| Your point 2 is completely off the mark. First of all, warfare is not winner take all. That's a sort of video game naive conception. The famous quote "War is politics by other means" is much more accurate. When armed conflicts happen, it's because the belligerents have specific objectives, and very rarely is that objective "the total obliteration of the enemy" vs something more specific and concrete like territory, access to natural resources, the creation of a vassal state that can be exploited, or sometimes purely ideological (nationalist notions growing into the idea that a people are entitled to an empire). Anyhow, the point is warfare is not a winner takes all game of obliteration. But also the idea that the future of warfare will be all autonomous weapons is massively overweighting on drone hype, and ignoring that a lot of the fundamentals haven't changed since the days of Bismark, despite the rise of drones, computer vision algorithms, etc. A simple example is Ukraine, where the battlefield is essentially defined by the combination of traditional artillery, mines and similar fortifications, and simple observation drones that don't have any particularly complex AI. The combination creates a 20 km "no go zone" that has nothing really to do with autonomy. In fact, the more AI centric loitering munitions provided by US/EU firms have performed quite poorly in Ukraine, which is why they're favoring much more simple implementations like using hobby FPV drone components, or remote piloting via GSM modems, etc. Will these technologies play an increasing role in future conflicts? Of course. But they're not going to completely upend things, or obliviate more traditional platforms. Heck, another example would be simple hand coded AIs have been better than humans in dogfights for decades now. And it matters exactly zero for real world conflicts, because what fighter pilots actually do isn't a Top Gun movie. |