Targeting doctrine is shifting from human decisions to oversight

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 23:34

   A few things. So I don't sense any commander saying we want to obfuscate mistakes in any way. And I think if you look at what they say on record, they believe in the law of armed conflict and they want to make sure their systems work. There is constantly in the messages I'm given a focus on the human makes the decision, the commander is responsible. So that is the official policy of the Defense Department.

2. 24:00

   However, I recently was able to review a new document that was revised in April 2026, which is called the Joint Targeting 360. This is the doctrine on how the entire U.S. forces do targeting. And there's a new section in there. There's a new chapter on the future of targeting that looks at the role of AI. and it looks to a time for the first time that I've ever seen in print where AI will initiate actions under human oversight rather than with the human making the decision. And it even says this throws up moral and legal dilemmas and there is a need for unambiguous guidance on that. Now that to me indicates that unambiguous guidance does not yet exist. The Pentagon is currently revising its directive 3000.

3. 25:00

   2009 on the autonomous weapons. These are weapons that could theoretically select a target, identify a target, select a target, and then strike a target without any human intervention. At the moment, the language is that that can happen following review with appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. So that already suggests supervision or oversight rather than actually making a human decision at the point of firing. That's different from Maven's smart system. That one should understand to be something like a drone, but ultimately it could become a digitally connected decision-making system. And so there's real tension there in the system about the extent to which that is going to happen. There is obviously huge ambition to speed up and scale hitting things. I have not come across anyone who is hoping to do that in

4. 25:58

   order to obfuscate information. But I have come across experts who are within the military who argue that while AI should make things more accountable, more transparent, it's really important how it's implemented. Because if you have commanders or targeters at the edge who can turn on or off the record of information, that information could be lost to history. Now, I don't know how that works, but I know it's really important that if you're going to rely on a system like that, you can audit it, that you can pull the data and find out exactly what decision was made when, based on what information, and whether that information was checked, and whether there's anything automatic in the system that surfaces anomalies, or if you have to go into the system and look for those anomalies. My sense is that that workflow is not yet worked out.

5. 26:49

   The joint targeting doctrine document that I reviewed is looking to a future where AI will