“Armies are created to protect an established system, not people.
In the future, an educated humanity will not stand for war”
Jacque Fresco
Welcome to the future… or at least, the fractured version of it we’re hurtling toward under the weight of decision-making rooted in old systems and outdated incentives.
The wars of the 2020’s now make shift not hypothetical, but already underway, and it represents a profound, system-level transformation in how conflict is conducted.
The Compression of Decision Time
In the recent U.S. military operations against Iran, advanced AI tools have been integrated into targeting processes. Anthropic’s Claude model, combined with Palantir’s Maven Smart System, processed vast streams of data drone feeds, intercepts, and intelligence, in order to identify, prioritize, and simulate targets in near real time.
Reports indicate the U.S. struck over 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours, with a significant portion occurring in the initial hours of the campaign.
What once required days or weeks of coordinated planning by teams of analysts has been reduced to minutes or seconds.
This acceleration prioritizes speed over deliberation, making human judgment a potential bottleneck. While formal oversight mechanisms remain in place, the volume and velocity of data challenge the depth of meaningful review. The result is a reliance on machine-assisted recommendations that planners only approve, with experts already warning of “cognitive off-loading” from decision-makers, with them only rubber-stamping machine-created plans.1
Deployment Now Crosses Increasingly Redder Lines
This evolution now extends beyond aerial and digital domains, with “boots on the ground” already being affected.
In February 2026, the U.S. robotics firm Foundation deployed two Phantom MK-1 humanoid robots to Ukraine for real-world battlefield evaluation, thus making it the first known instance of humanoid systems being tested in an active conflict zone. 2
Standing roughly 5’9″ to 5’11” and weighing 175–180 pounds, these machines are designed to navigate human environments, handle small arms, breach doors, resupply troops, and operate in high-risk areas.3
Foundation’s co-founder, a former Marine, has described the potential for a future where robots serve as primary combatants with humans in support roles.
The company already holds $24 million in U.S. military contracts and is scaling toward broader production. 4
Ukraine’s ongoing integration of robotic systems, be them in the fields of drones, ground vehicles, or logistics, illustrates how such technologies are moving from supplementary tools to core elements of force structure.
Once consistently present in contested environments, expanding their roles becomes a matter of refinement rather than fundamental debate.
Automation Lowers Barriers to Action
When the human cost of operations decreases, political and operational thresholds for engagement tend to lower. Drones demonstrated this dynamic years ago; AI and robotics just increase this accelerationist tendency.
Reduced immediate risk to personnel enables faster scaling, more sustained operations, and potentially quicker escalation.
This also makes wars less politically costly, since any warhawk can run on a platform of “our boys” no longer dying in foreign lands, and the only gap becomes financial and resource cost, rather than any humanitarian concern for citizen lives lost(while the foreigners that are tragically killed can be turned into an “other” that is distant and tiring to hear about, as proven by the lack of significant civil pressure changing the course of the war in Iraq, or the genocide in Gaza).
In this way, the incentives shift: with the advantage accruing to those who adopt these capabilities most aggressively.
And advanced technologies rarely remain exclusive. Non-state actors have already adapted commercial drones into effective weapons, and emerging tools like offline AI for navigation and targeting are lowering entry barriers further. Affiliates of groups like ISIS have employed explosive drones in regions such as the Sahel, using algorithmic aids to evade countermeasures and enhance precision.5
And systems built for external conflict can be repurposed internally. Surveillance platforms, predictive analytics, and autonomous tools, which are already deployed at scale in places like China’s Xinjiang region already prove how behavioral data and AI can enable pre-emptive control over populations. 6
Similar capabilities could redirect toward domestic enforcement elsewhere, turning external warfighting tools into instruments of internal governance. The technical boundary between outward projection and inward control is narrowing.
The Underlying Driver
This trajectory is not primarily a story of rogue technology. It flows from a deeper structure: competition over scarce resources, centralized power, and incentives that reward advantage over collective benefit. Within that framework, if a capability confers edge, it will be pursued and deployed. AI accelerates the logic rather than altering it.
The danger lies not in a single dramatic rupture but in incremental steps: from human decision-making, to machine-assisted, to dependent, to predominantly automated.
Each increment is presented as efficiency or necessity. Over time, the overall system changes in ways that become difficult to reverse or even fully question.
These developments affect stability, accountability, and human agency on a global scale. No single nation or group is immune; the diffusion of capabilities increases unpredictability and reduces windows for de-escalation.
Regulation and oversight are essential but operate within the existing incentive structure. They address symptoms without altering root causes: competition, scarcity, and concentrated control.
A Deeper Alternative
Accessist International views these trends as symptoms of an outdated operating system.
The response is not merely tighter rules, it requires a foundational reset: the open access economy.
Transparent, open-source networks where AI and automation manage resources for collective benefit rather than advantage or domination.
A system without artificial scarcity driving conflict, without wage labor as the default, without enforced scarcity perpetuating division.
AI handles complexity across society, but guided by participatory principles, therefor freeing humanity to focus on creativity, exploration, and harmony with the planet.
Fresco anticipated automation’s permeation of decision-making domains.
He predicted that governments will increasingly offload more and more complex decision-making to AI, which will impact more and more fields, including the military.
But he also recognized that war is a pointless waste of men and material.
In one of his quotes, he famously says that “war represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.”
While we do not worship him, we believe a lot of his insights remain just as valid today.
And in Iran, we are seeing that, with every missile burning through precious stocks of rare earth minerals7, as well as killing innocent civilians on both sides, with the resources used for that equipment lost forever.
Imagine instead those same resources, chips and rare earth minerals being used to intelligent systems that organize our transport in ways that make car accidents a thing of the past, autonomous machines that manage our crops, or surgical robots to heal our sick.
With open access, that is possible, creating a world where technology aligns with human and ecological needs instead of power hierarchies.
The window to redirect this path is narrowing. Recognition must come before adaptation hardens into inevitability.
Join the Accessist Revolution. Let’s build the foundation for abundance, not escalation.
The future remains open, but only if we act to shape it.
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/03/iran-war-heralds-era-of-ai-powered-bombing-quicker-than-speed-of-thought ↩︎
- https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/humanoid-robots-ukraine-war ↩︎
- https://sg.news.yahoo.com/company-testing-humanoid-robot-soldiers-190000011.html?guccounter=1 ↩︎
- https://militarnyi.com/en/news/ukraine-receives-phantom-mk-1-humanoid-robots-for-testing/ ↩︎
- https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2018/05/terrorists-are-going-use-artificial-intelligence/147944/ ↩︎
- https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms-repression/reverse-engineering-xinjiang-police-mass ↩︎
- https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/every-missile-fired-over-iran-is-burning-through-us-tungsten-stocks-2026-03-23/ ↩︎