American values require that human beings, not artificial intelligence, make the life-or-death decisions inherent to war. So announced Vice President JD Vance to graduating officers at the Air Force Academy recently. He’s right.
What “makes you as warfighters unique is that we wage war justly,” Vance said. This means that “if the warfare of the future is to live up to the moral values of our ancestors, decisions over life and death must be made by humans and not machines.”
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It’s worth saying that these moral values are religious. Vance didn’t declare this explicitly, though he made the point when he endorsed Pope Leo’s recent encyclical, saying that humanity must not “outsource the most important moral decisions to digital technology.” As AI disrupts human affairs, he shared, “the thing I worry about most with AI is how it will change warfare.” And only human beings, Vance exhorted the class of officers, have the conscience — “minds but also hearts” — to master AI and not let it master us.
This isn’t Luddite nostalgia from the prior enlisted Marine. It’s an insistence that, even as military technology enters the AI age, those who use it remain anchored to America’s foundational values. For Vance, a military that forgets why human judgment matters will eventually forget what it is defending — what the “res” is in the res publica of the American republic. This is why America’s religious values, particularly its two-and-a-half-century love affair with religious freedom, are vital to the military’s use of artificial intelligence.
No serious person thinks America can abstain from military AI completely. Our adversaries will not. AI will help soldiers see faster, move faster, defend faster, and, when necessary, strike faster. But speed is not wisdom. Automation can narrow the gap between identifying a target and destroying it until the moral act disappears into the workflow. A kill chain can become a robotic production line. Vance is right to tell officers to jealously guard their office as moral agents.
Contrast this with Ross Douthat’s recent interview with defense technologist Christian Brose, president of Anduril, which exposed the danger with unusual clarity. Asked about policy limits, Brose noted that the rules do not forbid automating the kill chain or building a system capable of functioning as a lethal autonomous weapon. “You’re not not allowed to do that,” he said. But Brose mostly avoided answering the question of whether we should fully delegate the taking of human life to autonomous digital systems. To answer this question, we need religious and moral values.
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The need for religious thinking in military ethics is not novel. New technologies have historically prompted religiously grounded moral reflection on their just employment. To name one example, after poison gas was used on the Western Front in World War I, followed by the use of mustard gas at Ypres, the question was not whether the technology worked. It was whether it should be used, an ethical question inseparable from moral judgment and religious thinking. It was the Red Cross — a humanitarian aid group inspired by Christianity — that appealed to governments for a ban, supported by the Vatican and other religious groups. Their effort culminated in the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which proscribed chemical and biological warfare.
The unfolding debate over AI warfare is technical, legal, and operational. It must also be theological and philosophical. As with the discernment of past developments in weapons technologies, the debate must ask what kind of victory would corrupt the victor. Religious liberty is essential to this debate — in the age of AI, it will preserve the human conscience in war. Because without religious conscience, as Vance implies, the most advanced military in history would become not stronger but less worthy of the republic it serves.
Christopher J. Motz is senior counsel and chairman of the military affairs practice group at First Liberty Institute. To learn more, go to firstliberty.org.