This paper is about the import of what I propose to call the pragmatics of
robotic warfare. Pragmatics in linguistics concerns itself with the significance of an utterance's context in terms of e.g. the intentions of and relations between the language users. Analogously, the pragmatics of a technology provides the context of it in terms of its concrete workings, the intentions of its development, its social and political genesis, its built-in purposes, the relations of those affected by the technology, and so on. Pragmatic considerations thus move from the “tactical” level of the concrete practical use of a given technology to the “strategic” level of the overall aims and strategies that constitute the design of technologies and weapons systems and thus define their realistic applications. I argue that many of the alleged advantages of robotic warfare “in principle” are of limited relevance since the much more problematic uses in practice are not merely contingent.