshima looked different in 1945 than they do today.
With respect to what is a legitimate target
Infanteer with bayonet
Gunner loading cannon
Trucker delivering shell
Labourer manufacturing shell
Cook feeding labourer
Landlord supplying bed and board for labourer
Hospital fixing up injured infanteers, gunners, truckers, labourers, cooks and landlords?
They are all part of the total war effort.
It is why Coventry, Dresden and Hiroshima looked different in 1945 than they do today.
