Coupling levels of abstraction in understanding meaningful human control of autonomous weapons: a two-tiered approach

Abstract The international debate on the ethics and legality of autonomous weapon systems (AWS), along with call for a ban, primarily focus nebulous concept fully AWS. These are AWS capable target selection engagement absent human supervision or control. This paper argues that such conception autonomy is divorced from both military planning decision-making operations; it also ignores design requirements govern engineering subsequent tracking tracing moral responsibility. To show how operations can be coupled ethics, this marries two different kinds meaningful control (MHC) termed levels abstraction. Under two-tiered understanding MHC, contentious notion ‘full’ becomes unproblematic.