Continuing the trajectories of the past seven or so years modestly into the future as the fine folks at the Defense Research Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) and other components of the DoD's research and development community (which collective the Geek refers to as Weapons Advanced Research Investigations Group or WARPIG) are tasked to do, it is evident that reality will have caught up with sci-fi by 2015 at the latest. The people in the air-conditioned control facility in Nevada running Predators and Reapers on the other side of the Earth will be as obsolescent as the eyeball only forward controllers of past years and wars.
The High Minded Deep Thinkers of the Legal War variety are already in a tizzy over the potential of gun and missile slinging autonomous killerbots roving the earth below and the sky above looking for someone to kill, something to blow up. These academic and jurisprudential types are fretting over the prospect that without a human in the loop, future wars will of necessity be cluttered by heaps of dead non-combatants and piles of ruins which were previously hospitals, orphanages and religious facilities.
The techno-wonks reply, "Pashaw!" They argue that properly written programs will prevent such targeting errors. They add that killerbots will lack the emotions which cloud human decision making.
The Geek is not competent to comment on programming matters. He is, however, qualified by both experience and study to acknowledge that in contact, in a firefight, after being covered by slime which a moment ago was one's buddy's brains, cool and rational thought is impaired, the emotions run high and the right index finger can twitch with wild abandon.
The techo types finally argue that the pace of some combat operations such as air-to-air contact is simply too rapid for slow human mental processes. Besides, they contend, autonomous systems typified by the Navy's Phalanx Close-In Weapons System have been in use for years without controversy.
The Geek finds nothing wrong with these two contentions.
However, both the techos and the war ethicists miss a critical point. They both show a lack of understanding as to the nature and character of war. This point was also missed by the science fiction writers of past decades.
War is waged in order to force one side to submit to the policy dictates of the other. Both sides are pursuing a political end by violent means. In the eyes of each belligerent, the political goal represents a better state of peace. They can't both be right. The gods of battle determine which will prevail.
War is at root a contest not simply of arms and armies but of political will, of determination, of the capacity to endure regardless of sacrifice, regardless of misery, regardless of bloodshed and destruction. It is a contest between humans and the material agencies they create.
Historically war between enemies of equal technological capacity and levels of organisational complexity has ended either in an inconclusive stalemate or in the obliteration of one combatant's forces in the field, political will and social cohesion. Wars between belligerents which are not relatively equal in industrial/technological capacities and political/social organisational complexity have ended when one side loses political will and quits.
The only exceptions to that general statement have come when the "winning" side has such an abundance of material and human resources as well as a very high level of political will that the war ends with the total subjugation of the loser. The best, most recent examples of this are the vast number of colonial wars waged across North and South America, Africa and Asia during the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries.
Importantly, no war--that's right--no war has been a contest between materiel per se. No country has been defeated simply through the destruction of materiel and physical plant. Not the Confederate States. Not Germany in either World War. Not even Japan even after the US Air Forces had leveled square mile after square mile of every Japanese urban industrial center.
People continue wars because men of their side die in combat. In a very real sense every war reaches a stage where the dead dictate policy. Where the collective political voice of a nation demands that their dead shall not have died in vain.
People end wars because enough folks on their side have died. Because the fear and loathing of death and destruction become more powerful than the initial commitment to the goal of the war or even the belief that the dead shall not have died in vain.
When the course of political will is tracked in every war of the modern (and now the so called post-modern) period, there is a direct link between combat deaths and, first, an increase in determination, followed by a progressive enervation of political will until terminal war weariness sets in.
In short, wars are not some sort of high-tech, high-expense form of chess. Without the up-close and personal human involvement in war, there can be no outcome. Not even semi-permanent closure of hostilities.
A war waged in whole or in major part by autonomous killer robots would, at the very best, resemble the limited wars of the Eighteenth Century in Europe. The wars were limited in death. Very limited in destruction. And, very, very inconclusive. As a result wars followed one another like circus elephants in trunk-to-tail procession.
Not until the wars of the French Revolution did war become a bloody, human contest with goals beyond the adjustment of boundaries or the satisfaction of royal egos. Then and only then did war once again become a struggle of political wills with genuine and long lasting results--including, it must be added, the cause of future wars.
Even the limited war in support of policy (or as it now called "overseas contingency operations") is at root a contest of political will. For Americans this kind of war, the most common it should be noted, is particularly difficult to understand and fight. We have a particular horror of casualties, particularly those of the fatal sort, so we bend our abilities to the task of winning while saving American lives.
There is nothing wrong with desiring to save the maximum number of American lives. The Geek is all in favor of that. With one proviso.
If, in the attempt to limit American exposure to risk, the US forces fight in a way which fails to undercut the opponent's political will, the war will drag on and on without an end in sight. There will be no better state of peace emerging.
OK, to err on the side of accuracy, there is another proviso, but it is linked to the first. If the US wages war in the wrong way or uses the wrong weapons, the very fact of doing so will strengthen the enemy's political will to resist. This is particularly true when the war is, to the Americans, a mere limited effort in support of some policy, and, to the enemy, it is an existential war or a war of transcendent significance.
The war currently being waged in Afghanistan and (in pertinent part) the FATA of Pakistan is such a war. For us it is merely an excursion in policy and punishment. For the Islamist jihadists of the target area, it is a war which is both existential and transcendent.
Our stand-off way of fighting can and has inflicted casualties on the enemy. It has killed key leadership cadre members.
But (here it comes again, the big "but") it has not undercut political will. Indeed, more than adequate information exists to support the contention that the remote control Predator and Reaper operations like air delivered death generally has been defined by potential targets as pusillanimous at best. They hold us in contempt for the way we fight.
You don't win by machines breaking machines. You don't win by machines merely killing people. You don't win by killing people. You win by killing political will within a group.
This means some must be killed. But, they have to be killed in the right way. Killer robots are not and never will be able to fill that mission.
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