Rise of the Machines

12/06/2009

Drone warfare is no longer sci-fi - how long before technology falls into the wrong hands?

Jasper Hamill

When Isaac Asimov first used the word robotics, he imagined machines would make life easier for humans. On the battlefield, at least, he was right. Robots are now an integral part of modern warfare, helping soldiers kill enemies more effectively, with less risk of human casualties.

Even poorer countries and terrorist organisations are making their own war robots, as the use of machines designed to kill changes the nature of warfare. A country armed with robotic weapons can now choose to use force against an enemy, without even risking the lives of its troops.

However, Peter Warren Singer, who is a fellow at the think tank Brookings Institution and a world authority on hi-tech warfare, has this warning: “Trends are already happening in our politics that this technology may take to their final, logical ending point. We don’t have a draft or conscription anymore. We don’t declare war, we don’t pay higher taxes or buy war bonds anymore.

"Now we have this technology that allows us to carry out acts of force, but without sending our people into harm’s way and all the political ramifications that brings. The barriers to war in our society are already dropping. This could be the technology that allows them to hit the ground.”

When American troops fought  Iraq during the first Gulf War the military used no robotic ground units whatsoever. Now there are an estimated 12,000 in use in the country – roughly the same number of tanks as Britain had at the end of WWI. During the invasion in 2003 America used a handful of airborne drones; it now has around 7,000 in service. America leads the way in robotic warfare, but around 47 nations are working on the technology, mostly believed to be flying drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Israel has designed several drones, including one called a Harpy that can fly around without human guidance, using sensors to detect enemy radar signals then blowing its targets to kingdom come. Iran also builds its own drones, apparently giving two to Hizbollah to use during their last confrontation with Israel.

With the spread of the technology the price of building a very basic, but potentially lethal, machine has dropped so significantly that designs for open source (meaning the plans are freely available) UAVs can be found on the internet and built for less than £300, raising the prospect that terrorists could manufacture their own – using GPS devices and some of the hi-tech components in iPhones or Nintendo Wii controllers to help their craft fly.

British military intelligence is said to be seriously considering the possibility that terrorists are planning a spectacular attack using several drones at once to attack civilian or military targets.

Singer explores the revolution in robotic warfare in his forthcoming book Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and 21st Century Conflict. “We are well behind in our understanding of just how far science has come already,” he says. “We look at robotics as what one defence analyst described to me as ‘mere science fiction’ and yet the reality is amazing.

"There are dilemmas and questions this new capability presents for politics and society that haven’t even been considered. Look at the advent of strategic bombing: battles no longer just take place on the frontlines, they have started to take place in the cities. It raised new questions of law: what is legal to target; what is not legal to target? It’s the same parallel with robotics, because they present you with these really tough questions to figure out.”   

The robots used for modern warfare are still some way from the machines of the Terminator movies – but within a decade we could see fully autonomous robot warriors used by larger states. The most deadly machines are currently “flown by wire” from afar, such as the Reaper UAV, a so-called hunter-killer (a name taken from the Terminator movies), which can be remote controlled to kill militants using Hellfire II missiles.

Britain owns two, flown from Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, but at the same facility the US operates around half of all its offensive UAVs including the more famous Predator drone. Pilots flying from Creech enact the strange ritual of commuting to and from war every time they have to work a shift, meaning they could spend a day killing militants in Iraq and the evening at home with their family.

The technology used to control the flying drones is deliberately intuitive, designed to chime with what one robotics expert has termed “Game Boy warfare”. Flying a UAV is so similar to playing a computer game that a 19-year-old, Joel Clark, became the US airforce’s top gun and now trains prospective pilots. Britain, on the other hand, only allows pilots with combat experience to fly its planes.

On the ground there are several robots now seeing active service. Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System (MAARS) is the latest and comes armed with a M240B medium machine gun and aiming scope, allowing it to kill targets from miles away, although it still needs what scientists call “a human in the loop” to control it from afar.

All the US’s models of MAARS’s predecessor, called TALON SWORDS, are said to have been withdrawn from service in Iraq. Rumours suggested this was because a malfunctioning unit turned its guns on American soldiers – an allegation denied by its manufacturer, Foster-Miller.

But the holy grail of robotics is to design a machine that can think for itself, acting without human involvement and making decisions in the heat of battle. It could be, in Singer’s words, “cool, calm and collected”, able to process battlefield information without the emotion that would cloud human judgement. Many war crimes happen when a soldier’s friend is killed, prompting an indiscriminate response and leading to civilian casualties.

A robot doesn’t care whether its friend gets killed and won’t lose its temper. Conversely, Singer says, “robots have no sense of empathy; no sense of guilt. They look at an 80-year-old grandmother in her wheelchair the very same way they look at a T80 tank”.


Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, has campaigned for international legislation to manage the use of war robots. He fears that terrorists could soon take advantage of cheap technology freely available on the internet to supplement suicide bombings with robotic assaults. “Our intelligence services are watching out for it already,” he says.

“I was told that they are expecting one big terrorist attack, when Al Qaeda will use many remote-control drones or planes. You don’t even need to remote control them anymore because you can simply build a drone with a one-metre wing span that can carry quite a bit of explosives.
“All a terrorist would need to do is attach a mobile phone to it, all the instructions are there on the internet, and then text it with the
co-ordinates of the target.

"The big problem is that you can have a lot of them going at once and they can’t be detected by radar. So it’s a pretty scary prospect.” One man has already been thrown off eBay for selling the software and plans that would enable the construction of a machine-gun toting automaton, Sharkey claims.

On the internet there are communities dedicated to the production of robots similar to the ones used by the military. The usefulness of airborne drones lies in the fact they can evade radar. If a terrorist organisation wished to bomb a football stadium, for instance, they would find it easier to fly in bombs in rather than try to sneak past security with one in their backpack.

How likely is this theory? Chris Anderson, editor of leading tech magazine Wired and an open source drone fanatic, started a community called DIY Drones that exists to propagate the technology to build cheap flying machines with autopilots.

“We’re experiencing a moment when all the components for an autopilot are available for only a few dollars. This is stuff that cost the Apollo space programme tens of millions of dollars and you can buy it for the price of a cup of coffee,” says Anderson.

The autopilot software he distributes cannot be sold outside America, because it’s counted as a weapon, but the rules didn’t anticipate that anyone would give the plans away. So could terrorists use his plans? “They don’t need us,” Anderson says, “because they already have this stuff. This technology is glaringly obvious, so anyone with a high school education can figure this out.

“Hizbollah had UAVs before we came along. Why aren’t the skies dark with them yet? I don’t know. It’s certainly not a lack of ability. Inside your Wii or iPhone is everything you need for a UAV. This technology is everywhere.”

It’s all still some way from making scifi nightmares a reality, but the threat is very real. Already, US forces in Iraq have found a basic robot that could deliver improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

We’re not about to start fighting the machines and neither are they likely to exterminate us anytime soon. The threat, as with every other weapon invented, lies in the human behind the machine.