Artificial Intelligence and the Changing Character of Armed Conflict: A Theoretical Framework of Autonomy, Speed and Accountability in Military Decision-Making

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is entering warfare not only as autonomous weapons but, more consequentially, as decision support that compresses the time between detection and strike, selects targets from data at scale, and shapes what commanders see. This theoretical paper develops a framework for the effects of AI on military decision-making. Drawing on strategic studies and the theory of war, on the international-humanitarian-law and meaningful-human-control debates, on the civil–military-relations literature, and on recent research on AI-enabled targeting, decision support and autonomy in contemporary conflicts, it distinguishes three changes AI introduces, autonomy (decisions without a human in the loop), speed (decisions faster than human deliberation) and opacity (decisions whose basis cannot be reconstructed), and argues that the second and third matter more than the first, because a human nominally in the loop of a system that recommends at machine speed from unexplainable inference exercises no meaningful control. The paper derives seven propositions about the effects of AI on escalation dynamics, on civilian harm and on the attribution of responsibility for unlawful acts, and considers the position of African states and regional organisations that will encounter these systems as importers, as hosts of conflicts in which others deploy them, and as parties to the international negotiations on their regulation. Nigeria's use of armed drones in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin anchors the African analysis. The paper closes with implications for military doctrine, arms-control diplomacy and the research agenda of African security studies. It concludes that a human in the loop is not in itself a safeguard but a question, since whether that human can deliberate, whether she has the time, the reasons and the authority, is what determines whether the loop is hers or the machine's.