A sober treatise on the future of warfare warns of the perils of autonomous robotic combatants

Sooner than you may think, robotic swarms will intercept incoming missiles at hypersonic speed, while dueling cyberattacks and countermeasures transpire at nearly the speed of light. Such strikes and counterstrikes will quickly overwhelm the capacities of human combatants to respond. 

Fiscal constraints and decreasing human resources, together with the promise of enhanced precision, effective risk management, and force multiplication, are driving Pentagon planners (and their counterparts in other nations) to aggressively pursue battlefield automation. In Army of None, Paul Scharre offer an authoritative and sobering perspective on the automated battlefields that wil very soon come to characterize military conflict, predicting that autonomous robots, many fully armed and capable of independent targeting decisions, will inevitably come to rule the waves, as well as prevailing on the ground, in the air, and especially in space. 

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