Prof. Michael Krom argues that just war principles still govern contemporary warfare, especially drone warfare and autonomous weapons, and that moral judgment cannot be replaced by technology or legal convenience.

This lecture was given on February 14th, 2026, at Dominican House of Studies.

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About the Speakers:

Michael Krom started reading Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae shortly after his conversion at the end of college. Upon learning about Flannery O’Connor’s “hillbilly Thomist” habit of reading Aquinas every night, he started studying two articles a day and completed the Summa while in graduate school at Emory University. As a professor at Saint Vincent College, he saw the urgent need for collegians and seminarians to receive a solid foundation in Aquinas’s philosophical theology. In 2020, he published Justice and Charity: An Introduction to Aquinas’s Moral, Economic, and Political Thought (Baker Academic Press), and teaches a Thomistic philosophy course each fall. In addition to continuing work on the moral, economic, and political topics covered in the book, his current research is on the influence of monastic spirituality on Aquinas; he is working on a monograph tentatively entitled Aquinas Among the Benedictines.

Keywords: AI, Autonomous Weapons, Common Good, Conscience, Discrimination, Drone Warfare, Human Judgment, Just War Theory, Proportionality, Prudence

Applying Just War Principles in Contemporary Warfare – Prof. Michael Krom

The Thomistic Institute