[monday_]

Kind of obvious that you can't effectively ban this.

The best realistic option here, in my opinion, is to require sensible constraints. E.g. hard-wiring war zones in them - a separate circuit could prevent firing if the drone is outside certain area. You could decrease the attack surface for such system by relying on a Kalman filter getting it's data from a dedicated accelerometer and a compass.

[ineedasername]

You probably can't ban it in the sense of complete & total non-use. But collectively the world has mostly decided and actually followed through on not using certain things like chemical weapons in warfare. While this has not eliminated their use, it would probably be much worse without this prohibition. For example they went largely unused in warfare in the European theatre of war in WWII.

Of course most recently Syria is a horrible exception to this track record, and it remains to be seen if this will embolden others to do the same. Nonetheless, the prohibition does show that such agreements can at least reduce the usage of certain methods of waging war.

But I don't think hardware or software constraints be effective: Once one side of a conflict decides to break the a prohibition about using autonomous drones, I don't think they will care about hardware protocols. There's also the fact that warfare generally does not have static boundaries and no one willing to use this type of weapon would concede to their uselessness once the fighting moved elsewhere. Especially because their enemies would simply & quickly change their tactics to work outside that zone.

[5560675260]

> the world has mostly decided and actually followed through on not using certain things like chemical weapons

Chemical weapons are not used because they were ineffective even during WW1 and make even less sense now, when there is no trench warfare and targets are generally highly mobile. Conventions have little to do with this.

[ineedasername]

They are very effective in certain tactical situations. Area denial as an example. Or to slow an enemy. Or induce fear and morale loss. Or inflict countless non-lethal casualties that sap resources from the enemy: I have relatives who 100 years ago sat for weeks in hospitals trying to recover from mustard gas (they never did, not fully). Or to force the enemy to spend more resources negating them than you do to create then: The simplest are cheapest are easy to produce while effective gas masks for ever soldier are a little more expensive and not fully effective under active conditions of war. Use against civilian populations as a weapon of terror, as in Syria, is yet another one. Asymmetric warfare in general is a broad area of usefulness.

Certainly they were effective enough that Japan used them in thousands of attacks against Chinese forces. Effective enough that the US and Russia and probably others actively researched and stockpiled them for decades into the cold war. They were considered a significant threat by the US during the Gulf War: Iraq had a history of using them against Iran so the US took many precautionary steps to protect or inoculate their soldiers against them. Too many precautions as it turns out because those protection methods are themselves credited as a major factor in Gulf War Syndrome which impacts hundreds of thousands of US soldiers. The US certain believed in their efficacy 70 years after the trench warfare of WW One.

I don't know where you get the idea that they are not effective, or only effective under conditions if trench warfare. Actual use shows this is not the case.

[JasonFruit]

> …the world has mostly decided and actually followed through on not using certain things…

Not completely, and for what is, in even human time-scales, not at all a long time. We'll see where it goes, but I'm not hopeful in the long run.

[ineedasername]

I can hardly be faulted for not having enough information to say if the prohibition will work on a longer time scale, and I even acknowledge this when I point out the risk that Syria's use may embolden others. I also fully admitted it did not have a perfect track record. So you are faulting my argument for issues I already acknowledged and addressed in the context of my claim: for a weapon that is cheap and easy to produce we have seen fairly little use of it.

Regardless of what comes after this, we can say that the prohibition worked reasonably well for at least 100 years. I'd certainly be happy if we got even 25 more years before fully autonomous lethal drones became common place, and a prohibition on such weapons could buy us so e time on the issue.

[randcraw]

Right. You can't ban the technology, but you can out the nations who employ merciless weapons as uncivilized pariahs who deserve coordinated disrespect, isolation, and punitive measures until the practice ends.

[ineedasername]

Yes, though I think equally, and maybe the more effective aspect of the prohibition against chemical warfare was the general recognition that going down that pathway would be much more awful for everyone than sticking to conventional methods. This is partly why Germany pretty much avoided using them in warfare during WWII: Once the genie was out of the bottle they would lose any advantage obtained in their initial use. (I don't know if it's apocryphal, but apparently Hitler also disliked them from his own experience in WWI)

[ajmurmann]

> until the practice ends.

I don't disagree with your point, but this part highlights how hard this is in practice. When does "the practice end"? When the war is one? When the current offensive ends? When we believe the devices aren't being produced anymore? This immediately reminds me of how Chamberlain treated Hitler.

[ineedasername]

You can sanction the countries in a variety of ways until they stop. You could deploy counter measures to prevent some things: a targeted strike against a chemical depot, or deploy anti-drone technology. This is not unlike the Student approach to slowing Iranian nuclear weapons development.

You can also go after the people behind the orders to do these things and bring them up on war crimes. I find the former option much more ethically reliable, as the later frequently suffers from the fact that war crimes tribunals are generally not convened against the actions of whoever wins, while the winner is all to eager to punish their enemies even beyond defeat.

But none of these options are perfect. We live in a world where bad people can do awful things and never suffer the consequences. Justice isn't dead, but it has never been equally applied.