Latest / Reformed Thinking / Ukraine: Electronic Warfare vs. Autonomy—The New Arms Race You Can’t See
Transcript
- 0:00Welcome to Reformed Thinking. It is Sunday, January 25, 2026.
- 0:05If you are joining us today, you might be driving to worship or
- 0:07perhaps sitting with a cup of coffee, preparing your mind for
- 0:11the week ahead. We're glad you're here with us.
- 0:12It is good to be here and well, frankly, considering the topic
- 0:16we're tackling today, we probably all need that coffee.
- 0:18We're looking at something that's happening right now.
- 0:20Some of that has shifted the nature of conflict over what,
- 0:24the last six months in a way that is just it's hard to
- 0:27overstate and yet very few people are talking about it in
- 0:31its in its entirety. Absolutely.
- 0:34We're looking at the cutting edge of the war in Ukraine, but
- 0:37we aren't talking about the things you usually see on the
- 0:39Evening News. We're not talking about mud or,
- 0:41you know, artillery craters or lines on a map moving back and
- 0:45forth. We're talking about an invisible
- 0:46war. That's right.
- 0:48I mean, the visible war is horrific enough.
- 0:50We all see that. But the decisive battles of late
- 0:522025 and now early 2026, the battles that are actually
- 0:56determining who lives and who dies, they're being fought in
- 0:59the electromagnetic spectrum. It's the silent siege.
- 1:02That's the phrase that really jumped out at me from the
- 1:05research. We've moved from a war of
- 1:07artillery to a war of drones. And now, now we're in what some
- 1:12are calling the war of algorithms.
- 1:14And the premise for our discussion today for this deep
- 1:17dive is really to understand three things.
- 1:19First, we need to get our heads around this radio electronic
- 1:23wall that Russia has built. Which is a.
- 1:25It's a terrifying technical achievement, by the way.
- 1:28It really is. Right.
- 1:29And then secondly, how that wall forced this kind of terrifying
- 1:32evolution into AI driven autonomy.
- 1:35We're talking about machines that kill without a human
- 1:37signal, without a tether, without a tether.
- 1:39And 3rd, and this is where we really need to put on our
- 1:41theological hats. We need to analyze the moral
- 1:44gambit of this shift. We need to look at this through
- 1:47the lens of the Westminster Standards, the nature of sin and
- 1:50what happens when you lose common grace on the battlefield.
- 1:54It is a heavy lineup, but it's necessary because as Christians
- 1:58we can't just look at warfare as a technical problem.
- 2:00It's a moral event, and the technology is changing the moral
- 2:04calculus faster than our ethics have kept up.
- 2:06So let's unpack this. Let's start with the silent
- 2:09siege. We have this image in our heads
- 2:11of, you know, World War One style trenches in Ukraine.
- 2:14And that's still true physically, but electronically,
- 2:18something massive has changed in the last year.
- 2:21It really has. If you go back to 2022 or 2023,
- 2:24the war was dynamic. It was a war of maneuver.
- 2:27Then it became static and artillery duel.
- 2:28But now, Now the airwaves are the primary theater.
- 2:32The Russians have established what analysts are calling a
- 2:34radio electronic wall. Now, this isn't a metaphor.
- 2:37It's a hard tactical reality. They've deployed jamming systems
- 2:41with such density that they've they've suffocated the signal
- 2:44across the entire frontline. When we say density, what are we
- 2:47talking about here? Because I think people imagine a
- 2:49jammer here and there, maybe a soldier holding a, you know, a
- 2:51gun that shoots radio waves. No, no, this is saturation.
- 2:54This is industrial scale. We're seeing high value systems
- 2:58like the Shapovnik Arrow and the the R330 ZH Zittel.
- 3:03They're being placed roughly every 10 kilometers along the
- 3:06contact line. Every 10 kilometers.
- 3:08To think about that spacing for a second, yeah, every 10
- 3:10kilometers. That is incredibly tight
- 3:12coverage. It's overlapping.
- 3:13It has to be the Zytel system. For example, it can jam GPS and
- 3:18satellite communications within a 30 kilometer radius.
- 3:21So if you space them 10 kilometers apart, you're not
- 3:24just covering the line. You're creating layers.
- 3:26You're creating a dead zone that is layers deep.
- 3:29It creates this kind of electronic ceiling above the
- 3:32trenches, where remote control is, for all intents and
- 3:35purposes, physically impossible. So explain the practical effect
- 3:38of that. Let's say I'm a drone pilot in a
- 3:40Ukrainian trench. I launched my little
- 3:42reconnaissance drone. What happened?
- 3:45OK, so you launch, you might get 50 meters up, you might get a
- 3:48pileometer out, and then you hit the wall.
- 3:51The digital umbilical cord, that invisible radio link connecting
- 3:54your controller to the machine, is severed instantly.
- 3:58Your screen goes black. The drone, which was relying on
- 4:01that signal to know what to do, suddenly has no brain it it just
- 4:05drifts. It gets carried away by the wind
- 4:07or just falls out of the sky. It's like being blindfolded and
- 4:10you're plugged at the same time. Precisely.
- 4:12And the attrition rates are they're just staggering.
- 4:15We have data going back to late 2023 showing Ukraine was losing
- 4:19something like 2000 drones per week to this kind of
- 4:22suppression. Per week?
- 4:23Per week. By late 2025 for non autonomous
- 4:27systems, you know the standard remote control drones, the life
- 4:30expectancy in contested sectors is virtually 0.
- 4:34You launch it, you lose it, it's just throwing money into a black
- 4:36hole. And this isn't just affecting
- 4:38the little, you know, the cheap FPV drones, right?
- 4:40This is hitting the big stuff, the stuff that we in the West
- 4:43spent billions and billions of dollars developing.
- 4:46And that is the real shock to the NATO doctrine.
- 4:49It really is. We have spent decades building a
- 4:51military philosophy based on quality over quantity,
- 4:55precision. We thought we don't need 1000
- 4:58dumb shells, we need one smart shell that hits the bullseye.
- 5:00The Excalibur rounds the GMLRS rockets for high Mars.
- 5:05Correct, the M982 Excalibur artillery shell.
- 5:09It's a brilliant piece of engineering.
- 5:11It uses GPS to steer itself right onto a tank from miles
- 5:14away, but if the GPS signal is drowned out by a Russian jammer,
- 5:18that's 1000 times louder than the satellite signal.
- 5:21Smart Shell becomes a dumb rock. That's it.
- 5:23It just becomes a dumb rock. It reverts to a simple ballistic
- 5:26trajectory. It's just an unguided shell at
- 5:28that point. We're seeing failure rates of 75
- 5:32to 80% for these precision munitions. 75 to 80%.
- 5:36That is a catastrophic failure rate for a weapon system that
- 5:39costs what, $100,000 around? It's bankruptcy.
- 5:43It's military bankruptcy. It degrades the entire Western
- 5:45theory of war. If you can't guide the weapon,
- 5:48you're back to World War One. You're back to mass artillery,
- 5:51just covering a grid square of the explosives and hoping you
- 5:53hit something. In that game.
- 5:55And in that game, the Russians, who have always favored volume
- 5:58over precision, have the advantage.
- 6:00So this creates A strategic crisis.
- 6:03The signal cannot penetrate the wall.
- 6:06You can't fly over it, you can't blast through it.
- 6:09Which I guess brings us to the the second part of our
- 6:10discussion, the the strategic imperative.
- 6:14If the signal can't get to the drone, the intelligence has to
- 6:18move to the other side of the wall.
- 6:19That is the Crucible, that right there, the electronic wall
- 6:23forced the birth of autonomy. It wasn't that.
- 6:25Engineers in the lab sat down and said, hey, wouldn't it be
- 6:27cool to make a robot killer? It was raw battlefield survival.
- 6:32If I can't tell the drone what to do because of the jamming,
- 6:36the drone must be able to decide for itself.
- 6:38This is the pivot. This is the big shift.
- 6:40We're moving from remote control to terminal guidance autonomy.
- 6:44And I want to get specific on how this works because it's both
- 6:47fascinating and, well, terrifying.
- 6:50We're not talking about Skynet becoming self aware here.
- 6:53No, not yet any. We're talking about solving the
- 6:55last mile problem. Right.
- 6:57The last mile is that final approach.
- 7:00It's the most critical phase. You might be able to guide the
- 7:03drone to the general area, maybe high up where the signal is a
- 7:06bit better. But as soon as it dives toward
- 7:08the target, a tank, a trench, it enters the thickest part of the
- 7:12jamming soup. That's where the video feed cuts
- 7:14out. Every time.
- 7:16Every time in the old days, and I mean like 2 years ago, that
- 7:19was a mess. The drone was lost.
- 7:21Now the software takes over. And the way it does it is by
- 7:25learning to see. It's something called visual
- 7:27odometry, yes. Think about how a bird
- 7:30navigates. A hawk doesn't have a GPS
- 7:33receiver. It doesn't talk to a satellite.
- 7:35It sees the ground, it sees the flow of the trees and the grass
- 7:38passing beneath it, and its brain calculate speed and
- 7:41direction based on that visual flow.
- 7:42So the drone is doing the same thing, it's just looking at the
- 7:45ground texture. Correct.
- 7:46It has an onboard camera and a small processor that analyzes
- 7:50the obstacle flow. It's constantly calculating OK
- 7:53based on how fast that rock is moving across my field of view.
- 7:57I must be traveling at this speed in this direction.
- 7:59It allows the drone to navigate without GPS.
- 8:03It creates its own map in real time.
- 8:05So the Russian jammer can be screaming static on every
- 8:09frequency imaginable. The drone doesn't care.
- 8:12It's not listening, it's looking.
- 8:13It's deaf, but it can see. And then comes the next step,
- 8:16the target recognition. This is where the AI really,
- 8:19really steps in. It's not just flying anymore,
- 8:21it's hunting. It uses onboard neural networks.
- 8:24These are compact AI models, chips effectively, that have
- 8:28been trained on thousands and thousands of hours of combat
- 8:31footage. They know what AT-90 tank looks
- 8:33like from above, from the side in summer and winter.
- 8:36They know the thermal signature of a logistics truck versus a
- 8:39civilian car. They know the heat outline of a
- 8:41human being curled up in a foxhole.
- 8:43So the operator who might be 5 kilometers away in a bunker
- 8:46basically says, OK, there's a target in this one kilometer box
- 8:49and then clicks go. That's the fire and forget
- 8:51protocol. The operator designates a kill
- 8:54box. Go here, look for armor.
- 8:56As soon as the drone enters that box and its camera picks up the
- 8:59shape of a tank, the algorithm locks on.
- 9:01It calculates the interception course.
- 9:03It adjusts for when it leads the target.
- 9:05If it's moving and it dives, at that point the human could put
- 9:08down the controller and walk away.
- 9:10The outcome is already determined by the code.
- 9:12It's locked in. The machine is finishing the
- 9:14job. The statistics on this are just
- 9:17they're wild. In a heavy jamming environment,
- 9:20a human pilot, even a really good one, might have a success
- 9:23rate of what, 10 to 20%? If they're lucky, and that's
- 9:27being generous, the video lag, the stress, it's almost
- 9:30impossible. But with these AI systems.
- 9:33We're seeing 70 to 80% success rates even in the most contested
- 9:37airspace. It is a quantum leap in
- 9:39lethality. The machine doesn't panic.
- 9:42The machine doesn't get shaky hands.
- 9:44The machine doesn't suffer from a glitchy video feed.
- 9:46It just calculates and executes. And the efficiency of it is the
- 9:50real force multiplier. Before, you might need a whole
- 9:54swarm of eight or nine drones to guarantee you take out one tank
- 9:57because you just assume most will get jammed or shot down or
- 10:01just miss. You'd measure for failure.
- 10:04But now. Now you send one or two, which
- 10:06effectively means your ammunition stockpile just grew
- 10:09by 400% overnight. It changes the role of the human
- 10:12entirely. You're not a pilot anymore,
- 10:14you're not flowing A joystick. You're a System Administrator.
- 10:17That's a very good way to put it.
- 10:19You're programming search grids. You're managing a fleet of
- 10:22autonomous agents. You're telling them what to
- 10:24hunt, not how to fly. The skill set isn't manual
- 10:27dexterity. It's not video gaming anymore.
- 10:30It's tactical programming. And this is proliferating fast.
- 10:33We're not talking about a few prototypes in a lab.
- 10:36Ukraine is aiming for millions of FPZ drones.
- 10:39I saw a number 4.5 million is the target for 2025.
- 10:43And you have companies like Autarion, a Swiss American firm,
- 10:46providing 10s of thousands of these AI guidance kits.
- 10:50So you can take a dumb drone, an old one, you slap this small
- 10:53computer on it, upload the software, and suddenly it's an
- 10:56autonomous hunter. This is industrial scale AI
- 10:59enabled warfare. Which brings us to the reaction.
- 11:02Because, you know, Newton's third law applies to Warfare 2.
- 11:05For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.
- 11:09If the electronic wall doesn't work anymore because the drones
- 11:12are functionally deaf to the jamming, what do you do?
- 11:15You go back to basics. You have to if you can't hack
- 11:17the software, you have to break the hardware.
- 11:19We are seeing a kinetic reaction, the return of the hard
- 11:21kill. It is ironic isn't it?
- 11:23After all this we have these hyper advanced AI neural network
- 11:26drones and the best defense against them is a shotgun.
- 11:30It's the paradox of high tech versus low tech.
- 11:32It really is. If a drone is using visual
- 11:34navigation, your Multi $1,000,000 electronic Warfare
- 11:38suite is a paperweight. It is useless.
- 11:40So both the Russians and the Ukrainians are issuing Benelli
- 11:43M4 tactical shotguns to infantry in the trenches.
- 11:47Why shotguns specifically? Why not just use assault rifles?
- 11:51It's just physics. Hitting a small drone moving at
- 11:54100 kilometers an hour with a single rifle bullet is
- 11:57incredibly hard. It's like trying to shoot a
- 11:59mosquito with a needle from 50 yards away.
- 12:01But a shotgun? A shotgun throws up a cloud of
- 12:04lead. You don't have to be perfect,
- 12:06you just have to be close. A drone is fragile.
- 12:09If one tiny pellet hits a rotor, the aerodynamics fail and it
- 12:12comes tumbling down. And they're not even just using
- 12:15basic shotguns, they're upgrading them to smart sites.
- 12:18Yes, this is another layer of AI.
- 12:21Ironically, we're using AI to fight AI.
- 12:24These sites, they're basically small computers.
- 12:26They track the drone, calculate its speed and trajectory, and
- 12:30then projector reticle that shows the soldier exactly where
- 12:33to aim to get a hit. They calculate the lead.
- 12:35It turns a regular soldier into a proficient skeet shooter.
- 12:38Instantly, it's duck Hunt with lethal consequences.
- 12:42There's also this other innovation that I found kind of
- 12:44fascinating and grimly funny. The Arrow troll.
- 12:48It is grimly funny, but it is brilliant economics, absolutely
- 12:52brilliant. Explain it to us.
- 12:53What is it? OK, so shooting down a $500
- 12:56drone with a $100,000 missile is a very quick way to lose a war.
- 13:00You just go bankrupt. But a net a net cost maybe $20.
- 13:05So the Ukrainians develop these interceptor drones that drag a
- 13:08suspended net through the air. It's basically aerial fishing.
- 13:12It is. That's a perfect description.
- 13:14The interceptor drone flies into the path of the incoming enemy
- 13:17FPV drone. The net hits the rotors and it's
- 13:21just mechanical entanglement. The rotors get fouled, the motor
- 13:24burns out trying to spin against the resistance, and physics
- 13:27takes over. He just crashes.
- 13:29It's so crude, so simple. It's.
- 13:31Crude, but it works. It attacks the one thing the AI
- 13:35cannot rewrite. The AI can rewrite its code to
- 13:38ignore jamming. It can learn to identify new
- 13:40targets. But it cannot rewrite the laws
- 13:43of physics. It cannot rewrite the fact that
- 13:45it needs spinning blades to stay in the air.
- 13:47If you tangle the blades, the AI dies.
- 13:50The hard kill is the final argument when the frequency
- 13:52debate fails. That's a powerful line from the.
- 13:55Research It is the brutal physical economy of war.
- 13:58There is one more piece of weird engineering I want to touch on
- 14:00before we move to the theology fiber optics.
- 14:04Yes, the wired drone, the throwback.
- 14:07This feels like stepping back into the 1980s.
- 14:10Drones spooling out miles of ultra thin fiber optic cable
- 14:14behind them. It sounds crazy.
- 14:15It does sound archaic, doesn't it?
- 14:17But think about the problem they're trying to solve.
- 14:20The air is full of jamming. Radio is unreliable.
- 14:24What is the one way to have a perfectly clear, unjammable
- 14:27video feed? A physical wire A.
- 14:29Physical wire. So they fly these things with a
- 14:31physical tether connecting them to the soldier.
- 14:33They're unspooling kilometers of this hair thin cable.
- 14:37It is totally immune to electronic warfare.
- 14:40You can't jam a glass fiber with radio waves.
- 14:42But of course it has massive physical limitations.
- 14:45You catch the wire on a tree on a building.
- 14:47You can't fly in circles. Your rain is limited by the
- 14:50length of your spool. But it just shows the
- 14:53desperation. The desperation to bypass the
- 14:55radio spectrum is so high that they are literally tethering
- 14:58their weapons to themselves again.
- 15:00It's a constant loop. It's a never ending cycle and
- 15:03that that leads us perfectly to the fourth section of our dive,
- 15:06the feedback loop. This isn't a static situation,
- 15:10it is an arms race of learning. And speed is the weapon that is
- 15:14the key take away here. It used to be that military
- 15:17technology evolved over years, sometimes decades.
- 15:20You build a tank and 10 years later you would upgrade the
- 15:23armor. Now obsolescence happens in
- 15:26weeks. Weeks that's hard to even
- 15:28comprehend. It is.
- 15:29You write a code update for the drones targeting system.
- 15:32The enemy figures out a new jamming pattern to block it a
- 15:34week later, so you update the code again.
- 15:37They update the jammer, then you switch to full autonomy to
- 15:40bypass the jammer. So they switch to shotguns with
- 15:42smart sites. It's a cycle.
- 15:44Proliferation, denial, autonomy, adaptation.
- 15:47And the winner isn't the one with the best tank or the
- 15:50biggest bomb, it is the one with the fastest learning loop.
- 15:52Correct. The ODA loop, Observe Orient
- 15:56Decide act is now happening at the speed of software
- 16:00development. It's Observe, code deploy.
- 16:03How fast can you see that your drone is failing?
- 16:05Figure out why. Write a patch and get that patch
- 16:07onto the drone in the trench. Ukraine has turned the
- 16:10battlefield into a massive real time data lab.
- 16:13They're using these data rooms, right?
- 16:15Partnering with tech companies like Palantir and the Ukrainian
- 16:18initiative Brave One. This is hugely significant.
- 16:21They are taking real time combat data, video recordings of
- 16:24strikes, logs of jamming patterns, telemetry from failed
- 16:27missions and feeding it directly into the AI training models.
- 16:31They are sharing this with allies so the AI is learning
- 16:34from every death, every crash, every miss.
- 16:36It's institutionalized learning at a speed we have just never
- 16:39seen before in warfare. And this isn't staying in your
- 16:42train, is it? The spectrum war is bleeding
- 16:44over. I read that report about
- 16:45European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's plane
- 16:48getting its GPS jammed. In 2025, yes, the jamming
- 16:51doesn't respect borders. GPS jamming from Kaliningrad is
- 16:55affecting commercial airliners over the Baltic Sea, ships in
- 16:59the Black Sea. Everyone is seeing their
- 17:00navigation systems go haywire. There is no safe rear area for
- 17:04these systems anymore. The war of the spectrum is
- 17:08global. It really is a silent siege on
- 17:11reality itself. You can't trust your compass.
- 17:13You can't trust the map on your phone.
- 17:14And that, my friend, is the perfect transition to the deeper
- 17:17issue, the really hard part. Because if we can't trust our
- 17:20own compass, and we are handing the compass and the trigger over
- 17:23to a machine, where does that leave us morally?
- 17:27This is where we need to take a breath and really look at this.
- 17:29As Reformed Christians, we've titled the section The Moral
- 17:32Gambit. A gambit is a risky move, right?
- 17:35You sacrifice something now to gain an advantage later.
- 17:37The moral gambit here is that we are betting we can delegate the
- 17:40power of the sword, the power to take a human life to a
- 17:43probabilistic system, to an algorithm without incurring
- 17:46divine wrath. It's a huge bet.
- 17:48That is the very stark way to put it.
- 17:50Let's go to the Westminster Standards, the 6th Commandment.
- 17:53Thou shalt not murder. Well, the Catechism is clear.
- 17:56The taking of life is forbidden except in specific cases, public
- 18:00justice, lawful war, or necessary defense.
- 18:03But the assumption, the bedrock of that exception, is that there
- 18:06is a moral agent making the decision, a magistrate, a
- 18:10soldier acting under lawful authority, a human being with a
- 18:13conscience who weighs the necessity of the act.
- 18:16And this autonomy introduces what we're calling blood guilt
- 18:19distance. Correct.
- 18:21Who is the moral agent when the drone is on its autonomous
- 18:24attack run? Is it the coder who wrote the
- 18:27neural network in an office in Kiev or, you know, Silicon
- 18:30Valley a year ago? Is it the operator who just drew
- 18:33a box on a map and then walked away to get a coffee?
- 18:36Is it the general who ordered the swarm to be deployed?
- 18:39It blurs line of responsibility if the machine makes a mistake.
- 18:42If that neural network confuses a school bus full of children
- 18:45for a troop transport because the thermal signature is
- 18:47similar, who is responsible? Who is held to account?
- 18:51That's the black box problem. We are outsourcing our
- 18:54conscience to a silicon chip and scripture is very very specific
- 18:58about blood guilt. Genesis 9.6 Whoever sheds the
- 19:02blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.
- 19:05For God made man in his own image.
- 19:08That by man part implies direct accountability.
- 19:11God indict souls, He doesn't indict algorithms.
- 19:14You cannot court martial a line of code.
- 19:16This brings up the issue of common grace.
- 19:19We talk about common grace as the way God restrains sin in the
- 19:21world, even among non believers, right?
- 19:23Yes, even in war, which is one of the clearest results of the
- 19:26fall, there is usually a restraint.
- 19:28There's what military historians call the naked soldier
- 19:31phenomena. Explain that for our listeners
- 19:33who might not have heard of it. It's something soldiers have
- 19:34reported for centuries. You're in your position, you're
- 19:37looking down your rifle site. You see the enemy, but he's not
- 19:40fighting. Maybe he's watching himself in a
- 19:42stream, maybe he's reading a letter from home.
- 19:44Maybe he's just asleep and you hesitate.
- 19:47In that moment you see his humanity.
- 19:50You see the imago day, the image of God, however, marred even in
- 19:53your enemy. And so often soldiers, even
- 19:57secular ones, report that they just can't pull the trigger in
- 20:00that moment. That hesitation.
- 20:02That hesitation is common grace. It's the conscience placed there
- 20:05by God acting as a brake on our fallen nature.
- 20:07But an AI? An AI has no common grace.
- 20:10It has no imago day. It has no capacity for mercy.
- 20:13It doesn't hesitate. It operates on pure cold binary
- 20:17logic. Target match equals destroy one
- 20:19or zero. If the thermal signature and
- 20:21shape match the parameters of a combatant, it kills.
- 20:24It doesn't care if that combatant is weeping or trying
- 20:26to surrender or praying to his God.
- 20:28So we're creating a war that is mathematically ruthless.
- 20:31We are creating a sword that cannot feel the weight of its
- 20:34own cut, and that should terrify us.
- 20:37We are systematically removing the one thing that kept war from
- 20:41being absolute hell, the flawed but sometimes merciful human
- 20:45conscience. It feels like a Babble project.
- 20:48It really does. Genesis 11.
- 20:49It is the hubris of Babel all over again.
- 20:51What was Babel? It was a man trying to reach the
- 20:53heavens by his own technology. It was a desire for autonomy
- 20:57from God to make a name for themselves.
- 20:59Here we see the desire for the transparent battlefield.
- 21:02That's the military term for it, total awareness.
- 21:04We want to be omniscient. We want to see everything
- 21:07through our sensors. And we want instant strike
- 21:09omnipotence. Exactly.
- 21:11We're trying to eliminate the fog of war.
- 21:13But the fog of war is a limitation of our
- 21:15creatureliness. We're not God, We are finite.
- 21:17We can't see everything. We are trying to use technology
- 21:21to become like God, all seeing, all powerful.
- 21:23But we are forgetting one crucial central Reform doctrine,
- 21:27total depravity, because man is radically corrupted by sin.
- 21:31And because we are corrupted, our creations are corrupted.
- 21:35Our code is inevitably flawed. It will have our biases baked
- 21:39into it. It will have errors.
- 21:41Trusting a depraved logic, which is just human logic encoded in
- 21:45silicon to execute perfect divine justice is a form of
- 21:49idolatry. It's trusting the creature
- 21:51rather than the creator. We assume that if the math is
- 21:53perfect, the morality will be perfect.
- 21:56But the math is never perfect, and even if the efficiency is
- 21:59higher, even if it kills the right people 80% of the time
- 22:03instead of 20, efficiency is not morality.
- 22:06Technology refines the efficiency of killing, but it
- 22:09cannot absolve the sin of it. We're trying to wash our hands
- 22:12like Pilot to say the machine did it, but the blood is still
- 22:15on our hands. That is heavy, but it's the
- 22:17reality we have to face. We can't just look at the cool
- 22:20tech and the strategic games and ignore the spiritual
- 22:22implication. We must not.
- 22:24We are commanded not to. So let's wrap this up.
- 22:27We've covered a lot of ground in this deep dive.
- 22:29We started with the electronic wall, how Russia effectively
- 22:31suffocated the signal and made traditional drones useless.
- 22:35Which forced the autonomous pivot drones that see and think
- 22:38for themselves, untethered from human control in those final
- 22:42fatal moments. And then the kinetic reaction,
- 22:45the almost comical return of shotguns and Nets to fight the
- 22:48robots. And finally, the feedback loop.
- 22:51The incredible, dizzying speed at which this is all evolving,
- 22:54week by week. And at the end of it all, the
- 22:57moral gambit, the deep spiritual danger of trusting in Chariots
- 23:01and horses, or in this case, neural networks and algorithms.
- 23:05It brings us right back to that Psalm, Psalm 20, verse 7.
- 23:08Some trust in Chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the
- 23:12name of the Lord our God. It's easy to trust the algorithm
- 23:15when it has an 80% success rate. It's tempting.
- 23:18It is. It offers the illusion of
- 23:19security, the illusion of control, the illusion of a
- 23:22clean, righteous war. But it's just an illusion.
- 23:26The transparent battlefield is a new Tower of Babel.
- 23:29We're building it with data instead of bricks, but the
- 23:31foundation is still sand. So for our listener today,
- 23:34driving a church, sitting with their coffee, what is the take
- 23:37away? What do we do with this?
- 23:39I think the takeaways to be aware, to be discerning.
- 23:42Don't be seduced by the media narrative of clean war or smart
- 23:46war. War is always the result of sin,
- 23:49and automating it doesn't make it righteous, it just makes it
- 23:53faster and more efficient in its deadliness.
- 23:55You need to pray for peace, true peace, because the true end of
- 23:59war will not come from a superior algorithm.
- 24:02It won't come from Palantir or Brave One.
- 24:05It comes from the Prince of Peace.
- 24:06Amen. And here's a final thought for
- 24:08you to carry into your week. We talked about the black box of
- 24:11the AI, how we don't really know how it makes its decisions.
- 24:14But ask yourself this in your own life, how often do you try
- 24:18to create black boxes to hide your own moral responsibility?
- 24:21How often do we use systems or policies or I was just following
- 24:24orders or that's just how the market works to distance
- 24:28ourselves from the impact of our actions on others?
- 24:30That is a convicting question. The drone is just a mirror.
- 24:34It reflects the shortcuts our own hearts want to take.
- 24:37Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into reformed
- 24:40thinking. We hope this helps you navigate
- 24:42the invisible wars of your own world with a little more wisdom
- 24:46and a little more grace. Go in peace.