Will robots wage war for us?

In September 2023, U.S. Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced plans to deploy an army of several thousand robotic units (program name: Replicator). These future robotic units will cover a wide area: air, sea, and land. The purpose of these units will be to take the place of humans in hostile and dangerous missions. The cost of the Replicator program is expected to be low, allowing for the "sacrifice" of machines.

"The robots will be able to carry out complex military missions on land, in the air and at sea without human intervention. Their production costs will be low enough to deploy them in high-risk areas and sacrifice them like kamikazes on priority missions..." (Le Big Data, September 4, 2023)

In this article in the Philosophie magazine, the author Octave Larmagnac-Matheron refers to the essay by the philosopher Grégoire Chamayou (Théorie du drone, 2013). This article takes a more philosophical but interesting approach to the use of robots within the army corps.

From this essay, the author of the article focuses on 4 points.

The first point, detailed in 3 factors, concerns the reason for wanting to have a robotic brigade or regiment.

Second, and just as interesting, the author raises the question of possible mutiny within a robot brigade or regiment. With firepower superior to that of traditional weapons, the mutiny would quickly turn in favor of the robots.

Third, the author highlights the fact that a soldier in the field develops a kind of critical awareness by being directly in the field. However, as the pilots of the Raptor drones have demonstrated, dehumanization (The Dehumanisation of Drone Warfare: Scrutinising the Legal Response to the Proliferation of UAVs in Contemporary Armed Conflict, Dr Salah Sharief, 2020) sets in when the soldier is no longer in direct contact with the reality of war.

The fourth and final point concerns the preservation of the soldier's life. According to the tradition of warrior virtues and heroism, the soldier is destined to die on the field of honor. But Chamayou sees the use of robots to save soldiers' lives as a radical change in the way states think about the future of their soldiers.