American values require that human beings, not artificial intelligence, make the life-or-death decisions inherent to war. So announced Vice President JD Vance to graduating officers at the Air Force Academy recently. He’s right.What “makes you as warfighters unique is that we wage war justly,” Vance said. This means that “if the warfare of the future is to live up to the moral values of our ancestors, decisions over life and death must be made by humans and not machines.”It’s worth saying that these moral values are religious. Vance didn’t declare this explicitly, though he made the point when he endorsed Pope Leo’s recent encyclical, saying that humanity must not “outsource the most important moral decisions to digital technology.” As AI disrupts human affairs, he shared, “the thing I worry about most with AI is how it will change warfare.” And only human beings, Vance exhorted the class of officers, have the conscience — “minds but also hearts” — to master AI and not let it master us.
This isn’t Luddite nostalgia from the prior enlisted Marine. It’s an insistence that, even as military technology enters the AI age, those who use it remain anchored to America’s foundational values. For Vance, a military that forgets why human judgment matters will eventually forget what it is defending — what the “res” is in the res publica of the American republic. This is why America’s religious values, particularly its two-and-a-half-century love affair with religious freedom, are vital to the military’s use of artificial intelligence.
