Investigating the kill cloud: information warfare, autonomous weapons & AI

Abstract

The “kill chain”—involving the analysis of data by human users of military technologies, the understanding of that data, and human decisions—has fast been replaced by the “kill cloud” that necessitates, allows, and exacerbates increased thirst for domination, violence against distant populations, and a culture of experimentation with human lives. This commentary reports an interdisciplinary discussion organised by the Disruption Network Lab that brought together whistleblowers, artists, and experts investigating the impact of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies on networked warfare. Exposing the problematics of networked warfare and the kill cloud, their colonial overtones, effects on human subjects in real life, erroneous scientific rationalities, and the (business) practices and logics that enable this algorithmic machinery of violence. The conference took place from the 29th of November to the 1st of December 2024 at the Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, Germany.

Full text

Vol.:(0123456789)
Digital War (2025) 6:4
https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-025-00101-x
REVIEW
Investigating thekill cloud: information warfare, autonomous
weapons & AI
IshmaelBhila1
© The Author(s) 2025
Abstract
The “kill chain”—involving the analysis of data by human users of military technologies, the understanding of that data,
and human decisions—has fast been replaced by the “kill cloud” that necessitates, allows, and exacerbates increased thirst
for domination, violence against distant populations, and a culture of experimentation with human lives. This commentary
reports an interdisciplinary discussion organised by the Disruption Network Lab that brought together whistleblowers, art-
ists, and experts investigating the impact of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies on networked warfare.
Exposing the problematics of networked warfare and the kill cloud, their colonial overtones, effects on human subjects in
real life, erroneous scientific rationalities, and the (business) practices and logics that enable this algorithmic machinery of
violence. The conference took place from the 29th of November to the 1st of December 2024 at the Kunstquartier Bethanien
in Berlin, Germany.
Keywords Autonomous weapons systems· Algorithmic warfare· Artificial intelligence (AI)· Surveillance· Kill chain
Introduction
The idea of the kill chain that characterised the “global war
on terror”, problematic as it was, was based on the prin-
ciple of “analyse-reflect-act” (Brose 2020). It allowed and
necessitated new practices of targeted killing that were
seen as morally plausible (Statman 2004) and more accu-
rate. Yet, the myth of accuracy and objectivity of emerging
technology-assisted targeted killing has been debunked by
many scholars over time (Fereidooni and Heidt 2024), and
the practices of these “kill lists” make the “messy target-
ing process more opaque and less traceable” (Weber 2016,
p. 107). On the other hand, the “kill cloud” worsens this
opacity and messiness with its characteristic dependence
on vast amounts of data, increased autonomy of machines,
and machine learning techniques. The idea of the kill cloud
was first introduced by Lisa Ling and Cian Westmoreland
to denote a rapidly growing networked infrastructure with
a global reach, whose principal aim is domination in every
spectrum of warfare, “including space, cyberspace, and the
electromagnetic spectrum” (Bazzichelli, 2021; Ling and
Westmoreland 2021).
This commentary summarises the discussions at the
“Investigating the Kill Cloud: Information Warfare, Autono-
mous Weapons & AI” conference that took place at the Kun-
stquartier Bethanien in Berlin, Germany, from the 29th of
November to the 1st of December 2024. As a celebration of
the Disru ption Netwo rk Lab’s tenth anniversary, the Disrup-
tion Network Lab cooperated with the “Meaningful Human
Control: Autonomous Weapons Systems Between Regula-
tion and Reflection” (MEHUCO) research network to bring
together whistleblowers, artists, civil society, and scholars
from a variety of disciplines including legal studies, science
and technology studies (STS), International Relations (IR),
political theory, media and communication studies, sociol-
ogy, computer science, and others. The conference, curated
by Tatiana Bazzichelli in collaboration with Jutta Weber,
was also aimed at providing space to share the results of the
investigations on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI)
on new technologies of war, automated weapons, and net-
worked warfare by the Disru ption Netwo rk Insti tute’s affili-
ated research fellows. These research fellows (Fig.1)were
Lisa Ling (whistleblower, former Technical Sergeant, US
Air Force Drone Surveillance Programme, USA), Jack
Poulson (Executive Director—Tech Inqui ry, USA), Naomi
* Ishmael Bhila
ishmael.bhila@uni-paderborn.de
1 Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany
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I.Bhila
4 Page 2 of 7
Colvin (Programme Director—Bluep rint for Futur e Speech,
UK), and Joana Moll (Artist & Researcher, ES). The three-
day event also included roundtable discussions aimed at
fostering discussion, knowledge sharing, and collaboration
among experts from various disciplines.
The MEHUCO research network, led by Paderborn
University, consists of five institutions of higher education
(University Bonn, Leibniz University Hannover, Hamburg
University, Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, and
Paderborn University). The “Investigating the Kill Cloud”
conference was organised by the Disruption Network Lab
together with the MEHUCO subproject “Swarm Technolo-
gies – Control and Autonomy in Complex Weapons Sys-
tems” hosted at Paderborn University. Although the discus-
sions and papers presented were numerous, wide-ranging,
and specialist, this paper presents a synthesised report of
these different talks. It focuses on a few themes that came
out of the conference while suggesting areas of further
research. All the presentations and performances are avail-
able online for the reader to immerse themselves in more
detail.
AI, thekill cloud, andwhistleblowing
Contemporary war and related military information prac-
tices rely on secrecy and classified data. Yet, with the
increased automation of warfare, this secrecy is also closely
constitutive of impunity, war crimes, and arbitrary killing
of innocent populations from afar. The role of declassified
data in “peering through the fog of war” has become urgent
and indispensable (O’Loughlin etal. 2010). It is within this
context that Jesselyn Radack argued that “whistleblowing
is critical in the context of drone war because we would
have no idea what’s occurring in the most secret and most
lethal government programme without the perspective of
insiders.”1 Without whistleblowers, Radack pointed out, it
would be impossible to know how governments undercount
civilian deaths, regarding thousands of lives as collateral.
Thus, the revealing work of people like Chelsea Manning,
Julian Assange, Brandon Bryant, Daniel Hale, Christopher
Aaron, and others has been instrumental in exposing the
ugly truths about remote warfare. Jack Poulson, whose pres-
entation was on the methods of database investigation of
Western intelligence and special operations, a major concern
of data-centric warfare is the propensity of governments (in
his case the US government) to delete evidence from the
public while having legal justifications to conceal any data
that would expose the military’s injustices. 2
In addition to exposing what is already taking place,
Thomas Drake(Fig.2) posited that whistleblowing helps
warn the public about the threats of data-centric warfare.
3 For Drake, whistleblowers pay an incredibly high price,
risking everything to expose injustices for the public's good.
In data-centric warfare, it is essential to “hold AI to its own
mirror” (ibid). It is crucial to expose the dangers of AI as
Fig. 1 Keynote Panel with the Disruption Network Institute Fellows. From Left—Joana Moll, Naomi Colvin, Jack Poulson, Lisa Ling, and Tati-
ana Bazzichelli (Moderator). Picture credits: Disruption Network Lab
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.

Investigating thekill cloud: information warfare, autonomous weapons & AI Page 3 of 7 4
it expands the killing fields, increases the “murder ratio”,
and becomes a narrative for the permissibility of inhuman
methods of warmongering from a distance. Whistleblowing
is crucial in exposing the false beliefs held by the public
regarding “sanitised warfare,” which is touted as the advan-
tage of data-centric warfare (Lisa Ling). 4
Experimental, business‑based warfare
For STS scholars, who were part of the aptly named “Disarm-
ing the Kill Cloud” 5 panel(Fig.3), data-centric warfare is
based on “sloppy military data science” relying on the princi-
ples of correlation (Jutta Weber), with increased algorithmic
intensification that does not align with the truth of the lived
realities of those on the ground (Lucy Suchman). Suchman
critiqued the idea of “ground truth” in military data practices,
arguing that together with the datasets from which it is built,
ground truth presupposes and requires operations of datafi-
cation—rendering worlds of interests as numbers (also see
Suchman 2020). For Eric Reichborn-Kjennerud, data-centric
warfare represents military logic, not the reality of the physi-
cal world. For Elke Schwartz, this military-business logic is
underpinned by a logic of trial and error, a high-risk-high-
reward business model that encourages the capitalist think-
ing of “move fast and break things” and “done is better than
perfect”. This military philosophy mandates mistakes and
valorises error in search of high financial rewards. Marijn
Hoijtink’s work on this panel expanded these ideas to include
the idea of “the platform” (see Hoijtink 2022; Hoijtink and
Planqué-van Hardeveld 2022) which embeds the idea of per-
fect knowledge, the ability to link everything to everything, to
systematise, and naturalise the logic of targeting as exemplified
by the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint All Domain
Command and Control (JADC2) that links all US military ser-
vices through data sensors, platforms, and other communica-
tion technologies. Hoijtink’s presentation proved the impact
and influence of platform owners in contemporary warfare,
which transforms the logic and practices of warfare. Naomi
Colvin’s presentation showed how the UK’s policy positions
on AI safety and risk are intricately linked to ideas from AI
labs and Silicon Valley (Colvin 2024).
The work by Joana Moll, which suggests going beyond
the techno-economic business model views of digital adver-
tising (Ad Tech), showed how the mechanisms of Ad Tech
are grounded in “critical relationships to bodies, emotion and
cognition, natural resources, warfare, ideologies, and past and
present politics” (Moll 2024, p. 5). Thus, Moll’s performance
and presentation showed these intricate relationships while
exposing how Ad Tech has become a major enabler of danger-
ous forms of surveillance that have fed into the mechanics of
the kill cloud.
Fig. 2 Thomas Drake Giving a Keynote Speech. Picture credits: Disruption Network Lab
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I.Bhila
4 Page 4 of 7
The coloniality ofalgorithmic violence
The study of algorithmic warfare and autonomous weap-
ons systems has largely focused on legality, state posi-
tions and narratives, imaginaries, governance, ethics, and
the problems of meaningful human control. Yet, power,
historical context, and colonial violence are at the core of
these systems' practices, governance, and conceptualisa-
tion. In a joint presentation covering their work with the
Airspace Tribunal, an ongoing project that is developing
a proposed new human right to counter the colonisation
of the sky, Shona Illingworth and Anthony Downey’s talk
characterised the “pathologies of algorithmic warfare” as
an offshoot of and central to neocolonialism. A number
of the presentations at the conference exposed the colo-
niality of algorithmic violence—that is, a set of values,
attitudes, epistemologies, and power structures that pro-
vide rationalisation and justification of colonial forms of
violence and dominance (see Quijano 2007). For Donatella
Della Ratta (discussion contribution), AI simply provides
a narrative through which machines can be blamed for
colonial violence perpetrated by human actors. Rather,
algorithmic warfare is mainly targeted at lives that do not
matter (see Butler 2009). For Khalil Dewan, algorithmic
violence is necropolitical—it ascribes the right to death
for those whose lives are deemed losable and disposable
(Mbembe 2019). 6 Shona Illingworth drew on evidence
gathered through the Airspace Tribunal’s development of
the propo sed new human right to protect the freedom to
live without physical or psychological threat from above,
that highlights how the sky, especially for the postcolo-
nial subject (see Jabri 2012 on the postcolonial subject),
is associated with imprisonment and death (Mohammed
2024), causing long-term psychological trauma and physi-
ological harm (Illingworth etal. 2024).
The realities of algorithmic warfare are inadequately
dealt with by the existing legal debates. For Anthony
Downey, there is a need to question the historical function/
context of AI, its operative logic in warfare, and its sys-
temic functioning. AI is used to provide justifications for
algorithmic violence, and it actualises threats it was cre-
ated to predict (Downey 2024), which has real ramifications
on real lives. These ramifications are even more threaten-
ing for populations in the Global South. For example, the
assault on privacy that people lament in the West is nothing
compared to the assault on privacy on people who live in
places with the most violent foreign surveillance practices,
like Gaza, Afghanistan, and elsewhere (Lisa Ling). 7 It is
therefore essential to question and critically analyse It is
therefore essential to question and critically analyse the
Fig. 3 The “Disarming the Kill Cloud” Panel in Session. From Left—Lucy Suchman, Marijn Hoijtink, Eric Reichborn-Kjennerud, Elke
Schwarz, and Jutta Weber (Moderator). Picture credits: Disruption Network Lab
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.

Investigating thekill cloud: information warfare, autonomous weapons & AI Page 5 of 7 4
epistemological underpinnings, power structures, and colo-
nial injustices created by the use of AI and related technolo-
gies in warfare.
Automated surveillance andtargeted killing
inGaza
The outbreak of the war in Gaza, characterised by the Inter-
national Court of Justice’s (ICJ) ruling on genocide, 8 United
Nations (UN) and several other human rights organisations
as a genocide, exposed several aspects related to algorithmic
warfare. In the first instance, it brought to the public’s atten-
tion the realities of algorithms and AI in warfare. Secondly,
it forced the discourse on autonomous weapons systems to
move from theoretical imaginations of how AI and machine
learning techniques could influence warfare to discussions
on how AI has facilitated genocide in practice (Amnesty
International 2024). Thirdly, the war transformed the dis-
course that had largely been focused on autonomous weap-
ons systems to now include other aspects of information
warfare like Decision Support Systems that are equally prob-
lematic. The “Automated Surveillance & Targeted Killing in
Gaza” panel(Fig.4), 9 which consisted of Matt Mahmoudi,
Sophia Goodfriend, and Khalil Dewan and was moderated
by Matthias Monroy, considered how surveillance technolo-
gies and practices of targeted killing operated in Gaza.
For the panellists, the technologies used for control and
killing in Gaza are used to justify the ongoing injustices.
Sophia Goodfriend argued that the algorithmic violence tak-
ing place in Gaza was largely based on three key political
decisions: (1) the intentional targeting of civilian homes, (2)
raising the threshold of civilian casualties, and (3) encour-
aging soldiers to over-rely on AI decisions (i.e. automation
bias). For Khalil Dewan, the conscious and deliberate politi-
cal move towards the automation of violence in Gaza has
a long history, with Israel being the first country to have a
targeting policy in the year 2000.
In practice, this targeted killing depends on a massive
infrastructure of surveillance technologies that include the
Red Wolf facial recognition technology, Blue Wolf (Good-
friend 2023), MABAT 2000, Checkpoint 56, and others,
leading to what Matt Mahmoudi characterised as “automated
apartheid” (also see Aizeki etal. 2024 on surveillance, con-
trol, and violence). This automated violence is done with
impunity, particularly with many actors and infrastructures
operating from outside the warzone, including satellites,
developers, and so on (Dewan). For Khalil Dewan, the Law
of Armed Combat (LAC) faces a key problem in the Gaza
case because the perpetrators of violence cannot be attacked
back. In addition, Dewan argued, the legal understanding of
“hostile intent” of the victims in Gaza is erroneous because
the entire population is labelled as hostile. Gaza has shown
us that there is a need for new critical approaches that
Fig. 4 The “Automated Surveillance & Automated Killing in Gaza” Panel in Session. From Left—Khalil Dewan, Matt Mahmoudi, Sophia
Goodfriend, and Matthias Monroy (Moderator). Picture credits: Disruption Network Lab
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.

I.Bhila
4 Page 6 of 7
question the injustices of the laws of war that are biased
against Global South populations.
Conclusion
As the effects of network-centric warfare become more and
more real, and as the numbers of unaccounted—for victims
pile up, it has become essential to expand the study of algo-
rithmic warfare and the action to constrain its excesses. As
the “Investigating the Kill Cloud” conference showed, the
role of whistleblowers in exposing these excesses cannot
be overstated. Secondly, as suggested by Anthony Downey
at the conference, there is an urgent need to develop fit-for-
purpose interdisciplinary methodologies for thinking “from
within” the apparatuses that animate algorithmic warfare
rather than merely representing or reflecting on them (see
also Bazzichelli, 2021 on the idea of disruption from within).
Jack Poulson’s work presents a big step in doing this from a
whistleblowing perspective, while the majority of scholars
represented in this report are largely critical of algorithmic
violence. Thirdly, the frames of thinking on algorithmic
warfare have been largely limited in scope, leaving most of
the existing scholarship unable to question the conditions of
injustice and power both at governance and practice levels.
Thus, subversive theorisation, including Global South and
postcolonial frameworks, can help unsettle the existing sys-
temic injustices necessitated and encouraged by emerging
technologies of war. This subversive thinking can open up
spaces for gender-sensitive, vulnerability-focused, and envi-
ronmentally conscious streams of questioning that have the
potential to unsettle systemic violence and domination. My
own work has so far questioned these injustices and colonial-
ity at the governance level (Bhila 2024a, 2024b). The work
of the Stop Killer Robots Campaign and like-minded organi-
sations has exposed the fallacies of algorithmic warfare and
targeted killing, but there is still a need for collaborative
efforts towards the critique of the “kill cloud” at all levels,
and by various communities of practice and thought.
Notes
1. Jesselyn Radack, Investigating the Kill Cloud Confer-
ence, 29 November 2024. Accessible at https:// www.
disru ption lab. org/ inves tigat ing- the- kill- cloud
2. Jack Poulson, Investigating the Kill Cloud Conference,
29 November 2024. Accessible at https:// www. disru
ption lab. org/ inves tigat ing- the- kill- cloud
3. Thomas Drake, Investigating the Kill Cloud Confer-
ence, 29 November 2024. Accessible at https:// www.
disru ption lab. org/ inves tigat ing- the- kill- cloud
4. Lisa Ling, Investigating the Kill Cloud Conference, 29
November 2024. Accessible at https:// www. disru ption
lab. org/ inves tigat ing- the- kill- cloud
5. Panel—“Disarming the Kill Cloud” at the Investigat-
ing the Kill Cloud Conference, with Lucy Suchman,
Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud, Marijn Hoijtink, and Elke
Schwarz, moderated by Jutta Weber. https:// www. disru
ption lab. org/ inves tigat ing- the- kill- cloud
6. Khalil Dewan, on Panel “Automated Surveillance &
Targeted Killing in Gaza”, Investigating the Kill Cloud
Conference, 30 November 2024. Accessible at https://
www. disru ption lab. org/ inves tigat ing- the- kill- cloud
7. Lisa Ling, Investigating the Kill Cloud Conference, 29
November 2024. Accessible at https:// www. disru ption
lab. org/ inves tigat ing- the- kill- cloud
8. Summary of the Order of 26 January 2024 | INTERNA-
TIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE, 2024).
9. Panel—“Automated Surveillance & Targeted Killing in
Gaza” at the Investigating the Kill Cloud Conference,
with Matt Mahmoudi, Sophia Goodfriend, and Khalil
Dewan. Moderated by Matthias Monroy.
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt
DEAL.
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Ishmael Bhila is a Doctoral Researcher at Paderborn University study-
ing small-state and Global South perspectives on algorithmic warfare,
particularly autonomous weapons systems. His research focuses on
the deliberative spaces in international forums like the United Nations
Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (UNCCW) where auton-
omous weapons systems are discussed.Ishmael was also a Research
Fellow inthe Meaningful Human Control: Between Regulation and
Reflexion (MeHuCo) research network.
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