Feminist Approaches to Countering Military AI
By Kirthi Jayakumar
Even as military AI is beginning to gain a stronghold in the way war is being waged, there is wisdom in prioritizing a feminist approach to counter its development, deployment, and use. Plenty of efforts world over have strived to centre feminist principles and values over militarism, questioning the need for and use of military AI at all. These examples offer useful learning and insight into what it might mean to prioritize feminism in creating a peaceful future, rather than to exacerbate existing cycles of violence through the introduction of a tool for efficiency and speed.
Centring Care Ethics Over Efficiency Metrics
Feminist care ethics prioritizes relationships, vulnerability, accountability and responsibility over utilitarian considerations. When applied to military AI, this framework challenges the efficiency-driven logic that treats casualties as acceptable statistics. For instance, a campaign called “Stop Killer Robots” grounds its activism in care-based arguments, emphasizing that autonomous weapons remove human compassion from life-and-death decisions, and arguing that delegating killing to algorithms violates the ethical requirement to care about individual human lives. Feminist principles help reframe the debate by shifting the focus away from precision and efficiency to ethics. The key questions we should ask as feminist is whether we need military AI at all, who bears responsibility when AI makes fatal errors, what justice looks like when a machine is at the forefront of making life-and-death decisions, and ultimately, how we should care for all those that are harmed as a result of it (Suchman & Weber, 2016).
Naming the Gendered Nature of AI Warfare
A feminist lens invites an intersectional understanding of the impact of warfare, including military AI use. It helps us see that military AI both perpetuates and amplifies gendered patterns of violence, disproportionately affecting women and gender minorities across the peacetime-wartime continuum. For instance, feminist research (e.g., Clark, 2019; De Volo, 2016) on drone warfare shows that surveillance AI often targets “military-age males” by default, and that the resulting strikes kill women and children who are deemed "collateral damage," both of which dehumanizes the actual target and others harmed in the process. Acheson (2020) explains that targeting men from majority world contexts through the use of autonomous weapons is also a form of gender-based violence with both racial and colonial overtones that demonize people of colour while prioritizing the security of wealthy western nations. The Drone Papers leaked by whistleblower documentation revealed that in a window of five months, US drone operations killed nearly 90% unintended targets (Barajas, 2015). These casualties disproportionately included women in domestic spaces, revealing how AI-assisted targeting systems encode assumptions about gendered spaces (i.e., public=male vs. private=female, non-binary identities not accounted for; Enloe, 2016).
Challenging Militarized Masculinity Cultures in Technological Development
A feminist lens also helps us see how military AI development is shaped by hyper-masculine cultures that valorise domination, aggression, and techno-solutionism while excluding diverse perspectives, lived experiences, intersectionality and multidimensionality, and the role of systemic and structural violence in these spaces. The inclusion of women and non-binary people in tech development is not about making essentialist arguments that claim women’s inherent predisposition toward peace or motherhood as a basis to include them, but about recognizing that different experiences produce gendered experiences and accounting for those experiences is possible only by exploring realities from their seat at the table. Without this, power will continue to be corralled in the hands of a few, whose worldviews will continue to inform tech development and deployment priorities. Without this, existing forms of marginalization, exclusion, and discrimination will continue and be exacerbated significantly, while the advantages of efficiency, speed, and scale will be uplifted as advantages regardless. Including a spectrum of identities into the fold is a way to safeguard against the concentration of power in the hands of an elite few. Intersectional and decolonial feminist approaches examine how military AI compounds discrimination based on race, class, gender, and geography, with the most marginalized bearing the greatest costs. For example, research by scholar practitioners Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru have shown how algorithmic bias operates in facial recognition, with direct implications for military AI.
Reframing Security Away from Militarization
Feminist approaches to understanding and reflecting on security redefine the concept as “human security,” and call for a shift away from state-centric interpretations. They recognize a wholesome and comprehensive form of security that acknowledges the many ways in which life is lived and experienced at the individual and community levels. In doing so, feminist approaches to security call for meaningful investments in actions and resources that support wholesome living, as opposed to militaristic spending that creates an atmosphere of fear, insecurity, and mistrust. Feminist approaches to security have also deconstructed the narratives that hyperfocus on AI warfare as precise and humane, revealing how these claims obscure messy realities of civilian harm (e.g., see Acheson, 2020
References
Acheson, R. (2020b). A WILPF Guide to Killer Robots. https://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Publications/wilpf-guide-aws.pdf
Barajas, J. (2015). Whistleblower releases documents into U.S. military’s drone program. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/whistleblower-comes-forward-with-documents-that-offer-glimpse-into-u-s-militarys-drone-program
Clark, L. (2019). Gender and drone warfare: a hauntological perspective. Routledge.
De Volo, L. B. (2016). Unmanned? Gender recalibrations and the rise of drone warfare. Politics & Gender, 12(1), 50-77.
Enloe, C. (2016). Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. Rowman & Littlefield.
Suchman, L., & Weber, J. (2016). Human-machine autonomies. Autonomous weapons systems: Law, ethics, policy, 75-102.
