The us military wants technology that justifies them not making more conservative choices, and I don’t see any moral justification for that. Drones are useful for cheaply eliminating risk to one actor, thus allowing more risky behaviour to the side that has them.

But being a cheap risk mitigator is also all they are, they bring no new strategic capability, as evidenced by how easily their use was ramped up and down, so their main effect, the one that could provide some moral justification, is making war cheaper.

Until I hear that it is, I will assume it is not, since it's much easier to achieve your mission of killing bad guys if you're also willing to kill good guys. You get more rewards for killing more bad guys, not saving more good guys.

Unfortunately that's how militaries and governments work.

Not to put too fine of a point on it but even a basic search on the topic would yield a ton of official policy doing exactly that.

There is explicit guidance and long history of minimizing civilian casualties as a goal within the DoD, and such guidance is codified in multiple legal documents under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Rules of Engagement and international treaties.

To wit: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0...

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/...

This is also taught as a basic tenet in introductory courses for new Military Officers. One example here:

https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/B130936...

But are such claims really true? Does the part of the military chain of command that actually does the killing take those claims to heart, as much as pentagon spokesmen do? Do the superiors of lieutenants and privates hold them to that standard, even when the laws of conduct become unenforceable by collateral victims, as in drone strikes?

In several US wars, such claim were not taken to heart. Vietnam became infamous in US history as lacking a sound casus belli, just as the 2003 Iraq War has. In messy wars like these, one of the principal casualties is often the enforcement of the rules of war, especially when it comes to laws of conduct that are still in the course of being written, such as the proper use of drones or AI.

This lack of enforcement becomes especially fraught when novel weaponry and its use is governed not by the military under its code of conduct, but by the CIA (who now runs most drone snipery), which AFAIK lacks an equivalent martial code of conduct.

Again, you can research this for yourself and find out that yes, it's deeply embedded into the culture. This is seen the most clear when military members who break the rules and are reprimanded, discharged or jailed. You can move the poles all you like, but the data exists.

the more war you create, the larger the military, and get larger their ability to spent on “protection” and “defence”

*edit: which is certainly offset pretty substantially by the hit to the countries GDP, because yknow... war is expensive!

I think you can certainly find examples where commercial entities have played a suspicious role in that respect, but to say that simply by supplying goods or services to the military you are war mongering is completely devoid of logic.

I think that this statement has been proven wrong countless times throughout history.

I try to avoid comparisons to the Nazis (even though many more people seem to be doing it these days with Trump in power), but isn't Google basically providing the government the technology to more effectively kill people in the Middle East, too? That's what it is at the end of the day, isn't it?

History will remember Google for this - especially when its technology will be used for some horrifying stuff in the future (and it will be). Right now we haven't even seen its true consequences yet, so it's easy for some to dismiss it as no big deal.

Can you really pretend that you're developing "neutral" weapons technology in this climate?

If anything, it seems this google technology would reduce the number of civilian casualties.