This Blueprint is a comprehensive reference document for delegations preparing for the 31 August – 4 September 2026 CCW GGE session on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), the final negotiating window before the November 2026 Review Conference.
It catalogues 121 distinct risks across six domains (technological, military, legal, political, ethical, societal), maps current governance mechanisms against remaining gaps, and proposes specific, attributed, operationally grounded ways forward for each.
It has been prepared by Cian Westmoreland as part of GGI’s project on the ‘The Global Governance of Autonomous Weapon Systems: Policy Gaps, Regulation Challenges and Governance Opportunities’ and forms part of the accompanying appendices of the forthcoming report.
The living document blueprint functions as a balanced toolkit for negotiators across the spectrum of state positions (not only those already committed to a maximalist instrument) while preserving diagnostic comprehensiveness and practitioner credibility.
The central analytical argument remains that ‘The Kill Cloud’ (the socio-technical assemblage of orbital sensors, commercial AI, autonomous weapons, and distributed command infrastructure) has architecturally displaced human moral and legal agency from lethal force decisions. Speed, resilience, and deniability were the engineering objectives; accountability erasure is the structural consequence. Existing regulatory frameworks have a definitional gap that excludes the decision-support systems (DSS) and information systems (IS) where algorithmic influence over targeting is most pervasive. The political economy of AWS development now actively rewards the removal of ethical constraints. These are not abstract scenarios: Lavender, Lancet, Maven, V2U, and Kargu-2 are the operational baseline, however contested individual reports may be (cases documented respectively at +972 Magazine, 2024; KSE Institute, 2025; Army University Press, 2025; HUR/Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, 2025; UN Panel of Experts, 2021).
The Blueprint identifies three concrete textual interventions in the current rolling text (status 18 December 2025) that would make a material difference and are achievable in a single negotiating session: (1) DSS non-exclusion, the rolling text characterization in Box I should not formally lock in DSS exclusion from the instrument's scope; (2) Meaningful control operationalization, the phrase 'context-appropriate human control and judgment' in Box III should be conditioned on the epistemic, deliberative, and causal criteria that make control genuine rather than nominal; (3) IS environment in Article 36, obligations under Box III paragraph 6 and testing requirements under Box IV should explicitly cover the information system environment in which identification, selection, and engagement functions operate.
The companion HAC document (Westmoreland, 2026b), proposes that any treaty definition of meaningful human control rest on three operationally testable criteria: epistemic agency (the operator must know enough to make a real decision); deliberative agency (there must be time, cognitive bandwidth, and counter-evidence available); causal agency (the human input must materially shape the outcome, not merely endorse a precomputed recommendation). A minimum IS disclosure floor sets the baseline conditions for ratification. Tier A regulation and Tier B prohibition thresholds give the criteria teeth. Specimen Article 36 checklists make the framework administratively implementable today, by states acting unilaterally if necessary.
The companion ATF document (Westmoreland, 2026c) proposes a dual-layer distributed ledger architecture: a classified Inner Chain inside national enclaves logs the full kill chain (mission planning, ROE invocation, sensor fusion, AI inference, target validation, engagement, post-action review); a cryptographic Outer Chain publishes zero-knowledge proofs of compliance properties without revealing classified content. The result is a forensic record that survives operational secrecy and makes evasion documentable rather than merely deniable. The Blueprint also presents lighter alternative architectures (Domain IX) for delegations who view full ATF as operationally burdensome, and explicitly identifies the ATF's implementation challenges rather than treating it as a costless solution.
(a) An Executive Summary and Comparison of Governance Options table giving negotiators a fast read on the choice space.
(b) A strengthened Counter-arguments section that engages Scharre, Sassoli, and operator-burden critiques directly rather than gesturing at them.
(c) A new Domain IX subsection presenting credible lighter alternatives to full ATF (lightweight national logging with mutual recognition, hybrid centaur-plus-enhanced-Article-36 models, tamper-evident-enclave plus CTBTO-style forensic sharing, and tiered/optional ATF) because giving delegations multiple landing zones is a precondition for negotiation rather than a concession of principle.
(d) A frank Implementation Challenges subsection acknowledging edge platform overhead, coalition classification gaps, adversarial attacks on the logging layer itself, and estimated cost and latency.
(e) A new Annex on realistic pathways for August 2026 and beyond, including a tiered instrument proposal and political mapping.
(f) Mitigation ideas added to the Where-this-framework-might-fail section. The author's argumentative position has not changed; what has changed is the document's posture toward delegations who do not yet share it.
(1) Adopt DSS non-exclusion language in the August text even if no further commitments are achievable in the session. Silence on DSS is preferable to formal exclusion because silence can be addressed in subsequent protocols; formal exclusion cannot.
(2) Anchor the HAC epistemic agency threshold in treaty text by amending 'meaningful human control' to require confidence-score disclosure, data-source identification, and failure-mode disclosure at point of operator use. This is a definitional clarification rather than a new prohibition, and is correspondingly more politically tractable.
(3) Add IS environment testing to Article 36 review obligations, including representative adversarial degradation (GPS-denied, sensor-spoofed, data-poisoned).
(4) Adopt a tiered instrument structure: a binding prohibition on fully autonomous anti-personnel use; a strong transparency floor (the IS disclosure baseline); and an optional full-ATF protocol open to states willing to accept it. This gives the August session a viable negotiating shape that does not require all-or-nothing trade-offs.
The proposals in this Blueprint are not costless. They impose latency on engagement decisions that may be operationally unwelcome; they require infrastructure investment that will fall most heavily on states with limited resources; they raise classification and interoperability questions for coalition operations; they depend on great-power participation that is uncertain at best. This Blueprint acknowledges these costs explicitly rather than treating them as objections to be overcome. The case the Blueprint makes is not that its proposals are without cost, it is that the costs of unconstrained, unaccountable AWS deployment are substantially higher, more durable, and harder to reverse than the costs of binding accountability infrastructure. That case has to be argued, not assumed.
The Comparison of Governance Options table in the document summarizes the choice space at a glance. The Counter-arguments and Where-this-framework-might-fail sections set out what skeptical delegations will reasonably object to, and how this Blueprint responds. Domains I–VI catalog specific risks with column-by-column governance analysis. Domain VII (Kill Cloud structural diagnosis), Domain VIII (HAC framework synthesis), and Domain IX (ATF architecture, alternatives, implementation challenges) are the synthesis sections delegations will most often need to cite. The Annex on realistic pathways is intended for use in informal consultations between sessions. The Bibliography (Domain X) and Glossary (Domain G) support both reference use and direct citation in negotiating documents.
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