The Defence White Paper spent considerable time discussing “cyber warfare” – the idea that in the future, wars would be in part fought by teams of hackers attempting to mess with the other side’s computers. Peter W. Singer argues in an op-ed today that the White Paper largely missed the real technological revolution coming to warfare – robotics:
An amazing revolution is ongoing around us, especially in war. The US military went into Iraq in 2003 with a handful of unmanned planes. There are now more than 7000 robotic drones in its inventory. In 2003, the invasion force had no ground robotics. Today there are roughly 12,000 on the ground. And the latest models of our robots give new meaning to the technology industry term “killer application”, as they now come with a lethal armoury of missiles, rockets, and machine-guns.
I reckon he’s pretty much got it right; and I don’t think the implications have sunk in yet. For one thing, Western militaries have been building ever-fewer, but much more capable platforms (tanks, ships, planes) over the decades, because of the enormous value placed on keeping their crews alive. When there is no crew at stake, it may make more sense to build them en masse, lower-capability, and cheap – perhaps a new generation of military commanders will play a real-life grunt rush.
Perhaps more importantly for those less interested in military technology and more about the horrible costs of war, Singer makes another highly pertinent point. The intolerance of (particularly) Western electorates for their soldiers coming home in body bags has been a major restraint on their leaders. If even more of the fighting is done by expendable machines, that restraint will undoubtedly lessen.
Elsewhere, Nick Gruen was also surprised by the ommission.
Actually, i reckon the information insecurity issue is being grossly underestimated by oz… the US has finally admitted to developing an attack force, not just something to keep the khaki-black-hats out.
The advantage of electronic warfare is there is less opportunity for political opposition because of bodybags (either of “our” soldiers or “their” civilians) aren’t as easily attributed. (A million people freeze to death in winter when the infrastructure is knocked out over the wire… and no shrapnel or isotopes to point the finger conclusively.)
… and the best at the cyberwarfare caper (both technical capacity and willingness to use it) are IMHO
* Israel
* China
* Russia
It actually wouldn’t surprise me if Israel’s political clout has something to do with it being embedded in so many crypto and surveillance technologies in anglo-speaking countries. Nobody can afford to cross them.
I like Singer as a fresh blast to one’s sense of ethics, but in warfare, I don’t think he’s read his history.
We’ve had expendable war robots for millenia it’s just that in previous generations we’ve called them “ranks”, drilled them, polished them, beaten and hazed them, given them rum for killing and amphetamines for attention, paid them next to nothing and given them National Days for our thanks. The ethical problem isn’t robotic, it’s long-delayed whiplash from the Nuremberg Trials, which ended the first- and second-generation patterns of battle once and for all, firmly placed moral responsibility with individual combatants and scrapped “orders” as a permissible defence for war crime.
Western Governments’ willingness to use Predator and other kinds of drones is always going to be the more expensive option, when compared to the unskilled labour of the armed poor. Far more effective, too, at the only significant level of war—the moral level.
Jeebus. I thought all that James Cameron “terminator” crap was fiction.
I gather one of those magnetic pulse thingy counter measures would give the robots a bit of trouble?
Complete bullshit, pardon my French. The best MBTs (main battle tanks) in the world can’t hold an inch of ground without the assistance of flesh and blood soldiers. And an MBT can’t be taken out with a single grenade.
John Robb on robotic revolution in warfare:
I gather one of those magnetic pulse thingy counter measures would give the robots a bit of trouble?
I don’t even think you need to go that hi-tech. Try lobbing a variant of the Molotov cocktail: instead of lit gasoline, use salt water. Cause you know the first models would be vulnerable to shorts, and are going to have giant ventilation ducts to prevent them from overheating.
Thomas Paine: you can harden systems against EMP fairly readily. It’s civilian systems that are vulnerable.
Nickws: sure. But you might be able to get away with a few humans and a lot of robots, rather than a lot of humans.
Cyber toys are bunk, a product of Hollywood fantasies. While undoubtably useful to ‘winning’ wars – the hard power aspect anyway – how exactly to they assist with an occupation? Ok IED or mine clearance work etc but that’s it. Their use in a city would only alienate the populace even more.
The military doesn’t need robotic soldiers, it needs an infantry corps trained in urban pacification and de-escalation of conflicts. Semi-police in otherwords. Soft power enhancers looking for the win-win, not hard power terminators with the killing and the laser guns and wow exciting noises and pretty lights and cool sunglasses.
But that is low-tech, labour intensive and doesn’t make pretty explosions so it’ll never happen.
Tony D: a good part of that is surveillance, which robots of various kinds are extremely useful for.
Just think how history would have been changed had the Kaiser and the Tsar relied on robots to fight WWI – no disgruntled Russian soldiers to make the Revolution, and no disgruntled demobilised German soldiers to form the Freikorps and provide a significant part of the base for the Nazis. However the quality of war poetry and war literature would have been poorer.
Obama just cancelled the superduper laser plane and the F-22 fighter, and he’s got away with it because Robert Gates is with him on these cuts.
I wonder where on earth the money is coming from for cyborgs and nanobot armies if the respectable tendency in US politics won’t pay for defence boondoggles that actually have been proven to work (the aforementioned stealth fighter).
Paul@11: I didn’t think anyone involved in WWI/WWII had much spare industrial capacity, let alone access to rare earth metals and so on to feed into their chip fab. Especially since a chip fab is huge, expensive, fragile and hard to conceal… talk about a target. Especially in the era of Dresden and Nagasaki where bombing whole cities to rubble was accepted practice.
My suspicion is that instead of soldiers revolting it would be the slaves. Viz, that 90% of the population who are being pushed closer to death in order to build the robots.
Also, given that a fair bit of the problem was an utter refusal on the part of the leaders to acknowledge new technology and adapt to it, what do you think the odds are that they would use robots? Except perhaps against their own populations…
Robert@10: yup, robots are excellent at producing huge amounts of low-grade data. Great stinking wodges of it, more than anyone can store let alone turn into intelligence. Until we get significantly further advanced in automated interpretation of surveillance data robots would probably make the problem worse.
Again, applied stupidity: look at the US in Iraq… one of their “intelligence” problems was that they started the war by removing all the people who could understand the local languages from their military. So it’s more likely that they’d use the new capabilities much as they use the ones they have now – to further inflame the target population. A single leak of video footage from inside a Muslim bedroom would be more effective at recruiting than bombing a dozen wedding parties.
Nickws: because Gates and Obama reckon that the F-22 and the laser plane are the battleships of 1941 (and, arguably, 1915) – magnificent weapons for fighting the last war.
Nobody needed slaves in the world wars to ramp up production massively (except Germany, to a limited extent); workers for the most part were willing to work hard to supply the massive amounts of materiel needed to wage war. As for spare industrial capacity, it depends when and where you are talking about. The US could afford to undertake a massive investment in a weapon which might well not have been usable before war’s end (ie. Manhattan); Germany was increasing weapons production to record levels as late as 1943 and 1944. And leaders were hardly averse to using new technologies: think of poison gas, tanks, bombers, submarines, radar, computers, atomic bombs, radio, etc.
No, the real problem (obviously!) would be the fact that the transistor wasn’t invented until 1947. Although the first attempts to make drone aircraft do date to the WWI period; there was considerable discussion of robot bombers between the wars; and the V1 could be considered the first, very crude, use of a robot in actual warfare, though they are more usually thought of as cruise missiles.
The V1 is a very interesting weapon, because (unlike the V2) it was extremely cheap and easy to produce.
The guidance technology of the time meant that it had to fly at altitudes where it was easy to shoot down. Today – even though a modern-day version would make a herd of elephants sound and look stealthy – you could build one that flies at treetop level and is accurate to within a few metres, and you could build it for the price of a second-hand car. I’d hate to have to defend against somebody launching several hundred at me.
Absolutely. I was always rather puzzled by Davros’s decision to equip the Daleks with 1960s Lucas electrical equipment and then begin the invasion of Earth in a gravel pit in rainy old England. No wonder they used to reliably explode for no very good reason five minutes before the end of Episode 4.
A while ago I found a website by a bloke in NZ (IIRC) who was aiming to build a cruise missile in his shed, using readily available commercial components and for less than US$15,000, just to show it could be done. I don’t know if he’s maintained the website/succeded yet/been locked up, but back when I found it, his plan looked plausible from an engineering point of view.
Brett, my understanding is that much of WWI was spent denying that machine guns and tanks had changed the way wars worked. Unless robots were utterly game changing in WWII the Axis especially would have to shift production rather than creating new capacity. That was, as I recall, one of the problems they had with V bombs and jet fighters.
The US was in a quite different position, having both significant industrial capacity and being far away from most of the combat. If they had pushed ICs instead of nukes they could have gone quite some way, but as mentioned, large numbers of not-really-guided missiles would probably have had more effect.
TIB: Bruce Simpson got shut down by the New Zealand government, possibly after being leaned on by the yanks.
Which was all fairly pointless, because everything he did could be fairly easily replicated.
It’s very 1984 isn’t it. The whole point becomes to produce expensive things which destroy each other, thereby necessitating the production of more of the expensive things and so on.
I must say that at this stage, insect intelligence doesn’t seem very good at differentiating between armed guerillas and wedding parties.
I’d like to draw the distinction between robots (thinking, autonomous machines) and remote controlled machines (just like normal machines except the controls are at a distance).
I’m far, far, far to jaded with hype and exaggeration when it comes to AI to be jumping to terminator/scifi references over this stuff.
They have real flesh and blood people piloting these ‘drones’, they dont fly themselves. Yes, they probably have sensors and stuff to do really basic dumb stuff like avoid crashing into the ground, identify likely targets and stuff, but the brains behind all these devices is still very much in the person doing the controlling.
These things are more like remote-controlled cars than the terminator.
Robotics seems a feasible expansion of military capabilities to me. And Jerry Baber’s one reason why. (Just the abstract, but you can find out more via Google, I’m sure.)
People don’t seem to have noticed it, but the top weapon in the air is already a kamikaze robot. The AMRAAM fully active radar guided missile is exactly this. The F-22 is a stealthy AMRAAM truck.
I’m half way through Singer’s book. It is uneven in quality. The AMRAAM gets no mentions while Star Trek gets about 30.
One of the more interesting points he makes in the book is that he says that there are engineers who state they believe that the X-45 UCAV program has been delayed and short changed because the X-45’s performance is so much better than the F-35 that had testing gone forward the already budget smashing under-performing F-35 would have been in real danger.
This has serious implications for Australia.
The Terminator movies come to my mind, too. And remember how the first one ended? With a nuclear flash. Of course we could abolish war, but that would send too many people broke, wouldn’t i?
Steve: You’re quite right, these things won’t be akin to the Terminator – the moral issues have been around as soon as somebody put a guidance system into a missile.
Not really. All leaders (political and military) very quickly became aware thatthis war was different — the very existence of the massive trench system on the Western Front was proof of that. The question was, what to do about it. And this is precisely why new technologies such as gas, tanks and submarines were developed and used, in order to break the stalemate in one way or another. Of
course, it took years to work out how to win battles in trench warfare, and
millions of casualties …
I think it’s implicit in this rather improbable counterfactual that they would be gamechanging, so you’d want to build as many as you can as quickly as you can (ie a rush). And some of the production which did happen would to a degree be obsoleted or obviated by these robot bombers (or whatever they are) such as conventional aircraft.
And again, all nations had spare industrial capacity when they entered war — none was fully mobilised for war. So those choices about how to allocate resources remained to be made. Depends when in the timeline the robots come along, I guess.
Nanobots ch_co_20already in operation in 1963?
Good point at #2 Liam. To which I’d add that that many militaries are getting into drones and robotics in a big way because a) Western societies and their pollies are becoming much more sensitized to casualties these days and b) personnel shortages. Especially the US military with its prime “Leave no one behind” directive.
Also agree with Tony D at #9. Though keeping a few very big sticks to hand is also a sensible precaution.
The point about guidance technology also a good one. The Nazis ROI for the V-1 and V-2 campaigns was pitiful precisely because of this. To the point where a concerted V-2 attack against Plymouth so missed its target that the Allies weren’t even aware until examining post war records that such attack had been mounted.
Incidentally both my parents were in London during the V-1 and V-2 attacks and said everyone had nothing but contempt for the doodlebugs. My mum said “They sounded so silly. It just seemed pathetic after the Blitz.”
However the V-2s spooked people a bit, not least because the authorities first tried to pass ‘em off as leaking gas pipe explosions or delayed action bombs from the Blitz – which hindered rather that helped morale. But by then everyone knew the end was in sight.
A fun thought. In his ‘War in the Age of Intelligent Machines’, Manuel de Landa wonders how do you go about surrendering to autonomous robots. How would they distinguish and recognise what a white flag or hands up meant?
Back to the original point. Yep it’s kinda funny the White Paper skimmed over robotics especially given Australia’s strengths in advanced and smart materials and MEMs being developed by some of our Defence CRCs.
Maybe the White Paper has a Black Supplementary.
Rob and moz: as usual, Adelaide is ahead of the curve in mutual hyper-surveillance. The whole State should be declared a protected panopticon and walled off.
To your a) and b), Nab-1000, I’d add c) because they’re awesome. They’re not about to change the fundamentally human ritual of war, but damn, who can say no to war-bots?
But can war-bots withstand disco?
“But can war-bots withstand disco?”
Resistance is
futilefunky.“Open the disco doors Hal.”
“I’m sorry Dave, you’re not on the door list.”
O Nabs.
Music Machine.
That’ll jolt me out of my maudlin Kate Bush reverie.
I hope you all realise that when the robots become totally autonomous and take over they’ll be searching back through internet archives to find anti-robot talk, like some of the ahove, they’ll trawl archives for dissent, and they will know who to round up and target as potential enemies.
Do you want to have to front up to a robot interrogator one day in 2018 and explain why back in 2009 you started mouthing off like “Fuck those robots, man, we’ll kick their metal arses!”
And remember, robots can travel back in time from the future, so if you’re already mulling over plans for an anti-robot insurgency, you’ll probably have one crashing through your living room window any moment now.
Darryl Mason @33
Nominated for quote of the year.
But I love my robot overlords.
1960s Lucas electrical equipment
That reminds me of a firend of mine who had a thing for british cars: “Lucas, Lord of Darkness”.
Re the X-45C, it’s coming along really rather quickly: http://www.gizmag.com/boeing-to-develop-fighter-sized-uav-based-on-x-45c/11636/
This is the most recent Defence related post I could find.
Hey Joel – don’t let the door hit you in the arse ont he way out!
Post on Fitzgibbon now up.