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Notes -
You know, for all the frequent concerns about AI killbots, modern smart weapons have, in practice driven what is, to use your term, kayfabe. I could point to how concerns about nuclear mutual destruction, while technically a valid concern, have thus seem to have caused a (fragile) truce on Great Power conflict. It seems that one outcome of true "smart weapons" would be the establishment of this sort of kayfabe, like in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "A Taste of Armageddon," but with no actual deaths, just our robots going at each other with the owners of the losing bots ceding the conflict, because of the implication.
Now that I think about it, the post-WWII era already has quite a few conflicts that are settled not by outright conquest, but by leveraging power into situations where one nation-state could clearly squish the other like a bug, and the loser taps out like a wrestling match, rather than a mano a mano fight to the death. It seems that some of the more enduring conflicts that exist (Israel/Palestine, for example) continue because the "losing" side refuses to tap out, and the rules of the international arena don't really consider such cases.
But it leads us to weird things like today's events, where one clearly-outgunned side is clearly and deliberately firing live ammunition at the other, and the fired-at parties seem to be left batting down the ammunition, and wondering whether it's worth the trouble to flatten the other side.
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