Free Republic

In March 2020, on a Libyan battlefield, civilization may have crossed an ominous threshold. Turkish-made autonomous drones reportedly “hunted down and ​. . . ​engaged” retreating forces loyal to General Khalifa Haftar with no human guidance. According to a UN-commissioned report, those lethal autonomous weapons were “programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability.” That was no theoretical scenario devised by military analysts or ethicists. Nor was it a scene from a Hollywood sci-fi thriller about rogue killer robots. It was a real occurrence, one...

In Kherson, a frontline Ukrainian city, small Russian drones have been hunting civilians for months. Like birds of prey, they chase their targets and either drop explosives upon them or self-detonate in kamikaze strikes. Lacking effective countermeasures, locals say they are living in a “human safari” — nowhere is safe anymore. This is the dystopian future of war that may yet come to the West, should great power conflicts proliferate. Kherson sits on the Dnipro River in south Ukraine, by the Black Sea coast. Once home to almost 300,000 people, the port city was liberated after months of Russian occupation...