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Hello, and welcome to the LawFair podcast, I'm Benjamin Whittes. Today on the podcast, the second

installment in a series of presentations made at the Hoover Institution on October 25th

to a group of distinguished journalists who were gathered for a media colloquium with

its task force on national security and law. This presentation was given by two people

who need no introduction to LawFair readers, Matt Waxman who speaks first, and Kenneth

Anderson who speaks second. It deals with autonomous weapons and the calls on the part

of human rights groups for a preemptive international law ban on autonomous lethal

firing power. The discussion is once again edited both for length and because not all

of the journalists present consented to have their portions of the audio used.

Thanks very much, so this is not a talk about armed drones or UAVs per se, but it does

look back on the last ten years history of drones in order to draw some general lessons

for U.S. policy and then apply them to some future weapon technologies that Ken and I have

been studying. Before talking about those future technologies, let me begin by emphasizing

three general points. The first is that historically it's often been the case that new weapon

technologies give rise to fears that their emergence, their deployment on the battlefield

will destroy the existing legal and ethical constraints on warfare. It will tear down the

existing ethical edifice that governs battlefield activity, and this raises questions whether

they should just be banned outright. This has been the story with some technologies going

...