

War Without Soldiers - razorburn
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/05/30/military-robots-technology-tech-security-cx_ag_0530robots.html

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niels_olson
Two comments, one personal, one theoretical.Personally, as a geek and physics
major turned military officer, specifically spending my last 18 months in the
fleet doing force protection planning and ops,now a father, 3rd year med
student, and homeowner in New Orleans, I can't conceive of a war these warbots
could win. They can only start and continue violence. They can't build homes,
mend communities, teach children or care for the sick and injured. They can't
stock shelves or forgive debts. These war bots appeal to young men who have
not yet faced physical adversity &military & political leaders too far removed
and too surrounded by military contractors. Would you want your family to face
these machines? I disagree with the claim that force protection is a valid
basis for bots. Thebots don'tprotect the troops. They continue violencethey
can't stop. Every bomb dropped leaves more work for soldiers on the ground and
increases the hostility of the local population toward those troops. Those
troops are your friends, neighbors, sons and daughters.

If code is law, what codable theoretical concept can society use to stop young
men and the leaders of the military-industrial complex from killing us all in
a scorched earth search for a technological solution to war? The concern most
have expressed here boils down to _moral hazard_ , the same concept employed
to curb bailouts of housing speculators and big companies. In both the bot and
bailout cases, moral hazard has been gradually removed from the decision-
making process. In finance, computing power, a credible objective(profit),
gimicks, and the failure of regulators to keep pace with their charges, made
it possible for the actors to get into the problems they now face. In the
military-industrial complex the case is more extreme:massive computing power,
a credible objective (less danger to our troops (they thought)), and a
complete abdication of regulatory responsibility, and exceptionally simple
regulatory basis (can't get much simpler than the five bases of jus ad
bellum). How to put lot more moral hazard back into the equations?

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noonespecial
I know all of the arguments. Saving American lives etc. They sound good. I
love robotics but I still recoil at the thought of first-world technological
giants deploying semi-autonomous, or ever fully autonomous machines to kill
vastly outmatched humans in third world nations at no risk to themselves. It
just _begs_ for abuse. If not now, certainly in the future.

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Hexstream
I understand your concerns but I'm also generally against holding back
technological progress as a way to slow down the roadmap to the inevitable bad
things that will result alongside the good ones.

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rw
Technological sophistication is orthogonal to societal progress.

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Hexstream
So in a parallel world where computers and the internet (or equivalents) never
happened society would be at exactly the same level?

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gaius
I really am torn by technology like this. On the one hand, force protection is
the responsibility of any commander, and anything that contributes to that
mission is a valuable asset.

But on the other, if we can go to war with no risk to ourselves, can we also
resist the temptation to do so on the slightest pretext?

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ivankirigin
Assymetric warfare is such that you are mainly trying to not kill civilians. A
teleoperated bot that doesn't fear for its life is better suited to storm a
city building by building.

Symmetric warfare will always include nukes. There is a huge risk, regardless
of the boots/bots ratio on the ground.

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gaius
Technically asymmetric warfare is such that you are _only_ trying to kill
civilians.

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hugh
Well no, asymmetric warfare is any warfare where the two parties differ
substantially in strength. In Iraq at the moment, for instance, we're trying
to kill the enemy while the enemy doesn't seem to care whether they kill our
soldiers or random civilians, but it would remain asymmetric even if the enemy
would be so kind as to restrict themselves to trying to kill our soldiers.

Unless you're saying that the enemy in Iraq counts as "civilians" because
they're not part of any proper and recognized army, but that's a rather point-
missing definition of "civilian", since the defining characteristic of a
civilian is whether they're engaging in combat.

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gaius
It is not such a stretch to envision a world in which we have flocks of these
circling endlessly over "enemy" population centres waiting targets of
opportunity. Our own people barely even need to be aware that we're doing it,
no body bags coming home, no loved-ones overseas for years, it will no more
make it to the news than when a Tomahawk is fired now.

 _That_ is a terror weapon, in the most literal sense.

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breck
Well put.

That being said, I'd prefer this scenario to the present one with body bags
coming home. That is, as long as I'm still living in the U.S., away from the
perpetually aloft drones.

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jsrn
As the article pointed out, the adoption of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) is
much smaller until now than that of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

If you are interested in UGVs in the military, check out the company iRobot. I
listened to a recent webcasted analyst conference from them and they basically
think that 2008 is an "inflection year" for UGVs - it's the first year they
sell their robots not only to specialist teams (mainly explosive ordnance
disposal (EOD) teams) but to the infantry, which is a much larger market. In
September, they await a decision if the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV),
a new smaller robot part of the Future Combat Systems, will be accelerated
(earlier it was planned to start production in 2013-2015).

The webcast I'm referring to is here (you don't have to fill out the form,
just press 'Access Event'. The presentation of the military division is in the
second half of the presentation, but it's also pretty interesting to just
watch the slides (the presentation of the military division starts at slide
93)): <http://investors.irobot.com/eventdetail.cfm?eventid=53016>

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ivankirigin
There aren't as many obstacles in the air. Line of sight is measured in miles.
GPS is perfect. The kinematics are smooth.

The UAV problem from a robotics perspective is trivial compared to UGVs.

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josefresco
I give you, Boston Dynamics BigDog Robot ... aka the Army Mule:
<http://youtube.com/watch?v=mpBG-nSRcrQ>

Check out the related video for more gas powered mule fun.

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nazgulnarsil
the reason warbots bother me is that people (including the decision makers)
haven't seemed to figure out what exactly they're trying to accomplish when
they go to war. What is the U.S.'s goal in Iraq? With no clearly defined goal,
how do we know when the war is over?

P.S. I know the economic reason for the iraq war
([http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.h...](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.html))
but that doesn't explain why we're still there.

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1gor
At some point robots will be mainly designed to fight other robots rather than
humans. Which is a welcome development, if indeed humans will be allowed only
to watch the fight from the sidelines.

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DTrejo
High Quality Entertainment. Just like how during one US civil war battle the
civilians had a picnic and watched.

