CCW Report, Vol. 10, No. 7

Weapons don't save lives
26 July 2022

Ray Acheson | Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Once again, a handful of countries are using the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on autonomous weapon systems to promote what they perceive to be potential “benefits” of these weapons. In particular, Russia and the United States are trying to sell other delegations on the advantages of weapons that operate autonomously from human beings. They are using the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) as an arms fair rather than the disarmament and arms control forum that it is meant to be.

We have written extensively in the past about the problems of this, and many other delegations continue to object to the purely hypothetical accounting of how AWS will “be more precise,” “reduce civilian casualties,” “take emotion out of attacks,” etc. etc. etc. All of this is based on suppositions that machines will be better than humans in battle.

This is fiction. What is real—what is known through overwhelming evidence through countless wars and acts of violence—is that all weapons take lives. They don’t save people. They kill and injure human beings, they destroy infrastructure, they cause long-lasting physical, psychological, social, moral, environmental, and economic harm.

What is also real is that so far, increasing autonomy in weapon systems has not made them more precise, or reduced civilian casualties, or taken “emotion” out of attacks. Armed drones have been used to slaughter families at funerals and weddings, to destroy schools and markets. Bombs are dropped on hospitals and homes, whether “precision guided” or not. Operators have been known to rejoice in the “bug splat” and describe their drones as rapists.

This is neither clean nor unemotional. Adding more autonomy to weapons will not “improve” this situation, but just create more and more distance between what is perceived as real or acceptable in war. It will lower the threshold for the use of force, it will create even greater asymmetries between the most heavily militarised states and the civilians living in targeted countries that don’t have the latest technologies of war and violence.

The same countries trying to sell these new weapons at the CCW also make a big deal of this forum being the best forum—or for some of them, the supposed “only” forum—to address autonomous weapons. So, while they claim that discussing AWS within the context of the CCW is essential due to the Convention’s unique objectives and purposes, they are also violating those very objectives and purposes by promoting the development and use of weapons. Because at its very core, the CCW is about realising “the aspiration of all peoples to live in peace” by ending the arms race and pursuing disarmament. Alleging “benefits” of increasing autonomous violence completely undermines the CCW, indicating once again that as long as this forum gives a veto to the militarily minded states, it will not be able to live up to its own aspirations.

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