BUT WAR'S ALREADY NEARLY CASUALTY FREE...:

Robots at War: The New Battlefield: It sounds like science fic­tion, but it is fact: On the battlefields of Iraq and Afghan­istan, robots are killing America’s ene­mies and sav­ing Ameri­can lives. But today’s Pack­Bots, Preda­tors, and Ravens are rela­tively prim­itive machines. The coming generation of “war-bots” will be im­mensely more sophisti­cated, and their devel­op­ment raises troubling new questions about how and when we wage ­war. (P. W. Singer, Wilson Quarterly)

The PackBot is only one of the many new unmanned systems operating in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today. When U.S. forces went into Iraq in 2003, they had zero robotic units on the ground. By the end of 2004, the number was up to 150. By the end of 2005 it was 2,400, and it more than doubled the next year. By the end of 2008, it was projected to reach as high as 12,000. And these weapons are just the first generation. Already in the prototype stage are varieties of unmanned weapons and exotic technologies, from automated machine guns and robotic ­stretcher ­bearers to tiny but lethal robots the size of insects, which look like they are straight out of the wildest science fiction. Pentagon planners are having to figure out not only how to use machines such as the PackBot in the wars of today, but also how they should plan for battlefields in the near future that will be, as one officer put it, “largely robotic.”

The most apt historical parallel to the current period in the development of robotics may well turn out to be World War I. Back then, strange, exciting new technologies that had been the stuff of science fiction just years earlier were introduced and used in increasing numbers on the battlefield. Indeed, it was H. G. Wells’s 1903 short story “Land Ironclads” that inspired Winston Churchill to champion the development of the tank. Another story, by A. A. Milne, creator of the beloved Winnie the Pooh series, was among the first to raise the prospect of using airplanes in war, while Arthur Conan Doyle (in “Danger”) and Jules Verne (in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) pioneered the notion of using submarines in war. These new technologies didn’t really change the fundamentals of war. But even the earliest models quickly proved useful enough to make it clear that they weren’t going to be relegated to the realm of fiction again anytime soon. More important, they raised questions not only about how best to use them in battle, but also about an array of new political, moral, and legal issues. For instance, the United States’ and Germany’s differing interpretations of how submarine warfare should be conducted helped draw America into a world war. Similarly, airplanes proved useful for spotting and attacking troops at greater distances, but also allowed for strategic bombing of cities and other sites, which extended the battlefield to the home front.

Much the same sort of recalibration of thinking about war is starting to happen as a result of robotics today. On the civilian side, experts such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates describe robotics as being close to where computers were in the early 1980s—still rare, but poised for a breakout. On the military side, unmanned systems are rapidly coming into use in almost every realm of war, moving more and more soldiers out of danger, and allowing their enemies to be targeted with increasing ­precision.

And they are changing the experience of war itself. This is leading some of the first generation of soldiers working with robots to worry that war waged by remote control will come to seem too easy, too tempting. More than a century ago, General Robert E. Lee famously observed, “It is good that we find war so horrible, or else we would become fond of it.” He didn’t contemplate a time when a pilot could “go to war” by commuting to work each morning in his Toyota to a cubicle where he could shoot missiles at an enemy thousands of miles away and then make it home in time for his kid’s soccer ­practice.

As our weapons are designed to have ever more autonomy, deeper questions arise. Can the new armaments reliably separate friend from foe? What laws and ethical codes apply? What are we saying when we send out unmanned ma­chines to fight for us? What is the “message” that those on the other side receive?

and we've had the capacity to nuke enemies for sixty years without using it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 18, 2009 9:20 AM