Panel: Robots have place in future army

WASHINGTON

By 2006, American troops in Iraq were facing more than 2,500 attacks a day from improvised explosive devices. Ordnance disposal teams were going out twice a day to defuse bombs.

On one particular day, as a member of one of those teams approached a device, it detonated in a wave of flame. The team member was no more.

That night, the team's commander sat down to write of the loss of a beloved teammate and of the team's guilt that they couldn't prevent his demise.

The silver lining: The deceased was a robot.

This is the future of war, says author Peter Singer, and the future has already arrived. Singer spoke Monday at the Brookings Institution, where he is a senior fellow in foreign policy and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative. Sharing the stage with him was Marine Gen. James Mattis, NATO's supreme allied commander transformation and head of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, based in Norfolk.

Monday's event was timed with the release of Singer's book, "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century." In it, he addresses how new technology, particularly robotics, will alter the nature of war and explores some of the ethical and legal issues that robot-based warfare will bring.

Mattis embraces the idea that robots have a role in modern war. The essence of war-fighting is "improvise, improvise, improvise," he said. He urged realism as well.

"War is fundamentally a social problem that needs human solutions," he said. "I want the best possible technology in the hands of the troops, but the thought that this will solve the problem of war is foolish."

Robotic vehicles are used chiefly for bomb disposal and aerial missions, including surveillance and attack.

The numbers bear witness to the revolution, Singer said Monday. At the start of the Iraq war, the United States only had a handful of unmanned aerial vehicles in the air. As of 2008, it had 5,300. There were no unmanned systems on the ground back then; there are now 12,000.

And these systems, Singer said, are only the first generation. Future robots will be able to make their own decisions on when and where to use force in what he called "the biggest revolution in warfare since the atomic bomb." In essence, he said, "humankind is starting to lose its 5,000-year monopoly on war."

Mattis countered that while the character of war may change, its fundamental nature does not. A reading of complex systems theory, he said, shows that no amount of technology can make war a perfect system; the variables are too great.

This is where the human mind comes in. For an "unmanned" aerial vehicle simply means there is no physical pilot in a cockpit. There are still teams of people on the ground flying, fixing and studying the system, including "cubicle soldiers" who fly drones from thousands of miles away before heading home to help their kids with their homework.

Both men foresee the increasing use of hybrid human/robot teams, like police officers and their dogs, where each member contributes what it's best at. As for what specific future roles robots could play, Mattis said it will depend on the type of conflict.

"You have to think in terms of what will work best for the end state," he said, particularly if the goal is not just to end a war but to establish a peace. "How discriminating can the robots be? Can they distinguish between friend and foe?"

As technology advances, Singer said others are taking note. Though the United States is still the leader, 43 other countries are working on military robotics, including Iran and Pakistan. Both men agreed that today's defense acquisitions process is far too slow for current war, much less for the types of ever-progressing technology that these new systems represent.

These technologies are as commercial as they are revolutionary, Singer added, meaning nonstate actors can play a dangerous role. Moreover, when fewer actual people are being sent into battle, the public's relationship with war is upended, and the bar for waging war is lowered.

Questions of culpability and international law follow. What happens when a drone kills the wrong person? On these and other issues, Singer said, the jury is still out.

As for how these machines could transform war, Mattis said that "every time a military has transformed, it has identified a problem and set out to solve it."

In World War I, the Germans got tired of losing soldiers on the battlefield and developed maneuver warfare. During the interwar years, the U.S. Navy learned how to integrate aircraft carriers and amphibious groups into its operations and began winning war games again.

In the current world, he said, the United States risks "being dominant and irrelevant at same time," a master of conventional warfare and a target for asymmetric battles. The goal, he said, is to "make irregular warfare a core competency without surrendering conventional competency."

Mattis stressed the need to use technology as a tool for human ends, not as an end in itself. Calls for increased use of robotics, he said, often underlie "a desire for a bloodless war.

"There comes a point when a country puts young folks at risk because it becomes important for them to defend a certain way of life," he said. "From a Marine point of view, we can't lose our honor by failing to put our own skin on the line."

Matthew Jones, (757) 446-2949, matthew.jones@pilotonline.com