The rise of the robot warriors

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen the unprecedented rise in the use of robots by the United States both on and above the battlefield.
Peter W. Singer, the director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, has been tracking these changes and their impacts. He focuses his research on three core issues: the future of war, current U.S. defense needs, and the future of the U.S. defense system. Singer’s most recent book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (The Penguin Press), takes a deep and broad look into the history and future of robotics and warfare. IEEE Spectrum Contributing Editor Robert N. Charette recently spoke to Singer about how robots are not only changing warfare itself but also the politics, economics, and ethics that surround warfare.


There is also the problem of our ignorance, almost willfully so. I had this remarkable experience during the book tour that really encapsulates that. I gave a talk and one of the people in attendance was a very senior Pentagon adviser—very senior, big name—who afterward was telling me about how really remarkable this was, he never imagined we had so many robots that we’re already using today, wow, he just didn’t know all this. As he is saying this, I am thinking, ”You’re the one who is helping shape the decisions on how to use them, you’re influencing funding for them, and yet you’re saying you weren’t aware of it.”
But that is not actually the thing that’s notable. He then went on to say, ”You know, this technology is coming so quickly that I bet that one day the Internet will be like in a video game with three dimensions and you’ll be able to walk around in it.”

I tell this story because my wife actually works for Linden Lab [the developers of Second Life]. I’m thinking in my head that he’s using the phrase ”one day” as if it is not even in three or five years’ time; it is the way we talk about ”one day we will live on Mars.” In his mind something like Second Life or virtual worlds is something way off in the fantasy world of one day, whereas it’s already five years old.
You don’t even have to be a really tech-savvy person to have known about it; it’s been featured on the television shows ”CSI” and ”The Office.” You just have to be tuned in to pop culture. Yet to him this is a thing that will never, ever happen. That just really struck me as the disconnect that we often have, including those in positions who really drive change the most, ironically enough.

Spectrum: I have a book by Alvin and Virginia Silverstein, published in 1983, called The Robots Are Here, which speaks of 1983 as being the year of the robots. It describes robots in factories, medicine, and the home, but there is absolutely no mention of military uses of robots. What has caused us to switch from looking at robots as toys to indispensable military hardware?

Singer: Throughout the history of war, it often is not what is technologically possible that matters the most; it’s what is viewed as bureaucratically imaginable and seen by soldiers in the field as battlefield useful. So look at the example of the machine gun; it was invented in the 1860s. We don’t actually start using it really until World War I, and even then it takes several more years of warfare before senior generals go, ”Hold it: This thing really does matter; it really is changing the way we have to fight.” Every technology has that.
So for robotics, it’s the experience post 9/11 and especially in the Iraq War. That’s where you have, I remember, one of the executives at the robot companies describing how you had people in the Pentagon who wouldn’t return their calls, and then, it’s like a switch had flipped; they are being told by those same people to ”make them as fast as you can.”
Each robotic company has their own moment like that. For iRobot, with the PackBot [a ground-based military robot], it happens when they finally get the prototypes into the hands of soldiers in Afghanistan and when the soldiers in Afghanistan won’t give them back at the end of what was supposed to be a couple of weeks of experiments. In the very first iteration of the U.S. Army’s Future Combat Systems [a $159 billion modernization program], there’s no small ground robotics in it. Now, with the new Obama administration defense budget, FCS is being gutted—except for this part [small robots] that was never part of the original plan. [Editor’s note: The entire FCS program was officially terminated on 24 June 2009]

Foster Miller [a high-tech company in Waltham, Mass.] talked about their ”ski-ski” moment in Iraq, where basically they had been able to get the robot systems out to the EOD [explosive ordnance disposal] teams, but the teams weren’t using them. The EOD guys are incredibly brave and were leaving the robots in the back of their vehicles. The ”ski-ski” moment is this tragic incident that happens over the course of a couple of days where two EOD techs are killed in Iraq, and both of them are of Eastern European heritage with last names ending in ski. And suddenly, it went from ”We leave the robots in the back of the truck” and ”We don’t use them because we’re brave” to ”You know what? We really do have to start using them.”

There are other similar experiences for all sorts of unmanned systems, such as with the [General Atomics MQ-1] Predator UAV drone, where you go from no one wants them to the top general in CENTCOM [United States Central Command] describing them as ”my most valuable weapon”—not ”my most valuable unmanned weapon” but ”my most valuable weapon overall.”