Back in 2024, a co-founder of defense-tech company Anduril, in a debate over these weapons, mocked his adversaries for using “phrases that sound really good in a sound bite” by asking them, “Where’s the moral high ground in a landmine that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of kids and a Russian tank?”

A report released by AEI just a few days ago insisted, “No treaty and no person or entity—not the Pope and not Congress—will ever put this genie back in the bottle. The live question is whether the US will develop these weapons on our terms, prospectively, or on an adversary’s terms in the midst of a crisis.” 

A co-founder of Foundation, a company that is committed to making AI-directed robot soldiers, recently said, “We think there’s a moral imperative to put these robots into war instead of soldiers.”

Whether or not they have moral imperatives or high grounds, these companies are moving ahead with this technology. According to CNBC, Foundation is planning to begin front-line testing of its robot soldiers with the U.S. military within months, not years. 

Indeed, they have already been deployed in Ukraine in a testing capacity. The next version of the robot, the Phantom 2, will come with “superhuman abilities” related to payload, battery life, and use of a wide variety of weapons. CNBC’s reporting suggests that the robots “will need to make fully autonomous decisions in certain time-critical scenarios” and that Foundation plans to “scale production to thousands of units this year.”

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Defenders of this technology often think that their critics either don’t understand the benefits of the technology or don’t understand the high-stakes realities of today’s international military conflicts. But let’s take on their two best arguments. 

The first goes something like this: “You moralizers who claim to care about human dignity in war don’t understand that these robots will actually protect human life and make civilian casualties less likely because AI will make fewer mistakes.”

Indeed, our government funds a program called ASIMOV, which “aims to develop benchmarks to objectively and quantitatively measure the ethical difficulty of future autonomy use cases and readiness of autonomous systems to perform in those use cases within the context of military operational values.” 

Essentially, this program will try to build scales and scores for things like how likely a particular target is a civilian and whether a particular amount of force, likely to cause a certain number of civilian deaths, will be “worth it” from a military perspective. This will produce fewer mistakes and less loss of innocent life.

But from the standpoint of just war theory, these kinds of judgements about how to respect noncombatant immunity of civilians and proportionate use of force absolutely require a human being to make the judgement. 

The second argument argues that this perspective is hopelessly naive. The U.S. has a techno-military race to win, and if it doesn’t, it will cease to be the world’s superpower. We are caught in a prisoner’s dilemma: if we don’t develop this technology, we cede the ground to Russia and China and perhaps even terrorist organizations. The only realistic option we have is to find the most moral way possible to deploy these weapons, not unilaterally disarm.

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Those of us who oppose these weapons must admit that these critics have a point. We may very well lose ground — if not to Russia and China, then to non-state actors who are likely to deploy these weapons as they become cheaper. 

It wouldn’t be the first time such ground was ceded: Those of us who criticize the intentional incineration of women and children in the carpet bombing of Dresden or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima admit that there was a military goal achieved through such ghastly actions. We just deny that every action that can achieve a legitimate military goal should be morally (and legally) permitted.

The world came to the brink of nuclear annihilation by weakly slouching toward the logic of prisoner’s dilemmas during the Cold War. But since then, we’ve proven that diplomacy can work. We’ve come to understand the moral atrocity of landmines and also used diplomacy to address it. Both Pope Leo and the Secretary General of the United Nations have spoken out strongly against lethal autonomous weapons, with the latter saying, “Some decisions must remain forever human. None more than taking a human life.”

In light of this, I propose three fronts on which to attack lethal autonomous weapons. The first is focused on international agreements and US law. Again, many who are pushing for autonomous weapons are not moral monsters — they feel trapped by what they perceive other countries will do. So we first need to take pressure out of the first by supporting U.N. efforts at restrictions. 

Here in the U.S., happily, the issue is not yet coded politically, so we can support measures like the bipartisan Beyer-Barrett-Jacobs Human Authority over Autonomous Weapons Act: a law that would require meaningful human control and, for five years, verification of AI targets against a non-AI source. A whopping 75% of Americans (along with Vice President JD Vance) support a bill like this.

Second, as I’ve argued elsewhere, we must protect the consciences of members of our military who cannot in good conscience deploy these weapons. It may provide complications for military leadership, but protecting the consciousness of doctors and nurses also creates complications for hospital leadership. 

Again, we must decide who we are and make a commitment to be that kind of people, that kind of country. 

Finally, we should be honest about the fact that a major driver of these technologies is, of course, greed. Those with the ability to do so should move their substantial investments away from these companies. 

Movement in this direction is starting to happen: The Heartland Initiative, for instance, has launched a Working Group on Defense Tech & Responsible Investment, bringing together institutional investors with over $18 trillion in assets under management and discussing whether they should pull their investments from certain companies compromised by this immoral technology. Catholic groups (both in Rome and here in the U.S.) are also considering these kinds of questions as part of the process of updating their investment guidelines.

Our country’s founders were deeply concerned about holding onto who we are as people, particularly in light of pressures foisted upon us by our entanglements overseas. We stand for human dignity, human rights, and the rules of war. 

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There are many wonderful stories about the role the U.S. played in World War II, but my favorite is about German soldiers, toward the end of the war, wanting to be captured by the Americans rather than the Russians. They knew which would respect their dignity and which would not. 

That’s who we are and who we must continue to be.