I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!
At a micro level, sure, you could argue that kill/no-kill decisions are being made by frontline enlisted soldiers, but the stress, the exhaustion, and being able to see your enemy downrange add a degree of humanization and discretion.
Wars are brutal. Some warring factions are incredibly brutal. But taking a human life can't be reduced to a `KILL? [Y/N]` decision made by some MAJ somewhere. Killing enemy soldiers is a last resort (formally, this is the concept of _military necessity_), and normalization of it as anything else is a mistake.
I also think it's a fallacy to compare this to the self-driving car trolley problem; the timeline of decisions, length of the decision chain, and ultimate goal of the decision-making process are _aggressively_ different.
My overarching points are, I guess:
War is a tragedy, obviously, but I don't think there's a way to avoid it right now. In absence of some way to stop war forever (hah), we can't trivialize taking human lives. It's not lost on me that this has been happening for a while at this point, and that it's getting worse. I still oppose it, and I think we all have a responsibility to be more critical of this regime of warfare.
I don't know how to counter the argument of "well, if we don't do it, _someone else_ will, eventually." This is some really fucked up, self-justifying inductive reasoning that can't easily be countered by calling out the moral bankruptcy of the premise. In the past, mutual disarmament treaties have been a down-the-line bandaid for this kind of thought process, but the nuclear rearmament we're seeing in the world right now shows it's not a panacea.