Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
by Luca Mainoldi
Rome (Fides News Agency) – On the occasion of the publication of Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical on artificial intelligence (AI) on May 25, the question of AI's use in warfare is also a key topic.
AI promises to fundamentally change all areas of human life, and the military sector is among the first to benefit. The ongoing wars, particularly the war in Ukraine (which began in 2022) and the war in the Middle East (which began in 2023), serve as a testing ground for innovative weapons systems and military tactics. These include robotic systems such as drones of all kinds and various forms of AI.
From logistics to intelligence, from planning military operations to their command and control, from target identification to the control of autonomous robotic weapons, there is no area in which artificial intelligence is not being used in the military and strategic field.
Among the systems that raise serious ethical concerns are those used to identify human targets, chosen based on forms of automated profiling.
“We are killing people using metadata,” General Michael Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency (NSA, 1999 to 2005) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, 2006 to 2009), openly admitted (from a technological perspective) in 2014. Metadata does not refer to the content of emails or phone calls, but to data associated with the message, such as the date, time, and location of the sender and recipient. The structured use of metadata allows for the creation of relational maps of potential targets and thus so-called environmental profiling: daily routines, potential vulnerabilities, and familial, friendly, and professional relationships. This model is amplified by the use of AI tools such as the Lavender system and the Hasbara system (“Gospel”), which is used by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, as well as another system called Where’s my Daddy? The first system enables the tracking of thousands of people's movements and the identification of potential Hamas members through the analysis of phone contacts, social media posts, WhatsApp chats and similar messages, facial recognition, and more. Based on reports processed by Lavender, the second program, Hasbara, automatically draws up a killing list, which is then forwarded to "Where's my Daddy?". This latter system, by tracking mobile phone movements, alerts users as soon as a target person turns their phone back on (which had been switched off for security reasons), usually upon returning home. Tragically, thousands of innocent people were killed in the Gaza War simply for being near or next to targets identified by AI systems. Originally designed for use under strict human supervision, these systems were deployed without careful verification of the information they generated. In the war between Israel and the US against Iran, AI tools from the US company Palantir, founded in 2003, were used. Palantir dominates the market for AI tools in the military and security sectors (the UK's National Health Service also uses its systems to analyze patient data). The Maven system, in particular, played a central role in the war, integrating data from satellites, drones, radar, electronic signals, and other sources to create a unified situational awareness picture of the battlefield. This significantly accelerated target identification (the so-called elimination chain), enabling, for example, a single person to accomplish in a matter of weeks what previously took entire teams of analysts months. The system apparently integrates models such as Claude from Anthropic and was used by both US and Israeli forces.
The proliferation of such tools not only raises dramatic ethical questions but also leads to the gradual disappearance of middle management (e.g., the officials responsible for analyzing raw data), which is being replaced by AI. This, in turn, raises the problem (familiar from the civilian sector, such as middle management in companies or public institutions) of selecting and training future leaders, since bottom-up training ("apprenticeship") is increasingly restricted by the use of AI. This creates the risk that AI will become the sole source of information for lethal decisions—until the day AI itself takes control. A risk already evident in autonomous weapon systems that can make the decision to kill without consulting a human superior.
The choice to develop and employ weapons of this kind is political. Western powers have so far stated that they do not want to introduce deadly, autonomous systems that are not controlled by humans. The positions of other powers are more nuanced. According to a UN report, a Turkish drone equipped with artificial intelligence carried out the first documented killing by a fully autonomous machine without human control in Libya in 2020. Furthermore, statements made by US Air Force Colonel Tucker Hamilton at an AI conference in 2023 remain controversial. He claimed that in a simulated experiment, the drone, tasked with destroying an enemy radar, attacked its own command center after receiving the order to suspend the attack in order to continue the mission. The US colonel's statements were later scaled down, but the scenario presented is considered credible. (Fides News Agency, 21/5/2026)
