DAILY STAR
Governments and militaries across the globe are stockpiling cheap Chinese combat drones and deploying them on the battlefield, leading to fears of mass mortality.
The Asian superpower is reportedly selling AI-enhanced combat drones to authorities across the world from Saudi Arabia to Myanmar and Iraq to Ethiopia, according to Al Jazeera.
But in and around the Middle East is where fears that “every human on the battlefield will be dead” are most rife.
Recently, a Saudi-led coalition dispatched the Chinese aircraft in Yemen as part of a devastating air campaign that has killed more than 8,000 Yemeni civilians in the past eight years.
In Iraq by January this year, Chinese droneshad carried out more than 260 air raids against ISIS targets as of mid-2018, with a success rate of nearly 100 percent according to Al Jazeera.
But Professor Toby Walsh, of the University of NSW, in Australia, thinks their power is too much, and worries what bad actors might do with them.
He said in late 2019: “They would be impossible to defend yourself against. Once the shooting starts, every human on the battlefield will be dead.”
Former US Defence Sec Mark Esper has said that China is selling drones programmed to decide themselves who lives or dies.