Walking onto the floor of CANSEC, Canada’s largest defence show, in Ottawa late last month, one thing was impossible to miss: drones and autonomy are no longer the future of war. They are its present. Every ship, aircraft and vehicle came mounted with a rotor, a wing or a set of legs, trailing sensors. Behind them sat the consoles: fused displays of land, sea, air, space and cyber that give a commander a god’s-eye view of the battlefield and the power to point, click and send an autonomous machine to kill.
At Canada’s biggest weapons show, the soldiers were the target
