Autonomous drones, artificial intelligence, combat robots... The war of the future is taking shape before our eyes, but can technology alone replace the human factor on the battlefield?
There is something disconcerting about the images that have been circulating since the Ukrainian conflict, FPV drones controlled from a smartphone screen, swarms of prowling ammunition, algorithms capable of identifying a target in a few milliseconds.
What was thought to be reserved for science fiction has become, in a few years, the daily life of soldiers on the front lines, and yet, one question persists: at a time when technology is becoming the central argument of all military doctrine, is it really enough to prepare for tomorrow's war?
The war in Ukraine has functioned as a full-scale laboratory, since 2022, both sides have made massive use of commercial drones hijacked for military purposes, civilian communication systems such as Starlink or Telegram, and software capable of sorting images by the thousands to detect a threat.
This shift between the civilian world and the military world is now structural. As several analysts point out, the boundaries between civilian innovation and defense are constantly blurring.
This reality has accelerated investments on a global scale, in the United States, the Replicator program aimed to deploy thousands of low-cost autonomous drones to counter the digital power of the Chinese army, in Europe, the alliance between Mistral AI and Helsing announced at the AI Action Summit in Paris in Paris in February 2025 marks the entry of civilian artificial intelligence giants into the arms sector, in France, the ministerial Agency for Defense AI ((Amiad) is working on the Pendragon project, a robotic unit. autonomous composed of terrestrial robots and coordinated drones, the first demonstration of which is expected before 2027.
This is where the debate becomes interesting because while autonomous systems and AI undeniably revolutionize the way operations are conducted, they do not work in a vacuum, the researchers who analyzed Ukrainian resistance point to an illuminating paradox: Ukraine has managed to compensate for a massive asymmetry in terms of firepower not thanks to gross technological superiority, but thanks to its ability to adapt.
Decentralized command, national cohesion, rapid integration of available tools, in other words, it is human intelligence that has been able to take advantage of technology, and not the other way around.
Military foresight specialists like to talk about “multipliers of effects”, a well-used drone can change the outcome of an engagement, but a drone that is poorly integrated into a doctrine, operated by insufficiently trained soldiers or deployed without tactical recoil, can be useless or even counterproductive, and the tool is only worth what the human and organizational context in which it is located is worth.
There is a more uncomfortable dimension to this debate, that of lethal autonomy, systems that are already operational are capable of detecting, pursuing, and striking a target without direct human intervention and the question of who, or what, decides life and death on the battlefield is no longer theoretical.
For states with democratic values, the stakes are high: maintaining a “human in the loop”, i.e. an identifiable manager for each lethal decision, is presented as a red line, technical safeguards are mentioned: algorithmic confidence thresholds, physical kill switches, coded geographical limitations, but their concrete implementation in the heat of action remains a promise more than a proven reality.
The historian Michel Goya summarizes the tension sharply: delegating the decision to kill to a machine means no longer fighting, is to make assassination, a radical formulation, but one that says something true about what we are in the process of normalizing.
Military technology is advancing at a speed that doctrines are struggling to keep up with, collective imaginaries fuelled by decades of science fiction are already saturating strategic debates with images of autonomous robots and algorithmic wars, the risk is to let these representations guide weapons choices before the fundamental questions have even been asked.
What the Ukrainian conflict has above all shown is that the war remains human in its deep roots, and the morale of the troops, the cohesion of a society, the capacity of a general staff to improvise: these invisible variables have weighed as much, if not more, than the sophistication of the equipment, as the sophistication of the equipment, the war of the future will not be won by the one who has the most drones but by the one who can best combine the power of machines with the quality of judgment. human.
Technology is essential, but it doesn't think for us.
