Frank Kendall, the Air Force secretary, told The Times that AI drones will need to have the capability to make lethal decisions while under human supervision.

"Individual decisions versus not doing individual decisions is the difference between winning and losing — and you're not going to lose," he said.

The fkd up part is I understand exactly where Pentagon planners and the engineers at various contractors are coming from. Remember when the world discovered the US had unmanned mini stealth bombers thanks to the Iranian military jamming the uplink of one and forcing it down?

Iran RQ-179 Incident

To be clear, the White House and Pentagon are lying in these public statements about the reason. It isn't due to China outnumbering the US, which is why their logic of we can out manufacture China on Terminators makes zero sense. Before I go on, let me state that I whole heartedly believe this is going to make the world a worse place and I wish it wasn't happening.

The US is lying about the why, they have to lie because they can't publicly announce recently identifying a massive flaw in current US doctrine surrounding unmanned combat platforms. The motivation for this is from what the Pentagon has witnessed in Ukraine, specifically the interactions between unmanned platforms and the type of electronic warfare a US peer-rival can bring to the table. Currently when an unmanned platform gets jammed and put into unscheduled communication blackout, it fail-safes like puppet with the strings cut by holding position then returning to base when fuel gets low. What the US has realized is if they ever end up in a shooting war with a peer-rival, unmanned combat platforms will need to fail-deadily like a creature of war that had its leash unexpectedly cut.

This change in failure mode is going to be needed for the Loyal Wingman unmanned fighters currently being built to team like a hunting dog with US manned fighters. In a conflict with Russia or China, there will be heavy electronic warfare and unmanned combat platforms will need to enter a fail-deadly mode whenever they lose uplink while actively engaged in combat.