The concepts of responsibility, control, and accountability serve as a reassuring foundation for operational, ethical, and legal questions regarding the employment of military AI and autonomous weapon systems. This normative terminological scaffolding, however, is often at odds with the complex dynamics of agency and human–machine interactions. Focussing on the figuration of the enhanced or augmented soldier, this contribution develops a theoretical framework that takes into account the role of interfaces and cognitive processes, shedding new light on these normative assumptions. First, this chapter looks at human/machine configurations within modern warfare paradigms. It discusses the idea of human augmentation, which reflects a deliberate vision of an ever-stronger hybridisation of humans and machines: human soldier or weapon? Second, the chapter proposes an interface-centred approach to cognitive processes, modelling cognition as a continuous re-establishment of relations between the body and its environment. Cognitive processes and interface effects often remain underexplored when theorising military AI. They are, however, central to the dynamics of the human–machine relationship, which makes them so meaningful for questions of intention, control, or responsibility. Third, this framework will be applied to the cognition of the enhanced or augmented human soldier, highlighting three areas: (a) human agency, nonconscious decision-making and (de)skilling, (b) situational awareness, and (c) prediction. Overall, the interface-centred approach to human augmentation and cognition developed in this chapter calls into question normative presuppositions and reframes theoretical certitudes around the reference objects of responsibility, control, accountability, or rationality, which also has implications for ethical and legal debates.
