Pentagon officials are worried that the US military is losing its edge compared to competitors like China, and are willing to explore almost anything to stay on top\u2014including creating watered-down versions of the Terminator.<\/p>\n
Due to technological revolutions outside its control, the Department of Defense (DoD) anticipates the dawn of a bold new era of automated war within just 15 years. By then, they believe, wars could be fought entirely using intelligent robotic systems armed with advanced weapons.<\/p>\n
Last week, US defense secretary Chuck Hagel ann\u200bounced<\/a> the \u2018Defense Innovation Initiative\u2019\u2014a sweeping plan to identify and develop cutting edge technology breakthroughs \u201cover the next three to five years and beyond\u201d to maintain global US\u00a0“mili\u200btary-technological superiority.”<\/a> Areas to be covered by the DoD programme include robotics, autonomous systems, miniaturization, Big Data and advanced manufacturing, including 3D printing.<\/p>\n But just how far down the rabbit hole Hagel\u2019s initiative could go\u2014whether driven by desperation, fantasy or hubris\u2014is revealed by an overlooked Pentagon-funded study, published quietly in mid-September by the DoD National Defense University\u2019s (NDU) Center for Technology and National Security Policy in Washington DC.<\/p>\n The 72-page\u00a0d\u200bocument<\/a> throws detailed light on the far-reaching implications of the Pentagon\u2019s plan to monopolize imminent \u201ctransformational advances\u201d in biotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence, information technology, nanotechnology, and energy.<\/p>\n Hagel\u2019s initiative is being overseen by deputy defense secretary Robert O. Work, lead author of a\u00a0r\u200beport<\/a> released last January by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), \u201c20YY: Preparing for War in the Robotic Age.\u201d<\/p>\n Work\u2019s report is also cited heavily in the new study published by the NDU, a Pentagon-funded higher education institution that trains US military officials and develops government national security strategy and defense policies.<\/p>\n The NDU study warns that while accelerating technological change will \u201cflatten the world economically, socially, politically, and militarily, it could also increase wealth inequality and social stress,\u201d and argues that the Pentagon must take drastic action to avoid the potential decline of US military power: \u201cFor DoD to remain the world\u2019s preeminent military force, it must redefine its culture and organizational processes to become more networked, nimble, and knowledge-based.\u201d<\/p>\n The authors of the NDU paper, Dr James Kadtke and Dr Linton Wells, are seasoned long-term Pentagon advisers, both affiliated with the NDU\u2019s technology center which produces research \u201csupporting the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Services, and Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n Kadtke was previously a senior official at the White House\u2019s National Nanotechnology Coordinating Office, while Wells\u2014who served under Paul Wolfowitz as DoD chief information officer and deputy assistant defense secretary\u2014was until this June NDU\u2019s Force Transformation Chair.<\/p>\n Wells also chairs a little-known group known as the \u2018Highlands Forum,\u2019 which is run by former Pentagon staffer Richard O\u2019Neill on behalf of the DoD. The\u00a0Fo\u200brum<\/a> brings together military and information technology experts to explore the defense policy issues arising from the impact of the internet and globalization.<\/p>\n Explaining the Highlands Forum process in 2006 to\u00a0Gover\u200bnment Executive<\/a> magazine, Wells described the Forum as a DoD-sponsored \u201cidea engine\u201d that \u201cgenerates ideas in the minds of government people who have the ability to act through other processes\u2026 What happens out of Highlands is you get people who come back with an idea and say, \u2018Now how can I cause this to happen?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Big Data\u2019s Big Brother<\/strong><\/p>\n A key area emphasized by the Wells and Kadtke study is improving the US intelligence community\u2019s ability to automatically analyze vast data sets without the need for human involvement.<\/p>\n Pointing out that \u201csensitive personal information\u201d can now be easily mined from online sources and social media, they call for policies on \u201cPersonally Identifiable Information (PII) to determine the Department\u2019s ability to make use of information from social media in domestic contingencies\u201d\u2014in other words, to determine under what conditions the Pentagon can use private information on American citizens obtained via data-mining of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and so on.<\/p>\n Their study argues that DoD can leverage \u201clarge-scale data collection\u201d for medicine and society, through \u201cmonitoring of individuals and populations using sensors, wearable devices, and IoT [the \u2018Internet of Things\u2019]\u201d which together \u201cwill provide detection and predictive analytics.\u201d The Pentagon can build capacity for this \u201cin partnership with large private sector providers, where the most innovative solutions are currently developing.\u201d<\/p>\n In particular, the Pentagon must improve its capacity to analyze data sets quickly, by investing in \u201cautomated analysis techniques, text analytics, and user interface techniques to reduce the cycle time and manpower requirements required for analysis of large data sets.\u201d<\/p>\n Kadtke and Wells want the US military to take advantage of the increasing interconnection of people and devices via the new \u2018Internet of Things\u2019 through the use of \u201cembedded systems\u201d in \u201cautomobiles, factories, infrastructure, appliances and homes, pets, and potentially, inside human beings.\u201d Due to the advent of \u201ccloud robotics\u2026 the line between conventional robotics and intelligent everyday devices will become increasingly blurred.\u201d<\/p>\n Cloud robotics, a term coined by Google\u2019s new robotics chief, James Kuffner, allows individual robots to augment their capabilities by connecting through the internet to share online resources and collaborate with other machines. By 2030, nearly every aspect of global society could become, in their words, \u201cinstrumented, networked, and potentially available for control via the Internet, in a hierarchy of cyber-physical systems.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet the most direct military application of such technologies, the Pentagon study concludes, will be in \u201cCommand-Control-Communications, Computers and Intelligence-Surveillance-Reconnaissance (C4ISR)\u201d\u2014a field led by \u201cworld-class organizations such as the National Security Agency (NSA).\u201d<\/p>\n Clever Kill Bots in the Cloud<\/strong><\/p>\n Within this context of Big Data and cloud robotics, Kadtke and Wells enthuse that as unmanned robotic systems become more intelligent, the cheap manufacture of \u201carmies of Kill Bots that can autonomously wage war\u201d will soon be a reality. Robots could also become embedded in civilian life to perform \u201csurveillance, infrastructure monitoring, police telepresence, and homeland security applications.\u201d<\/p>\n The main challenge to such robot institutionalization will come from a \u201cpolitical backlash\u201d to robots being able to determine by themselves when to kill.<\/p>\n To counter public objections, they advocate that the Pentagon should be \u201chighly proactive\u201d in ensuring \u201cit is not perceived as creating weapons systems without a \u2018human in the loop.\u2019 It may be that DoD should publicly self-limit its operational doctrine on the use of such systems to head off public or international backlash to its development of autonomous systems.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite this PR move, they recommend that DoD should still \u201cremain ahead of the curve\u201d by developing \u201coperational doctrine for forces made up significantly or even entirely of unmanned or autonomous elements.\u201d [emphasis added]<\/p>\n The rationale is to \u201caugment or substitute for human operators\u201d as much as possible, especially for missions that are \u201chazardous,\u201d \u201cimpractical,\u201d or \u201cimpossible\u201d for humans (like, perhaps, all wars?). In just five years, the study reports, Pentagon research to improve robot intelligence will bear \u201csignificant advances.\u201d<\/p>\n Skynet by 2020s?<\/strong><\/p>\n Perhaps the most disturbing dimension among the NDU study\u2019s insights is the prospect that within the next decade, artificial intelligence (AI) research could spawn \u201cstrong AI\u201d\u2014or at least a form of \u201cweak AI\u201d that approximates some features of the former.<\/p>\n Strong AI should be able to simulate a wide range of human cognition, and include traits like consciousness, sentience, sapience, or self-awareness. Many now believe, Kadtke and Wells, observe, that \u201cstrong AI may be achieved sometime in the 2020s.\u201d<\/p>\n They report that a range of technological advances support \u201cthis optimism,\u201d especially that \u201ccomputer processors will likely reach the computational power of the human brain sometime in the 2020s\u201d\u2014Intel aims to reach this milestone by 201\u200b8<\/a>. Other relevant advances in development include \u201cfull brain simulations, neuro-synaptic computers, and general knowledge representation systems such as IBM Watson.\u201d<\/p>\n As the costs of robotics manufacturing and cloud computing plummet, the NDU paper says, AI advances could even allow for automation of high-level military functions like \u201cproblem solving,\u201d \u201cstrategy development\u201d or \u201coperational planning.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn the longer term, fully robotic soldiers may be developed and deployed, particularly by wealthier countries,\u201d the paper says (thankfully, no plans to add \u2018living tissue\u2019 on the outside are mentioned).<\/p>\n The study thus foresees the Pentagon playing a largely supervisory role over autonomous machines as increasingly central to all dimensions of warfare\u2014from operational planning to identifying threats via surveillance and social media data-mining; from determining enemy targets to actually pursuing and executing them.<\/p>\n There is no soul-searching, though, about the obvious risks of using AI to automate such core elements of military planning and operations, beyond the following oblique sentence: \u201cOne negative aspect of these trends, however, lies in the risks that are possible due to unforeseen vulnerabilities that may arise from the large scale deployment of smart automated systems, for which there is little practical experience.\u201d<\/p>\n But if the reservations of billionaire tech entrepreneur Ellon Musk are anything to go by, the Pentagon\u2019s hubris is deeply amiss. Musk, an early investor in the AI company DeepMind now owned by Google, has warned of \u201csomething dangerous\u201d happening in five years<\/a> due to \u201cclose to exponential\u201d growth of AI at the firm\u2014and some AI experts agr\u200bee<\/a>.<\/p>\n Synthetic Genetically Enhanced Laser-Armed Prosthetic People<\/strong><\/p>\n As if this wasn\u2019t disturbing enough, Kadtke and Wells go on to chart significant developments across a wide range of other significant technologies. They point to the development of Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) that project electromagnetic radiation as laser light, and which are already being deployed in test form.<\/p>\n This August, USS Ponce deployed with an operational laser\u2014a matter that was only\u00a0rep\u200borted<\/a> in the last few days. DEWs, the NDU authors predict, \u201cwill be a very disruptive military technology\u201d due to \u201cunique characteristics, such as near-zero flight time, high accuracy, and an effectively infinite magazine.\u201d The Pentagon plans to widely deploy DEWs aboard ships in a few years.<\/p>\n The Pentagon also wants to harvest technologies that could \u2018upgrade\u2019 human physical, psychological, and cognitive makeup. The NDU paper catalogues a range of relevant fields, including \u201cpersonalized (genetic) medicine, tissue and organ regeneration via stem cells, implants such as computer chips and communication devices, robotic prosthetics, direct brain-machine interfaces, and potentially direct brain-brain communications.\u201d<\/p>\n Another area experiencing breakthrough develop\u200bments is synthetic biology (SynBio)<\/a>. Scientists have recently created cells with DNA composed of non-natural amino acids, opening the door to create entirely new \u201cdesigner life forms,\u201d the Pentagon report enthuses, and to engineer them with \u201cspecialized and exotic properties.\u201d<\/p>\n Kadtke and Wells flag up a recent Pentagon assessment of current SynBio research suggesting \u201cgreat promise for the engineering of synthetic organisms\u201d useful for a range of \u201cdefense relevant applications.\u201d<\/p>\n It is already possible to replace organs with artificial electro-mechanical devices for a wide range of body parts. Citing ongoing US Army research on \u201ccognition and neuro-ergonomics,\u201d Kadtke and Wells forecast that: \u201cReliable artificial lungs, ear and eye implants, and muscles will all likely be commercially available within 5 to 10 years.\u201d Even more radically, they note the emerging possibility of using stem cells to regenerate every human body part.<\/p>\n Meshing such developments with robotics has further radical implications. The authors highlight successful demonstrations of implantation of silicon memory and processors into the brain, as well as \u201cpurely thought controlled devices.\u201d In the long-term, these breakthroughts could make \u2018wearable devices\u2019 like Google Glass look like ancient fossils, superceded by \u201cdistributed human-machine systems employing brain-machine interfaces and analog physiomimetic processors, as well as hybrid cybernetic systems, which could provide seamless and artificially enhanced human data exploration and analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n We\u2019re all terror suspects<\/strong><\/p>\n Taken together, the \u201cscientific revolutions\u201d catalogued by the NDU report\u2014if militarized\u2014would grant the Department of Defense (DoD) \u201cdisruptive new capabilities\u201d of a virtually totalitarian quality.<\/p>\n As I was told by former NSA senior executive\u00a0Thomas D\u200brake<\/a>, the whistleblower who inspired Edward Snowden, ongoing Pentagon-funded research on data-mining feeds directly into fine-tuning the algorithms used by the US intelligence community to identify not just \u2018terror suspects\u2019, but also targets for the CIA\u2019s drone-strike kill lists.<\/p>\n Nearly\u200b half<\/a> the people on the US government\u2019s terrorism watch list of \u201cknown or suspected terrorists\u201d have \u201cno recognized terrorist group affiliation,\u201d and\u00a0more th\u200ban half<\/a> the victims of CIA drone-strikes over a single year were \u201cassessed\u201d as \u201cAfghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists\u201d\u2014among others who were merely \u201csuspected, associated with, or who probably\u201d belonged to unidentified militant groups. Multiple\u00a0stu\u200bdies<\/a> show that a substantive number of drone strike victims are civilians\u2014and a secret Obama administration\u00a0me\u200bmo<\/a> released this summer under Freedom of Information reveals that the drone programme authorizes the killing of civilians as inevitable collateral damage.<\/p>\n Indeed, flawed assumptions in the Pentagon\u2019s classification systems for threat assessment mean that even \u201cnonviolent political activists\u201d might be conflated with\u00a0pote\u200bntial ‘extremists’<\/a>, who \u201csupport political violence\u201d and thus pose a threat to US interests.<\/p>\n It is far from clear that the Pentagon\u2019s Skynet-esque vision of future warfare will actually reach fruition. That the aspiration is being pursued so fervently in the name of \u2018national security,\u2019 in the age of austerity no less, certainly raises questions about whether the most powerful military in the world is not so much losing its edge, as it is losing the plot.<\/p>\n _____________________________<\/p>\n Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed isa member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment. He is director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development,<\/em> a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar who writes for <\/em>The Guardian on the geopolitics of environmental, energy and economic crises. He is the author of<\/em> A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It<\/a>, and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, <\/em>Zero Point<\/a>. The Sibel Edmonds memoirs, <\/em>Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story<\/a> is available from all good online booksellers.<\/em><\/p>\n