Memorial Day asks a hard question of any society that sends its children into harm’s way: who do we honor when the instruments of war grow less and less recognizably human? Yesterday, May 27, 2024, Americans observed Memorial Day with ceremonies and a presidential proclamation that asked the nation to unite in prayer and remembrance for those who gave the last full measure of devotion.
At Arlington and in town squares across the country the imagery is unchanged: folded flags, rows of graves, and families who carry absence like a second skin. President Biden led the annual observance at Arlington, laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and reminding the nation that service binds us to an idea and to one another. Those rituals matter because they name, in public, the human cost beneath strategy and technology.
Yet the instruments of that service are changing. Robotics, autonomy, and artificial intelligence are moving from laboratory curiosities to front-line tools. From unmanned aerial vehicles that extend a pilot’s reach to autonomous logistics and sensors that keep supply lines open, machines reduce exposure to immediate danger. The technical promise is real. The ethical and political predicament is also real. When machines shift tactical risk away from human bodies they also shift responsibility into new, often opaque, channels where engineers, commanders, and algorithms intersect.
This is not abstract. The Department of Defense has tried to formalize that human-technological relationship with a set of ethical principles for AI and by updating policy on autonomy in weapon systems to reassert the centrality of human judgment. The DoD’s adoption of five AI ethical principles beginning in 2020 set the frame for what responsible military AI should aspire to: responsibility, equity, traceability, reliability, and governability.
More recently, the department revised its Directive on Autonomy in Weapon Systems to emphasize that autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. That policy update underscores an important truth for Memorial Day reflection: as our tools grow more capable, the ethical burden on the humans who design, field, and command them grows as well.
Honoring the dead on Memorial Day therefore requires a broader ledger than graves and ceremonies. It must include technicians who keep systems safe, logisticians who sustain operations, analysts who surface the limits of automation, and policymakers who write the rules that govern life and death decisions. It must include Gold Star families whose loved ones were operators, maintainers, or simply present where a machine was deployed. These are human stories too, and they complicate any simple narrative that machines merely spare lives.
There is practical urgency to that complexity. DoD efforts to operationalize responsible AI and to provide toolkits for implementation are attempts to translate ethical commitments into engineering practices and acquisition rules. Tools and checklists matter because they are how institutions turn principle into habit. But a checklist cannot grieve, lobby, or remember. Only people do that.
Memory should also sharpen accountability. Machines magnify both competence and error. A software edge case, a misinterpreted sensor cue, or a maintenance oversight can have human consequences that echo long beyond a single engagement. On Memorial Day we commemorate the end point of sacrifice. We should also recommit to preventing avoidable losses by insisting on transparent testing, clear chains of responsibility, and robust human oversight where lethal force is concerned. Policy language that preserves “appropriate levels of human judgment” is meaningful only if institutions and budgets back sustained training, evaluation, and honest post-incident inquiry.
Finally, remembrance must be forward looking. Memorial Day asks citizens to bind memory to mission. For those of us who study and build military robotics, that duty translates to humility and to continual moral work. We must design systems that augment human prudence rather than obscure it. We must remember that a machine’s purpose in conflict is not an argument for indifference to human life. Machines will change how wars are fought but they should never change whom we choose to honor. The people who created, operated, maintained, and loved our fallen are the real subjects of this day. Their names, testimonies, and obligations should remain central as the technologies of war evolve.
Remembering the dead also means reasserting the living responsibilities of the living. On this Memorial Day let us fold the memory of sacrifice into our duties as engineers, commanders, policymakers, and citizens. Let us ensure that the machines we deploy are matched by systems of care, accountability, and public memory that keep the human cost visible and the human conscience engaged.