> wars fought like this may involve less loss of life
Western audiences forget why wars were often fought to the last man. Mass murder could often be the merciful option. Vae victis.
A military superpower unwilling to impose its will through sheer brutality is a huge historical outlier. As Pax Americana disintegrates, new powers will arise in its wake. ISIS was a brief glimpse into the future.
The trick is going to be improved friend/foe detection. Historically, wars simply ended when the victor would kill all remaining enemy soldiers and enslaved their families and other people inside the areas they were defending. Brutal but effective.
The last century since basically WWII and especially the Vietnam war, we've seen increasingly less brutal wars where harming innocents is seen as a negative (in the case of Vietnam, that was what eroded the will to fight). Lately, we're seeing a type of asynchronous war fare where huge armies are effectively powerless because an insignificant opponent is hiding among civilians delivering very minor attacks with no strategic relevance. There are a whole range of stale mate situations across especially the middle east where the attacking side is simply hard to root out without lots of undesirable casualties among civilians. Just ask the Israeli's. They live tens of kilometers away from people willing to die to risk launching rockets at them, despite the fact these rockets rarely hit anything. It's been the status quo for the last decades. Their military is big enough that it keeps foreign countries from trying to invade but domestically, it's clearly not able to end the conflict.
Stalin would have ended that conflict in no time. There would be no-one remaining to figut, the local language would be Russian, and there might be a new Palestine presence somewhere deep in Siberia. His successor Putin has fared less well in Chechnya mainly because he would suffer internationally if he did it the Stalin way.
Guerilla warfare is dependent on the other side being humane enough or unwilling to not want to cause unnecessary casualties. As long as attackers manage to hide, they can't be hunted down without large amounts of innocents dying. WWII style leveling of entire cities is very much frowned upon now. I live in such a city (Berlin).
However, the ability for guerilla fighters to hide after an attack is time sensitive and critical to their survival. Drones swarming an area would make that a lot harder. Urban warfare particularly is dreaded by armies because of high casualty rates related to simply not knowing where the enemy is and the need to fight door to door to find them. This could fix that. It could be over in minutes. It won't end all wars but it will make particularly guerilla warfare a lot harder.
ISIS could be a thing of the past. The next engagements with the likes of those might be short, brutal, and effective. Minimum (but not less) loss of life, maximum effectiveness. It would follow months of covert mapping the territory, inventorying its inhabitants, and tracking all their movements followed by a few minutes of mayhem. Some people find that scary but they forget what decades long of conflict or a real war looks like.
IDK. First, I don't believe there will be any kind of surgical precision with autonomous weapons systems. Human drone operators have taken out way too many weddings for my liking, and the German army obliterated a lot of people gathering around a stuck tanker.
Second, with a delay of say 10 years, swarm autonomous drones will be in the hand of insurgents. We've seen how ISIS took out tanks and troop by dropping tank shells from drones. They are not dumb and will happily adopt drone swarms. The science and IT is out there.
It is true that armies have a harder time carpet-bombing cities, but at the same time, what modern armies hate even more is losing their own guys. Even a semi-capable killer drone swarm could make it real hard to take and hold cities if seemingly out of the blue your buddies drop dead. Insurgents typically will not care that much if there's dead civilians if they can terrorize invasion forces.
Western audiences forget why wars were often fought to the last man. Mass murder could often be the merciful option. Vae victis.
A military superpower unwilling to impose its will through sheer brutality is a huge historical outlier. As Pax Americana disintegrates, new powers will arise in its wake. ISIS was a brief glimpse into the future.