I'd be careful about this. There is a general principle in military communities that troops are not to obey "illegal orders" but time and time again throughout history we have seen that backstop fail. At a base level we all do what we think is best for ourselves. Troops will shoot prisoners. Troops will shoot protestors. They will nuke their own hometowns if they believe that is either necessary or if failure to do so will result in their own demise. And many troops, people, will do what they are told out of pure loyalty to a charismatic leader. The only real safeguard is layer upon layer of checks to ensure no one leader can ever exercise independent control.
See this reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/history/comments/b6k528/percentage_...
Troops can also desert which is especially prevalent in civil war situations. That's why during war, you need propagandists coming up with constant stories about how horrible and bad the other side is, so that you get people to shoot.
The unit that so brutally killed the tianmen protesters was one of the most brutal ones the Chinese military had. That's why they had to wait for days for it to arrive. Had they deployed different units, they might have fraternized with the protesters and joined them in their protest, making the task even harder for the leadership. Try getting even the most brutal unit to shoot at people in their own uniform.
For military parades, you can't afford 5% of people who intentionally don't march in lock step. That's why usually the troops which participate in such parades are isolated and fed propaganda leading up to the parade.
The human component is a constant variable that needs to be accounted for in military leadership.
What? I've been on countless parades and don't remember any pre-parade propaganda. I've never even heard of such a think in a western military. Parades are just a regular day at the office. Honor guards and flag parties certainly practice heavily, but the idea that anyone "intentionally" doesn't march properly is ... odd.
Also, "lockstep" should not be used in reference to parades. The lockstep was a punishment once inflicted on convicts in an prisons. If you go back hundreds of year there was a style of marching, but it was nothing like the more recent method used as a punishment.
Humans also may be even likelier to be loyal than moral if a drone with a gun follows them around to keep them on-side.
But this is one such check. As I remember it it was at work in the fall of the Soviet Union, and it was worked around at Tiananmen Square (where they brought in troops from the country, not trusting the ones on site to be brutal enough).
I’d generalise this check to all leaders. No man rules alone. Power only exists in its relationship with people.
Robotic armies permit force projection without any people. That changes the political calculus in all sections of society, from military leadership to billionaires to members of a terrorist group.
If it's just career soldiers, then it's in their career interest to enlarge the military's influence on society, increase budgets etc.
A domestic army of robots is really just a foreign army on contract. They have zero loyalty to anyone who doesn't directly control them.
Whereas a general with a drone swarm and a few thousand supporters might be able to suppress a city. Fortunately a little far fetched, but what was impossible with nukes is only impractical with drones.
Also, nuclear weapons can't be used 'a little bit' but killer robots can be -- it is much less clear where we draw the line. It seems likely that their use will be normalized/entrenched before we figure that out.
Though I hope that you're right.
I think one of the reasons why the west wants to block mainland China from manufacturing chips is to prevent them from building a robot army.
Maybe cheap LIDAR will be something we can keep a lid on? But regular vision is still likely pretty good for lining up a shot or finding a face.
Just ban general purpose computers that allow running arbitrary unsigned code. I'm sure lots of governments and corporations would be happy to get on board that one, and many end-users wouldn't notice.
Of course you could make your population turn over their old smartphones, remove IR filtering from the camera lenses and solder them to a robot body. But this will slow down manufacturing as it isn't well suited to mass manufacturing processes. Furthermore, it's a limited resource so you might have to deal with attempts by your enemy to exhaust it. Last, you'd be limited in fanciness, as in your robots can only process limited amounts. The best place to source the computation needed for really "smart" robot soldiers would probably be self driving cars as they have the AI processing power needed.
Armies of killer robots start radically changing the calculations. It isn't obvious how but it probably removes a lot of the interest of more ordinary people and makes it a question of what the elites want. If the programmers are on side and the factories are mostly automatic, then the ability of people to push back on their own military becomes complicated.