America’s Robot Army
December 6th, 2006Recently, I wrote, “In the early battles of the Rise of the Machines, victory will go to the side with the monkey wrenches, not the side with the terminator robots. The bad news? The bad news will be the result of another couple of decades worth of autonomous weapons research and design. You won’t want that thing to knock on your door late at night.”
Well, unless a major crash takes out the present system, get ready to experience “military omniscience.”
Via: New Statesman:
War is about to change, in terrifying ways. America’s next wars, the ones the Pentagon is now planning, will be nothing like the conflicts that have gone before them.
In just a few years, US forces will be able to deal out death, not at the squeeze of a trigger or even the push of a button, but with no human intervention whatsoever. Many fighting soldiers – those GIs in tin hats who are dying two a day in Iraq – will be replaced by machines backed up by surveillance technology so penetrating and pervasive that it is referred to as “military omniscience”. Any Americans involved will be less likely to carry rifles than PlayStation-style consoles and monitors that display simulated streetscapes of the kind familiar to players of Grand Theft Auto – and they may be miles from where the killing takes place.
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This is no geeky fantasy. Much of the hardware and software already exists and the race to produce the rest is on such a scale that US officials are calling it the “new Manhattan Project”. Hundreds of research projects are under way at American universities and defence companies, backed by billions of dollars, and Donald Rumsfeld’s department of defence is determined to deliver as soon as possible. The momentum is coming not only from the relentless humiliation of US forces at the hands of some determined insurgents on the streets of Baghdad, but also from a realisation in Washington that this is the shape of things to come. Future wars, they believe, will be fought in the dirty, mazy streets of big cities in the “global south”, and if the US is to prevail it needs radically new strategies and equipment.
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Tether drew this moral: “We need a network, or web, of sensors to better map a city and the activities in it, including inside buildings, to sort adversaries and their equipment from civilians and their equipment, including in crowds, and to spot snipers, suicide bombers or IEDs [improvised explosive devices] . . . This is not just a matter of more and better sensors, but, just as important, the systems needed to make actionable intelligence out of all the data.”
Darpa has a host of projects working to meet those needs, often in surprising ways. One, called Combat Zones That See, aims to scatter across cities thousands of tiny CCTV cameras, each equipped with wireless communication software that will make it possible to link their data and track the movements of every vehicle on the streets. The cameras themselves will not be that different from those found in modern mobile phones.
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Darpa’s VisiBuilding programme, meanwhile, is making “X-ray eye” sensors that can see through concrete, locating people and weapons inside buildings. And Human ID at a Distance is working on software that can identify individual people from scans of their faces, their manner of walking or even their smell, and then track them anywhere they go.
Closely related to this drive are projects involving compu-ter simulations of urban landscapes and entire cities, which will provide backdrops essential for using the data gathered by cameras and sensors. The biggest is Urban Resolve, a simulated war against a full-scale insurgency in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, in the year 2015.
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Gordon Johnson, a team leader on Project Alpha, which is developing robots for the US army, predicts that, if the robot’s gun can return fire automatically and instantly to within a metre of a location from which its sensors have detected a gunshot, it will always kill the person who has fired. “Anyone who would shoot at our forces would die,” says Johnson. “Before he can drop that weapon and run, he’s probably already dead. Well now, these cowards in Baghdad would have to pay with blood and guts every time they shoot at one of our folks. The costs of poker went up significantly. The enemy, are they going to give up blood and guts to kill machines? I’m guessing not.”
I guess my video gaming 13 year old nephew could one day find himself fighting via satellite on the front line. What comes to mind is that great scene in Robocop where the killing machines meet their match in a flight of stairs. And rudimentary signal jamming devices would soon cause chaos in the robot army. Hearts, minds, blood and sweat win wars. I wouldn’t worry about this… it’s just some weapons fetishist having a wank.
The belief that Tech will save the world (for the fascists) is just as misquided as the belief that tech is The End of the World (for the rest of us). Both are incorrect.
We already “out-tech” in every 3rd world backwater battle in which we engage, by incredible amounts. And we still get our asses handed to us. “Increasing the Tech” doesnt change that — its an entirely misleading paradigm. How much *more tech* will fix the situation? Its similar to the national debt situation: if it’s $9 trillion now and we’re in the tubes, why not $200 trillion? its meaningless. and “Out-teching” in this situation is similaly meaningles.
We regulars neednt fear being out-teched: WE ALREADY ARE.
Line from apocalypse now, paraphrased:
Q: “How can that villager think he can beat us, in a UH-11 Huey gunship, heavily armed with 50 caliber guns, rockets, infrared and comm systems, with a bow and arrow??!?”
A: “How do you think you could ever defeat someone who would meet you in battle with a bow? He will never be defeated”.
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Now: yes, an area can be depopulated– if that was the goal, a nuke would handle it. But that’s not what control is about, is it? A living, working population in Baghdad, paying tribute to the empire and giving up their Oil, is not the same thing as a depopulated mess that costs billions to mess with.
Those in control need those people and those resources, for their economic structures. Only *some* companies benefit from costly hi-tech interventions. The rest eventually get impatient for their turn at the profits.
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Moral: Yes, we can beat them, with a bow.
interesting interview with a dude who survived an explosion in the basment of WTC.
http://www.thisisdevon.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=141529&command=displayContent&sourceNode=141513&contentPK=16094683&moduleName=InternalSearch&formname=sidebarsearch
The Simpsons were way ahead of DARPA on this one:
Commandant: The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_War_of_Lisa_Simpson
these high-tech toys are useless in the face of diminishing available energy, 40.7% solar conversion or not. and this report is being based on the companys’ PR peoples spin aka “under perfect conditions, if everything goes right, in the correct phase of the moon it’ll work as advertised.” just like the “smart-bombs” that were so hyped up, and damned near every other high-tech toy the war machine churns out with a enormous price-tag that doesn’t work nearly as well as the general populace is led to believe.
I’m pleased to see the optimism out there on this issue. It’s a big mistake, however, to believe that this crap is some kind of flash in the pan pipe dream. If you look into the amount of effort and money that is being thrown at this, you’ll conclude: this isn’t a joke. They want this more than anything. And robots are being used, today, to kill people. That’s not speculation about some grim future. That’s happening now. It’s simple remote control, granted, but the autonomous and semi-autonomous mode apps are forthcoming.
I don’t see how the system stays up long enough for this stuff to crawl and swarm out of the university/military labs in the ways They desire. But I’ve been wrong before.
I’m afraid the machine will continue to exert an influence beyond its proper bounds for a long time. Even if the technocratic world eventually has to confine itself to a self-gated ghetto, it needs resrouces to run and due to the absolutist nature of machine logic, its not going to stop.
Increasing power costs only further incentivize better methods to acquire it, and like all incentive dynamics, it doesn’t necessarily take conscious decisions for the incentives to have real effects on priorities.
What reason is there to think that the machine won’t last another hundred years at least? If oil runs out, there’s still nuclear for a long while yet, even taking into account peak nuke (which we may have already passed.)
I wasn’t referring to just energy. Assume They have infinite energy. There are raw material scarcity issues and the strategic threat wildcards, like weather, economic disaster and any number of other scenarios. Indeed, it would be STUPID to assume that energy scarcity alone is going to collapse this thing. It could crawl along for a long, long time. Or not. Nobody knows.
Great topic, Kevin. Funny- I’ve been tinkering with a short story/screen play about this stuff for several months. Truth is always stranger than fiction…
The real driver now for this is initiative is the rise and continued success of 4th generation warfare combined with an opponent who does not fear dying in his attack due to his religious beliefs. There really isn’t any military, or perhaps even political, countermeasure for this. All we can do is take casualties until we give up. Because the other guy won’t. Neither will his cousin. Or his sister. Or his kid.
We can’t field our own suicide commandos in response. (At least not in large numbers; “Onward Christian Soldiers” notwithstanding), so the best countermeasure we can muster, (goes the E-ring reasoning), is to eliminate the OPFOR’s ability to create US casualties by removing most of our soldiers from the actual combat zone.
These “robots” really don’t need to be very autonomous, although the ability to swarm them or slave them to a controlled unit is handy. They can be remotely operated almost continously by shifts of operators. (Who don’t even need to be in the military, which certainly will make for some interesting RoE…) Is the great success of vivid, squad-based First Person Shooter games like “Americas Army” and “Battlefield 2” really very surprising in this context? Think about what kind of people will *want* to join an army where *you* can respawn, but the other guy can’t? Great job program for that burgeoning federal prisoner population, methinks…
The big difficulty in all this has been how to provide a robust, secure, high-bandwidth link to each of these beauties. Without getting into it too much, let me just say that this has been solved in the lab, (at least well enough to filed first gen equipment), and efforts to operationalize it are well under way. This sort of telepresence will ultimately have a profound effect on not only the nature of warfare, but throughout society.
Better get back to work on my pet project before somebody else gets to Hollywood before me. I’m thinking of casting Clint Eastwood as the grizzled but troubled triple amputee ex-NCO who is the toughest bastard in the cubicles.
Don’t forget: the “enemy” is not some towel-head, four thousand miles away: it’s YOU when you decide you’ve had enough with a fascist goverment. Ultimately, these weapons will be used to keep the people in the home country on the straight and narrow. If you think the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots were government run wild, just wait for the future, when they know every move you make.
[…] In other words, the touchy-feely, clean green electric Hummers of the future are going to be a spinoffs from Pentagon death ray and super cannon projects. (Same as it ever was.) The military needs the energy density that this EEstor thing provides for weapon systems. Weirdly, there was no mention of the autonomous hunter/killer robots. Oh yes, those projects need power too… […]