War by Other Means — PALLADIUM Magazine

By John Severini.

Robotic warfare is shifting the source of state power away from citizens to firms. The Ukraine War created an explosion of automated warfighting, from kamikaze drones to remotely piloted mini-tanks. As machines fight the wars of the future, the longstanding terms of the social contract will be rewritten.

In December 2024, Ukrainian forces carried out the world's first successful combined air-ground assault using only remotely piloted drones. As manpower shortages intensify, Ukraine's military has automated its core capacities.

Even in military superpowers like the United States, defensive planners have argued that increased use of unmanned systems like Ukraine's drone fleets could allow America to project more power at a lower cost and with lower risk to American lives.

The pivot to unmanned combat systems is just one part of a broader Western outsourcing of military capabilities to the corporate sector. The intelligence company Palantir is already deeply integrated into both American and Ukrainian military command and control.

As governments take advantage of private-sector tech, they unexpectedly find themselves at the mercy of these same corporations. SpaceX was able to dictate prices to the Pentagon during the Iran War; Anthropic overruled DoW policy to prevent Claude's use in autonomous weaponry.

Even the state's ability to nationalize private companies is eroded in 21st-century warfare: when cutting-edge technology requires constant innovation, competitive marketplaces, and top personnel, then government nationalizations risk destroying the companies they acquire.

Sovereignty ultimately rests on the government's power to coerce its populace, and is checked by the people's ability to disobey government orders. When military power is fully mechanized, the primary check on sovereignty is no longer the people but rather corporations.

Mass democracies like America were founded on the strength of mass armies of individual soldiers. In the age of autonomous, industrial, unmanned warfare, this very basis of popular sovereignty will be challenged. Politics must evolve for this era.

While transhumanists here are likely to applaud this development, I think it is important to point out that it directly undercuts the populist approach to politics in all countries. There is perhaps a limited window of democratic power as a tool against bureaucracy, and it might be far shorter than usually believed.

Read more here:
https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/war-by-other-means

> Mass democracies like America were founded on the strength of mass armies of individual soldiers. In the age of autonomous, industrial, unmanned warfare, this very basis of popular sovereignty will be challenged.

This has been dead since Vietnam, where it became clear that conscription doesn’t work anymore and mass population-scale armies no longer make sense. Maybe this is another possible trigger for “WTF happened in 1971”. In any case all of America’s wars since have been fought with ever smaller numbers of voluntary professionals with ever greater use of technology.

The idea that we can check the power of govt with our heckin muskets has been a punchline for exactly as long.

> Politics must evolve for this era

Yes, a fair challenge.

In an age of exponential takeoff, lack of growth is death. Legitimacy will always depend on credible capacity for violence; 100 years a voting majority of men was enough. Today, this capacity depends critically on economic and technological growth. China once again more correct.

>>5568
i wonder how much the failure of conscription was just the obvious stupidity of the Vietnam war and by that point illegitimacy of the country. I would bet a napoleonic charismatic state project would be able to project a lot more force than sclerotic post-national entities like the United States. Say what you will about the Islamic republic of Iran, they are able to project a surprising amount of force simply on the basis of having the back of their own fighting men and potential fighting men. Yeah they are smart and technology-forward, but their true strength seems to be in their organization of the will of their fighting men. Whereas since about 1960 the United States of America has had only nominal concern and often outright hostility for its men. You can't disenfranchise and abuse your young men and then complain that the age of democratic fighting spirit is over. And Ukraine is similarly a nationalist mass-conscription project more than you might think from OP's line of thought.

It may be that a hypertechnological elitist republic will beat out more democratic forces, but that is NOT what we observed in these boondoggle wars. Rather we have a hypertechnological (as a cope for post-industrial) elitist (as a cope for illegitimate) imperial force getting slowly pwned and ground down in a battle of wills by actual democratic fighting forces like the viet cong, taliban, etc.

If anything, the end of democratic war is the end of the ability of democratic masses of young men to control their own states. Some of that may be technological; it's too easy for modern secret police to simply nip such things in the bud. But that's very different from an actual change in war technology. It may be quite a while before the actual current state of war technology propagates through to the structure of states, if it ever does. The thing we might observe instead is the propagation of political technology into what forms of warfare are possible.

Even Napoleon's army was only possible because of the French revolution socially putting such men and possibilities on an even footing for a brief time. By ww1, the feeling of mass democracy was still there, but the reality of it was long dead, so the sclerotic anti-youth states were able to gleefully send their hated young men into the meatgrinder. WW2 was another revolution-enabled war but with victory by counter-revolutionary forces as the top-down secret police principle (and sheer mass of the communist world for entirely political reasons) proved dominant.

The orthodox quigley position of course is that elite weapons produces elitist states, but empirically this looks a lot more to me that it applies over *internal* political struggle than external.