Article by Stephen Sims: “On June 13, 2025, Iran’s air defense network was largely silent in the face of an intense Israeli bombing campaign. Just before the attack, swarms of explosive quadcopter drones, launched by Israel from inside Iranian territory and acting on vast troves of intelligence sifted with the use of AI to select targets, had taken out Iran’s radar systems and numerous missile sites. Israel’s one-two punch made Iran an object lesson in how a combination of AI and drones is blazing a new trajectory for international politics.
Not long before, on June 1, Ukraine had employed a strikingly similar tactic, using cargo trucks with false inventories to smuggle drones deep into Russian territory. The drones had been trained using AI to recognize Tu-95 “Bear” bombers based on photographs taken of a decommissioned version in a Ukrainian air museum and to recognize the weakest point of the bombers, often the fuel tanks in the wings. This allowed the drones, flying first autonomously and then with human pilots, to strike Russian bombers with high precision as far away as Siberia.
In the grand scheme of geopolitics, these events were small. The conflict between Iran and Israel ended up being more like glorified shadowboxing than real war, and the Ukrainian strike on Russia did nothing to change the relentless, grinding attrition of the front line. These events are not obvious ruptures in international politics, as when nuclear fire consumed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. That moment announced with dreadful clarity that the future of war and strategy would never be the same. The use of AI coupled with drones, however, is more like Sputnik in 1957, a seemingly small event that nevertheless drastically altered the human relationship to technology.
Heidegger once remarked that the first images of Earth from the Moon shocked him because they revealed a new way of grasping the human condition, drained of direct human experience. AI-enabled drone strikes carry a similar symbolic charge: they represent war drained of direct human contact…(More)”.
