Are killer robots here?

Last December, the Ukrainian military took over a Russian trench fully with remote-controlled robots. This is part of a larger trend in which warfare becomes more automated – and lethal. But humans are – for now – still important on the battlefield.

Darius Kölsch

On a cold December day in the northeastern Kharkiv region, a Ukrainian national guard unit had the same mission as so many other units in the war. Attack and take control of a Russian trench. Usually, these attacks work by sending small groups of soldiers, supported by first-person-view drones that bomb enemy positions. 

But this time, no Ukrainian soldier advanced. Instead, the drones in the sky were supporting robots on the ground, small remote-controlled cars with mounted machine guns, piloted by Ukrainian soldiers a few hundred meters away. And it was a success – the trench was taken over without a single Ukrainian soldier physically there.

Now, the Ukrainian military has officially introduced the domestically-produced "Liut" combat vehicle. With what is possibly the first fully uninhabited attack – i.e. attack without a human advancing – in history, the question is: are killer robots here? 

Drones – the new kings of battle

Since the two world wars, artillery, the 'big guns', has been the 'king of battle' by being the leading cause of casualties. But in Ukraine, the largest land war in Europe since 1945, drones have now taken that spot. They account for more civilian deaths than artillery (according to the UN) and a Ukrainian MP noted the same trend in military casualties. 

Virtually all of these deaths are caused by airborne drones, which are cheaper, more precise, and more responsive than artillery. While humans still pilot these from the ground, automation vastly increases their range – and reduces the skills operators need, increasing drone strikes’ success rates from 10-20% to about 70-80%, CSIS finds.

While this will likely not make artillery obsolete, the shift forces militaries to question how their multi-million-euro tanks or artillery systems are still relevant for modern battle.

More crucially, however, this change makes the battlefield more lethal. In other words, soldiers can afford less and less to be detected, because weapons are becoming more precise and will strike their positions faster when found. For the same reason – increased lethality – fewer and fewer soldiers are necessary to cover the same area.

But this is unlikely to make wars any less deadly. First, autonomous weapons increase risk to civilians, who are often difficult to distinguish from combatants, especially in urban settings. Second, the increased reach of cheap, uninhabited weapons has made areas further from the front line less safe, putting more and more supply units, training locations, and towns and cities at risk. That's what we see in Russia's relentless drone attacks on Ukrainian cities.

Uninhabited weapons don't revolutionise warfare (yet)

But while airborne drones become increasingly important, both Russia and Ukraine have looked for ways to defend against them. The most efficient solution is often jamming the connection between the drone and the operator, rendering it ineffective. AI is frequently pitched as a solution to this, since a fully autonomous drone would not require any connection to an operator to continue its mission.

However, while Russian and Ukrainian AI-controlled drones were rolled out in early 2024, both seem to have had limited success for now. Instead, the militaries have in some cases now reverted to simply connecting the drones with up to 41 km-long fibre-optic cables, meaning the drone’s connection can't be tampered with unless the cable is physically accessed.

For now, aerial drones are the most likely to be autonomous, as navigation is much easier in the sky. Ground drones remain far rarer and still require extensive human supervision.

The future of warfare

Still, defence companies and institutions alike are at least nominally declaring that AI-powered warfare is the future. But while AI has arguably rapidly caught up with humans in cognitive tasks, warfare is determined by physical tasks, which AI is not good at. Additionally, even advanced AI is prone to errors, errors which have already killed civilians in conflict.

Most notably, Israel's AI targeting system "Lavender" selected and led to the death of thousands of people in Gaza. The operators only devote about 20 seconds to each proposed target – verifying it as male – before authorising strikes, despite an error rate of about 10%, according to +972 magazine. 

AI, as algorithms by definition, learn from patterns – patterns which militaries have always sought to avoid, as detection and predictability are already fatal mistakes. Absent any revolutionary change in AI, the future of warfare will have drones operated by humans but increasingly supported by AI. 

For now, this trend will make battlefields more lethal, making it more dangerous for soldiers to be discovered and on the move. In Ukraine, for instance, drones (and mines) have led to extremely limited territorial changes in the past year, much like modern artillery contributed to the stalemates in the First World War. 

But this does not mean the stalemate will continue indefinitely. Like tactical innovations helped break the trench stalemates of World War I, militaries will eventually develop tactics and technologies to overcome the trench stalemates in Ukraine. Recently, the United Kingdom has reportedly successfully tested a weapon that can fry the internal electronics of multiple unmanned vehicles – AI or not.

What life is like at the frontline

Three years into the full-scale invasion, Ukrainians live in different realities: the one close to the frontline, and the one further away. Just a few hours east of Dnipro, a big, bustling city where it’s almost possible to believe that there is no war – at least for the few minutes between air raids –  you suddenly arrive in a different and much harsher reality.

Anastasia Kucher

The closer you get to the frontline, the more visible the war becomes. There are more destroyed buildings, more volunteers, more medics and soldiers. People have more serious faces, but they also crack funnier jokes, as humour is the only way to deal with the realisation that everything has a price, and that price is human lives.

Take Pavlohrad, a city roughly 60 kilometres from the active combat zones in the Donetsk region. As we drive through the city that had 100,000 inhabitants before the war, evacuation ambulances rush to hospitals to take in the injured, and destroyed buildings are more and more frequent. Military-coloured SUVs make it clear that rough terrain isn’t far away. Last week, Russian drones completely destroyed the Pavlohrad base and all equipment of the "Hospitaliers", a volunteer medical battalion that supports thousands of people.

While buying a great cappuccino in a local coffee shop in Dobropillia, only 20 kilometres from the line of contact, I asked the barista, a young woman in her twenties, about the March attack when 11 people died and 50 were injured.

"That apartment building is not far away, my grandmother's apartment is there," she told me as she worked on several orders at once. When I asked about her grandmother's well-being, she answered very calmly: "She was killed in the attack, two of my other relatives were injured."

Oleksandr, an ageing man, stopped beside me as I looked at another destroyed house that had a huge, gaping hole in it. He told me about his life: "I come from a village near the border with Russia. I left my home a long time ago, it was impossible to live there after Russia occupied the area". 

He lit a cigarette and mentioned that he had lived in Donetsk, then Mariupol and a few other places that are now also occupied, before settling in Dobropillia. Oleksandr is just one example of many people with a similar fate - a perpetual internally displaced person within his own homeland.

Closer to the frontline, people still live in villages that have been almost erased from the map – destroyed infrastructure, lack of essentials, water, electricity, and constant bombing. Grandmothers with colourful scarves around their heads sit on benches by their fences, people plant flowers and tend their gardens to the sound of artillery shells. Even with the ever-present danger, many will stay in their homes for as long as they can, as for many it's all that they have.