Robotics - the war of the machines

Robots on and off the battlefield are bringing about the biggest change in warfare since the invention of the atomic bomb

By P. W. Singer

In the early 70s, several scientists, engineers, military industry contractors and officers in the US Air Force joined together and founded a professional group. They were trying to solve a problem: how to build machines that could operate on their own, without human control, and how to convince both the public and reluctant Pentagon officials that robots on the battlefield were a good idea. For decades, the members of the group met once or twice a year, without much media exposure, to discuss technical issues, catch up on gossip and renew old friendships. This once-casual group, called the International Association for Unmanned Systems, now has more than 1,500 companies and organizations from 55 countries. In fact, its growth was so rapid that it ran into an identity crisis. At one of the meetings, held in San Diego, she even hired an "expert storyteller" to help her formulate the story of the amazing changes in robotics technology. One of the participants was able to formulate the identity crisis that befell the group with these words: "Where did we come from? Where are we? Where do we need to go and where do we want to go?"

The reason that prompted the group to conduct such a soul-searching is one of the most fundamental changes in modern warfare since the invention of gunpowder or the airplane: an astonishingly rapid increase in the use of robots on the battlefield. In 2003, no robot accompanied the advance of US forces from Kuwait to Baghdad. Since then, about 7,000 unmanned aerial vehicles and about 12,000 ground vehicles have been added to the American military arsenal, which have been entrusted with diverse tasks, starting with locating snipers and ending with bombing hideouts of senior Al-Qaeda officials in Pakistan. The world's most powerful combat forces, which once rejected robots as unsuited to their fighting culture, are now embracing mechanized warfare as a way to combat irregular enemy forces that set off explosive devices remotely via cell phones and disappear into the local crowd. These robotic systems are greatly influencing how this new type of warfare is conducted, and they are also fueling debate about the effects of combat use of increasingly autonomous and intelligent machines. Although moving the soldiers away from the danger zone may save human lives, the increasing use of robots raises deep political, legal and moral questions concerning the fundamental nature of war and the possibility that such technologies will, unintentionally, cause wars to break out more easily.

The first roots of the story lie, perhaps, in the play RUR from 1921, in which the Czech writer Karl Chapek coined the term "robot" to describe mechanical servants who eventually rebel against their human masters. This word was loaded with meaning because it was derived from the Czech word for "forced labor" and an older Slavic word meaning "slave" and was associated with "robotniks" - peasants who rebelled against the rich landowners in the 19th century. This storyline of robots doing jobs we don't want to do and eventually taking over everything is very common in science fiction and continues to appear even today in movies like "Terminator" and "The Matrix".

Today, robotics experts use the terms "unmanned" or "remotely operated" to avoid evoking Hollywood-inspired horror visions of machines plotting to end humanity. In the simplest terms, robots are machines that operate in a "sensing-thinking-acting" paradigm. That is, they have sensors that collect information about the world, this data is transferred to computer processors, and sometimes to artificial intelligence software, and they use it to make appropriate decisions. Finally, based on this information, mechanical systems called "effectors" or "end units" perform some physical action in their environment. Robots do not have to be humanoid, like the people in the metal suit from the Hollywood movies. These systems come in a very wide variety of sizes and shapes and rarely resemble the human-looking C-3PO from "Star Wars" or the Terminator from "Terminator."

In the last decade, robots have become more useful and easier to operate on the battlefield thanks to the global positioning satellite system (GPS), remote controls similar to those of video games and a variety of other technologies. The ability to identify targets in enemy territory, focus on them and attack them without exposing the human operators to danger received high priority after the September 11 attacks, and every new use of systems in the field was a success story with wider effects. For example, in the early months of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, a prototype of the PackBot (now often used to defuse bombs) was sent to the battlefield for testing. The soldiers loved it and refused to return it to the manufacturer, iRobot, and since then thousands more have been sold. An executive at another robotics company says that before 11/XNUMX the Pentagon didn't even call him back. After that date he was told: "Make them as fast as you can."

This accelerated adoption of military robotics was reflected in practice as the campaign in Iraq progressed. When the US Army invaded Iraq in 2003, the ground forces were not equipped with any unmanned systems. At the end of 2004 their number reached about 150. A year later there were 2,400 robots, and today the US ground forces include more than 12,000 robots. The same trend was also observed in the air force: the invading forces were accompanied by few unmanned aircraft, and today there are more than 7,000. This progress is just the beginning: a senior US Air Force general predicts that the next major US military conflict will involve not just the thousands of robots currently in use but "tens of thousands".

The raw numbers indicate an important conceptual change in the army, which until a few years ago doubted the capabilities of robots and defended the age-old right of the warrior to lead the charge in battle. Today, the US Air Force, Army, and Navy are enticing teenagers to enlist through television commercials, one of which enthusiastically tells how the Navy is "working non-stop to get the men off the front lines."

When the youth enlist, exposure to automated systems is an essential part of the entire process, from enlistment to discharge. They use the latest virtual training software to learn how to operate a particular weapon system. At the end of the training, they might operate a lawnmower-sized PackBot or a TALON ground robot, which defuses bombs or peeks over a ridge for insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan.

If they join the Navy, they may serve on a destroyer or a shallow-water combatant ship (LCS) equipped with the Aegis naval combat system. These tools function as motherships for a selection of systems - from unmanned Fire Scout helicopters to the motorized and robotic Protector patrol boats. If they serve in submarines, they can detect mines or conduct surveillance on hostile coastlines using unmanned underwater vehicles such as REMUS (an acronym for "Remote Environmental Monitoring Units", a torpedo-like robotic submarine developed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution). In the Air Force, they may fly drones such as Predator or Global Hawk over Central Asia without physically leaving the US even for a moment.

The war robots of tomorrow

Recruiting ads present such technologies as part of today's military, even though they "look like science fiction." In reality they are only the first generation, a hint of what is yet to come. That is, the PackBot that today fights sideloaders and the Predator UAVs that are now flying in the skies of Afghanistan are equivalent to the Ford Model T car and the Wright Brothers' plane. The next-generation prototypes reveal three main ways in which robots will change the nature of combat.

The concept that robots are only "unmanned systems" - identical to any other machine but without a human operator inside - is starting to disappear. This development retraces the course of the automobile's history: the thought of cars as "horseless carriages" faded away when designers began to imagine completely new shapes and sizes. That liberation from previous concepts regarding robots creates a wide variety of designs. As expected, some models draw inspiration from biology. For example, Boston Dynamics' BigDog robot is a four-legged metal equipment carrier. Others are hybrid creatures, such as the Navy High School tracking robot, which is equipped with both wings and legs. Other robots, now in the early design stages, are completely shapeless: the ChemBot robot, made by the University of Chicago and iRobot, is a block-like machine that can change its shape and push itself through a hole in a wall.

Since there is no human inside, the robots can be of different sizes. There are already tiny robots measured in millimeters and grams, such as the surveillance robot made by AeroVironment, designed for combat in built-up terrain. It imitates the scout ("the hummingbird") in its size and its ability to hover over a target. The next step is nanoscale robots (billionths of a meter in size), which some scientists believe will become common within a few decades. Such machines may play diverse roles in war, starting with "smart dust" that locates the enemy and ending with cellular-scale machines inside the human body that heal wounds, or alternatively cause injury. At the other end of the scale, the possibility of operating a system that does not need to take into account the physical needs of the human operators leads to the creation of huge unmanned systems, such as the Lockheed-Martin company's fly-raising airship, an unmanned zeppelin carrying a radar the length of a football field and designed to fly At an altitude of more than 20,000 meters for more than a month continuously.

The other important change, besides the size and shape, is the expansion of the range of roles that these machines are capable of performing on the battlefield. Like the early "avirons" in the First World War, the robots were initially used only for observation and information gathering tasks, and now new tasks have been added to them. The technology development company QinetiQ North America, manufacturer of TALON, introduced MAARS in 2007, a robot armed with a machine gun and a grenade launcher capable of guarding and sniping missions. Also medical robots, such as the US Army Medical Research and Supply Command's robotic rescue vehicle, have been designed to drag wounded soldiers to safety and treat them.

The third major change is the increasing intelligence and independence of robots. Thanks to the constant growth in computing power, soldiers now enlisting may see before the end of their military careers robots equipped with computers a billion times more powerful than those available today. The World War II-era military did not separate the B-17 and B-24 bombers based on their intelligence, but today's weapons systems require just such distinctions. For example, the Predator series of unmanned aerial vehicles began as a machine fully controlled remotely via a remote control system, and are now capable of taking off and landing on their own and tracking a dozen targets at once. The target detection software is even able to track footprints and locate their point of origin. However, the army is already planning to replace these aircraft, which entered service in 1995, with a more advanced generation.

The expansion of robotic intelligence and independence raises fundamental questions about the roles that should be assigned to machines. Such a decision should take into account not only the benefit that the machine will bring in battle, but also the meaning of the transfer of this responsibility both from the point of view of the human commanders and from the political, ethical and legal point of view. The most likely outcome in the near future is that the robots will become a kind of "companions in battle". Under this scenario, mixed teams of humans and robots will work together, and each side will do what it is best qualified to do. The human factor may become a kind of "team captain", which determines moves for the robotic team members but gives them enough independence to react to the changing circumstances.

The real story

These noteworthy developments may not yet clarify the full significance of the direction in which robotics is moving and what it means for the world and for the future of warfare. It is impossible to infer what the full effects of the robots will be just from describing their physical capabilities, just as it is impossible to understand the importance of gunpowder just from knowing that it causes a chemical explosion that allows the projectiles to travel a longer trajectory.

Robots are one of those rare inventions that literally change the rules of the game. Such "revolutionary" technology does not give one side a permanent advantage, as some analysts mistakenly believe, because the other side is quick to adopt or adapt to it. It simply devours the cards not only on the battlefield but also in the social structures surrounding it. The longbow, for example, was not noteworthy merely because it enabled the English to defeat the French at the Battle of Agincourt in the Hundred Years' War; It also allowed organized groups of peasants to defeat knights and put an end to the feudal age.

The historical equivalent of the current period is perhaps the First World War. In those days, strange and exciting technologies that were considered science fiction just a few years before entered the battlefield and were used in increasing numbers. In fact, it was a short story written by H. G. Wells in 1903, "The Land Ironclads" that inspired Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, to lead the development of the tank. Another story by A. A. Milne, creator of the beloved "Winnie the Pooh" series, was one of the first to come up with the idea of ​​using airplanes in war, while Arthur Conan Doyle (in his short story "Danger!" from 1914) and Jules Verne (in the book "Twenty A thousand miles under water" from 1869) were the pioneers of the idea of ​​full combat use of submarines.

Early adopters have an advantage, but it only lasts a short time. For example, only 20 years after the British invented tanks and used them in World War I, the Germans caught up with them and proved with their blitzkrieg tactics that they understood how to use the new weapon more effectively.

However, the advent of tanks, planes, and submarines was important because they created a whole new set of political, moral, and legal questions with dramatic strategic implications. For example, disagreements between the US and Germany regarding the legal use of submarines for war purposes (should they be allowed to sink merchant ships without warning?) dragged the US into World War I and thus led to its rise to the rank of a superpower. Similarly, the planes proved to be useful not only for locating forces and attacking them at a great distance, they also caused the development of aerial bombardment, and eventually heavy bombing of population concentrations, which gave a whole new meaning to the term "home front".

The plot gets complicated

Today, similar circumstances can be seen when it comes to military robotics. What do the words "go to war" mean? In democratic countries, they have long indicated a serious commitment, including biasing public opinion in favor of a move that endangers not only the lives of the citizens' sons and daughters, but also the very survival of the state. Unmanned systems (and their ability to carry out forceful actions at a distance) erode the public's emotional reservations - a process that began in the US as early as 1979, with the abolition of conscription.

The removal of the human warrior from the scene of conflict may well make it easier to go to war and even change the way we think about it. For example, the US has carried out more than 130 airstrikes in Pakistan using the Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles. This number is three times greater than all the manned bombing missions carried out at the beginning of the Kosovo war ten years earlier. But unlike in that war, the robotic attacks in Pakistan did not provoke any debate in Congress and received relatively little media coverage. In fact, the US was involved here in what used to be called "war", but without the public discussion. The conflict is not even considered a war because it does not involve the loss of American soldiers' lives. These attacks were extremely effective: they killed about 40 leaders of al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their allied forces, without having to endanger American soldiers, including pilots. However, the effects of these attacks have raised questions that have yet to be answered.

One of these questions is what is the effect of this technology on the "war of ideas" that the US is waging against terrorist propaganda and recruitment for terrorism. That is, how and why is the reality of a strict attempt on the part of the US to act with great precision absorbed on the other side of the globe through a cloud of anger and misconceptions? In the American mass media, the terms "precise" and "costless" are used to describe the technology, but a major newspaper in Pakistan declared the United States the "prime hated figure" and "scapegoat for all purposes" for the attacks.

Unfortunately, the word "drone" (unmanned aerial vehicle) has become a common phrase in the Urdu language and appears in the lyrics of rock songs accusing America of dishonorable warfare. This issue becomes even more complex when you take into account the question of liability when something goes wrong. According to estimates, the number of casualties among the civilian population is 1,000-200, but many of these incidents occur near some of the most dangerous terrorist leaders in the world. Where should the line be drawn?

The meaning of "going to war" also changes regarding the soldier of 2010 as an individual. Going to battle always entailed the risk that the soldier would not return home. Achilles and Odysseus sailed to fight in Troy. My grandfather was sent to fight the Japanese after the Battle of Pearl Harbor. The war from afar changed the basic truth that prevailed in the 5,000 years of war known to mankind. More and more soldiers get up in the morning, drive to work, sit in front of computers and use robotic systems to fight insurgents 11,300 kilometers away. At the end of the "combat" day, they return to their cars, drive home, and as an American Air Force officer put it: "Twenty minutes later you are sitting at the dinner table talking to the children." The most dangerous part of their daily routine is not the battlefield but the journey home.

The disconnection from the battlefield also brings about a demographic change among the perpetrators of the various combat operations and raises questions regarding the identity of the soldier (young recruits perform jobs that were previously reserved for senior officers), his status (technician versus fighter) and the nature of stress and exhaustion in battle. On the surface, the remote operators are just playing video games, but they experience the psychological stress of fighting day after day, because the lives of humans on the ground depend on their flawless performance. According to their commanders, the challenges of transporting a unit into remote combat are very different from those of physically transporting a regular unit into the line of fire, and sometimes even more difficult.

With each step increase in the lethality and intelligence of the robots, the role of man in making decisions in war is getting smaller. For example, the pace of war is such that only systems like C-RAM - "Anti-Rocket Artillery and Mortar" (which looks a bit like the robot R2-D2 from "Star Wars" plus a 20 millimeter machine gun) - are able to react quickly enough to intercept incoming rockets and missiles. The person certainly has a part in the decision-making, but mainly in the programming phase of the robot. During the operation of the machine in the territory, the operator actually holds only the right of veto. The decision to override the robot's decision must be made within half a second, and few are willing to challenge what they perceive to be the machine's superior judge.

Many claim that such a trend will reduce the chance of mistakes in war and ensure that the rules of warfare will always be observed, as if they were software code inside the computer processor. This approach ignores the complex environment of war. An unmanned system might be able to spot a person carrying a Kalashnikov rifle from over a mile away and tell whether or not they've fired recently (based on the weapon's heat signature), but a machine, just like the human soldier today, would have a hard time telling whether it's an enemy, a friendly militia member, or a husband An ordinary store.

On top of that, the technology is not removing the ancient "fog of war" cloak, as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other proponents of the digital battlefield once believed. For example, sophisticated C-RAM technology reportedly once mistakenly identified a US military helicopter as a hostile target due to a programming error. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Unfortunately, what was described as a "software error" in an investigation report of a similar anti-aircraft system in South Africa had more dire consequences in 2007. The weapon system, equipped with a 35 millimeter cannon, was supposed to fire into the sky during a training exercise. Instead she switched to a horizontal position, fired in a circle and killed nine soldiers before she ran out of ammunition.

Such accidents naturally create very difficult legal questions. Who should be held responsible? What system of laws can one even rely on in such a case? Such cases prove that technology often advances faster than social institutions. How to reconcile the laws of war of the 20th century with the new reality?

A New Beginning

Our definitions and the way we understand war, how it is conducted and even who is supposed to fight it are now in a vortex that originates from the amazing new technology that brings extraordinary capabilities into the picture. The human race has experienced such situations in the past. We often strive to assimilate new technologies and understand them, and in the end what was perceived at the time as strange and even unacceptable becomes completely normal in our eyes. Perhaps the best example is from the 15th century, when a French noble claimed that the rifle was a murder weapon that a real soldier would not think of using. According to him, only cowards "will not dare to look into the faces of the people they are exterminating from a distance with their poor bullets."

Although we have "progressed" since then, the topic of robots is very similar. It is possible that the control of technology will turn out to be much simpler than the dilemmas in the field of policy, which are created due to the extreme abilities of machines to change the world around them. This is why some scientists propose another historical equivalent for our robotics situation today: not the gun or the airplane, but the atomic bomb. We are creating exciting technology that pushes the boundaries of science but raises poignant concerns far beyond the realm of science, so much so that we may come to regret these elaborate engineering works, as some of the early atomic bomb designers did.

Of course, just like those inventors in the 40s, today's robot developers continue their work because it is militarily useful, highly profitable, and at the cutting edge of science. Albert Einstein, it is said, put it this way: "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?"

The real story is that what used to be the subject of endless idle discussions at science fiction conferences is now worthy of serious discussion - and not just in the Pentagon. This is a matter of importance not only to the meetings of robot traders, the laboratories and the battlefield, but also to how we unfold the story of humanity itself. For 5,000 years humans had a monopoly on warfare. It is now over.

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key concepts

In the past, the US military saw robots as obstacles preventing traditional soldiering.

Unmanned systems thrived in conflicts in the Middle East, either as a means of dealing with the urban maze of streets and alleys or as a means of observing remote villages.

As the robots perform more on their own, they raise more and more ethical and legal questions.

Anatomy of a next generation robot

Human soldiers and ordinary machines will not be able to compete with the newest military robots that are being developed these days. BigDog, a four-legged beast-like robot carrying a load of ammunition or other supplies weighing hundreds of kilograms, will traverse steep, craggy, rocky, muddy or snowy terrain impassable to wheeled or tracked vehicles.

Global Positioning System (GPS)

The position of the robot is determined according to the points of reference obtained from the GPS

Electronic eyes

A radar known as LIDAR and a machine vision module scan the immediate environment

Motion sensors and generators

Sensors transmit to the robot's computer information about the position of the leg and the forces acting on it. After combining the sensor data from all four legs, the computer sends a signal to the servo valve, and it opens to flow oil into the motion generator (a cylinder with pistons) that actually moves the leg to the desired position.

engine and hydraulic system

Electricity provided by the engine activates a pump that flows oil in the hydraulic system, and the system activates the motion generators.

מחשב

Input from the sensors allows the processor to calculate the speed and acceleration and send a command to the motion generators to adjust the foot guides.

The author

F. W. Singer (Singer) directs the 21st Century Defense Project at the Brookings Institution. He authored the bestseller Wired for War: The Robot Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, published in 2009 (wiredforwar.pwsinger.com).

Remote action

The American air war by remote control

A complex communications network allows soldiers at bases in America and overseas to control unmanned aerial vehicles that launch missiles or gather intelligence from fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each base is responsible for controlling one or more types of aircraft or receiving intelligence data. The information is transmitted from and to Iraq and Afghanistan through two communication centers located in the US.

And more on the subject

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. PW Singer. Penguin, 2009.

Bombs Away. The Economist, Technology Quarterly, page 13; March 4, 2010.

The Regulation of New Warfare. Peter W. Singer. Brookings Institution