Drones do not hasten the end of war
Fires and plumes of smoke rise after debris from an intercepted Iranian drone struck an oil facility in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, in March. Credit: AP/Altaf Qadri
The war with Iran might or might not be winding down. A peace agreement might or might not be signed soon. Either way, lessons already have been learned.
One of the most interesting ones came earlier this month when an Army Apache helicopter was shot down by an Iranian drone over the Strait of Hormuz. The two-person crew was rescued by an American unmanned surface vessel — in other words, a drone boat.
It was a milestone in warfare — the first known incident in which airborne troops were taken down by a drone and then rescued by a drone. What this portends for the future of warmaking is fascinating but ominous.
The use of drones in battle has exploded in recent years, most notably in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Inexpensive drones have helped Ukraine level the playing field with far more powerful Russia by stymieing the progress of the Kremlin’s troops on the ground and allowing Ukraine to strike energy infrastructure and military installations deep into Russia, far behind the front lines. Drones can hunt and destroy tanks, conduct reconnaissance, track the movement of troops, drop grenades into trenches with frightening accuracy, and strike targets near and far with awesome precision — all while minimizing the danger to one’s own troops.
But the conflict in Ukraine — and, to a lesser extent, the one between the United States and Iran — also has shown that drones do not hasten the end of war. If anything, they prolong it by allowing weaker nations with cheap drones to fight more powerful nations with expensive missiles to a standstill. That of course is good for smaller nations fighting “just” wars. But the result when a country like Russia uses its drones to attack civilian targets is longer-lasting horror for regular folks even as military personnel suffer fewer losses.
It seems inevitable that drones will eventually replace boats, jets, missiles, submarines and tanks — weapons that currently are manned — as well as troops themselves. Drones, after all, are cheaper than people and traditional war machines. As human fighters become obsolete, how will that change calculations of whether to wage war? The more removed that decision-makers are from the human cost of battle, the less bloodshed they have to tally and defend, the more likely they could be to go to war in the first place. On the other hand, knowing that an enemy perceived as weaker can effectively fight back and draw out the battle with drones might give war hawks pause.
The United States has clearly if belatedly recognized the effectiveness of drones in war. It wants to buy more than 1 million of them over the next few years.
But the nature of this drone debate will soon morph again with advances in artificial intelligence. The drones of the future seem certain to be equipped with AI. Just this past week, one of the Ukraine Defense Ministry’s top drone analysts said the next generation of war drones will have AI that replaces human operators and lets the drones independently recognize, choose and strike targets — introducing the likelihood of errors of judgment made without human input, and putting yet more distance between people who decide to wage war and those who will suffer from it.
In his recent encyclical, Pope Leo XIV eloquently warned that AI “can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data. In this way, it will accustom us to the idea that violence is inevitable and needs only to be optimized.”
Lightening the moral weight intrinsic to every decision to wage war is a dangerous proposition. War is hell. Drones, equipped or not with AI, make it seem less so. We must proceed carefully or we all will suffer.
Columnist Michael Dobie is a retired member of the editorial board.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
