More than just conventional wisdom, it has become almost a cliché to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved “how technology doesn’t have a big place in any doctrine of future war,” as one security analyst told me in 2007. The American military efforts in those countries (or so the thinking goes) have dispelled the understanding of technology-dominated warfare that was prevalent just a few years ago—the notion that modern armed conflict would be fundamentally changed in the age of computers and networks.
It is true that Afghanistan and Iraq have done much to puncture that understanding of war. The vaunted theory, so beloved in the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon, of a “network-centric” revolution in military affairs can now be seen more clearly as a byproduct of the 1990s dotcom boom. The Internet has certainly affected how people shop, communicate, and date. Amid this ecstatic hype, it is not surprising that many security studies experts, both in and out of the defense establishment, latched onto the notion that linking up all our systems via electronic networks would “lift the fog of war,” allow war to be done on the cheap, and even allow the United States to “lock out” competition from the marketplace of war, much as they saw Microsoft doing to Apple at the time.
Nor is it surprising that now analysts are writing off high-tech warfare altogether in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq. Insurgents armed with crude conventional weapons have proven frequently able to flummox their well-equipped American foes. Many observers increasingly seem to believe that if irregular warfare is likely to be the future of armed conflict, advanced technologies have no great role.
These “all or nothing” attitudes are each incorrect. High technology is not a silver bullet solution to insurgencies, but that doesn’t mean that technology doesn’t matter in these fights. In fact, far from proving the uselessness of advanced technology in modern warfare, Afghanistan and Iraq have for the first time proved the value of a technology that will truly revolutionize warfare—robotics.
When U.S. forces went into Iraq, the original invasion had no robotic systems on the ground. By the end of 2004, there were 150 robots on the ground in Iraq; a year later there were 2,400; by the end of 2008, there were about 12,000 robots of nearly two dozen varieties operating on the ground in Iraq. As one retired Army officer put it, the “Army of the Grand Robotic” is taking shape.
It isn’t just on the ground: military robots have been taking to the skies—and the seas and space, too. And the field is rapidly advancing. The robotic systems now rolling out in prototype stage are far more capable, intelligent, and autonomous than ones already in service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even they are just the start. As one robotics executive put it at a demonstration of new military prototypes a couple of years ago, “The robots you are seeing here today I like to think of as the Model T. These are not what you are going to see when they are actually deployed in the field. We are seeing the very first stages of this technology.” And just as the Model T exploded on the scene—selling only 239 cars in its first year and over one million a decade later—the demand for robotic warriors is growing very rapidly.
The truly revolutionary part, however, is not robots’ increasing numbers, or even their capabilities. It is the ripple effects that they will have in areas ranging from politics and war to business and ethics. For instance, the difficulties for the existing laws of war that this robotics revolution will provoke are barely beginning to be understood. Technology generally evolves much more quickly than the laws of war. During World War I, for example, all sorts of recent inventions, from airplanes dropping bombs to cannons shooting chemical weapons, were introduced before anyone agreed on the rules for their use—and, as to be expected, the warring sides sometimes took different interpretations on critical questions. While it is far too early to know with any certainty, we can at least start to establish the underlying frameworks as to how robots will reshape the practice and the ethics of warfare...
Not merely scientists, but everyone from theologians (who helped create the first laws of war) to the human rights and arms control communities must start looking at where this technological revolution is taking both our weapons and laws. These discussions and debates also need to be global, as the issues of robotics cross national lines (forty-three countries now have military robotics programs). Over time, some sort of consensus might emerge—if not banning the use of all autonomous robots with lethal weapons, then perhaps banning just certain types of robots (such as ones not made of metal, which would be hard to detect and thus of most benefit to terrorist groups).
Some critics will argue against any international discussions or against creating new laws that act to restrict what can be done in war and research. As Steven Metz of the Army War College says, “You have to remember that many consider international law to be a form of asymmetric warfare, limiting our choices, tying us down.” Yet history tells us that, time and again, the society that builds an ethical rule of law and stands by its values is the one that ultimately prevails on the battlefield. There is a “bottom line” reason for why we should adhere to the laws of war, explains a U.S. Air Force major general. “The more society adheres to ethical norms, democratic values, and individual rights, the more successful a warfighter that society will be.”
So as we begin to wrestle with the problems that robots present for the laws of war, we might find instructive the wisdom from a past generation that grappled with a revolutionary and fearsome new technology (in that case, atomic weapons). As John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.”
P. W. Singer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of the institution’s 21st Century Defense Initiative. This essay is adapted from his new book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, just published by Penguin.
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