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Autonomous Weapons and Killer Robots: New Warnings, Old Habits

1 September 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark AIM Extra , https://theaimn.net/autonomous-weapons-and-killer-robots-new-warnings-old-habits/

Another bleak warning, another round of Cassandra calls about humanity’s immaculate sense of destructive self. This month, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC) Mirjana Spoljaric Egger issued a joint appeal stating that, “We are now dangerously close to crossing a moral red line: the autonomous targeting of humans by machines.” Both insist that two types of autonomous weapons – unpredictable autonomous weapons and anti-personnel weapons – be prohibited.

In Geneva, the chief of disarmament affairs at UN Geneva, Mélanie Régimbal, held up the fort by reiterating the position taken by the UN that systems selecting or engaging targets and taking human lives in the absence of control and judgment “are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant and should be prohibited under international law.”

Laurent Gisel, head of the arms and the conduct of hostilities division at the ICRC, also spoke from Geneva, describing conflict as “not a story of precision, distinction and restraints” but one “of civilians killed, families displaced, hospitals, schools and homes destroyed at ever greater speed and scale.” In the thick fog of conflict, many variables could come into play. “A combatant can surrender or be wounded and therefore be protected from attack; civilians can enter the area of operations of the autonomous weapons systems; the weapons may encounter a situation that would not have been anticipated.” The dangers of unpredictability in such autonomous systems was hugely problematic. “If it’s not possible to predict it, then how is it possible to limit it?”

These are not remarkable warnings. The UN and ICRC had issued a joint appeal on the subject in 2023, calling upon States to negotiate a legally binding document by 2026. At the level of civil society, the Stop Killer Robots coalition was formed in October 2012 and publicly launched in 2013. The campaign, according to the group, focuses on fostering a world where “we respect each other’s inherent dignity”; take responsibility for choices regarding technology and how it alters the relationships between humans; develop technology to promote peace, justice, human rights, equality and respect for law; and where people work as activists “to build a society and overcome inequalities and systems of oppression.” This is fairly airy stuff, but central is the goal of developing and fortifying “social norms that reject autonomous killing by machine [sic] in warfare, policing, border control and other circumstances.” Control, responsibility, accountability are fundamental features.

That campaign has not made much meaningful progress of late. The faith placed by the military establishment in murderous machines remains an unshakeable one, with the idea of human control over decision making increasingly thinned in favour of the uncritical human consumer of data. That faith has effectively displaced the scrupulous, incredulous decision maker when it comes to acquiring and hitting targets. Within the first few weeks of the Gaza War, beginning on October 7, 2023, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was making generous use of Lavender, an AI decision-support system (DSS) to generate 37,000 individual targets on a crude rating scale of significance depending on affiliations with armed groups. Other systems used in battle included The Gospel (Habsora), which generates target lists and Where’s Daddy?, a platform tracking the locations of individuals ahead of the strike. The resulting slaughter to scale tallied. Far from suggesting a seamless integration of human and machine, the IDF’s conduct suggests a misplaced optimism, and laziness, in deferring to the merits of a killing system.

The disagreement between the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic and the US Department of Defense over the dangerous limits of autonomous systems in war is another case in point. The falling out between the two players in the thanatotic economy was serious enough to see a concerted attempt by the Pentagon to blacklist the firm as a “supply-chain risk.” (This was found on August 27 by the US District Court of the Northern District of California to be an “unlawful retaliation” in violation of the First Amendment and a denial of due process as protected by the Fifth Amendment.) That falling out, however, is not necessarily a boon for those favouring limits on killer robots or fully autonomous military platforms. 

In a February 2026 statement, Dario Amodei, the company’s co-founder, conceded that the Pentagon, “not private companies”, made military decisions. “We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit our technology in an ad hoc manner.” Amodei, however, considers himself a politically sentient being, which begs the question as to why he is at the vanguard of denuding humanity’s role in making decisions, notably through encouraging Large Language Models (LLMs) that remove initiative, industry and inventiveness. AI, he claims, can “undermine” democracy, a goal he seems to be pursuing himself. Of personal concern was the use of the company’s technology for mass domestic surveillance, which presented “serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties” and the use of fully autonomous weapons “that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets.” But even here, his quibbles are brittle, given an admission that fully autonomous systems “may prove critical for our national defense.” The concern, it would seem, lay in the reliability of the systems available and whether they would harm American personnel. “We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.” 

Two days after Amodei’s statement, the pre-emptive, joint illegal attack on Iran by the US and Israel commenced, seeing yet another gluttonous use of AI DSS. Targets were generated at speed by the US military’s resort to Palantir’s Maven Smart System, which integrates Anthropic’s Claude AI to assess surveillance data, generate lists of targets and prioritise them. “Many of the targets hit in Iran,” writes Noor Hammad of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), “have been civilian, including a school and healthcare and residential facilities, illustrating the risks of rapid target generation.” Think tankers can always be relied upon to offer the understatement and euphemism in equal measure.

Gisel has told reporters that there is, as things stand, no “confirmed evidence that autonomous weapons have been used to directly target human beings in the battlefield.” This is a distinction with little difference, given the deferential attitudes shown by the technology fetishists in the IDF, the Pentagon and other militaries. If the system says so, it must be right. There is also a risk that these calls for restraint and a legal system of control will simply fatten the detritus of worry without effect. Ahead of the seventh Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) taking place in November, the human species is unlikely to take a pathway that does not first imperil it before seeking, irretrievably, to bottle the escaped genie. From the creation of atomic weapons to the threats of climate change, the worst will always come before any touted panacea. And that panacea, when it appears, is likely to be a mere palliative.

September 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Transnational Technocratic Machine: Class War Behind The Flags

One Supply Chain, Multiple Flags

Military budgets in 2026 remain enormous. The U.S. national-defense request approached or exceeded $1 trillion when reconciliation and related measures are included (with the formal DoD request at roughly $961.6 billion). China’s official 2026 defense budget stands at approximately 1.94 trillion yuan, with central-government expenditure of roughly 1.91 trillion yuan—about a 7% increase. Russia’s 2026 military expenditure is budgeted at approximately 14.9 trillion rubles, equal to about 6.3% of GDP, according to SIPRI analysis of the wartime economy. Iran operates with a fraction of those resources but invests heavily in relatively inexpensive drones, missiles, and asymmetric systems.

These numbers are presented as national strength. In practice they recycle capital through the same commercial layers…….. The originating firm often never sees the final military end-user. The profit has already been taken at the commercial stage.

The technocratic class that designs the chips, owns the foundries, finances the distributors, and staffs the regulatory bodies benefits whether the final buyer is a Western defense prime, a Chinese state-linked enterprise, a Russian wartime manufacturer, or an Iranian procurement network.

 Gloria Guillo, Tortilla con Sal., August 31, 2026, https://www.tortillaconsal.com/bitacora/node/10200

How a Shared Global Technology Supply Chain Serves Transnational Elites Against Workers Everywhere

The story sold to populations is that the United States, China, Russia, and Iran are locked in geopolitical rivalry, each building separate military-industrial systems to confront the others. That narrative conceals the deeper structure. The weapons carry national markings. The technological base that makes them possible does not. Semiconductors, sensors, power electronics, microcontrollers, RF components, machine tools, and industrial equipment move through the same global commercial networks. Components pass through distributors, brokers, front companies, and third countries before they appear in missiles, drones, radar, or electronic-warfare systems on every side.

What looks like interstate competition is better understood as a transnational class project. A layer of technocrats—executives in semiconductor firms, private-equity and defense-finance networks, logistics conglomerates, and the political managers who write export rules and sanction lists—operates across borders. Their interest is not the security of any particular population. It is the continuous expansion of high-margin dual-use technology markets, the extraction of surplus from workers who fabricate and assemble the components, and the management of scarcity and conflict that keeps demand high. Workers in Taiwanese fabrication plants, Chinese assembly lines, American distribution warehouses, Russian military factories, and Iranian workshops are all inputs to the same circuit. The impoverished in every country pay the taxes, endure the austerity, and absorb the destruction when those circuits feed actual shooting wars.

One Supply Chain, Multiple Flags

Military budgets in 2026 remain enormous. The U.S. national-defense request approached or exceeded $1 trillion when reconciliation and related measures are included (with the formal DoD request at roughly $961.6 billion). China’s official 2026 defense budget stands at approximately 1.94 trillion yuan, with central-government expenditure of roughly 1.91 trillion yuan—about a 7% increase. Russia’s 2026 military expenditure is budgeted at approximately 14.9 trillion rubles, equal to about 6.3% of GDP, according to SIPRI analysis of the wartime economy. Iran operates with a fraction of those resources but invests heavily in relatively inexpensive drones, missiles, and asymmetric systems.

These numbers are presented as national strength. In practice they recycle capital through the same commercial layers. A processor or power-management chip does not know whether it will end in a consumer device or a guidance package. The same is true of sensors, memory, connectors, and machine tools. Once a component leaves the factory, layers of intermediaries can move it across sanctioned and non-sanctioned jurisdictions. Documented cases show U.S.-origin electronics reaching Iranian UAV and missile programs through Chinese and Hong Kong fronts (DOJ indictment of Chinese nationals), with parallel patterns for Russian systems and repeated Treasury designations of procurement networks involving China, Hong Kong, and other transit points. The originating firm often never sees the final military end-user. The profit has already been taken at the commercial stage.

This is not a conspiracy of one secret corporation. It is the ordinary functioning of a globalized production system in which dual-use technology is the most valuable commodity. The technocratic class that designs the chips, owns the foundries, finances the distributors, and staffs the regulatory bodies benefits whether the final buyer is a Western defense prime, a Chinese state-linked enterprise, a Russian wartime manufacturer, or an Iranian procurement network. National flags provide the political cover; class interest provides the continuity.

Workers as the Common Exploited Base

The labor that produces these components is performed by workers whose wages, conditions, and political power are systematically subordinated. Fabrication, packaging, testing, and logistics are concentrated in locations chosen for cost and control. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has documented that the Department of Defense relies on more than 200,000 suppliers and cannot fully identify where all of the microelectronics in the products it purchases are manufactured. According to Defense Department estimates cited by GAO, approximately 88% of microelectronics production and 98% of semiconductor assembly, packaging and testing occur overseas, primarily in Taiwan, South Korea, and China.

That overseas dependence is not an accidental vulnerability; it is a feature that allows capital to discipline labor by threatening relocation or by pitting workforces against one another under the banner of national competition. When governments announce new defense spending, the immediate beneficiaries are the contractors and their financiers. The money then flows downward into subcontractors, component makers, chemical suppliers, and logistics firms—extracting value at every step while the social costs of militarization (debt, inflation, environmental damage, and eventual battlefield casualties) fall on broader working populations.

Sanctions and export controls are presented as tools of national security. In practice they function as instruments of selective scarcity. They raise the price of dual-use goods, create rents for those who can navigate the gray markets, and force poorer states or sanctioned populations into more precarious procurement channels. The same networks that move restricted electronics also move the profits upward. Workers in the sanctioned economies face shortages and intensified exploitation; workers in the sanctioning economies face higher taxes and the ideological demand to identify with “their” military-industrial complex. The technocratic layer remains insulated.

Opacity as Class Power

Supply-chain visibility is weak even inside the largest military systems. The inability of major defense bureaucracies to map every microelectronic origin is not merely bureaucratic failure. Opacity protects the circulation of dual-use technology and the intermediaries who profit from it. When diversion occurs through shell companies and false end-user declarations, the system continues to function for capital while the political narrative of “adversaries” is maintained for domestic audiences. The real common denominator is not shared nationality but shared dependence on a commercial technology base controlled by a narrow transnational stratum.

Disrupting the Machine Means Disrupting Class Power

If the shared technological substrate is what enables large-scale militarization across rival states, then genuine disruption of war requires breaking the class monopoly over that substrate. Nationalist solutions—more sanctions, more domestic production under the same ownership structures, more spending funneled to the same contractors—reproduce the circuit. They merely rearrange which faction of capital captures the rents.

A class-oriented approach starts from the opposite premise: the workers who design, fabricate, assemble, transport, and maintain the dual-use base have no objective interest in feeding any military-industrial system. Their interest lies in converting that productive capacity toward social needs and in denying its conversion into instruments of destruction. That requires transparency forced from below, refusal of dual-use labor discipline, international coordination that ignores official enemy lines, and collective control over the lower tiers of the technological pyramid—the machine tools, specialized materials, and distribution nodes that currently serve capital’s ability to arm multiple sides.

The flags will continue to wave. The budgets will continue to be justified in the language of national survival. But the underlying circuit is class power operating through technology. As long as a transnational technocratic layer can move dual-use components across borders while workers on every side remain divided by nationality and subordinated by wage discipline, the capacity for industrialized war remains intact. Breaking that capacity means treating the supply chain not as a national security problem but as a site of global class conflict—technocrats and their state managers on one side, the workers who actually produce the material basis of modern warfare on the other.

September 2, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

‘Let’s stop being suckers for Ukraine’ – Polish MEP

Kiev “spits into our face” by glorifying Nazi collaborators behind massacres of Poles, Ewa Zajaczkowska-Hernik has said

29 Aug, 2026, https://www.rt.com/news/644805-poland-ukraine-nazi-mep/ 

Warsaw should stop giving Ukraine free weapons as long as it glorifies Nazi collaborators responsible for massacring Poles, a member of the European Parliament has said.

Earlier this week, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky again called upon Kiev’s foreign backers to provide more Patriot missiles, citing an acute shortage of air defense munitions amid intensifying Russian strikes on military-related targets across the country.

Polish Deputy Defense Minister Pawel Zalewski told Ukrainian media on Thursday that Warsaw was ready to cooperate with Kiev on the production of Patriot interceptors for the needs of both NATO and Zelensky’s government.

In a post on X the same day, Zajaczkowska-Hernik expressed her frustration, saying: “More missiles for Patriots for Zelensky for nothing? Let’s stop being suckers for Ukraine!”

Warsaw has provided Kiev with some $4.6 billion in military aid since February 2022, supplying tanks and warplanes, among other things, and “should have pursued a transactional policy” towards Ukraine, she argued.

“We’re handing them valuable equipment and paying off their loans for them, and they spit in our face with the Banderite pantheon of heroes – what the hell is this?!” the MEP wrote.

Relations between Warsaw and Kiev deteriorated in June after Zelensky granted an active Ukrainian commando unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army),” prompting outrage in Poland.

The UPA was the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), led by Stepan Bandera, which collaborated with Nazi Germany during the early stages of its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. UPA fighters massacred up to 100,000 ethnic Polish civilians in 1943-1944 in what is now western Ukraine, according to Polish estimates.

In recent months, the remains of two OUN co-founders – Andrey Melnik and Evgeny Konovalets – were exhumed in Europe and delivered to Ukraine to be reburied as part of a push by Zelensky to build a “Pantheon of outstanding Ukrainians.”

Warsaw warned Kiev that it will not support its bid to join the EU if it does not change its ways, while Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that the neo-Nazi nature of the Ukrainian government had become so visible that even the Polish authorities, who are gripped by Russophobia, cannot help but see it. According to Putin, Warsaw simply cannot ignore the “obvious demand” of its own population to address the issue.

September 2, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment