Security and Defence
Pandora’s box is already open
photo: ©Naeblys - stock.adobe.com
War in a robotic age
by Israel Rafalovich, Journalist, Brussels
D
efence strategists and planners are confronted to a rapidly approaching future with a new war fighting regime where unmanned and autonomous systems play central roles. For politicians and military strategists with tight budgets, robots are popular especially with military interventions in foreign countries becoming less popular. Military experts see robotics as part of an asymmetric warfare in which an opponent whose overall capabilities are regarded as technologically inferior can defeat a superior one. We should begin to prepare now for this not so distant future of war in the robotic age.
Man versus machine? A warfare regime based on unmanned and autonomous systems will change our basic concepts of defence strategy. It might be a constraint on the ability of democratic states to use lethal autonomous weapon systems, but authoritarian peer adversaries may not face similar constraints, equipped with autonomous weapons and willing to use them in an unconstrained manner. The military advantage might shift to our opponent. Furthermore, systems have already profoundly reshaped strategy and procurement priorities and are growing increasingly important in armed forces worldwide. Unmanned systems have been employed extensively in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
These largely remotely piloted air and ground vehicles will soon be replaced by increasingly autonomous systems across the full range of military operations. Increasingly autonomous systems will be able to take on roles humans simply cannot, such as undertaking more dangerous missions or reacting with greater speed, precision and coordination than humans are capable of: autonomous cargo drones could drop off supplies to the front line, self-driving machines could remove land mines, and artificial intelligence can be used to develop precision models. These characteristics will make robots of all shapes and capabilities more and more attractive to force designers, and more central to tactics and operations. Future lethal autonomous weapon systems will be capable of both independently identifying, engaging and destroying a target without manual human control. We should be careful before we relinquish such moral decision-making to machines. Even if they had the sophistication, relinquishing the decision to kill to machines crosses a fundamental moral line.
Internationally accepted ethical standards Technologies such as these are no longer confined to the realm of science fiction. They have reached a point where the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) is feasible within years, not decades. → Continued on page 50
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