Aye, Robot!
Technology can’t change the rules of war.
By Tim Fernholz, Georgetown University
Wednesday June 7, 2006
The soldiers sprint up to a house, guns at the ready and hurl something through the window. As the glass shatters, the package falls to the floor, flips over and rolls forward, its internal motors whining as its head spins upright and its tank treads roll over debris. This is our hero: Packbot. Using the robot as an extra set of eyes, the soldiers run into the house and clear it of hostiles with nary a casualty. The day is saved, and our electronic hero has struck a blow for democracy, freedom and the American way.
 Of course, this is just an Army promotional video, "Assault on Normandy," presented by iRobot, a leading (and unfortunately named, given the Isaac Asimov reference) provider of commercial, industrial and military robotics technology, including the Packbot. The video was shown at a recent Heritage Foundation panel entitled "Robots: The Future is Here." But contrary to the claims of conservative tech enthusiasts, the future isn’t here yet: A closer look at what the panel promised, and the plans of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, shows an over-emphasis on technology in place of traditional military strategy. Whatever your views on the war in Iraq or war in general, this technological tunnel vision is hurting our national security.
Take the aspirations of iRobot founder Helen Greiner. Her company markets Packbot (500 are already in the field), which, like its vacuum cleaner forebears, has attachments to perform tasks from surveillance to bomb detection. It’s been successful in Iraq as a method of disarming (or at least setting off) Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and scoping out caves suspected of harboring terrorists in Afghanistan. Like its airborne counterpart, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), it helps minimize military casualties by keeping soldiers away from work that is, in the robotics mantra, ‘dirty, dangerous or dull,’ and increasing their situational awareness. As one officer quoted by Greiner said, "When a robot dies, you don’t have to send a letter to its mother."
This is a fine sentiment, and in these limited uses, robotic technology is assisting our troops. But Greiner argues that these robotic advances are a "disruptive" technology that will create a major military paradigm shift (her comparison was with fire). Her company plans to create more autonomous, armed robots and integrate them into Future Combat Systems (FCS), which is a meta-program of the Defense Department. FCS (whose unnerving slogan is "One Team: Army/Defense/Industry") is part of Rumsfeld’s plan to streamline military support operations. The term for all of this is network centric warfare, which is the use of information technology to link soldiers, weapons systems and surveillance operations.
A major validation of network centric warfare occurred in the invasion of Afghanistan. Special Forces troops, employing precision bombing and UAVs, augmented local allies the Northern Alliance to drive out the Taliban. The success of U.S. technology there prompted Army planners to try replicating that strategy in Iraq. But as Army War College Professor Stephen Biddle has written, this "Afghan Model" of warfare can only apply in certain situations; and the most important criteria in those situations is a close-to-equal balance between the quality and number of ground troops on each side (in that case Taliban v. Northern Alliance). Robots cannot make up for a gap in manpower between sides.
But in the course of the Iraq war planning, Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks won a now-infamous bureaucratic battle with General Eric Shinseki, who recommended 500,000 troops to secure Iraq. In the end, the U.S. deployed 170,000 soldiers. But, as the nature of the war changed from conventional (destroying Saddam Hussein’s army) to unconventional (reconstruction, counter-insurgency and peacekeeping), the failure of this strategy became apparent. Lawrence Korb, a military expert at the Center for American Progress, says, "They ignored [General Anthony] Zinni and Shinseki, and they thought technology can substitute for troops. It doesn’t substitute in an insurgency."
The zenith of this over-emphasis on technology is the FCS, the subject of the promotional video. FCS promises to combine a wide variety of components, from software to robots to vehicles, which promise increased combat effectiveness. But the program’s costs are ballooning, and 52 of 53 components have not been proven in combat testing. The FCS could go down the path of famous defense industry boondoggles like the Osprey, missile defense and Star Wars: costly, always in production, never quite there.
But beyond the monetary costs of failure, there is the human — and security — cost. The Marine Corps manual says "Any doctrine which attempts to reduce warfare to ratios of forces, weapons and equipment neglects the impact of the human will on the conduct of war and is therefore inherently flawed." And that seems true: A recent look at network centric warfare in The New Republic revealed that this warfare can be just as confusing as war without computers and that low-tech countermeasures exist to fight American superiority. Even the networked supply lines gave insurgents an advantage; retired Colonel T.X. Hammes told TNR that in 2004, "the insurgents started to hit the supply convoys hard … [B]ecause we were doing nearly just-in-time supply and not building ‘iron mountains,’ the forces in Iraq faced a real logistics crisis."
So what should we be prioritizing? Our over-stretched and over-stressed troops. By returning the National Guard and Reserve forces to their traditional roles and increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, we will have the forces necessary to fight asymmetrical warfare more effectively. This will require real leadership in Congress and the executive branch — and a thorough re-thinking of how to address low-intensity conflicts in the Middle East — in order to shift financial resources from defense contractors to troops.
In the full-length version of the FCS promotional video, there is a momentary pause in the fictional battle. A younger soldier turns to his commander as a column of enemy troops approaches their position and says, "Sergeant, don’t you think — I mean, we’re gonna need more guys!" The Sergeant replies, "No, Garrett. Not today," before the tech-augmented troops destroy their enemies. One can imagine almost the same conversation taking place between Rumsfeld and General Shinseki before the invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, Iraq hasn’t turned out like a promotional video.
Illustration: August J. Pollak
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I agree that technology in warfare will decrese casualties, however many soldiers go onto the battlefield fully aware that death is eminent, or at least threatening. I believe that a future dependancy on AI and robotic technology will end in the same manor as the boxoffice hit the ‘Matrix’ did for humankind, terribly.
— Lauryn Dewitski - Jun 12, 07:35 PM - #