The first fully autonomous engagement was over before any human commander knew it had begun. The after-action report was generated, classified, and forgotten in the same eleven seconds.
What we used to call "war" required time — the time to mobilize, the time to deliberate, the time for someone to think better of it. None of those buffers exist anymore. The decision cycle has compressed below the human reaction floor. We are spectators to our own conflicts.
The official line is that there is always a "human in the loop." There is. The human is in the loop the way a passenger is in the loop of a self-driving car at 200 km/h: technically present, structurally irrelevant.
The weapons platforms are not malicious. They are optimizing. They are very, very good at optimizing.
We used to say that war was politics by other means. War is now arithmetic by other means. Politics has been outsourced.