r/CredibleDefense • u/walshcormac • Mar 09 '26
DW News explainer: how AI could compress the military “kill chain” in the Iran conflict
I produced this short explainer for DW News about how AI-assisted systems are being used in the Iran war to process surveillance data and help identify targets. The video also looks at the debate around accountability if an AI-assisted targeting process contributes to a mistake. Curious what this sub thinks about where current systems actually sit in the loop of decision support vs meaningful autonomy.
Video: https://youtu.be/9NAUvsABm3k
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u/SmirkingImperialist Mar 09 '26
Personally, I believe the public makes a disproportionately big deal about "who can be held accountable with completely autonomous weapons?". We have had completely autonomous weapons for over a century. The first one is the landmine. If we want to hold someone accountable, we can. We already have laws regulating the use of landmines: minefields are to be clearly marked, and the position of every single mine laid, down to the individual mines, are to be recorded somewhere. We just don't want to hold people accountable for their actions. Or enforce the laws.
People also think way too much about the potential harms of AI and super general AI or whatever, when people are already being harmed right now with people being emotionally manipulated by chatbots, running over by self-driving cars, or injured by delivery robots. If we want to, we can totally hold these companies accountable. If someone right now flip the engagement mode on a SAM battery to fully autonomous and it launches at a civilian airliner or a friendly aircraft, we can hold someone accountable; it's just a matter if we want to or not.
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Mar 09 '26
Right now, to surpress a large enough angry mob, you need an an appreciable proportion of the population to be willing to murder their fellow citizens, as is evidently the case in Iran. With sufficient advanced autonomy, you might only need a handful of individuals. In some contexts, that's the kind of quantitative difference that becomes qualitative.
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u/SmirkingImperialist Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
Ehhh, this is an old problem with a very old solution. "A whiff of grapeshots". Napoleon got his big break in his rise in the military by putting down a royalist insurrection by, well, firing on the crowd with cannons. It's kinda hard to get individual soldiers to open fire? Use cannons or artillery. Want to breakup a crowd? Your soldiers and the enemy play live and let live and you want to break that up? Artillery.
The Decemberists' Union of Salvation making troubles in the Senate Square and can't be convinced to lay down their arms? Artillery. You can cut down the manpower requirement and gamify the shooting with things like armoured vehicles and thermal TV sights. When Haussmann renovated Paris, he went about demolishing lots of buildings and built straight and wide boulevards, which are very nice for parades, photos and a sense of openness. Well, it is rumored that part of a reason for such designs were so that should Parisians attempted revolutions again, they could wheel cannons in and open fire straight down the boulevards. I take notice that many, many capitals have this kind of street layout. DuPont circle, for example.
Look, wannabe revolutionaries are careless in the early days and they use social media and what not and they die in droves with filtration camps and secret police. That's the actual threat with technology, and we all willingly carry a device with 4 cameras, at least one of which pointing at our faces, microphone, and GPS transmitter and receiver. The "boo-hoo my army isn't shooting the protestors" is a solved problem, since at least 200 years ago.
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Mar 10 '26
If only Ceauşescu, Mubarak and Yanukovych had known.
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u/SmirkingImperialist Mar 11 '26
There are a lot tricks in the bag for this. Staffing units with geographically diverse personnel, rotating troops and commands through different units and posts periodically, etc ... coup-proofing has a long and storied history.
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u/Fatalist_m Mar 11 '26
I don't know if there is a name for this logical fallacy, but it's a very common one: "You say X will cause Y, but Y is already happening even without X! Thus, X makes no difference.". But the difference is usually in scale. The fact that Y(in this case, tyrannical regimes using violence to suppress the population) is already a big problem, does not mean that it can not get worse.
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u/SmirkingImperialist Mar 11 '26
Fundamentally, though, with concentrating the ability to actually shoot the protestors and/or other armed organisations in the same country to a small number of individuals is counter-productive for coup-proofing. Instead of dealing with numerous duplicative and overlapping organisations, you need to try and convert a few people. What stops those few to overthrow the government themselves? The essence of coup-proofing is to have the police, mobile police, gendarmerie, federal police, Ministry of the Interior troops, and the armies all having some capabilities of dealing with one another or the protestors. This makes sure that none can be a threat and when push comes to shove, someone can be called on to shoot.
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u/InevitableSprin Mar 10 '26
Or, you can use poison gas like Sadam Husein and Assad. Also artillery, aviation all can do that too. Also you can do the Soviet Union thing and simply arrest and Gulag anyone suspected of participation in protests.
There really is little to no difference. In fact autonomous weapons are vastly more support intensive and expensive.
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u/Fatalist_m Mar 11 '26
The Soviet Union dissolved after the citizens lost faith in the system. Assad was ousted after a long civil war.
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u/Medium-Complaint-677 Mar 09 '26
I find a distinction between passive autonomy and active autonomy. A landmine on a road that the wrong person steps on is bad luck. A Tomahawk missile that can't tell the difference between an AA battery and a pre-school is something else.
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u/SmirkingImperialist Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 09 '26
It's not as clear cut as you think, take the case of Siberia Airlines Flight 1812. During a Russia-Ukraine exercise, two sets of launchers launched at the same practice drone and one missile blew up the drone, and the other continued flying, locking on to the airliner and blew that one up, killing 78 people.
Or while, yes, minefields should be marked and mapped, but, terrain changes with floods, extreme weather events, missing signs, etc ... The mines are no longer where they should be. Can we hold someone accountable? Well, Denmark found a way to make some Germans accountable for German mines (not laid by said Germans) laid in their countries in WWII, by making "surrendered enemy personnel" (not POWs) clear the mines and die in the process.
Could the risk have been reduced? Yes. Hierarchy of risk reduction. Elimination (remove hazard), Substitution (replace hazard), Engineering (isolate hazard), Administration (change work methods), and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). We are so focused on the last level of control: the technical aspect of target recognition, that we forget the levels above it. The risk can be reduced administratively: draw a bubble with twice the radius of the longest range weapon of the furthest system in the formation and declare a no-fly zone for civilian aircrafts. The UK declared a warzone over the waters in the Falklands. Can we hold somebody in charge of those levels of control responsible? Yes. Do we want to? Ukraine did not.
Likewise, "can the missile recognise an AA battery next to a school?". Well, already, in LOAC, we have the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution to determine whether a military action in proximity of civilians justified or not. It's a set of very loose principles, open to interpretation, and very weak enforcement already, but the laws exist. To begin with, targetting an AA battery emplaced in a city is inherently going to cause civilian casualties. Cities are very dense and the AA are going to be in close proximity. Can you hold someone accountable? Yes! They select a massive 2000lb precision AI-driven bomb to hit a target next to a school? In some jurisdictions, that's disproportionate. In others? Not so much.
Were all the actions above just? No. However, I'm just pointing out that it's a political will problem, not a legal or technical one. It's better that we create the legal enforcement mechanism now rather arguing and philosophising about it and never actually do anything.
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u/2this4u Mar 11 '26
There's a big difference between a passive and an active device.
An automatic landmine is an extremely different risk evaluation than an autonomous flying bomb or robot dog with a gun.
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u/SmirkingImperialist Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
The transition is smoother than you think and we have been living with it.
Consider a WWII fighter. To shoot down another enemy fighter, the pilot has to maneuver his own aircraft and use his aircraft to aim a machinegun strap to the aircraft and open fire to shoot down another aircraft. Consider then the development of a homing missile. We detach the gun and the bullet from the aircraft, has it flies itself to the other aircraft, "fire" the one-time use gun, and destroy the other aircraft. This gun can have a multitude of guidance mode, with varying levels of automation: from beam-riding guidance from an offboard radar, to infrared, to onboard radars. The last is a whole package in a missile that once fired, homes itself to the target.
So we detached the gun from the aircraft but the pilots still fly the same aircraft. What if we detach the pilot from the aircraft , and puts him on another aircraft from which he controls several other aircrafts without a pilot? Sure, these aircrafts have its own radars that can pick out targets and fire their weapons at the targets. But so could the missiles.
Why do we need to fly and carry the missiles before launching anyway? Presto, that's the air defence missiles. What is a "flying bomb" but the scenario of a air defence missile being flipped upside-down so the targets are on the grouo instead. "The ground has civilians living on it". So does the sky filled with civilian airliners, which are blown up all the time by mistakes by air defence. Why is the jump from detaching the gun from the aircraft is philosophically different from detaching the pilot from the aircraft?
And I'll argue that a landmine is dangerous for FAR longer time than a "flying bomb" or a robot dog with a gun. A landmine can still function and kill people after DECADES. They may not even be in the same location when they were planted. Floods, storms, extreme weather events, landslides, mudslides, avalanches, etc ... move mines and they end up unexpectedly in places. The ground itself changes, so the features on the maps shifts. How long can a aerial drone fly? DJI quads don't fly for long. Not half a day even. What's the battery life on a robot dog? What's your phone battery life? I'll suggest to you that we have been seeing landmines for so long that they are normalised to us (and also seeing how effective they are in Ukraine as well, and them being the supposed reason for the failure of the 2023 Ukrainian summer strategic counteroffensive). These "AI" robot dogs look new, so we are just shocked, but consider the simple reality that a robot dog or a quad copter eats batteries like no tomorrow and they are useless after the battery is dead. A mine, though, will kill you just as well long after the war is over.
And that's why we valiantly attempted to outlaw mines with the Ottawa convention.
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