IT SOUNDS like every general’s dream: technology that allows a nation to fight a war with little or no loss of life on its side. It is also a peace-seeking citizen’s nightmare. Without the politically embarrassing threat of soldiers returning home in flag-wrapped coffins, governments would find it far easier to commit to military action. The consequences for countries on the receiving end – and for world peace – would be immense.
This is not a fantasy scenario. Over the coming years, the world’s most powerful military machine, the US Department of Defense, aims to replace a large proportion of its armed vehicles and weaponry with robotised technologies. By 2010, a third of its “deep-strike” aircraft will be unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), according to a Congressional Research Service report issued in July (). In a further five years a similar proportion of the US army’s ground combat vehicles will be remote-controlled robots varying in size from supermarket carts to trucks. The US navy, too, will have fleets of uncrewed boats and submarines.
“By 2015, the US aims to replace a third of its armed vehicles and weaponry with robotic vehicles”
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The US military is already using robots in various roles. In November 2002, for example, an armed UAV destroyed a car in Yemen carrying the suspected chief of Al-Qaida in that country, killing him and five others. In Iraq and Afghanistan, robots are proving highly successful in neutralising roadside bombs and other small-scale explosives.
This is only the start. One of the next steps is to give robotic ground vehicles the attack power of UAVs, arming them with weapons such as machine guns, grenade launchers and anti-tank rockets (New Scientist, 21 September, p 28). They could then be sent into places that were particularly dangerous for troops, such as booby-trapped or ambush-vulnerable buildings.
After that the plan is to take things to a whole new level, with unmanned planes and ground robots able to communicate with each other and act in concert. A reconnaissance UAV could signal swarms of robots to attack an enemy position, for example, or an unmanned ground vehicle might call in an air strike from UAVs.
All uncrewed vehicles are remote-controlled at present, but the Pentagon’s Office of Naval Research is planning to develop technology that it hopes will enable a robot to determine whether a person it comes across is a threat, using measures such as the remote sensing of their heartbeat – though whether these kinds of methods can be made reliable is highly questionable.
“Teleoperation [remote control] is the norm, but semi-autonomous enhancements are being added all the time,” says Bob Quinn of Foster-Miller, a technology firm in Waltham, Massachusetts, owned by the UK defence research company Qinetiq. Foster-Miller, like its main rival iRobot, was set up by roboticists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The company’s armed robot, dubbed Swords, has just received US army safety certification. Nevertheless doubts remain over how reliable armed robotic devices will be, especially if they end up operating autonomously. What happens when the software fails?
Such fears have persuaded the military to go slow on the use of autonomous weaponry. An early version of one of Foster-Miller’s robots was designed to de-mine beaches autonomously but was later converted to remote control at the navy’s request. It is feasible that as safety concerns are addressed, autonomous devices will become increasingly popular, though experts in robotics point out that might be a long time away. An armed robot will not only need to be fail-safe, it must also be able to identify friend and foe just as well as a soldier.
Despite these fears, the rise of armed robots seems inevitable. Quinn tells the story of a group of US marines impressed by a Swords robot armed with a machine gun being tested at a US army base. “If they could have they would have put that robot in their trunk, because they were off to Ramadi, Iraq, and they wanted that robot to [help them] stay alive. When you see that passion, I have no philosophical problems about this technology whatsoever,” he says.
Outside the military, however, plenty of people beg to differ. Ultimately, these developments will allow the US, as well as several NATO countries that are also keen on the technology, to fight wars without suffering anywhere near as many casualties. The idea that warfare can be “clinical” has been found wanting time and again in recent years – think of the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel’s recent bombardment of Lebanon – but there’s no question that reliable autonomous robots deployed on a large scale could make fighting wars a great deal less risky for those that own them.
And therein lies the great danger. What are the chances of a less violent world when the powerful nations can make their mark on the less powerful at the flick of a switch? As Quinn puts it: “We are not trying to create a level battlefield here, we are trying to do the opposite: create a very un-level battlefield.”
