I don’t understand how to come to this. War is crap, not a dinner party. There’s always a human on both sides who will drop a bomb and laugh on camera, with no responsibility. Go watch it (actually don’t, it’s NSFL). Reading this thread feels like everyone watched and believed in that movie where they tried to select and eliminate a target for 2 hours with futuristic hi-tech. A human hesitates to press the button before the war. When in it, he will only be concerned with things like ammunition saving and tactical nuances. There’s not much more morals in a human who usually sits there at the button than in AI automation.
But also at least then you have someone who is liable when things go wrong. When its fully automated, like the other comment mentions, they can just shrug and blame the AI. Who gets sued when a self driving car kills someone by accident? I don't know. Perhaps a lack of ownership is excusable. But when a weapon deliberately kills someone I think we need to have ownership somewhere.
Perhaps as a general rule the maker of the AI system should have liability for the AI up until someone else signs and accepts that responsibility. None of this "Company does not accept liability" crap. They have to make it clear that "customer accepts liability" or else it's them. That way they will be incentivized to make the military or whoever sign.
We know that humans can make mistakes, due to a multitude of reasons. They can be tired, moody, distracted, stressed out, time-pressured, simply not care enough, etc, all contributing to making the wrong call. But a computer does not suffer from such issues. Secondly, a computer (program) is able to perform billions and billions of computations within some time period in order to ENSURE that doing this thing with grave consequences is absolutely warranted.
Maybe for some domains we can tolerate errors from AI, but when deciding whether a person (and everyone around them) lives or dies, surely simply being on average even more accurate than a human is not enough. "Killbots" MUST be extremely heavily regulated.
And your probably right that the alternatives maybe worse, the folks behind Lavender could probably even prove it with data.. but there should be a moral impetus to always have a human in the loop regardless. And any such attempt to justify it won't capture the publics attention like a sky-net doomsday happening over the civilians in Gaza.