By ZACHARY FRYER-BIGGS | Special To The Washington Post | Published: February 19, 2021 The camouflage-clad cadets are huddled around a miniature arena in the basement of a building dug into the cliffs on the West Point campus. They're watching a robotic tank about the height of a soda can with a metal spear attached whir into action. Surrounded by balloons of various colors representing either enemy fighters or civilians, the tank, acting on its own, uses a thumbnail-size camera to home in on a red balloon. The cadets wince as an earsplitting pop suddenly reverberates through the room: One "ISIS fighter" down. That startling bang is the object of this exercise, part of a class in military ethics being taught to these sophomores at the U.S. Military Academy. The cadets have programmed the tank with an algorithm directing it to use its lance to "kill" the enemy fighters; now they are tweaking it to make the robot either more or less aggressive in fulfilling its mission — with as little harm to unintended targets as possible.