A dead Russian infantryman is worth twelve points in Ukraine’s “Army of Drones Bonus” system, a gamified incentive program recently instituted in its defensive war against Russia. Successful drone operators earn points redeemable for new weapons. “The more you destroy, the more you receive,” says Andrii Hrytseniuk, CEO of the agency that developed the system. Drone warfare has become increasingly important in conflicts around the world—nowhere more so than in Ukraine. Cheap drone fleets and effective strategies have helped Ukraine hold the line and even make gains with strikes deep into Russia.
The ability to kill or injure the enemy and damage its infrastructure cheaply, at a distance, and with minimal or no direct human involvement promises to make twenty-first-century war even more barbaric than it already is. At the outset of Russia’s invasion, tanks and artillery inflicted most of the damage, but drones now account for an estimated three-fourths of the casualties, which may total more than two million. Civilian casualties have increased in recent months, largely due to drones. Worldwide, children have been killed and maimed in conflict zones in steadily rising numbers since 2020, a trend the UN also ties directly to developments in drone technology.
Military officials and the arms industry describe drone strikes as “precision-guided,” but they are often launched indiscriminately in massive quantities and on the basis of faulty intelligence. In Somalia, where Biden-era restrictions on drone warfare have been discarded in a covert war against Islamic extremist groups, a U.S. drone attack decimated the town of Jamaame, killing at least twelve civilians, including eight children. (The Trump administration has refused to admit any civilians were killed.) Trump’s Pentagon is also using drones to help commit extrajudicial executions of hundreds of civilians suspected of drug smuggling in the Caribbean.
In Sudan’s civil war, daily drone barrages killed more than one thousand civilians in the first five months of 2026. Both the army and opposing paramilitary forces are sourcing cheap Chinese-made drones that have made “every trip to the market, school, health clinic or a relative’s home a gamble,” according to the Los Angeles Times. In Iran, Shahed drones transformed Trump’s shambolic war. Costing $35,000 or even less to produce, they have imposed serious costs on the U.S. military, which is forced to defend against them with interceptors costing up to $3 million each. Iran has targeted U.S. partner nations with swarms of drones that have destroyed infrastructure and killed civilians across the Gulf.
AI has already been heavily integrated into drone technology to speed up target acquisition, evade signal jammers, and assist in decisions to strike. Partnering with U.S. tech firms, Israel used machine-learning algorithms to identify targets in its barbaric war on Gaza, resulting in predictable mistakes with horrific consequences. AI weapons companies like Alex Karp’s Palantir and drone startups supported by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt are promising, in Schmidt’s words, “the largest revolution in military affairs in history.”
AI systems, of course, don’t know what death is and can’t make moral decisions the way human beings do. The systems identify targets based on statistical pattern-matching that lacks context, and their accuracy is heavily dependent on data quality. Military leaders insist that “kill decisions” are still made by soldiers, but with the increased volume of attacks enabled by AI, the “human in the loop” may become little more than a rubber stamp efficiently processing death sentences at a physical and moral remove. And as militaries work to sever the link between enemy drones and their operators, the pressure will grow to ensure they can finish attacks autonomously. The United States’ “Project Maven,” which helped launch the Ukrainian drone industry, has already taken significant strides toward full AI autonomy, and reports suggest that Ukrainian drones have already killed without any human input. This arms race raises the hellish prospect of battlefields—and civilian streets—swarmed by rogue bots launched by state and nonstate actors, dealing death from above on the basis of opaque algorithms.
Russia’s war in Ukraine may, like World War I, go down in history as the beginning of a new era of industrial warfare. The Great War upended nineteenth-century assumptions about tactics, munitions, and the glory of war. It took tens of millions of deaths and the destruction of an entire continent in another world war to force the development of strong international institutions capable of negotiating and enforcing treaties to limit warfare and prevent atrocities. But after securing landmark agreements over nuclear, chemical, and cluster weapons, those institutions have steadily eroded over the past several years.
Today, the UN is calling for new treaties to regulate and restrict the use of drones. Autonomous weapons “cannot become a license for atrocity crimes,” said the UN’s human-rights chief, Volker Türk. But the prospects for new negotiations are bleak, and existing international law is proving toothless. As Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, makes clear, “the current weaknesses of the UN”—including funding shortfalls and declines in peacekeeping activities—“and the international political system reveal the need for profound reforms.”
Those reforms, Pope Leo argues, are “not simply a question of technical adjustments”; effective multilateralism must address “the crisis of convictions and values that also concerns the ethical foundation of nations.” Leo’s hope—and our own—is that the catastrophic danger posed by AI and new drone technology will spur us to recover those convictions, rebuild our connections to one another, and step back from the brink.
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