Future of warfare is going to something more like Command And Conquer game, where operators will direct autonomous machine with a click of a mouse and warfare will be mostly done at a distance....
Probably with less casualties overall...
Probably with less casualties overall...
Imagine Iraq occupied with pretty much only machines and Iraqis never actually see an American. And if this removes the threat of death from one side, what does that do to the cost of war? Could it actually make it more common because it is less politically risky? It feels inevitable, but it also scares me.
Other countries are more willing to lose soldiers but refrain from war for other reasons: the economic cost, fear of losing, loss of standing in the international community, or simply having no enemy they particularly want to fight.
Also, why just other countries? Asymmetrical (class) warfare is very popular, here, now. I don't see the kind of people waging it having moral setbacks about other kinds.
If the source of a country's military might is the ability of the civilian population to produce goods needed for the war effort, then the civilian population becomes a legitimate target.
The result of that logic in WW II was mass bombing campaigns which were capable of "dehousing" 100k+ people in a single night.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPnppCelvk0 for an hour long documentary on how our world came to accept such logic as reasonable.
Oh wait, it's the present.
Civilian casualties have been a big part of war. It seems too soon to say an automated army won't have the potential to massively increase civilian casualties given that it lowers the cost to the attacker and robot don't care if they engage in atrocities, etc.
When you have to put your own humans in a combat situation, you think twice before sending your men to their potential doom. With robots and unmanned vehicles, you can just keep throwing them at the problem, cost is the only concern.
There was a fairly impressive display from Russian manufacturers of all kinds of autonomous mobile fighting units and fixed sentry emplacements recently. So it appears not building them is no longer an option. Some of them were even new.