The four-star general proudly recounts how he had spent “two hours watching footage” beamed to his office. Sitting behind a live feed of video from a Predator drone, he saw the two insurgent leaders sneak into a compound of houses. Then, he waited as other insurgents entered and exited the compound, openly carrying weapons. He was now personally certain: Not only was the compound a legitimate target, but any civilians in the houses had to know that it was being used for war, what with all the armed men moving about. So, having personally checked out the situation, the general tells how he gave the order to strike. But, his role in the operation didn’t end there; he explains how he even decided what size bomb his pilots should drop.

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Something big is going on in the history of war. The U.S. military went into Iraq with just a handful of drones in the air and zero unmanned systems on the ground, none of them armed. Today, there are over 5,300 drones in the U.S. inventory and another roughly 12,000 on the ground, with the latest models armed with a lethal armory of missiles, rockets, and machine guns. And these are just the first generation, the Model T Fords compared to what is already in the prototype stage.

For my book Wired for War, I spent the last several years trying to capture just what is going on in this historic revolution we are now experiencing, as robots begin to move into the fighting of our human wars. The book features stories and anecdotes of everyone from robotic scientists and the science-fiction writers who inspire them to 19-year-old drone pilots and the Iraqi insurgents they are fighting. But when I present the findings to U.S. military audiences, it is the above vignette, and the questions it raises about the future of generalship, that prompt the most reaction.

In his masterful history of men at war, The Face of Battle (Viking Press, 1976, p. 114), John Keegan wrote, “The personal bond between leader and follower lies at the root of all explanations of what does and does not happen in battle.” In Keegan’s view, the exemplar of this was Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt, who inspired his “band of brothers” by fighting in their midst.

But with the rise of each new communications technology, these connections between the soldiers in the field and those giving them battle orders began to be distanced. Generals were no longer at the same front lines as their men but began to operate from command posts, which moved further back with each new technologic advance. And yet, describes analyst Chris Grey, the very same technologies also pushed a trend “towards centralization of command, and thus towards micromanagement.”

For instance, when telegraphs were introduced during the Crimean War (1853–56), generals sipping tea back in England quickly figured out that they could now send in their daily plans to those at the frontlines in Russia. And so they did. With the radio, this went even further. Hitler, for instance, was notorious for issuing highly detailed orders to individual units fighting on the Eastern Front, cutting out the German army’s entire command staff from the process of leading its troops in war.

But with our new technologies, we are seeing this trend taken to its extreme, or perhaps its logical conclusion. Our digitized Global Command and Control System (GCCS) tracks every movement on a computer map, down to the individual weapon. But with robotics, and, most importantly, the live video of battle that various unmanned systems beam back, commanders are enabled as never before. They are physically off the battlefield like those in Crimea, but able to take action in it like Henry the V. They not only are able to transmit orders in real-time to the lowest level troops or systems in the field, but they also have simultaneous real-time visibility into it. Moreover, even a general at the very front could never before “see” exactly what a soldier saw in the bulls-eye of his rifle sights, nor could he do anything about it. With a robotic system like a Predator drone, that commander can see the exact same thing that the operator sees, at the exact same time, and even take over the decision to shoot or not.

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