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This seems like a highly questionable conclusion. 'No autonomy' means (to me) no kind of technological assist whatsoever, not just not just no executive power. Consider the humble digital camera. You likely have one close by. My old point-and shoot has 'intelligent' control of focus and aperture, and is 'smart' enough to look for shapes resembling human faces and prefer them as focus targets. Newer models on various cameras include recognizing babies (as distinct from adults), tracking moving objects and so forth. Now, if you have any experience with a manual (film) camera you can't help but be aware of how useful these new tools are, although you might not depend on them. I chose cameras as an example because they're cheap - almost commoditized, in fact - and the degree of 'assist' offered by the technology is really quite startling, and furthermore seems to be accelerating with every new generation of camera. Back in the military context, consider the hierarchical nature of military command. Say you are a submarine commander in wartime. Your job is to sink enemy ships, but you don't want to accidentally sink any ships belonging to allies or neutrals, and (to a lesser degree) you want to avoid sinking even the enemy's passenger ships, where the military gain would be marginal but the propaganda cost to your side would be significant. You, the commander are the executive who makes the decision to fire a torpedo. but to do so, you rely on a mix of incoming intelligence about shipping movements, the judgment of sonar operators about the signature and identity of passing ships, a larger staff who orient your craft and ready your weapons, and finally a small officer staff whose functions are to implement your orders and also to draw your attention to possible error. You, as an executive, are replaceable, mainly by necessity but sometimes by choice; the existence of a tiered officer class in combination with a military code serves as a useful check on excess, though not a foolproof one. Now as far as drones go, the operator is equivalent to the executive. However, the operator's decision is only as good as the quality of information relayed to him or her by subordinates. In this case, the subordinates are increasingly heading towards being technological systems. I would really be surprised if these UAVs did not include some degree of auto-targeting based on high-amplitude infrared signatures or so. We know (from our experience with cameras, and many other contexts you can think up) that real-time signal processing is both affordable and ubiquitous, and we also know that good systems design involves leveraging technology to increase efficiency wherever possible. So the point (finally...sorry) is that the human autonomy you cite is probably somewhat less than total, insofar as it relies on technological assists which aid in the selection and tracking of targets. This is a very marginal loss of autonomy, to be sure - one that may seem so slight as to be negligible, and indeed one which is often positive insofar as it may reduce human error. But: a) as we all know, technology frequently displaces skills to the extent that such skills can systemized, and the military is all about doing things systematically b) it's relatively easy to program a machine to listen/look for the signature of (say) automatic gunfire, but we are a long way from being able to explain to one that in some cultures, this is considered a good way to celebrate a wedding. |