The Rise of the Machines: Why Increasingly "Perfect" Weapons Help Perpetuate Our Wars and Endanger Our Nation

Abstract

Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be. --Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. --Isaac Asimov AT THE START of 2004, when I was the commander of a military intelligence company in Baghdad, my company received five of the first Raven unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed to Iraq. (1) The Raven UAV is a small, hand-launched reconnaissance plane that has probably never figured prominently in any discussion about the ethics of waging war via remote-controlled robots. This drone is not armed, nor can it range more than a few miles from its controller. It looks more like a large toy plane than a weapon of war. To my troops, I seemed quite enthused about this capability. Not all of this excitement was for show. I actually did find the technology and the fact that my troops were among the first to employ these drones in Iraq to be exciting. I had fully bought into the fantasy that such technology would make my country safe from terrorist attack and invincible in war. I also felt, however, a sense of unease. One thing I worried about was socalled collateral damage. I knew that, because of the small, gray viewing screens that came with these drones as well as their limited loiter time, it might prove too easy to misinterpret the situation on the ground and relay false information to combat troops with big guns. I suspected that, if we did contribute to civilian deaths, my troops and I would not handle it well. But at the same time, I worried that we might cope quite well. Since we were physically removed from the action, maybe such an event would not affect us much. Would it look and feel, I wondered, like sitting at home, a can of Coke in hand, watching a war movie? Would we feel no more than a passing pang that the show that day had been a particularly hard one to watch? And, if that is how we felt, what would that say about us? It did not take long for a vivid nightmare to bring my fears to the surface. In this dream, I saw a little Iraqi girl and her family in a car, frightened, caught in the middle of a major U.S. military operation, trying to escape both insurgents and encircling U.S. forces. Believing the car to be filled with insurgents, my troops followed this car with one of our Ravens and alerted a checkpoint to the approaching threat. When a Bradley destroyed the car with a TOW missile, the officers in our command post cheered, clapping each other on the back. I awoke filled with dread. I now recognize this dream as a symptom of cognitive dissonance, the psychological result of holding two or more conflicting cognitions. In this instance, my identity as a U.S. Army officer and all this identity's attendant values (duty to follow legal orders, loyalty to my fellow soldiers, and so on) clashed with my fear of harming innocents. It also clashed with a growing feeling that there was something fundamentally troubling about how we were choosing to wage war. In this essay, I will not argue that waging war remotely does not have ethical advantages, for it clearly does. For one, armed drones and other robots are incapable of running concentration camps and committing rape and other crimes that still require human troops on the ground. Indeed, removing combat operators from the stress of life-threatening danger reduces their potential to commit those crimes that they could still conceivably commit via drones. Neuroscientists are finding that the neural circuits responsible for conscious self-control are highly vulnerable to stress. (2) When these circuits shut down, primal impulses go unchecked. (3) This means that soldiers under extreme physical duress can commit crimes that they would normally be unable to commit. Another ethical advantage is that, compared to most other modern weapons systems, armed drones do a better job of helping combat operators to distinguish and target combatants instead