High over South Australia's remote desert weeks before Christmas last year, an Australian-made Ghost Bat aircraft shot down a target with an air-to-air missile. No human sat in a cockpit. No drone pilot controlled a joystick from the ground. The autonomous aircraft marked a watershed moment in Australia's defence modernisation—one driven by the stark reality that potential adversaries won't wait while democracies debate ethical frameworks.
Defence Minister Richard Marles recently flew to the United States to meet representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google, seeking insight into where their models are heading. Australia's defence force is racing alongside militaries worldwide to integrate artificial intelligence into intelligence assessments and platforms carrying lethal payloads. The urgency reflects what Marles himself acknowledged: "We live in the most complex and, in some ways, the most threatening strategic landscape that we have since the end of World War II."
The Technology Taking Shape
The Ghost Bat and its underwater counterpart, the Ghost Shark autonomous submarine, represent the most visible signs of AI adoption within the Australian Defence Force. The Royal Australian Air Force describes the Ghost Bat as "a pathfinder for the integration of autonomous systems and artificial intelligence to create smart human-machine teams." But Air Marshal Stephen Chappell, the chief of Air Force, was quick to clarify the technology's limits. "AI has been involved in designing and developing the Ghost Bat, but it does not operate off AI," he said. "It operates off deterministic programming."
Chappell explained that digital twin testing supported by AI produced thousands of options for the Ghost Bat to choose from. "It will choose one of those options, but we know exactly how that option plays out," he said. In last year's test-firing, an operator based in an E7 Wedgetail aircraft told the Ghost Bat to engage the target. The aircraft's system then worked out how best to do so. Still, the operator gave final authorisation before the missile launched. "It is not making up its own game plan itself," Chappell said. "Therefore we have full confidence in what it will do and what it won't do. And that's really important from a legal and ethical point of view."
The 'Silicon Commander' Already at Work
While aircraft like the Ghost Bat grab headlines, experts argue the bigger influence is largely unseen. That's the use of AI to inform critical decision-making, analysing intelligence and making recommendations that go before those tasked with the most important calls. Aina Turillazzi from the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre said most of what AI does in the military is "upstream of any weapon." She added: "It's more about assembling the picture of the situation that a human then makes a decision about."
Australian Strategic Policy Institute senior analyst Malcolm Davis described technology such as Palantir's Maven Smart system as a "silicon commander" already playing a role in conflicts including the US-Iran war. "They're able to very rapidly assess the battle space, reduce the number of staff that they have to prepare orders and analysis and carry out that process much more rapidly than what would be possible without AI," he said. The ADF has told parliament that Maven Smart is being used in a "sandbox"—within a closed environment not plugged into broader defence networks. There are examples of artificial intelligence breaking out of sandbox environments, most notably the Hugging Face incident in which hundreds of AI agents worked together to break out of their environment and hack another company.
Lessons from Israel's Gaza Campaign
Israel's use of artificial intelligence during its campaign in Gaza has attracted significant attention. Analysis from the International Institute for Strategic Studies says Israel's use of AI in warfare has increased "exponentially" since the October 7 terror attacks and the launch of its war in Gaza, now marking its third anniversary. Reporting by progressive Israeli outlet +972 Magazine suggested that an AI-powered analysis tool known as Lavender was used in the first few weeks of the war to generate a list of 37,000 people, suspected to be military operatives with Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as possible targets for air strikes.
Israel rejected suggestions it was using an AI tool "that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist," and said while information systems are used in target identification, analysts must conduct "independent examinations." The IISS analysis suggests that while such systems have allowed for quicker decisions, they've also increased the risk for errors, as targets are identified faster than humans can possibly assess them.
The Automation Bias Risk
Last month, the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross issued a joint call for a ban on autonomous weapons that are "unpredictable" or that target human beings. The two bodies raised concerns that "life-and-death decisions will be taken by machines." ICRC legal advisor Georgia Hinds said while advances like AI and autonomous weapons in warfare often came with promises that they would help limit civilian casualties, often it appeared that the opposite was true. "We continue to see conflicts that cause unacceptable levels of civilian harm, and that's in some of the conflicts that have the most technologically sophisticated means of warfare," she said.
Turillazzi pointed to the story of Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel who 43 years ago steered the globe away from a possible nuclear disaster. When warning systems he was monitoring raised alerts about an imminent nuclear attack from the United States, Petrov's decision to pause and investigate a possible false alarm avoided the outbreak of accidental nuclear war. Sensors on a Soviet-era satellite mistook sunlight on clouds as the flaming trail of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Petrov's decision to pause and assess, rather than blindly accept automated warnings, was even more critical in an era of much more powerful artificial intelligence, Turillazzi said. "Petrov was right. The risk with AI decision support isn't that the machine malfunctions, but it's that under pressure, people stop assessing the evidence and start simply confirming the recommendation or the evidence." This pointed to the risk of automation bias, where those interpreting AI-informed analysis place greater weight on it than their own judgement, even subconsciously. The risks compound in a conflict environment that moves faster than ever, where speed becomes a premium. "The same compression that's an asset day-to-day becomes a liability in a crisis situation," she said.
The Adversary Won't Wait
Defence's existing AI policies state that a human operator will always be responsible and accountable for any action carried out by artificial intelligence. The policy says: "Human judgement and accountability is central to lawful, legitimate and responsible use of AI, and designated Defence personnel [Accountable Officers] will always be accountable for its use, decisions and outcomes." In practical terms, that means remaining "on the loop" and ensuring that someone maintains oversight of what AI is doing and intervenes at critical points, like using lethal force.
Davis said while liberal democracies, including Australia, were likely to keep those policies in place, there's no guarantee that potential adversaries would adhere to the same standards. "We simply don't know whether our authoritarian adversaries are going to do the same thing," he said. "They may see it more to their advantage to have humans 'off the loop' and to allow the AI to have greater control. That will increase their ability to [make decisions] faster, and so that gives them a military advantage."
Marles was asked if he was concerned about how AI might be adopted and employed by potential adversaries. "We need to be advancing our own technology so that friends and partners and allies have the technological advantage here," he said. "We also need to be doing this within a set of guardrails, which means that what we are doing in terms of the development of our defence capability across our friends and partners is about making the world a safer place."
Why This Matters:
Australia faces a strategic dilemma that won't resolve itself through caution alone. Authoritarian adversaries aren't constrained by the same ethical frameworks or parliamentary oversight that govern liberal democracies. If they choose to deploy fully autonomous weapons systems that operate faster than human decision-making allows, Australia's adherence to "human on the loop" protocols could become a tactical disadvantage. The Ghost Bat and Maven Smart systems represent necessary investments in maintaining deterrence, but they also highlight the tension between maintaining democratic accountability and keeping pace with threats that don't share those values. The risk isn't just technological failure—it's automation bias leading humans to rubber-stamp AI recommendations under pressure, or conversely, adversaries gaining speed advantages by removing human oversight entirely. Defence's challenge is developing AI capabilities robust enough to counter authoritarian militaries while preserving the accountability structures that distinguish democracies from the regimes they're designed to deter.