I think that journal's mainly about the use of UAV drones, their increasingly autonomous use of lethal weaponry and who exactly is legally liable when people are killed, I mean if a UAV misfires on an allied unit is it the fault of the engineer who's duty is to maintain the weaponry & sensors, or the person who coded the "artificial intelligence", or the person who deployed the UAV in that area, or is it the fault of the unit on the ground for not having a reliable IFF system?
It's easy to end up in a situation where for example an inboard sensor has an electrical fault, the damaged sensor causes the software to mistakenly select an ally as a target, which is arguably the field commander's fault for having that unit in the UAV's field of fire (I mean you wouldn't have people walking in front of an automated turret would you? regardless whether it has IFF or not) so in the end nobody is held accountable because just like a soldier in the field the UAV was acting autonomously, so no one person that contributed to the accident can be held directly accountable, but lacking a will of it's own the UAV can't be held accountable either.
That legal ambiguity also makes autonomous systems the perfect tool for getting away with murder, if you can conspire a situation that will cause an autonomous system to malfunction then you can set up "accidents" that involve so many variables that actually proving that the murderer intended to commit murder becomes almost impossible.
