"The Side That Waits Will Lose": Why Human-Controlled Armies Are Becoming Obsolete

Autonomous warfare will not arrive as robotic armies marching across battlefields. It is already emerging in eastern Ukraine, where machines execute missions at speeds no human can match and electronic warfare routinely severs operator links. The side that insists on human approval before acting, according to David Petraeus and Isaac Flanagan, will simply lose.

The argument anchors a Foreign Affairs essay by the two authors, as "Hvylya" reports.

The authors describe a coming shift from individually operated drones to autonomous formations - platoon- or even battalion-sized units of air, ground, and maritime systems that share information and coordinate strikes without human intervention. These formations will "coordinate with each other at machine speed," radically compressing the time between identifying a target and striking it. "Any military that tries to retain human control of the tempo of battle," Petraeus and Flanagan write, "will experience a serious liability."

This does not mean humans vanish from the equation. Commanders will retain control over decisions about escalation, engagement with civilian populations, and whether a strike serves or undermines political objectives. "In democracies, in particular, these decisions will need to remain irreducibly human," the authors note. But tactical execution - sensing, targeting, movement, timing, and striking - will shift to algorithmically piloted machines that humans program but do not control moment to moment.

The shift demands a fundamental rethink of command itself. Instead of issuing orders to subordinates in real time, commanders will have to translate their intent into precise machine-readable terms before a mission begins: what success looks like, which actions are permitted, which are prohibited, and what systems should do when they encounter conditions the commander did not anticipate. Petraeus and Flanagan compare this to delegating tasks to trusted subordinates - except that the new subordinates are software systems operating at far greater speeds and potentially out of contact. This raises hard questions about what happens when overwhelming firepower is deployed with a fraction of the oversight that traditional command structures provide, and how legal oversight actually works in strike cells when decisions move faster than any human can review.

Also read: War Over Taiwan May Not Spiral Into WWIII - but the Escalation Risks Are Staggering.