Science fiction is becoming science reality
With virtually no public scrutiny, robotics is quickly revolutionizing not only how war is fought, but who fights in war. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the military had no robots on the ground and only a handful of unstaffed drones in the air. Today, according to P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the U.S. military has some 7,000 drones in operation—more than double the number of staffed aircraft that it owns—and more than 12,000 robots on the ground.
Predator drones armed with laser-guided Hellfire missiles have regularly bombed Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, and their use is skyrocketing. In 2008, 71 Predators flew 138,404 combat hours—a 94 percent increase over the year before, according to a recent presentation by Air Force Colonel Eric Mathewson. And over the last year, U.S. drones flown largely by the CIA have attacked inside Pakistan more than 40 times. Rather than reconsider this belligerent policy, President Obama has become one of its most enthusiastic backers. Since his inauguration, he has already authorized nine such attacks that have collectively killed over 125 people and sparked large protests within Pakistan.
On the ground in Iraq, there are at least 22 different robotic systems in operation. While they are used primarily for reconnaissance and to help soldiers defuse roadside bombs, in May 2007, the first armed ground robot was deployed south of Baghdad. The Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct-Action System, or SWORDS, stands three feet tall and rolls on two tank treads. It’s currently fitted with an M249 machine gun that can be swapped for other powerful weapons and controlled with a modified laptop. More sophisticated armed ground systems—such as the MAARS and the one-ton Gladiator—are currently being developed and tested and will likely see combat in the not-so-distant future.
Research into artificial intelligence is also rapidly advancing. One 2003 study by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, entitled “Unmanned Effects: Taking the Human Out of the Loop,” even suggests that networked, autonomous robots could be the norm on the battlefield by as early as 2025.
Congress has been the primary force behind this revolution. In 2001, the Defense Authorization Act stated that one-third of the military’s deep strike aircraft should be unstaffed within 10 years, and that one-third of the ground combat vehicles should be unstaffed within 15 years. More recently, in the Defense Department’s 2007 budget, Congress ordered the Pentagon to show “a preference for joint unmanned systems in acquisition programs for new systems, including a requirement under any such program for the development of a manned system for a certification that an unmanned system is incapable of meeting program requirements.”
This strong congressional backing and the increasing popularity of these systems within the military have fueled a booming robotics industry that was all but nonexistent 15 years ago. The Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), for example, has 1,400 member companies and organizations from 50 countries looking to cash in on what appears to be the future of war. Analysts from the Teal Group, a defense consultancy firm, recently predicted that spending on unstaffed planes alone will double from $3.4 billion annually today to $7.3 billion over the next decade.
THE PROBLEM
In all likelihood, as the proponents of military robots claim, the number of U.S. soldiers who are killed on the battlefield will decrease. This has been the trend as technology in war has advanced over the last century. For example, more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in Vietnam. Today, after six years of intense fighting in Iraq, fewer than 4,200 U.S. soldiers have died in combat. And in Afghanistan, far fewer coalition troops have been killed than in Iraq—even though that figure has been steadily increasing. The use of robots is at least in part responsible for this dramatic reduction in U.S. casualties. As unstaffed systems are deployed in greater numbers, they will only slash that figure further for future wars.
This may sound like a positive development, but its potential downsides are profound. At the same time that the number of soldiers killed in war has dropped, the percentage of civilian deaths has steadily risen. In World War I, less than 10 percent of casualties were civilian; in World War II, the percentage of civilian casualties rose to roughly 50 percent, and today more than 90 percent of those killed in wars are civilians. In Iraq, for example, ample evidence suggests that more than a million civilians have been killed as a result of the war. Another 4.5 million Iraqis have either been internally displaced or have fled the country out of fear for their lives. By allowing soldiers to kill from greater distances—and therefore to pull the trigger more easily—robots will likely take this trend a step further.
Military robotics will also increase the threat of terrorism. “If people know that they are going to be killed by these robots,” argues Fr. G. Simon Harak, director of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking, “then why would they not therefore retaliate against civilian centers in the United States? It would only make military sense that they’ll find where we are vulnerable.” Unfortunately, if that does happen, few will make the connection.
More than anything else, the prospect of U.S. troops dying on some far-off battlefield seems to be responsible for the public’s hesitance to use military force. Therefore, if the number of U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags can be significantly reduced in future wars, the public will inevitably pay even less attention to our foreign policy and military interventions abroad than it already does. This will in turn make it that much easier for politicians to start wars in the first place. For instance, John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, argued in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post that robots would allow the United States to intervene militarily in Darfur or other hot spots where politicians are currently reluctant to send flesh-and-blood troops.
Robots will also deal a blow to the growing counter-recruitment movement by easing the military’s current recruiting difficulties. Whereas each SWORDS or drone is currently controlled by at least one soldier, progress in the field of artificial intelligence will allow a soldier to control multiple robots simultaneously. James Canton, chief executive officer of the Institute of Global Futures and an expert on military technology, predicts that future military units may consist of 150 humans and 2,000 robots. Such a development would allow the government to go to war with a much smaller military than it currently needs. The military has also limited who it recruits by age and physical fitness. Robots will change that equation entirely. As Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired’s popular Danger Room blog, has said, “having a strong bladder and big butt may be more useful physical attributes” for future soldiers than being able to do a hundred push-ups.
GROWING RESISTANCE
Given the challenges that a more robotic army will create for those working for peace, the antiwar movement cannot wait a minute longer to begin seriously resisting these killer machines. Several places where activists can start are clear. Some military contractors that develop unstaffed systems, such as iRobot and Northrop Grumman, are publicly traded companies. That exposes them to potential shareholder resolutions and makes them more sensitive about their public image, which nonviolent action can affect.
Some military contractors also make consumer products that can be boycotted. For example, iRobot manufactures both the PackBot, a hugely successful bomb disposal robot which can now be armed with a shotgun, and the popular robotic Roomba vacuum cleaner. As this market for personal robots—which was valued at $17 billion by the end of 2007, according to a U.N. report—continues to grow, boycotting those corporations that also make robots for the military will be an increasingly effective tactic for activists.
Universities that have robotics labs that receive funding from the Department of Defense are also important targets for the antiwar movement. On March 2, 2007, activists with the Pittsburgh Organizing Group chained their arms together in PVC pipes and erected a tripod that suspended a protester 15 feet in the air in front of the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the largest academic military contractors in the country. Fourteen activists were arrested in the action, which successfully shut down the robotics lab for the day and garnered considerable media attention in the process. With nearly 350 colleges and universities conducting some form of research for the Pentagon, according to a 2002 report by the Association of American Universities, many other academic institutions must be similarly confronted.
Finally, activists are beginning to protest at the military bases where the drone pilots work. The Nevada Desert Experience (NDE) has recently been demonstrating outside of Creech Air Force Base, where soldiers operate many of the Predator and Reaper drones that regularly bomb Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan. Some of the activists who participated in NDE’s annual Sacred Peace Walk this April, including Kathy Kelly and others from Voices for Creative Nonviolence, kept a presence outside of the Creech base and risked arrest in an act of civil disobedience.
The peace movement can claim some victories, however small, against other military contractors in recent years. The engineering and construction giant Bechtel withdrew from Iraq in 2006. Halliburton sold off its subsidiary KBR and moved its headquarters to Dubai in 2007. And early this year, the Iraqi government announced that the infamous mercenary firm Blackwater—which changed its name to Xe in an effort to shake its tarnished reputation—will be kicked out of the country. Killer robots, however, pose more of an existential threat than war profiteers ever did. If we don’t start to step up the pressure to stop this robotics revolution in its tracks, science fiction has warned us about our potential fate.
