

Coming Soon: the Drone Arms Race - OstiaAntica
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sunday-review/coming-soon-the-drone-arms-race.html

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astrofinch
>“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the
right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks,
argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of
Pittsburgh and author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher
export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry
about most.”

How about the fact that we're doing it, period?

[http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_i...](http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html)

~~~
Anti-Ratfish
And no less scary, 15-40% of the time a civilian is hit instead of the correct
target. <http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker> And
given the dubious right of the CIA to hit there intended target in the first
place, the acceptance of UAV strikes is disturbing to me.

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grandalf
Imagine when drones the size of dragonflies carry needles containing poison to
assassination targets. Today's drones are very crude in comparison.

Once it becomes plausible that any squirrel, mouse, dragon fly, etc. could be
an assassination weapon, it will become necessary for heads of state to travel
surrounded by swarms of friendly robots, in all sorts of form factors.

~~~
epoxyhockey
I'll let you in on a little secret: Heads of states are generally not
assassination targets by other country states.

Why? If you were a country, would you like to deal with a
decentralized/unofficial government that has no control over its citizens?

~~~
0x12
You're obviously not related to Hugo Chavez ;)

Travel does not have to mean 'travel outside the country', so even if most
attempts to decapitate a country are home-grown that doesn't mean that heads
of state don't travel with a security entourage when they are within their own
borders.

On top of that I do believe that heads of state already travel with a security
entourage when traveling abroad.

It is not necessarily the other nations they're afraid of but their lunatics.
And a small robot drone will be within the financial means of anybody with an
axe to grind in the fairly near future.

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mathattack
Everything we do that duhumanizes war comes with good ethical concerns (less
loss of human life) but this doesn't make war any better.

Drones - save our lives. Cruise missiles - save our lives. An A-bomb saved our
lives.

Not getting into as many wars would save the most lives. (Note: Some wars -
like WW II are I admit unavoidable, but very few fall under this heading)

~~~
OstiaAntica
World War II wasn't unavoidable. If the West, particularly France, had pursued
a less vindictive peace with Germany after the first world war, the
circumstances that brought Hitler to power would not have existed.
Specifically, the unsustainable reparations on Germany, and the French
decision to occupy the German coal regions in the 1920s, destabilized the
German economy and destroyed the Weimar Republic.

~~~
spindritf
> If the West, particularly France, had pursued a less vindictive peace with
> Germany after the first world war, the circumstances that brought Hitler to
> power would not have existed.

And if it wasn't for Appeasement, if the western powers made good on their
promises (especially the Anglo-Polish military alliance), Hitler could have
been defeated before Germans managed to set the whole continent on fire; and
if the French didn't put so much trust in the Maginot Line...

~~~
dantheman
The French were outclassed in all ways, their techniques were completely
outdated. For instance using motorcycle messengers to transfer orders instead
of telephone/radio communications, they could not respond fast enough to
German Blitzkrieg.

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jonmc12
I always thought it would be cool if a company built a big bird's nest tower
in cities that would host a bunch of flying drones. Then, consumers could rent
the video-capture drones online to fly over approved areas, upon which the
drones would return to nest for re-fueling. Think maybe you could subsidize
the cost (possibly even make a profit) with the video data, or by streaming
some feeds for the population to watch. Though have no idea of feasibility
(FAA, equipment, real estate), I do like the idea of eyes in the sky for
consumer benefit. Maybe something like this could be used for defense - giving
population more awareness of airspace.

~~~
brd
UAVs are currently not allowed to be flown by commercial entities in US
airspace. If/when that changes it will be fascinating to watch the variety of
startups that crop up to take advantage of it.

~~~
rdtsc
However individuals can fly RC planes. What about companies making RC planes?
Are they allowed to test fly them? Set one of those planes up with a deadly
payload (use your imagination here) and you have a UAV...

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guelo
Obama's job as president was to temper the fantasies of the generals and the
CIA. He failed. The future lawless robot wars will be scary.

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brown9-2
I think that future was coming regardless of anything he could do as commander
in chief. There is no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.

~~~
guelo
Obama didn't have to authorize targeted assassinations far away from any
battlefield.

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nekitamo
In this war, there is no battlefield.

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guelo
That's the problem with these robots. The USA has now set the precedent that
the robots can go anywhere in the world and blow anyone up that we label a
terrorist. This is dangerous and stupid. Of course it was Bush that invented
the endless war (how do we win this war? are we supposed to to kill every
young muslim that hates us?), but Bush preferred kidnapping people and
sticking them in secret prisons, Obama prefers using robots to assassinate
from afar, no messy legal challenges that way.

We have a monopoly on the robots now but they are only going to get cheaper in
the future and everybody will have them, they will present a threat to all
establishments. It is stupid for the USA to be going off on our "might makes
right" arrogance destroying all international laws and norms. And for what? Do
these dirt poor guys in Afghanistan and Pakistan really pose a threat to us?
No they don't.

The only solution in the future will be for everyone to come together to ban
these machines, similar to the treaties against land mines and chemical
weapons, but the U.S. will have no moral authority to do so.

This future is not very far away.

~~~
thret
Once drones become prolific, they will start killing drones instead of people
and maybe we can have a bloodless war the same way we have paperless offices.

~~~
nitrogen
Eventually we won't have to go to the expense of building weapons at all, and
computers will decide who lives and dies:
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/A_Taste_of_Ar...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon)

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epoxyhockey
I'm going to take an optimistic stance on this topic and say that war
technology evolves; we shouldn't be scared of it just because it was sci-fi 10
years ago. I think the development of the nuclear bomb was more scary than
some line-manufactured drones.

Yes, Obama has been awfully militant lately. He may have thought that it was
the best thing he could do in an attempt to get positive approval ratings from
the general public. Killing an American citizen w/o trial may have gone too
far, even for middle America.

The drone arms race is going to be an economical one. And, given the state of
the world economy, no country is going to spend billions of dollars on a drone
war anytime soon.

~~~
njharman
Drones are far cheaper then other options.

I'm taking a pessimistic view. When the costs of war are externalized (as they
are now and will be even more so with drones and robots) we no lose the
incentives to not have war.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon>

~~~
winestock
"It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it." -
Robert E. Lee

Fighting war with robots resembles video games. Everyone associates video
games with fun. Therefore, we do run the risk of making war _seem_ less
terrible and, thus, becoming more fond of it.

One of the reasons why the co-op portion of _Portal 2_ uses robots as player
characters is that the designers knew that these characters would die
frequently. In order to keep the E10+ rating and in order to quell any
outrage, the designers used robots that are not even vaguely human in shape
aside from the fact that they are bipedal. TVtropes calls the effect
"Slapstick Sociopathy."

~~~
jberryman
> Therefore, we do run the risk of making war seem less terrible and, thus,
> becoming more fond of it.

I think you only have to modernize and mechanize warfare to the point that
wars are fought and the horrors experienced by a sufficiently small minority
of the populace. That is I think if there is some threshold, in America we've
already surpassed it and war has become no longer terrible to us; future
technological advances aren't required.

There are teenagers today who can only remember living in the america of this
abstract war narrative, yet who have lived in a world _completely_ untouched
by it: no death, no fear, no butter rations, no wrapping bandages for the
troops, no shared purpose, no end in site. Perpetual war is reality, and as
this financial crisis seems to be illustrating, is also the priority.

~~~
marquis
>lived in a world completely untouched by it

War has certainly touched the U.S. youth as we've seen massive internal shifts
on personal liberty (e.g. TSA, security guards in school, signs in public
transport that ask you to monitor your fellow citizens). The youth is also
clearly able to see that the U.S. spends a disproportionate amount on the
military rather than enriching it's own culture and people's lives. Much like
the Occupy Wallstreet movement I would expect to see a call, by the upcoming
generation, to demand that their birthright is not continued to be sucked dry
by the military.

Spike Jonze's short film "Scenes from the suburbs" is an insightful example of
how we might imagine a further deepening militarization of the U.S. Sadly it
does not seem so far fetched to me.

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0x12
Just like we have a moratorium on the use of chemical weapons we ought to have
one on drones. Not that it would ever be ratified.

There is something seriously wrong with the level of detachment drones afford
the actors on any battlefield.

Taking a life should be something done with a large level of reluctance and
with the 'taker' risking his own through physical presence. Once that balance
is lost it becomes all too easy to resort to violence at a much earlier stage
of a conflict.

This is all about reducing the barrier to entry for war and that's a very
dangerous thing.

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rdtsc
Drone + neurotoxic chemicals = a deadly & cheap weapon?

~~~
0x12
Remind me to stay on your good side.

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ars
"If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority
Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States
say?"

What difference does it make if they used a drone or did it the traditional
way?

An attack is an attack it makes no difference how you do it.

~~~
wladimir
When there are more and more nations with drones, it will be harder to trace
them back to some nation-state. And with technology-only attacks there is no
longer necessarily a nation-state with army behind it at all. Just an
organization with a lot of capital. China could deny being involved. Or maybe
the drones were infected with a computer virus
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085004>)

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brd
I think the scariest part of this drone trend is the opportunity to wage war
without losing human life. This shift in risk will dramatically reduce the
barrier to starting a war and will further reinforce the power of those
already on top.

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prodigal_erik
The problem is that lives will still be lost, just not by our side. If we
could have war without losing _any_ lives, that sounds cool—stick in some
cameras and we'd happily pay to watch.

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Eliezer
Yeah, the horror of war without lost life is something I think the survivors
of, oh, say, the Hundred Years War, would call (in the modern parlance) a
First World Problem.

~~~
Anti-Ratfish
War is becoming much safer. The world is too. Fascinating article on it here.
<http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker> However I'd love
to see any evidence showing drones keep deaths down in war. Maybe in the
future, but right now they make life very unsafe in places like Pakistan,
which given it's allied to America is bizarre. Edit: this was supposed to be a
reply to Boltcode.

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Game_Ender
An area this article does not go into is how the increased use of robotics in
the military could cause the military to classify large swaths of it as
controlled weapons research. This would limit the ability of researchers and
companies to publish or even work in that area.

~~~
shabble
People like the GRASP[1] guys: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM>
are probably somewhere pretty high on that list.

They still need to solve the location sensing issues though - having high-
precision calibrated wall mounted sensors aren't really practical for ad-hoc
use.

I don't doubt that someone will solve this problem in the not-too-distant
future though, and heavily autonomous quadrotor aerostats will be in heavy
use.

[1] <https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/>

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padobson
What I'm waiting for is this technology to be open to business and consumer
solutions. I dream of a world where Amazon implements drone technology into
their SOA fulfillment centers and makes it possible for orders to be delivered
in hours or minutes instead of days.

Imagine being a high school kid and having a job targeting drop zones for
Amazon packages as drones make their final approaches. It'd be a heck of a lot
cooler then driving a brown UPS truck.

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DanielBMarkham
I was tweeting the other day that we now live in a world where the president
of the United States can, without judicial review, assassinate with robots an
American Citizen living abroad because of their speech and influence on
terrorists.

Sounded crazy -- "death by robots" -- but that's about where we are (I don't
differentiate between remote-operated vehicles and fully autonomous vehicles
because it's not germane) We can't and won't torture a guy we pick up with a
rocket launcher in his hand getting ready to kill us, but we can push a button
and whack somebody who hangs out with really bad people. Don't forget
collateral damage. And we call this morality.

Telemetry and robotics are going to change the world in wildly dramatic ways
over the next 50 years. Places like HN are where somewhat knowledgeable people
can kick around these ideas now, before everybody and his NGO have their own
killer robots.

~~~
adamjernst
"Hangs out with really bad people"? Please. You make it sound like Anwar al-
Awlaki had a beer with al Qaeda so we decided to whack him.

When someone is active on the battlefield, and there's no way to physically
capture him, what do you expect?

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wvoq
> You make it sound like Anwar al-Awlaki had a beer with al Qaeda so we
> decided to whack him.

Well, that's practically all that we know-- he was killed for propagandizing
on behalf of some terrible ideas. But it isn't illegal to propagandize on
behalf of terrible ideas, whereas it is illegal to execute US citizens because
you find them loathsome and geo-strategically inconvenient.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn publicly what Anwar al-Awlaki actually
did, and whether his actions were criminal? As far as I can tell, it's unclear
whether anything al-Awlaki did would actually satisfy the "imminent lawless
action" test in a civilian criminal court. I suspect the senior officials
responsible for his assassination understand this too, which is why they would
prefer to dispense with the niceties of extradition and trial.

So here's where we find ourselves: in a world in which the US government
openly assassinates US citizens who have not been convicted of any crime, and
no one bats an eyelash.

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jebblue
There was a Star Trek TV episode where two cities fought each other using
computers. No spoilers on how it ended.

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alexhawket
I'm more interested in the day when there are so many drones, they spend more
time fighting each other and forget about the humans all together. We may
never even see them, dogfighting above the clouds, save for a the perpetual
flutter of broken parts falling from the heavens.

Another possibility.. cities protected by phalanxes of model rocket sized
guided missiles scanning perpetually for enemy drones.

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InclinedPlane
That's nonsensical. The chances of drone armies being so perfectly matched
they always fight to a stalemate are basically zero. Ultimately one side will
win, and then it will have a free hand. It's no different than a conventional
air war in that regard.

~~~
meric
It will have a free hand but then the other side will immediately surrender.
Hopefully.

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ck2
And the race to make a working emp generator begins.

~~~
0x12
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compres...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator)

