Dr Neil Renic1
1UNSW Canberra, Australia
Biography:
Neil Renic is currently a researcher at the Centre for Military Studies at the University of Copenhagen and will join UNSW Canberra as Lecturer in July 2025. He is also a Fellow at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg. His current work focuses on the changing character and regulation of armed conflict, and emerging military technologies such as armed drones and autonomous weapons. He is the author of Asymmetric Killing: Risk Avoidance, Just War, and the Warrior Ethos (Oxford University Press 2020).
Abstract:
In this paper, I consider the potential integration of artificial intelligence into resort-to-force decision making from a Just War perspective. I evaluate two principles from this tradition: 1) the jus ad bellum principle of “reasonable prospect of success”; and 2) the more recent jus ad vim principle of “the probability of escalation”. More than any other principles of Just War, these prudential standards seem amenable to the probabilistic reasoning of AI-driven systems. I argue, however, that this optimism in the efficiency and humanizing potential of AI-optimized military operations is misplaced. We need to cultivate a tragic sensibility in war – a recognition of the inescapable limits of foresight, the permanence of uncertainty, and the dangers of unconstrained ambition. False confidence in the efficacy of these systems will blind us to their technical limits. It will also, more seriously, obscure the deleterious impact of AI on the process of resort-to-force decision-making; its potential to suffocate the moral and political wisdom so essential to the responsible exercise of violence on the international stage.