War by Other Means
TLDR
Ukraine deployed unmanned ground and aerial vehicles to conduct a December 2024 assault near Lyptsi without any soldiers on the battlefield, using robots to preserve limited manpower in a war of attrition. The shift toward robotic warfare is creating structural dependency on private defense firms like Palantir and Anthropic, which now control critical military software, algorithms, and AI capabilities that governments struggle to replace or audit. As states increasingly outsource core military functions to private enterprise for efficiency, political power shifts from public institutions toward firms, potentially eroding democratic constraints on warfare and state accountability to citizens.
Why it matters
The use of robots in war will only increase, with governments relying on a much smaller pool of human capital for labor and war. A fundamental source of political power has begun to shift from the people towards the firms that make the machines.
