The heavy use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan is perhaps the biggest innovation in warfare in the last ten years. It’s the beginning of a much more radical change where sophisticated remote-controlled or even autonomous machines take over more and more warfare.
Questions: How fast is the technology improving and how far will it go? How soon will we see remote-controlled land-based weapons? What is the likelihood that in, say, 30 years you could stage an invasion largely through remote control.
What are the political implications? Presumably this will further benefit the rich and technologically advanced nations. Today these countries tend to be very sensitive about casualties and very reluctant to send ground troops. If war could largely be conducted remotely, presumably ground interventions would carry much less political risk and therefore be carried out more often. At the same time remote-controlled robots could potentially be used more carefully avoiding civilian casualties compared to missiles, planes or ground troops.
Not very much, I figure. Modern wars are guerilla wars. If you’re the invading force, success depends on building relationships with the country you’re trying to conquer, propaganda campaigns, and media management. Those things all depend on human beings. If you’re the guerillas trying to repel the invaders, chances are that you can’t afford any drones or robots.
The human beings would do the relationships and propaganda; the robots (controlled by humans) would do the fighting.
Hacking wouldn’t be a serious issue in asymmetric warfare because one side would have vastly superior technology; I would bet the US military could create weapons software which is completely impregnable to all the but the most sophisticated governments. At the very least, impregnable to outfits like the Taliban.
The psychological element is also important. Vietnam showed that even a third-world country could defeat a superpower by inflicting enough casualties to destroy political support at home. Guerrilla armies live in the hope that even if they are losing the battles they may be inflicting sufficient pain that the other side will eventually give up. But what if the other side is just throwing robots at you and barely suffering any casualties. Fighting that kind of enemy would be extremely disheartening and it may be the guerrillas who give up.
Very fast (in the US at least, and probably in Europe as well…I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Japanese were doing a lot of R&D on this too since they have a really big investment in commercial robot projects). The US has land, sea and air prototypes in the pipeline for weaponized unmanned vehicles…as well as unmanned support vehicles for logistics (tactical and strategic) and medical functions. And I think the pace is increasing wrt development.
I don’t think that poorer nations will be able to make the investment needed to develop this kind of technology themselves. Just like they weren’t able to make the investment in much of our current technology…so, warfare will continue to be asymmetric.
Definitely. However, even when this technology becomes more prevalent I can see countries like the US still being reluctant to send in our mechanized minions for several reasons. First off, they aren’t going to replace soldiers…they are only another enhancement for soldiers. Secondly the technology is going to be costly…I could see situations where a poor nation fighting a rich one would be more than willing to trade a few cheap human fighters for an expensive unmanned combat vehicle. Lastly, consider the negative propaganda aspects of having unmanned combat vehicles engage and wipe out a bunch of rebels. Even if we (or the Euros) were in the right in the conflict there is going to be a VERY negative reaction to a bunch of unmanned combat vehicles mowing down a bunch of armed insurgents.
Maybe. I suppose you could hold fire longer and take a more dispassionate view of being fired on or attacked. However, there are still humans in the loop, so you are still going to have mistakes and accidents made.
Remote drones advance to the point where ground troops are rarely needed. This effectively makes it impossible for a large modern nation to use ground troops in any significant role because of the objections of their own population to putting their sons and daughters at needless risk. arguments about the cost will not be persuasive in this situation. Money over lives? The population at large will not accept it.
Now consider a local population resisting american imperialism (these days refered to as an “insurgency”) announces that it will no longer attack any american troops. They will only destroy remote drones.
How long until they gain world sympathy?
Right now, no matter how right the local population is in their fight, they cannot fight without taking american lives. This then justifies the continued war against them no matter how wrong that war in itself may be.
If on the other hand, they can fight with while maintaining a principaled position of never killing, it won’t matter how wrong they are, or how right the war against them. It will become vitaully impossible to maintain the pretense for the war against them.
I think remote drones do not favour more developed countries. Any ass backwards 3rd world country will know that all they have to do is hold out for a while while refusing to actually take lives on any rare occasions where they are given the oppertunity. And they will be victorious when the population of the more developed country, without being angered by the deaths of their own citizens will eventually become disgusted with the killing of the 3rd world population and puts and end to the war.
You wont see very many inovations or a long term curve in how far the weapons will eventually progress. Drones are not exactly a new phenom, the airforce was flying drones in the Vietnam war for recon.
Whats changed is that now , weapons have been mated onto the drone and allows telepoperation, in terms of service politics, as soon as they are no longer needed , the reapers will be phased out and replaced by manned variants.
Actaully great for third world countries, the scud missile really took off among the lesser nations because it was pilotless and you could fire em off by the dozens and get no worse accuracy than your manned program.
Airforces tend to require the really smart people, who become a liability towards the usual less educated despots, a copy cat version of the reaper or an air defense version would net them the same result as a full squadron of mig 21’s for a whole lot cheaper investment.
I don’t see why, since unmanned vehicles are capable of better performance. Especially planes, since a machine can handle more g-forces. As I understand it, it was service politics that held back the obvious step of arming drones, because of tests showing that the drones are simply better at fighting.
They might be better at unmanned combat, at the moment we have specs on what they can do tele-operated. I’ll give them the bennifit of the doubt and agree that in quite a lot of respects they will probably be better than the manned versions.
The problem here long term, is that they might be too good or at least as good as what we have currently. When you can crate up your entire airforce or a good part of it, for future conflicts, you dont need as many pilots, navigators, ground crew, techs and all down the line, thus fewer command slots , fewer generals, less pork for the congressional districts.
Since the drones cannot do air lift , at least not yet , thats still safe for now , but fighter pilots and bomber pilots eventually go on to become generals, so bet on those programs to be taken over by other organizations using war surplus reapers and predators, and a phase out of the program by the airforce.
Declan
Until we embarrass ourselves at some time in the future by our manned air force getting slaughtered by an otherwise less powerful enemy that stuck with drones. Warfare is Darwinian like that.
It will be a long time before that happens, before drones the big thing was surface to air missiles. Did not matter how fancy an airplane you had , the russian sams were garunteed to make the average country safe from marauding american imperialists.
As you say , warfare is a darwinian process, for them and for us.
I think political pressure to reduce casualties would overwhelm any service inertia at least in the long run. And actually I don’t this technology would spread that easily to third-world governments let alone guerrilla groups. How many countries have mastered the smart-bomb technology that the US used in the 1991 Gulf War? This isn’t going to be just about robots. It will be robots plus recon drones plus satellites plus smart software processing all this information to create a virtual battlefield plus highly skilled humans who use all this technology to work together to control the robot army.
I would guess that casualties suffered by Americans in future conflicts get fretted about even more than they are now. I can imagine some African flareup in, I dunno, 2026, in which three marines die, and the press will pay more attention to them than to 4000 dead Americans in the Iraq War, 58000 dead in Vietnam or 407000 dead in WW2 because three dead marines in drone-laden 2026 will seem to epitomize the word “unnecessary.”
Popular Mechanics articleabout an unmanned helicopter-sniper that is being developed by the military. Sniper-bots are probably the next phase of the technology that will actually be implemented. They could fly in the air or be placed on strategic locations at various points on the ground. The ground-based ones wouldn’t need a whole lot of power (which is likely to be a big constraint for robot warfare) and could be controlled by a relay of humans. They would never need rest, food or sleep. They could be placed in all sorts of locations which are impossible for human snipers with many more options for camouflage and protection.
