Ethical review boards have no framework for approving autonomous swarm lethal engagement tests

Before any autonomous weapons test involving simulated lethal engagement, military research programs must pass institutional review and legal compliance checks. But no ethical framework exists specifically for autonomous swarm lethality testing -- existing reviews are designed for single autonomous systems with identifiable decision points. A swarm where lethal decisions emerge from collective behavior (no single drone 'decides' to kill) falls outside every existing ethical review template. This persists because ethics review frameworks follow doctrine, and doctrine follows capability development, creating a circular dependency where the ethics review cannot be written until the swarm is tested, but the swarm cannot be tested until the ethics review is approved.