how killer robots are already preparing to fight the wars of tomorrow

With a new age of empires seemingly on the immediate horizon, militaries across the world are scrambling for a new great equalizer on the battlefield: AI.

Unfortunately for humanity, empires, conquest, and geopolitical games that affect our history for centuries are the default mode of our existence. The whole idea of a rules-based international order where wars of conquest are supposed to be met with global backlash is an aberration, created in the aftermath of back to back world wars, which were themselves a shock to the industrializing planet.

Sure, wars and skirmishes happened all the time but they were not supposed to be all over the world all at once, killing tens of millions, mutilating even more, and triggering revolutions and civil wars in their aftermath, triggering the next global war. Something had to be done. New organizations had to be created. New alliances had to be built. A new way for handing conflicts between nations had to be created.

Now, you can argue that the emergent “rules based international order” was a sham. That it was led by colonial powers, that it didn’t prevent proxy wars between empires like the ones in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine, or deal with collapses and civil wars in Rwanda, Somalia, Syria, Liberia, Libya, Sudan, or Congo. That it was conceived by Woodrow Wilson, who believed in a sort of enlightened imperialism and that the world should be America’s plaything.

And you’d have a very valid argument, because what’s happening now with the Trump administration’s foreign can only be seen as belligerent Wilsonianism taken to its most radical extreme. Until now, the United States was an empire by invitation. Taken over by the equivalent of delusional high school bullies, it wants to be an empire by force. Hence the threats towards allies and trading partners, and the classic narcissistic idea that everyone owes them something and they better get it.

In their minds, it’s impossible to compete with well armed, well trained conventional forces that have globe-spanning force projection. NATO? Who needs it. What are any of these countries going to do after 75 years under the American defense umbrella, and chronic under-investment in their militaries?

Well, believe it or not, the answer may just be AI. Not solely but itself, of course, but as an enabler of a massive paradigm shift in warfare and what constitutes a viable armed force. In fact, we may be seeing some of these new doctrines emerging in Ukraine, as cheap by capable drones, AI-enhanced targeting, and semi-autonomous weapons are becoming commonplace.

Part of the problem is that large, established, conventional militaries may be suffering from bloat. Sure, they have a lot of vehicles, weapons, and ammo, but as part of very expensive platforms requiring significant upkeep and trained support crews. Many a conventional weapons program has been mired in prolonged and costly quagmires in which defense contractors promised to deliver jack-of-all-trades weapons platforms, and ended up eventually delivering decent systems but only after spending hundreds of billions more than anticipated and significant compromises.

Not only is this financially unsustainable, it also means that opponents able to create a swarm of cheap drones using AI for guidance, or as a force multiplier for remote pilots who choose the targets, can overwhelm expensive weapons platforms with a tsunami of violent cannon fodder, then do it again and again. All they need to do is send out as many sorties as possible as quickly as they can to get in as many lucky shots as their technology allows while figuring our countermeasures, retraining the AIs on the fly to try different patterns and approaches.

This isn’t just theoretical. Taiwan is testing the same strategy as it prepares for what is an increasingly more likely Chinese attack, creating small robotic battle ships to guard the island’s most vulnerable amphibious landing zones. Australia is trying to work with Boeing to create a small drone squadron to compliment a conventional jet fighter. The EU is working with French aerospace companies on autonomous fighter drones such as the subtly named nEUROn, a counterpart to the U.S. Navy’s X-47B. And Ukrainian naval drones have been an absolute menace to Russia in the Black Sea.

Large, heavy, complex, expensive, and ambitious seems to be on its way out as sleek, automated, fast, cheap, and purpose built looks to take over. Instead of trying to build a jack-of-all-trades that relies on stealth and speed to still get the job done, make the weapon excel in one or two things, simplify the design to make it ruthlessly efficient, easy to maintain, and extend its life expectancy, add a stealthy outer shell with quiet engines, and unleash it at massive scale. Then add AI to make it human-agnostic.

The future of warfare isn’t large deployments, massive bases, and entire battalions in action. It’s remotely operated and autonomous weapons swarming target areas, able to operate with minimal effort, unloading absurd amounts of ordinance without taking a single human loss for days, if not weeks at a time. Wars fought with computers and robots and special forces aided by drones and automated sentries, not long columns of APCs and giant transport planes constantly landing and taking off overhead.

Obviously, this won’t be a transformation that happens overnight. But given the trends we already see evolving in response to new technology and the sudden and shocking changes in the world world, this seems to be precisely where we’re headed.

Tomorrow’s global hegemonic hyperpower — and perhaps beyond — will have not just an enormous, well funded military, but the best and most sober understanding of how to deploy AI, conduct semi-autonomous warfare, and have the logistics not to simply project its power, but to scale up its efforts in the blink of an eye. And yes, it will need diverse specialists and experts to figure out and thoroughly test its doctrines. Grit and aggression can win battles, sure, but logistics, contingency planning, persistence, and experience are what actually wins wars.