FlamingText

The Future of Warfare, Pt. 1

This is my take on the latest developments in the fast-growing field of killer robots. Yes that's right I said killer robots. There are two kinds of people: Those who find killer robots fascinating and everybody else. I trust you to know which category you fall into...

the Shape of Things to Come

  In spite of a century of warnings from science fiction authors, the age of armed robots is upon us. Like most other technological advances with terrifying implications, the long-foretold day has arrived with little fanfare and almost no public debate. The project at the heart of this is called Future Combat Systems, and with its $127 billion price tag it is the largest military contract in history. It is an across-the-board plan to modernize all branches of the military and create a largely automated fighting force within the next decade. It is proceeding in part thanks to a Congressional resolution passed in 2000 which called for one-third of ground vehicles and a third of the deep-strike aircraft to become robotic by 2015. The cost of meeting this goal is expected to drive Defense Department's budget up by nearly 20 percent, from the $419.3 billion in next year's budget request to a projected $502.3 billion in 2010. This is not including the costs incurred by any ongoing wars.

  This increase is largely accounted for by a projected 52 percent rise in the annual cost of new weapons purchases, from the current $78 billion to $118.6 billion. It is interesting to note, then, that a large part of the justification for this proposed modernized force is economic savings. A recent Pentagon study showed that the lifetime cost of one soldier from enlistment through burial is about $4 million, and this figure is growing. Currently the Pentagon owes its soldiers $653 billion in retirement benefits which it cannot pay. The hope is that a robotic soldier will cost one tenth as much.

  "Well before the end of the century, there will be no people on the battlefield," says Robert Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Management and Technology. Finkelstein, a leading proponent of the automation of combat represented by the FCS program, is echoing an often-repeated promise of the modernized military, the promise of combat with no casualties. Recognizing that the loss of soldier’s lives is the single greatest factor making the American public reluctant to wage war, many military strategists see automating the most dangerous battlefield tasks as holding tremendous promise in the ongoing PR battle to justify overseas engagements, along with the more obvious benefits to life and limb.

  Unfortunately, the scenario painted by Finkelstein and others leaves out a crucial point: When he says there will be no people on the battlefield, what he actually means is no American people on the battlefield. Although the idea of a future where wars are waged entirely between robotic soldiers while humans sit safely on the sidelines may sound like a decided improvement over the current state of affairs, at present there are no plans to make robots that are designed to fight anything other than human opponents. Thus the promise of casualty-free war is something of a misnomer. Consequence-free war is probably a more accurate description of the goal here, with the automated component of warfare occupying an increasingly large role in securing the goal laid out in the National Security Strategy : Global military dominance.

  In the arenas of aerial and naval combat this goal has long since been achieved, with American air and sea power virtually unchallenged since the fall of the Soviet Union. Even so, the Pentagon is exploring various programs to increase American dominance of the skies and seas even further. Unmanned aircraft are a central component of this strategy, and enthusiasm for unmanned fighters and bombers has been greatly heightened by the success of the Predator.

  Prior to the Afghanistan conflict, the Predator was an unarmed, lightweight surveillance plane that flew its missions high above the battlefields of Bosnia. Shortly after 9/11 they were first outfitted with 100-lb Hellfire missiles. Since then Predators have logged over 80,000 hours flying missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. Currently the Air Force has a fleet of at least 80 of the planes in operation. They are the first generation of remote-controlled weaponry, capable of applying lethal force at a great distance with no risk to the operators, who might be stationed anywhere on the globe. For instance, the remote “pilots” of the Air Force's 15th and 17th Expeditionary Reconnaissance squadrons are flying missions in Iraq every day, even though they are stationed literally around the world in the Nevada desert. Here, sitting in front of video screens displaying real-time video and audio from the field of battle, the decisions to fire or not to fire are made. While the missiles may be landing in Iraq, the button that fires them in many cases is under the finger of a nineteen-year-old operator in Nevada who has never even been overseas.

  Such remote-control strikes are not without controversy: There have been known instances of mistaken identity and unintended casualties from such attacks. In 2001 the CIA, using a Predator attack drone, killed an Afghan shepherd who was said to resemble Osama bin Laden in height and weight. There was also the more widely-publicized strike the following year against a car that was said to be carrying Abu Ali al-Harithi, a leading Al Queda target. With al-Harithi in the car were five other suspected Al Queda operatives, including American citizen Ahmed Hijazi, leading many critics to point out that the U.S. was carrying out extra-judicial killings through its intelligence-gathering apparatus. While this incident has generated considerable debate over the legality of conducting assassinations of overseas American citizens who have not actually been convicted of any crime (other than the crime of finding themselves in close proximity to a CIA target), lost in the debate are some other thorny issues: First, the fact that this new technology for the first time places the CIA, an agency charged with intelligence-gathering, into the role of being a de facto branch of the military, operating outside of the normal chain of command. Second, the fact that the public statement offered by the CIA after the fact left it conspicuously unclear whether they knew the identity of the other passengers in the car when they authorized the strike.

  These incidents highlight one of the potential problems of this new generation of weaponry: Even though the current weapons are controlled by human operators, the decision-making process is heavily dependent on the intervening technology. As the technology increases both in complexity and ubiquity, the role computers will play in the decision-making process governing life and death is certain to grow, and each step along the path towards the eventual goal of fully autonomous killing machines will open up new dilemmas. We have already seen the first deaths due to poor image-resolution. In the future, we are likely to see deaths due to limitations in the operating systems themselves. As the role of machines shifts from one of seeing the battlefield to one of perceiving the battlefield, it seems inevitable that those perceptions will at times prove to be unreliable or inaccurate.

   Gordon Johnson, head of robotics programs at the Joint Forces Research Center, addressed this concern in a recent interview:
"I have been asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than a tank parked nearby. We will not entrust a robot with that decision until we are confident they can make it."

  When questioned about the legality of using robotic soldiers, Johnson replied "The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making life-or-death decisions."

"The American military will have these kinds of robots. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when."

Next: SWORDS, the first automated infantryman.

Posted by flamingbanjo at April 8, 2005 10:43 AM