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Military Robots and the Laws of War
P. W. Singer

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 understandingof technologydominated 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 seenmore 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 thecheap, 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. Manyobservers 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 technologyin modern warfare, Afghanistan and Iraq have for the first time proved the value of a technology that will truly revolutionize warfare—robotics.

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-FirstCentury, just published by Penguin.

Winter 2009 ~ 25
Adapted from Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century by P. W. Singer. Printed by arrangement with the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) 2009 by P. W. Singer. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.

P. W. Singer

When U.S. forces went into Iraq, the originalinvasion 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 takingto 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 seeinghere 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,...