Ethical challenges in AI-enhanced military operations

This Research Topic primarily focuses on the people—military personnel throughout the command structure—who serve in combat settings with AI-enabled machines. In a battlespace where machine autonomy is increasingly assuming functions once restricted to human beings, maintaining clear lines of human responsibility is of paramount importance. Clarifying this issue should improve ethical instruction within military training and educational institutions, as well as change how AI developers design their technologies. In turn, this will render ethical guidelines better tailored to the battlefield scenarios military personnel will confront in the future. This collection aims to yield moral guidelines for the variety of military uses of AI technology, primarily in three areas: Conventional armed conflict/battlefield combat; Cyber military operations and cyber conflict; Strategic planning for war and data-driven battlefield management. Additionally, these essays examine the impact on the competency and character of human operators, inter alia, through the lens of virtue ethics. That is, they focus on individual character and the cultivation of moral predispositions that empower us to act responsibly amid the challenges to personal and professional life increasingly posed by the use of artificial intelligence in cyber security, kinetic warfare, and intelligence and strategic planning.