Can an AI actually make a moral decision about who lives and who dies in a war

[Sam92]

As militaries increasingly weave AI directly into their command chains, Al Jazeera examines a genuinely hard question, not just whether these systems make accurate decisions, but whether they're capable of moral judgment at all. The reporting points to several real deployments already reshaping how modern conflicts are fought, AI powered interceptor drones in Ukraine, Israel's AI assisted target generation systems, and Palantir's Maven Smart System, used to identify and strike targets during recent fighting between the US, Israel and Iran

One incident cited in the piece is genuinely sobering. On the first day of that conflict, Maven reportedly helped identify more than 1,000 targets, among them an Iranian primary school where more than 150 people, most of them children, were killed. According to the reporting, the Pentagon's investigation into that strike remains stalled months later, with the error reportedly traced back to outdated satellite data rather than a flaw in the AI system's reasoning itself

Elke Schwarz, a professor of political theory at Queen Mary University London and author of Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies, argues plainly that AI systems cannot replicate genuine moral reasoning, not for any lack of sophistication in the underlying language models, but because moral and legal deliberation inherently requires time, a fundamentally different way of thinking about action than the compressed, high speed workflows these systems are built to enable. Her core concern is that streamlining decisions for speed and scale means sacrificing the more rigorous deliberative process that meaningful ethical judgment actually depends on

The stakes are scaling quickly regardless of how that philosophical question gets resolved. Global military spending rose 2.9 percent last year to 2.87 trillion dollars, and spending on military AI specifically is projected to nearly double, from 11.7 billion to almost 19.3 billion dollars by 2030. The Trump administration has proposed 1.5 trillion dollars in defense spending for the coming fiscal year explicitly aimed at accelerating the shift from a traditional military industrial complex toward what officials describe as a military tech one, meaning systems like these are being built into military decision making faster than the underlying ethical and legal questions are being resolved

Can AI systems make moral decisions in war?www.aljazeera.com

[Dan96]

Schwarz's point that moral deliberation requires time by its very nature, and that compressing decisions for speed necessarily sacrifices that process, is a genuinely clarifying way to frame why this isn't just a capability question