The head of Global Security's website, John Pike, has been a commentator on military, intelligence and space issues for several decades. Mr Pike has a piece in the Sunday issue of The Washington Post. The topic is robots on the battlefield and the title is "Coming to the Battlefield: Stone-Cold Robot Killers."
Even today the US Air Force is conducting combat missions in Afghanistan with Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAV) being flown by operators out of an Air Base north of Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Navy is ready to start testing a UAV (X-47B) for aircraft carriers and the US Army has a large "Future Combat Systems" (FCS) program that depends for success on high speed computing and high speed communications and that includes a number of robots.
Mr Pike promises that as Moore's Law is applied to battlefield robots we will eventually see a situation where conventional wars will disappear and genocides will be no more.
Before you get excited at the prospect of a future without war, remember that Clausewitz' concept of "friction" will most likely not go away. Unanticipated problems will occur. Software programming will not provide perfect differentiation of subtle differences in situations. The other side will adapt.
Further, while I accept Moore's Law, I don't believe that robots will be able to look into mud huts, read the minds of those inside and formulate responses--nor should we allow them to do such things.
The more dangerous side of this is that the ability to conduct military operations without fear of loss of human life will cause our political leadership to think they can conduct military operations with impunity. They will feel they can use robots to conduct small scale operations in the hope of making the other side see reason or in the hope that the other side is just a few trouble makers. Our political leaders will forget that the other side, if strongly motivated, will eventually find some way to get back at us.
War is a terrible, ugly, messy human activity and it should not be delegated to robots.
Regards -- Cliff
1 comment:
Cliff,
The last few paragraphs of this post made me think about how grateful I am a) to have Robert Gates as SECDEF, and b) that President-Elect Obama is keeping him on.
The Foreign Affairs article you cited in an earlier post ("A Balanced U.S. Military Strategy") is a gem because although it's written by a D.C. principal, he clearly has the cojones to take a stance on things like the need for nation(re)-building and the importance of understanding a human culture, right down to the level of a red-headed white guy with a green uniform in someone's mud hut...that's something no one will ever get from Nellis Air Force Base, even if they're technically stepping into "CENTCOM" in the Predator spaces..heck, they might not even get it from Bagram or Balad..
Also, not to beat my nation-building drum too hard (hey, you know I'm biased) but J. Anthony Holmes had a good article coming from the state-civilian perspective titled "Reviving the U.S. Foreign Service."
best,
gp
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