Autonomous Weapons
The Second Amendment assumed the citizen and the state would always be in the same weight class. A swarm of drones has further ended that assumption.
Autonomous weapons have evolved from crude wartime experiments into the defining instruments of modern conflict…and they are reshaping the balance of power between states and citizens in ways that may prove irreversible. The Pentagon's fiscal year 2026 budget includes a first-ever dedicated line of $13.4 billion for AI and autonomous systems [1], venture capital is pouring tens of billions into defense startups [2], and on the battlefields of Ukraine, both sides now deploy roughly 10,000 drones per day [3]. The implications extend far beyond the battlefield. When a government can project lethal force at industrial scale, at minimal cost, with near-zero risk to its own personnel, the asymmetry between those who control these weapons and those who don't reaches a threshold unlike anything in the history of warfare.
From radio-controlled biplanes to AI-guided swarms
The lineage of today's autonomous weapons stretches back over a century. During World War I, the Kettering Bug (a pilotless aerial torpedo developed with Orville Wright serving as an aeronautical consultant) became the first serious attempt at unmanned strike capability, though the war ended before any saw combat [4]. World War II brought mass production: Reginald Denny's Radioplane Company delivered nearly 15,000 target drones to the US military [5].
The modern era took shape after the 1960 shootdown of Francis Gary Powers's U-2 spyplane, which accelerated development of the Ryan Firebee reconnaissance drone. Over the course of the Vietnam War, Firebees flew more than 3,400 surveillance sorties over Southeast Asia [6]. But the true revolution came from Israel. After losing manned aircraft to Syrian SAMs in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel invested heavily in unmanned systems. By 1982, Israeli Mastiff and Scout drones provided real-time intelligence in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, enabling the destruction of 17 of 19 Syrian SAM batteries in what became known as Operation Mole Cricket 19…a watershed moment for unmanned warfare [7].
The Predator drone, built by General Atomics from a lineage of designs by Israeli-American engineer Abraham Karem, first flew in 1994 and deployed to the Balkans by 1995. After 9/11, everything accelerated. In April 2001, the US military possessed just 90 non-target UAVs. A decade later, the inventory had ballooned to nearly 11,000 [8]. The Predator's armed successor, the MQ-9 Reaper, became the workhorse of the war on terror [9].
Today the frontier has shifted again. Turkey's Bayraktar TB2, with over one million flight hours across more than 30 countries, proved devastatingly effective in Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Ukraine [10]. Iran's Shahed-136 (a one-way attack drone costing an estimated $20,000 to $50,000 versus $1 million or more for a cruise missile) has been launched by the tens of thousands against Ukrainian cities [11]. And in Ukraine itself, both sides now deploy FPV drones costing as little as $300 to $500 each, which account for an estimated 60–70% of all equipment destroyed [12] [13]. Miniaturization has pushed even further: Australia's DefendTex D40, a lethal quadcopter weighing just 300 grams with a 110-gram warhead, is small enough to fire from a standard 40mm grenade launcher and has been delivered to Ukrainian forces [43]. Both sides have also mass-fielded fiber-optic FPV drones - connected to operators by thin cables, making them completely immune to the electronic jamming that is the primary defense against conventional radio-linked drones [44].
Adoption at a speed no one predicted
The pace of drone proliferation has been staggering across every dimension: from US counterterrorism campaigns to full-scale industrial warfare. Under the Bush administration, the US conducted roughly 48–54 drone strikes in Pakistan [14]. Under Obama, that figure exploded to approximately 563 lethal strikes across Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia: a tenfold increase [15]. The Trump administration further accelerated the tempo, conducting 176 strikes in Yemen alone in two years, exceeding Obama's eight-year total of 154 [16].
The Ukraine war redefined scale entirely. Ukrainian forces went from producing 20,000 FPV drones per month in January 2024 to 200,000 per month by year's end [17]. Russia launched over 57,000 Shahed-type drones against Ukraine and planned to produce 2 million FPV drones in 2025 [11] [17]. Russia's ZALA Lancet-3 loitering munition has logged over 2,800 documented launches with a 77.7% hit rate against Ukrainian artillery and armor [45]. The cost asymmetry is staggering: a single $400 Ukrainian FPV drone has been documented destroying a Russian T-72 tank worth $1.5 million - a 3,750-to-1 cost ratio [46]. The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war had offered an earlier preview: Azerbaijan's Turkish and Israeli drones systematically dismantled Armenian armor and air defenses in 44 days, shocking military planners worldwide [18]. Today, over 90 countries and non-state groups operate military drones [19], and at least 48 nations possess armed medium-altitude systems [20].
Silicon Valley goes to war
The defense industrial base is undergoing its most significant transformation in decades. General Atomics recently secured a $14.1 billion IDIQ contract ceiling for MQ-9 Reaper development, procurement, sustainment, and foreign military sales [21]. The Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program envisions 1,000 or more autonomous drone wingmen, with billions allocated across multiple increments [22]. Boeing is developing the MQ-25 Stingray, the Navy's first carrier-based unmanned refueling aircraft, under an $805 million contract [23].
But the most disruptive force is a new generation of startups. Anduril Industries, founded in 2017 by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, reached a $30.5 billion valuation in June 2025 after raising $2.5 billion in a round that was eight times oversubscribed [24]. Anduril beat Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to win the Air Force's CCA competition [22]. Shield AI, co-founded by a former Navy SEAL, reached a $12.7 billion valuation in March 2026, with its Hivemind AI pilot autonomously flying F-16s [25]. Saronic, building autonomous warships, hit $9.25 billion [26]. Europe's Helsing, delivering hundreds of loitering munitions monthly to Ukraine, reached roughly €12 billion [27].
The capital follows the conviction. Defense tech VC investment nearly tripled between 2020 and 2025, with round values reaching $29 billion [2]. A significant share of 2025 defense tech funding went to drone and autonomous systems startups [28]. The Pentagon's Replicator initiative, launched in August 2023 to field thousands of low-cost autonomous systems, awarded contracts to more than 30 companies, the majority of them non-traditional defense firms [29]. Replicator has since been reorganized into the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, while Secretary of Defense Hegseth's Drone Dominance initiative has ordered an initial batch of 30,000 drones at roughly $2,900 each, with an ultimate procurement target of 340,000 [47].
The asymmetry that should concern everyone
These weapons may be necessary for national defense. Senior Pentagon officials have stated the US may be compelled to develop autonomous systems because competitors like China and Russia already are [30]. Paul Scharre, a leading scholar on autonomous weapons, has argued that militaries should embrace technology where it can make war more precise and humane, but without surrendering human judgment [31]. Autonomous systems operate in environments too dangerous for humans, stay on station longer, and reduce soldier casualties.
But the same capabilities that prove effective in interstate warfare create an unprecedented power asymmetry between governments and governed populations. When a state can project lethal force cheaply, remotely, and with zero risk to operators, a fundamental constraint on the use of force erodes. Austrian disarmament official Alexander Kmentt warned that autonomous weapons "may reduce the political threshold for deploying or using force" because they eliminate the domestic political cost of casualties [32]. This is not theoretical. A Palestinian delegation at the 2024 Vienna Conference on Autonomous Weapons cautioned that AI-powered weapons are likely to be tested on populations of the Global South [33]. The ACLU has documented surveillance drones being used domestically to intimidate protesters, noting they signify surveillance, dominance, and control [34].
The accountability problem deepens the asymmetry. Human Rights Watch, in its report Mind the Gap, identified a fundamental vacuum: a fully autonomous weapon could commit acts that would rise to the level of war crimes if a person carried them out, but victims would see no one punished for these crimes [35]. The International Committee of the Red Cross has called for legally binding rules, including a prohibition on autonomous weapons designed to target people, insisting that humans must retain control over life-and-death decisions [36]. UC Berkeley AI scientist Stuart Russell has warned that cheap autonomous weapons could become available in what he calls "all the armed supermarkets of the world," with anti-personnel systems potentially falling to the price of a landmine [37].
Some argue cheap drones actually democratize warfare - a $500 FPV drone neutralizing a $5 million tank as the ultimate equalizer [38]. There is truth to this at the tactical level. But the trajectory points toward something far more dangerous than any single drone: integrated AI systems capable of persistent surveillance and coordinated lethal action across entire regions, controlled by whoever commands the computational infrastructure to deploy them. Autonomous swarms have already moved from demonstration to deployment. Israel conducted the first documented combat use of a drone swarm during its May 2021 Gaza operations [48]. China's Atlas system demonstrated 96 combat drones controlled by a single operator in March 2025, with AI handling target recognition, task allocation, and precision strike autonomously [49]. In Ukraine, the startup Swarmer has logged over 100,000 combat missions using AI coordination software that decides which drone in a group strikes - with humans designating the target area but AI determining timing, approach, and execution [50]. A UN Panel of Experts reported that Turkey's STM Kargu-2 drone may have autonomously engaged targets in Libya as early as March 2020…potentially the first documented case of a lethal autonomous engagement in combat, though the details remain contested [51].
The defender's dilemma compounds the asymmetry. Intercepting a $35,000 Shahed with a $4.1 million Patriot missile yields a 117-to-1 unfavorable cost ratio for the defender [52]. The US Navy spent hundreds of millions firing $2.1 million SM-2 missiles at Houthi drones in the Red Sea. The only economically sustainable defenses are directed-energy weapons (Israel's Iron Beam laser at $2–5 per shot) and cheap interceptor drones [52]. This means that the cost of projecting force with drones is collapsing while the cost of defending against them remains punishingly high, concentrating advantage with the attacker.
As Peter Asaro of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control has argued, computational systems are not moral and legal agents and thus cannot serve as legitimate arbiters of when it is appropriate to take human life [39].
International governance has failed to keep pace. Three consecutive UN General Assembly resolutions (in 2023, 2024, and 2025) have called for action, with 166 nations voting in favor in 2024 [40]. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of more than 250 organizations, has pushed for a treaty since its public launch in 2013, backed by UN Secretary-General Guterres's declaration that machines that have the power and the discretion to take human lives without human involvement are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant, and should be banned by international law [41]. Yet the major military powers, the US, Russia, China, Israel, and the UK continue to block binding regulation. Experts assess the likelihood of a treaty emerging from the CCW process by its 2026 deadline as "slim to none" [42].
Where this leaves us
The autonomous weapons revolution is not approaching, it has arrived. The technology is deployed across dozens of conflicts, investment is surging at historic rates, and the regulatory frameworks that might constrain these systems remain stalled by the very nations building them fastest. A lethal drone now weighs less than a can of soda. AI-coordinated swarms have logged over 100,000 combat missions. Pentagon CTO Emil Michael stated in December 2025 that the front lines of territorial conflict are now "robot-on-robot" [53]. The core tension is not innovation versus caution but something more fundamental: the legitimate demands of national defense against the unprecedented concentration of lethal power these systems enable. When machines can kill without risking the lives of those who send them, the calculus of violence shifts in ways that reach well beyond any battlefield. The question is not whether these weapons will proliferate (they already have) but whether any institution will impose meaningful limits before the asymmetry they create becomes permanent.That’s why the MAD Act puts guardrails on autonomous weapons. They can never be deployed on an American citizen on American soil - full stop. And while defensive autonomous weapons use but be allowed in act in seconds, offensive use must be explicit for certain targets, geographic locations, goals, and timelines.
Sources
If there are any issues with our reasoning or facts, please let us know
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