What does AI in the military mean for military professionalism and responsible/effective warfighting?

Nathan Gabriel Wood (Ghent University)

Date: Thursday the 5th of December

Starting time: 11:15am (AEDT) *

Finish Time: 12pm (AEDT)

Abstract: Traditional military virtues such as courage, honor, and fidelity may be seen to lose their force in an age where our weapons are becoming increasingly autonomous. More than this, as warfighters find themselves increasingly distanced from the conflicts they are engaged in due to unmanned and long-range systems, classic military virtues may even appear to be out of place, to represent an anachronism of an older time when we still fought "up close and personal". However, as I argue in this article, AI-enabled, autonomous, and unmanned systems do not fundamentally alter the virtues of a good solider; regardless of the weapons used, courage, honor, fidelity, and the gamut of traditional martial virtues are still to be extolled. However, in the modern age, these virtues will be exemplified in very different ways, and will call the soldier to a very different set of "virtuous acts". In particular, I argue that what constitute virtuous acts will be critically dependent on the exact warfighting role a soldier is performing, and with what tools at his or her disposal. Thus, the courageous drone pilot will be called to act in ways which are distinct from those of the courageous infantryman or pilot, yet this by no means diminishes the role of courage for that former soldier. Instead, his or her courage will be instantiated through such things as a willingness to risk their career in order to take the necessary risks to minimize civilian casualties.

The first aim of the article is thus to provide an exploration of the concrete demands of virtue for the modern warfighter, given the changing nature of war and the ways combatants are expected to fight in modern militaries.

Building on this, the article demonstrates that AI-enabled and increasingly autonomous weapon systems do not, as one might suppose, diminish the role of virtue in modern warfare. On the contrary, these weapons in fact demand an even greater share of virtue on the part of combatants participating in war, as the decisions of individual combatants become more potentially impactful than ever before. This not only implies that military virtue still plays a pivotal role in war, but highlights that virtue paradoxically becomes more important in the age of autonomous and AI-enabled weapons, as a combatant's virtue is one of the few deeply human forces counteracting cold machine logic in decisions to kill enemies. I conclude by showing that martial virtues serve as an outer bound on appropriate behavior, setting base standards for how autonomous systems are to be deployed, under what considerations of due care, and in line with basic tenets of the ethics and laws of war.

Nathan Wood received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Ghent University, in the fields of military ethics and formal ethics. He is currently a research group leader at Hamburg University of Technology and an external research fellow of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo. His research focuses on the ethics and laws of war, especially as these relate to emerging technologies, autonomous weapon systems, and aspects of future conflict. He has previously published in War on the Rocks, Ethics and Information Technology, Philosophical Studies, The Journal of Military Ethics, and numerous other outlets.