On a scorching early afternoon in August 2007, Col. David “Diesel” Sullivan was doing his daily rounds at Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas when he got the call. A pilot under his command at the base, remotely flying an armed, unmanned MQ-9 Reaper aerial drone in eastern Afghanistan, had spotted four men perched on an Afghan hilltop. Were they Taliban? If so, they were perfectly placed to ambush an American raiding party just hours away.
Sullivan walked out of the heat and into the small, single-wide trailer operations room (the “ops cell”) to assess the situation firsthand. Maneuvering the Reaper by joystick, the pilot pointed to the screen: Four human shapes were silhouetted against a tarp some 7,500 miles away. The local time was 2 a.m. These were hardly goatherds, and with no coalition soldiers reported on the hill, consensus emerged that the four figures were insurgents. Sullivan ordered the countdown for lethal force, and his pilot began the 10-minute sequence for launch of a laser-guided Hellfire missile. Then Sullivan noticed a detail that gave him pause. Two of the men were doing sit-ups and push-ups. “I’ve been watching the Taliban for years now in small units like that,” he said. “They would not be doing exercises.”
Ultimately U.S. commanders on the ground were asked to check with their field units one last time. Sullivan watched via infrared video feed from half a world away as one of the silhouettes picked up a portable phone. With only minutes to spare, Sullivan stopped what would have been a deadly friendly-fire missile strike on American troops.
Robotics experts call what Sullivan exercised “discrimination,” the ability to target enemy forces while keeping fire away from civilians, friendly troops, and prisoners of war. In the move toward increasing use of unmanned military machines, discrimination is the elephant in the room.
Rise of the Machines
Thousands of unmanned aerial drones, tanks, and submarines have been developed and deployed by militaries in up to 50 nations. These include unpiloted planes such as the MQ-9 Reaper and its more famous predecessor, the MQ-1 Predator, as well as ground vehicles such as the unmanned minitank Talon SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System) and the multipurpose PackBot, which has been widely used to defuse roadside bombs in Iraq and which can also gather intelligence and detect snipers.
They are machines, certainly, but calling these devices robots—as many in both the military and the public do—is a leap. Most mobile military robots in use today are piloted via remote control by a human operator. Discrimination, more than anything else, requires that humans call the shots. Indeed, field tests of autonomous military bots have tragically made the point: In a South African military exercise in October 2007, an automated antiaircraft gun went haywire, spraying 35mm cannon shells at a phalanx of nearby artillery soldiers, killing nine.
Even so, as surely as every modern jetliner runs primarily on autopilot, tomorrow’s military robots will increasingly operate on their own initiative. Before the decade is out, some fighting force may well succeed in fielding a military robot that can kill without a joystick operator behind a curtain elsewhere in the world. On American shores, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2000 [PDF] mandated that by 2010 one-third of the military’s combat aircraft be unmanned and that by 2015 one-third of all combat vehicles be unmanned. (As far as the larger drones go, we are running behind schedule.) Although legislation did not specify that bots be autonomous, Peter Singer, director of the Brookings Institution’s 21st Century Defense Initiative project and author of a recent book on military robots, Wired for War, calls the push toward autonomy real and pressing.
For instance, enemies could jam radio signals sent by satellite to control drones and robots from afar. “That leads us to make the system more autonomous,” Singer says. “If I’ve sent it out on a mission and the enemy jams it, we still want to be able to carry out the mission.” An autonomous drone following internal commands could do just that.
For those in the field, the rise of the machines has been dramatic and pervasive. Edward Barrett, a U.S. Naval Academy instructor and former Air Force officer who flew through war zones in Sarajevo in 1993 and in the Iraq War a decade later, says that in the past decade he has grown accustomed to sharing airspace with remotely piloted drones. “Technologies change and platforms change,” he says of the evolving Predators and Reapers. “That’s a major shift. Now we’ve got a nonhuman combatant, in many cases remotely controlled by humans. An autonomous nonhuman would be nice to have.”
First of Its Kind
In one tiny sliver of the world—the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea—the first autonomous killer bots have already finished a trial run. But discrimination is hardly their forte. “There are automatic guns in the demilitarized zone that can target and fire without human decision,” says Colin Allen, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University and coauthor of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong. “They’re not the full sci-fi thing because they’re not mobile, and everybody knows where not to go. Nevertheless, if a child strays into that area, these machines cannot discriminate them from adults.”
Also close to launch are autonomous soldier bots requiring lesser powers of discrimination, designed for ancillary roles like ferrying supplies. Airdrops of combat and medical goods, for instance, may soon be handled by the Onyx autonomously guided parafoil system, a gliding robotic sail that guides cargo dropped from aircraft at altitudes of up to 25,000 feet and possibly higher. Onyx is controlled by two brake lines comparable to those used by parachuters: When one line is tugged, the vehicle turns, and when both are tugged, it slows. A more advanced model, LEAPP, will incorporate a computer-controlled propeller to guide cargo to specific locations on the ground. Flying in formation, the bots would avoid collision and land closer to troops than was ever possible before.
Meanwhile, Vecna Robotics is perfecting a tank with a humanoid upper body to remove injured soldiers from the battlefield. The system, called the Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot, or BEAR, would ride into a battle zone, autonomously retrieve a wounded soldier, and then, following remote instructions, carry him to safety in its robotic arms.
