Unmanned drone attacks and
shape-shifting robots: War’s remote-control future
By Anna Mulrine, Christian Science Monitor
The development of a new generation of military robots, including armed
drones, may eventually mark one of the biggest revolutions in warfare in
generations. Throughout history, from the crossbow to the cannon to the
aircraft carrier, one weapon has supplanted another as nations have strived to
create increasingly lethal means of allowing armies to project power from afar.
But many of the new emerging technologies promise not only firepower but
also the ability to do something else: reduce the number of soldiers needed in
war. While few are suggesting armies made up exclusively of automated machines
(yet), the increased use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan has already
reinforced the view among many policymakers and Pentagon planners that the
United States can carry out effective military operations by relying largely on
UAVs, targeted cruise missile strikes, and a relatively small number of special
operations forces.
At the least, many enthusiasts see the new high-tech tools helping to
save American lives. At the most, they see them changing the nature of war—how
it’s fought and how much it might cost—as well as helping America maintain its
military preeminence.
Yet the prospect of a military less reliant on soldiers and more on
“push button” technologies also raises profound ethical and moral questions.
Will drones controlled by pilots thousands of miles away, as many of them are
now, reduce war to an antiseptic video game? Will the US be more likely to wage
war if doing so does not risk American lives? And what of the oversight role of
Congress in a world of more remote-control weapons? Already, when lawmakers on
Capitol Hill accused the Obama administration of circumventing their authority
in waging war in Libya, White House lawyers argued in essence that an operation
can’t be considered war if there are no troops on the ground—and, as a result,
does not require the permission of Congress.
“If the military continues to reduce the human cost of waging war,” says
Lt. Col. Edward Barrett, an ethicist at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.,
“there’s a possibility that you’re not going to try hard enough to avoid it.”
Beneath a new moon, a crew pushes the 2,500-pound Predator drone toward
a blacked-out flight line and prepares it for takeoff. The soldiers wheel over
a pallet of Hellfire missiles and load them onto the plane’s undercarriage. The
Predator pilot walks around the aircraft, conducting his preflight check. He
then returns to a nearby trailer, sits down at a console with joysticks and
monitors, and guides the snub-nosed plane down the runway and into the night
air—unmanned and fully armed.
The takeoffs of Predators with metronome regularity here at Kandahar Air
Field, in southern Afghanistan, has helped turn this strip of asphalt into what
the Pentagon calls the single busiest runway in the world. An aircraft lifts
off or lands every two minutes. It’s a reminder of how integral drones have
become to the war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terror.
Initially, of course, the plan was not to put weapons on Predator drones
at all. Like the first military airplanes, they were to be used just for
surveillance. As the war in Iraq progressed, however, US service members
jury-rigged the drones with weapons. Today, armed Predators and their larger
offspring, Reapers, fly over America’s battlefields, equipped with both missiles
and powerful cameras, becoming the most widely used and, arguably, most
important tools in the US arsenal.
Since first being introduced in Iraq and Afghanistan, their numbers have
grown from 167 in 2002 to more than 7,000 today. The US Air Force is now recruiting
more UAV pilots than traditional ones.
“The demand has just absolutely skyrocketed,” says the commander of the
Air Force’s 451st Operations Group, which runs Predator and Reaper operations
in Kandahar.
As their numbers have grown, so has the sophistication with which the
military uses them. The earliest drones operated more as independent assets—as
aerial eyes that sent back intelligence and dropped their bombs. But today the
unmanned aircraft are integrated into almost every operation on the ground,
acting as advanced scouts and omniscient surveyors of battle zones. They
monitor the precise movements of insurgents and kill enemy leaders. They
conduct “virtual lineups,” zooming in powerful cameras to help determine
whether a suspected insurgent may have carried out a particular attack.
“A lot of the ground commanders won’t execute a mission without us,”
says the Air Force’s commander of the 62nd Expeditionary Reconnaissance
Squadron in Afghanistan.
Robots, too, have become a far more pervasive presence on America’s
fields of battle. Remote-control machines that move about on wheels and tracks
scour for roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers in the mountains of
eastern Afghanistan carry hand-held drones in backpacks, which they assemble
and throw into the air to scope out terrain and check for enemy fighters. In
the past 10 years, the Pentagon’s use of robots has grown from zero to some
12,000 in war zones today.
Part of the exponential rise in the use of UAVs and robots stems from a
confluence of events: improvements in technology and America’s prolonged
involvement in two simultaneous wars.
There is, too, the prospect of more money for military contractors
eyeing a downturn in future defense budgets. Today, the amount of money being
spent on research for military robotics surpasses the budget of the National
Science Foundation, which, at $6.9 billion a year, funds nearly one-quarter of
all federally supported scientific research at the nation’s universities.
Military officials also see in the new technologies the possibility of
savings in an era of shrinking budgets. Deploying forces overseas can now cost
as much as $1 million a year per soldier.
Yet the biggest allure of the new high-tech armaments may be something
as old as conflict itself: the desire to reduce the number of casualties on the
battlefield and gain a strategic advantage over the enemy. As Lt. Gen. Richard
Lynch, a commander in Iraq, observed at a conference on military robotics in
Washington earlier this year: “When I look at the 153 soldiers who paid the
ultimate sacrifice [under my command], I know that 80 percent of them were put
in a situation where we could have placed an unmanned system in the same job.”
Drones, in particular, seem the epitome of risk-free warfare for the nation
using them—there are, after all, no pilots to shoot down. Moreover, the people
who run them are often nowhere near the field of battle. Some 90 percent of the
UAV operations over Afghanistan are flown by people in trailers in the deserts
of Nevada. In Kandahar, soldiers help the planes take off and land and then
hand over controls to the airmen in the US.
“We want to minimize the [human] footprint as much as possible,” says
the 451st Operations Group commander at the Kandahar airfield, where the effects
of being close to the war are clearly visible: The plywood walls of the
tactical operations center are lined with framed bits of jagged metal from
mortars that have fallen on the airfield over the years.
While the distant control of drones may well protect American lives, it
raises questions about what it means to have people so far removed from the
field of conflict. “Sometimes you felt like God hurling thunderbolts from
afar,” says Lt. Col. Matt Martin, who was among the first generation of US soldiers
to work with drones to wage war and who has written a book—“Predator: The
Remote-Control Air War Over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot’s Story.”
Martin agrees that the unmanned aircraft no doubt reduce American
casualties, but wonders if it makes killing “too easy, too tempting, too much
like simulated combat, like the computer game Civilization.”
It probably doesn’t reassure critics that the flight controls for drones
over the years have come to resemble video-game contollers, which the military
has done to make them more intuitive for a generation of young soldiers raised
on games like Gears of War and Killzone.
Martin knows what it’s like to confront the dark side of war, even as he
fought it from afar. During one operation, he was piloting a drone that was
tracking an insurgent. Just after he fired one of the aircraft’s missiles, two
children rode their bicycles into range. They were both killed. “You get good
at compartmentalizing,” says Martin.
What worries critics is those who are too good at it—and the impact in
general of waging war at a distance. Some fret about the mechanics of the
decisionmaking process: Who ultimately makes the decision to pull the trigger?
And how do you decide whom to put on the hit list—a top Al Qaeda official, yes,
but is some petty but persistent insurgent a matter of national security?
As the US increasingly uses drones in its secret campaigns, questions
arise about how much to inform America’s allies about UAV attacks and whether
they alienate local populations more than they help subdue the enemy, which the
US has starkly, and almost weekly, confronted with its drone campaign in
Pakistan.
From the US military’s viewpoint, the drone war has been fantastically
successful, helping to kill key Al Qaeda operatives and Taliban insurgents with
a minimum of civilian casualties and almost no US troops put at risk.
Some even believe that the ethical oversight of drones is far more
rigorous than that of manned aircraft, since at least 150 people—ground crews,
engineers, pilots, intelligence analyzers—are typically involved in each UAV
mission.
The issue of what’s a minimum of civilian losses is, of course,
subjective. In 2009, the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank,
estimated that the US drone war was killing about 10 civilians for every 1
insurgent in Pakistan. That may be far fewer casualties than would be killed
with traditional airstrikes. But it is hardly comforting to the Pakistanis.
Moreover, the very practice of taking out enemy leaders or sympathizers
could at some point, according to detractors, devolve into an aerial
assassination campaign. When the US used a drone strike last month to kill
jihadist cleric and American-born Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, President Obama
hailed it as a “major blow” to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But some
critics decried the killing of a US citizen with no public scrutiny.
Barrett, who is the director of research at the Naval Academy’s
Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, discusses with his students the
prospect of whether UAVs make it easier to wage war if the government doesn’t
have to worry about a public outcry. “There are not the mass numbers of troops
moving around and visible, so it could be easier to circumvent the oversight of
Congress and, therefore, legitimate authority,” he notes.
Others ask a more simple but practical question: What about the troops
who conduct the UAV strikes from the Nevada desert—could they become legitimate
targets of America’s enemies at, say, a local mall, bringing the war on terror
to the suburbs?
Some worry that the US is, in fact, placing too heavy a burden on its
UAV troops. Despite warnings that “video-game warfare” might make them callous
to killing, new studies suggest that the stress levels drone operators face are
higher than those for infantry forces on the ground.
“Having this idea of a ‘surgical war’ where you can really just pinpoint
the bad guys with the least amount of damage to our own force, there’s a bit of
naiveté in all that,” says Maryann Cusinamo Love, an associate professor at
Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
She says the powerful cameras on the drones allow pilots to see in
“great vivid detail the real-time results of their actions. That is an
incredible stress on them.”
It is also, she argues, a “ghettoization of the killing function in
war.” However justified the military mission may be, she says, “You are still
giving the most stressful job of war disproportionately to this one subset of
people.”
With the advent of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, however,
technology has once again rendezvoused with military necessity. A company
called iRobot in Bedford, Mass., sent a prototype of its PackBot, which
soldiers began using to clear caves and bunkers suspected of being mined. When
the testing period was over, “The Army unit didn’t want to give the test robot
back,” Mr. Singer notes.
While the use of robots that can detect and defuse explosives is growing
exponentially, the next big frontier for America’s military R2-D2s may parallel
what happened to drones: They may be fitted with weapons—offering new fighting
capabilities as well as raising new concerns.
Already, researchers are experimenting with attaching machine guns to
robots that can be triggered remotely. Field tests in Iraq for one of the first
weaponized robots, dubbed SWORDS, didn’t go well.
“There were several instances of noncommanded firing of the system
during testing,” says Jeffrey Jaczkowski, deputy manager of the US Army’s
Robotic Systems Joint Project Office.
Though US military officials tend to emphasize that troops must remain
“in the loop” as robots or drones are weaponized, there remains a strong push
for automation coming from the Pentagon. In 2007, the US Army sent out a
request for proposals calling for robots with “fully autonomous engagement
without human intervention.” In other words, the ability to shoot on their own.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Ronald Arkin is
researching a stunning premise: whether robots can be created that treat humans
on the battlefield better than human soldiers treat each other. He has pored
over the first study of US soldiers returning from the Iraq war, a 2006 US
Surgeon General’s report that asked troops to evaluate their own ethical
behavior and that of their comrades.
He was struck by “the incredibly high level of atrocities that are
witnessed, committed, or abetted by soldiers.” Modern warfare has not lessened
the impact on soldiers. It is as stressful as ancient hand-to-hand combat with
axes, he argues, because of the sorts of quick decisions that fighting with
modern technology requires.
“Human beings have never been designed to operate under the combat
conditions of today,” he says. “There are many, many problems with the speed
with which we are killing right now—and that exacerbates the potential for
violation of laws of war.”
With Pentagon funding, Dr. Arkin is looking at whether it is possible to
build robots that behave more ethically than humans—to not be tempted to shoot
someone, for instance, out of fear or revenge.
The key, he says, is that the robot should “first do no harm, rather
than ‘shoot first, ask questions later.’”
Other research into armed robots centers not so much on outperforming
humans as being able to work with them. In the not-too-distant future, military
officials envision soldiers and robots teaming up in the field, with the troops
able to communicate with machines the way they would with a human squad team
member. Eventually, says Thompson, the robot-soldier relationship could become
even more collaborative, with one human soldier leading many armed robots.
After that, the scenarios start to become something more out of the
realm of film studios. For instance, retired Navy Capt. Robert Moses, president
of iRobot’s government and industrial relations division, can envision the day
of humanless battlefields.
“I think the first thing to do is to go ahead and have the Army get
comfortable with the robot,” he says. One day, though, “you could write a
scenario where you have an unmanned battle space—a ‘Star Wars’ approach.”
These developments raise questions that ethicists are just beginning to
unravel. This includes Peter Asaro, who last year formed the International
Committee for Robot Arms Control. He’s grappling with conundrums like: What, to
a machine, counts as “about to shoot me?” How does a robot make a distinction
between a dog, a man, and a child? How does it tell an enemy from a friend?
Such things are not entirely abstract. An automated “sentry robot” now
stands guard in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, equipped
with heat, voice, and motion sensors, as well as a 5 mm machine gun. What
if it starts firing, accidentally or otherwise?
In the end, the emerging era of remote-control
warfare—like evolutions in warfare throughout history—will likely create
profound new capabilities as well as profound new problems for the US. The key
will be to minimize the one over the other.
