War by Other Means - by Palladium Editors
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War by Other Means<br>Robotic warfare is shifting the source of state power away from citizens to firms. The transition will produce a new social contract.<br>Jun 23, 2026
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National Archives and Records Administration / Pilots guiding a remotely piloted vehicle during Operation Desert Shield.<br>This article by John Severini was published on Palladium Magazine on June 23, 2026.
In December 2024, the Ukrainian National Guard’s 13th Khartiia Brigade carried out a combined ground and air assault near the town of Lyptsi. Air assets coordinated with dispersed ground forces bounding from cover to cover. Dozens of attackers overran Russian positions, cleared mines in the vicinity, and laid down a defensive perimeter around the captured territory. But not a single Ukrainian was present on the battlefield.<br>To achieve this, soldiers piloted a mix of unmanned ground vehicles mounted with machine-gun turrets, aerial drones bristling with grenades and assault rifles, and more conventional kamikaze drones. This experiment allowed the Ukrainians to trade valuable human advantages like spatial awareness and tactical flexibility for the assurance that their only casualties would be robotic. For a country suffering severe manpower shortages, such a tradeoff was welcome amid a gruesome war of attrition fought against an adversary with more than three times its population.<br>The growing use of drones is both a cause and a consequence of an ongoing transformation of military power. As robotic soldiers mature on the battlefield, defense planners are beginning to rethink the tradeoffs they pose in combat in favor of the labor-saving benefits they provide. One vision of “America First” foreign policy argues that downsizing American personnel abroad could be amply made up for by increasing the use of unmanned munitions, driving costs down and bringing soldiers home without weakening deterrence.<br>Combined with recent and forthcoming improvements to industrial automation, all signs point toward governments relying on a much smaller pool of human capital for labor and war. Accordingly, this means that a fundamental source of political power has begun to shift from the people toward the firms that make those machines. This is leading to an erosion of the popular constraints that have historically disciplined the use of force, and an ever-greater insulation of the state from revolutions and popular uprisings.<br>For some countries like Ukraine, this reliance is born of immediate necessity. Yet even for powerful countries like the United States, the growing reliance on commercial industry in areas like robotics and AI raises fundamental questions about the basis of sovereignty and the future of the liberal-democratic social contract.<br>The Dawn of Robotic Warfare<br>Although humans remain predominant on the battlefield, many of the advantages they held have shifted in favor of robots. For instance, while humans struggle to quickly communicate detailed, accurate information in a chaotic environment, data transmission between robots is immediate and precise. Target assessment by ground units can be relayed to air support almost instantaneously, and automated command centers can process more information than any human operator. Machines do all of this without becoming sick, hungry, tired, confused, distracted, or disobedient.<br>A gap between human and machine capabilities remains, however. Most systems require persistent wireless links, and electronic jamming has become widespread on the battlefield. Both Ukraine and Russia now use lightweight fiber-optic tethers to maintain physical connections, limiting range and mobility. Full autonomy has only just begun to impact military strategy, but its use is increasing—both sides of the war in Ukraine have fielded fully autonomous drones, which are confirmed to have taken the lives of human combatants. As the technical constraints are overcome, the military “tooth” may increasingly become machine-run, with humans receding into a “tail” involving maintenance, refinement, and training.<br>Slowly but surely, the absence of humans on the battlefield is becoming normalized, creating structural preconditions for an eventual handover to full autonomy. On its face, this trend seems humane—fewer soldiers, fewer deaths—but it also risks changing the political costs of war, which becomes more palatable, even routine. “Forever wars” emerge from such a disjunction between military effort and political consequence.<br>While human soldiers remain more versatile than their robotic counterparts, the tradeoff between the two depends on the marginal value a state places on military effectiveness relative to the value it places on its capital and labor reserves. Ukraine, for example, faces an exceptionally challenging demographic situation as outmigration, aging, and the casualties of war bleed the country dry. In this situation, even inferior...