In the military, a kill chain refers to the sequential process of finding, fixing, tracking, targeting, engaging, and assessing a target. And the U.S. military war machine has found that humans are not as willing to kill as much as they’d like them to be. After World War II, studies conducted by Brigadier General SLA Marshall showed that only 20% of U.S. infantrymen fired their weapons at the enemy, even when under direct threat. He attributed this to an innate human resistance to killing. He wrote in his book, Men Against Fire, that the average and healthy individual has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that, at the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector.

This led to changes in U.S. military training, such as human-shaped silhouette targets and dehumanization of the enemy. In 1996, the psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman showed that increasing the kill rate in U.S. infantrymen came with psychological costs due to the guilt and trauma of killing. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in 2011 showed that soldiers who believed they killed someone in combat were at higher risk of PTSD, depression, and suicidal thoughts. It is for these reasons that the IDF, with the help of the U.S.

military and Palantir, have been utilizing artificial intelligence on the battlefield. Destroying an entire building to kill one person may seem extreme for a human, but not for AI. It is admitted that the AI targeting system murders innocent civilians 10% of the time, and AI is not bothered one bit. The golden dome that President Trump announced will rely upon AI-driven tracking and interceptors, and lethal autonomous weapons are next. The Bullfrog M2 is an autonomous, 50-caliber machine gun developed for the U.S. military. It detects, tracks, identifies, and acquires targets autonomously. Last year, DARPA released footage of artificial intelligence autonomously flying an F-16, the X-62A, against a human piloted F-16.

Known as the founder of Oculus VR, Palmer Lucky is the latest, harmless-looking front man for the military-industrial complex. In 2017, Lucky founded Andoril Industries, a military technology company focused on autonomous military weapons systems. To be clear, autonomy does not mean remote control. Once an autonomous weapon is programmed and given a task, it can use artificial intelligence for surveillance or to identify, select, and engage targets. No operator needed. It’s a scary idea to some people. It’s a scary idea, but I mean, that’s the world we live in. I’d say it’s a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapon system that doesn’t have any level of intelligence at all.

In your mind, is it enough just to have all these things as deterrence, or do they have to be deployed and used? They have to believe that you can use them. By the end of this year, Andoril says it will have secured more than $6 billion in government contracts worldwide. The U.S. Department of Defense has the goal of always having robots, not soldiers, make first contact with the enemy. Robotic systems are being developed to perform everything from surveillance to killing. With an army of autonomous slaughterbots, there is no longer a concern of ethics.

If a government wanted to unleash them against their own people, they will have no problem following those orders. Greg Reiss reporting. The Reiss Report is now fully funded by my sub-stack subscribers. Subscribe today and support my work at gregreiss.substack.com. [tr:trw].

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