{"id":111671,"date":"2018-05-21T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-05-21T11:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=111671"},"modified":"2018-05-19T19:53:46","modified_gmt":"2018-05-19T18:53:46","slug":"the-u-s-army-is-turning-to-robot-soldiers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/05\/the-u-s-army-is-turning-to-robot-soldiers\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Army Is Turning to Robot Soldiers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Right now, they\u2019re used for reconnaissance and explosives. Soon, they\u2019ll be on the battlefield alongside troops. Then comes the hard part. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The Foster-Miller TALON small-tracked military robot, designed by QinetiQ.
Photographer: David Mansell\/Camera Press\/Redux<\/p><\/div>\n

18 May 2018 – <\/em>From the spears hurled by Romans to the missiles launched by fighter pilots, the weapons humans use to kill each other have always been subject to improvement. Militaries seek to make\u00a0each one ever-more lethal and, in doing so, better\u00a0protect the soldier\u00a0who wields it. But in the next evolution of combat, the U.S. Army is heading down a path that may\u00a0lead humans off the battlefield entirely.<\/p>\n

Over the next few years, the Pentagon is poised to spend almost $1 billion for a range of robots designed to complement combat troops. Beyond scouting and explosives\u00a0disposal, these new machines will sniff out hazardous chemicals or other agents, perform complex reconnaissance and even carry a soldier\u2019s gear.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithin five years, I have no doubt there will be robots in every Army formation,\u201d said Bryan McVeigh, the Army\u2019s project manager for force protection.\u00a0He touted a record 800 robots fielded over\u00a0the past 18 months. \u201cWe\u2019re going from talking about robots to actually building and fielding programs,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cThis is an exciting time to be working on robots with the Army.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s just the beginning.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon has split its robot platforms into light, medium and heavy categories. In April, the Army awarded a $429.1 million contract to two Massachusetts companies, Endeavor Robotics of Chelmsford and Waltham-based QinetiQ North America, for small bots weighing fewer than 25 pounds. This spring, Endeavor also landed two contracts<\/a> worth $34 million from the Marine Corps for small and midsized robots.<\/p>\n

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A man walks past a QinetiQ modular advanced armed robotic system at a convention in Washington.
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski\/Bloomberg<\/p><\/div>\n

In October, the Army awarded Endeavor $158.5 million for a class of more than 1,200 medium robots, called the Man-Transportable Robotic System, Increment II, weighing less than 165 pounds. The MTRS robot, designed to detect explosives as well as chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear threats, is scheduled to enter service by late summer 2019. The Army plans to determine its needs for a larger, heavier class of robot later this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a recognition that ground robots can do a lot more, and there\u2019s a lot of capabilities that can and should be exploited,\u201d said Sean Bielat, Endeavor\u2019s chief executive officer. Specifically, he points to\u00a0\u201cthe dull, the dirty and the dangerous\u201d infantry tasks as those best suited to robotics.<\/p>\n

During combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department amassed an inventory of more than 7,000 robots, with much of the hardware designed to neutralize improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Military brass were trying to quickly solve a vexing problem that was killing troops, but the acquisition strategy led to a motley assortment of devices that trade journal Defense News last year called \u201ca petting zoo<\/a> of various ground robots.\u201d<\/p>\n

This approach also meant that each \u201cpet\u201d was essentially a one-off device used for a single task. The Army\u2019s current approach is to field more inter-operable robots with a common chassis, allowing different sensors and payloads to be attached, along with standardized controllers for various platforms, said McVeigh, a retired Army colonel.<\/p>\n

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A U.S. army robot operated in Iraq by soldiers from an explosive-ordnance disposal company in 2005. Photographer: DAVID FURST\/AFP<\/p><\/div>\n

This strategy is also geared toward affordability. \u201cIf we want to change payloads, then we can spend our money on changing the payloads and not having to change the whole system,\u201d he said. While it ramps up to use its newer robots,\u00a0the Army will retain about 2,500 of the medium and small robots from the older fleet.<\/p>\n

Amid their many capacities, none of the current or planned U.S. infantry robots is armed\u2014yet. Armed robots are hardly new, of course, with South Korea deploying sentry gun-bots in the demilitarized zone fronting North Korea and various countries flying drones equipped with a variety of weapons.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust strapping a conventional weapon onto a robot doesn\u2019t necessarily give you that much\u201d for ground troops, said\u00a0Bielat, the Endeavor Robotics CEO. \u201cThere is occasional interest in weaponizing robots, but it\u2019s not particularly strong interest. What is envisioned in these discussions is always man-in-the-loop, definitely not autonomous use of weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, depending on one\u2019s perspective, machines that kill autonomously are either a harbinger of a \u201cTerminator\u201d-style dystopia or a logical evolution of warfare. This new generation of weaponry would be armed and able to \u201csee\u201d and assess a battle zone faster and more thoroughly than a human\u2014and react far more quickly.\u00a0What happens next is where the topic veers into a moral,\u00a0perhaps existential, morass.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems inevitable that technology is taking us to a point where countries will face the question of whether to delegate lethal decision-making to machines,\u201d said Paul Scharre, a senior fellow and director of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we went to war and no one slept uneasy at night, what does that say about us?\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Last year, 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence, including Elon Musk, the billionaire founder\u00a0of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, sent a letter to the United Nations urging a ban on lethal autonomous weapons.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend,\u201d the letter stated, warning of a \u201cPandora\u2019s box\u201d being opened with such systems.<\/p>\n

To date, 26 countries have joined calls for a ban<\/a> on fully autonomous weapons, including 14 nations in Latin America, according to the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Notably absent from this list are nations with robust defense industries that research AI and robotics\u2014countries\u00a0such as the U.S., Russia, Israel, France, Germany, South Korea and the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n

The campaign<\/a>\u00a0was launched\u00a0five years ago by activists alarmed at the prospect of machines wielding \u201cthe power to decide who lives or dies on the battlefield.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you buy into the notion that it\u2019s a moral and humanitarian issue\u2014that you have machines making life-and-death decisions on the battlefield\u2014then it\u2019s a very simple issue,\u201d said Steve Goose, director of Human Rights Watch\u2019s arms division and a co-founder of the campaign. \u201cPeople have a sense of revulsion over this.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Kobra, a bomb-disposal robot from Endeavor Robotics.
Photographer: Daniel Karmann\/dpa\/AP Photo<\/p><\/div>\n

Not long ago, such futuristic software seemed, if not quite impossible, at least 30 years away. Given the pace of research, however,\u00a0that\u2019s no longer the case\u2014a fact that has given the effort by Musk, Goose and others new urgency.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems that each year, that estimate has come down,\u201d Goose said. Autonomous weapons systems are \u201cyears, not decades\u201d hence, he said in an interview last month from Geneva, where a UN group convened its fifth annual conference on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems.<\/p>\n

Much of the recent discussion has focused on defining the terms of debate\u00a0and where human control for lethal decisions should lie. There are also questions as to how quickly such machines will proliferate and how to deal with such technology in the hands of rogue, non-state actors.<\/p>\n

Over time, Goose said, the campaign will \u201cconvince these governments that every nation is going to be better off if no nation has these weapons.\u201d But Scharre said there\u2019s no chance the UN will agree to a legally binding treaty to ban autonomous weapons. He predicts that \u201ca critical mass\u201d of nations supporting some type of ban could pursue an agreement outside the UN.<\/p>\n

While proponents may argue that autonomous robot soldiers will shield soldiers from harm, they will also remove the bloody consequences of armed conflict, a knowledge that \u201cputs a valuable brake on the horrors of war,\u201d said Scharre, a former Army Ranger.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a value of someone being able to appreciate the human consequences of war,\u201d he said. \u201cA world without that could be potentially more harmful. If we went to war and no one slept uneasy at night, what does that say about us?\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 bloomberg.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

18 May 2018 – From the spears hurled by Romans to the missiles launched by fighter pilots, the weapons humans use to kill each other have always been subject to improvement. Right now, robots are used for reconnaissance and explosives. Soon, they\u2019ll be on the battlefield alongside troops. Then comes the hard part.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":111674,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}