The smaller more asymmetric military operations are often used to test prototype weapons. My response about automated genocide is that it most likely already happened. And I can't think of a better testbed than an AC130 gunship for an automatic aiming system, the operators only see thermal blobs anyway. Not like this, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/10/robot-cannon-ki/
Wow, I hadn't heard of that story, truly scary stuff.
This video was linked to in that article, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/10/video-robo-weap/ hopefully every soldier, programmer, and engineer working on these systems has to watch similar videos so that they know the importance of getting this stuff right.