{"id":8977,"date":"2026-04-12T23:04:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T03:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/?p=8977"},"modified":"2026-04-12T23:04:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T03:04:09","slug":"who-pulls-the-trigger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/2026\/04\/12\/who-pulls-the-trigger\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Pulls The Trigger?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Abbaszadeh
\nTechnology Editor<\/strong><\/p>\n

In late February, a $35,000 autonomous drone built by an Arizona startup flew over the Persian Gulf and hit its target. No pilot. No last-second confirmation from a commander. The U.S. military called it Operation Epic Fury. Analysts called it something else: a preview of what war looks like from here on out.<\/p>\n

The conflict with Iran has forced a conversation that years of UN meetings and policy papers never quite could. Autonomous weapons are no longer theoretical. They are being used right now, at scale, in a live war, and the rules governing them still do not exist.<\/p>\n

In the opening hours of coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes on February 28th, nearly 900 targets were hit in the first twelve hours alone. Iran responded with over 1,400 drones in the first week of its retaliation campaign, with drones making up roughly 71 percent of all recorded strikes on Gulf states. Expensive Patriot interceptors costing millions per shot were being taken down by Iranian drones that cost a fraction of that. The math of modern warfare had changed, and militaries everywhere were taking notes.<\/p>\n

What set this conflict apart was how openly AI had been folded into the decision process. Reports surfaced that U.S. forces used AI tools to assist with targeting, processing thousands of potential strike candidates faster than any human team could. In one cited Air Force experiment, machines generated recommendations in under ten seconds and produced thirty times more options than human planners working the same problem. At that speed, the idea of meaningful human review starts to look more like a formality than a safeguard.<\/p>\n

Those reports landed while diplomats were literally sitting in Geneva debating autonomous weapons policy. The UN meeting under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons was already supposed to be addressing these exact concerns. Instead, delegates found themselves watching a real war answer questions their draft language hadn’t caught up to yet. After a U.S. strike hit a school in the Iranian city of Minab, the accountability question got unavoidable fast. When an AI system recommends a target and that target turns out to be wrong, there is no clean answer for who bears responsibility.<\/p>\n

Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy raised the alarm at the UN last September, warning that AI had set off the most destructive arms race in human history. Most governments nodded along and did little. A major treaty negotiation is now scheduled for the November 2026 CCW Review Conference, but the appetite for actual constraints is unclear, especially from countries that just watched autonomous weapons perform well in combat.<\/p>\n

The technology keeps moving… but the governance hasn’t started yet.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Contact Kevin at kevin.abbaszadeh@student.shu.edu<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In late February, a $35,000 autonomous drone built by an Arizona startup flew over the Persian Gulf and hit its target. No pilot. No last-second confirmation from a commander. The U.S. military called it Operation Epic Fury. Analysts called it something else: a preview of what war looks like from here on out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5828,"featured_media":8978,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,869],"tags":[1711,1625,481,372,964,135,648,18,86,255,1169],"class_list":["post-8977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","category-us-news","tag-1711","tag-1625","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-department-of-defense","tag-investing","tag-iran","tag-technology","tag-trump","tag-usnews","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5828"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8977"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9012,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8977\/revisions\/9012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/stillmanexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}