Automated Warfare

"In the future, all wars will be fought by robots."

It sounds vaguely utopian, doesn't it? For anyone willing to skip over the implication that we will still be happy obliterating each other in order to solve the world's problems. But there is one other truly naive notion in this statement - the idea that both sides would have robots. Asymmetric wars will be the gold standard of conflict in the twenty-first century. As in Iraq, it will be people versus the machines.

So where does one's morality come in on something as bizarre as that? Is it better/worse to have little automatons out there, fighting the insurgents? Or to insinuate even further, massacring the innocents? Indeed, what does it say about human beings that we seem to find the ideal solutions in warfare those which involve the least amount of bloodshed on the killer's hands. Stealth bombers. Tomahawk cruise missiles. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. With the advances being made in automated devices, putting robots on the front lines seems an inevitable next step.

Questions of morality abound in the nexus of the electronic and the military. For instance, is hacking another country's infrastructure considered an act of war, to be preempted by an official declaration? And what are the rules of engagement for cyberwarfare? Tampering with the civilian infrastructure without directly harming any individual could be considered either illegal or perfectly acceptable depending on interpretation - whereas, say, interrupting the FAA's flight tracking network so that no plane was capable of landing safely might be considered illegal for intending undue harm to civilians, even though you'd technically be targeting non-civilian equipment for the hack.

This is the technical edge of warfare, and you may notice a singular factor uniting such implements - an aversion to seeing the whites of the eyes in the person you're smearing out of existence. UAVs probably take the cake for distance brutality. Some dude in Nevada, deep inside a bunker sitting in front of a TV screen is circling the skies of Afghanistan, trying to pick out the difference between nomadic sheepherders and Osama. He may never in his life come within a thousand miles of the country he's bombing.

And these drones come in all shapes and sizes. Bug-sized UAVs are already in use(!) for reconnaissance purposes. DARPA has enticed people into creating a car that drives itself across the desert - a race in live traffic also earned a victor at the end of last year. Autonomous is the new black when it comes to military spending, it seems.

And why not? There is something much cleaner and less abhorrent to the human soul about destruction from afar. If you never see up close the cradle in the shattered remnants of the home you've demolished, can you truly feel for the child?

Robots making war is the both the present day reality and one that will continue into the future. Automated battalions will also make lawmakers much less adverse to using force. But robots do not win hearts and minds. They cannot comfort the victims of genocide or give reassurance to women raped in the chaos of a guerrilla conflict. There is no robot solution for Darfur.

Robots will not write constitutions.

Or at least certainly not the same kind that will be spewing ordinance into the enemy.

And is it necessarily such a good thing to be taking humans out of the conflict - to wage a war without risking your own people? Obviously, from a purely American perspective, I could understand any who'd prefer it if we had robots doing the dirty work in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving our young men and women to be safe and sound at home. But how much more willing would we be to endure a conflict that has gone on longer than World War II and killed over a million civilians by some estimates? Without real consequence or tragedy for our families, would there be nearly such an outcry from the American public to get the hell out of there? If carbombs were only ever killing Sunnis and Shiites, would we really even notice?

A robotic army would, if anything, encourage the use of blunt force in situations where the consequences would normally forbid it - a world in which the rich and capable nations are more willing to go to war than ever before. And that is a far more dystopian sentiment than any other I can think to offer.

Maybe there is a perverse benefit to putting human lives on the line and losing them: to remind us just why war is such a terrible thing.

As for the robots, for the time being we shall still have to face the consequences of our decisions - they've been pulled off the front.

Cutting Cables: Info Warfare in the 21st Century

By now, it's almost common knowledge that there have been a rash of "incidents" (Thanks, BoingBoing) surrounding the internet infrastructure of the Middle East. Something has managed to disable five separate cables connecting the region to the rest of the world.

The economic implications are already disastrous. Stalled or massively slowed internet has consequences far beyond just the commerce of the Middle East. Any government using the web to communicate is hamstrung; sensitive data being stored in overseas servers is rendered inaccessible. Things. Stop. Working.

Imagine suddenly being unconnected, only it's not just you, but your neighbors, your boss, your company, every company, newspaper, tv channel, and any utilities that have migrated onto the web. I suppose it's a salute to the incredible power and connectivity of the internet that imagining being "disconnected" in this day and age is hard to even fathom. It's almost surprising things don't sound any more dire from over there (but how does one hear them? There's probably a Zen proverb hidden in this somewhere...)

The actual system of cables is so complicated that accurate speculation on the severity of the outage is tricky. The cables connect a great number of countries and the pipelines run to the north-east up into the Mediterranean and Europe and south-west down and around India and into Asia. For a more comprehensive look, The Guardian provides this handy diagram.

However, there are certain statistics which seem frankly indicative of an intended target. At the moment, Iran reads zero response--essentially, nothing coming, nothing going. I will not vouch for the accuracy of the test at the given moment, especially with the haywire atmosphere of the region, but it is an interesting insight.

And then, as one astute BoingBoing reader pointed out, this all comes within days of the Iran Oil Bourse opening. Wow, talk about coincidences, right? With the IOB in place, the removal of the dollar from Iranian oil transactions is essentially complete. This would be a severe blow against the U.S. With the dollar already in a bit of a death-spiral as of late, dollar-based oil transactions have been a pillar of keeping the currency relevant on the open market. Many have already seen Iran's announcement of this move and the U.S.'s subsequent upping of war rhetoric as history repeating itself.

If the conclusion is not already obvious, all of the exaggerated run-ins in the Strait of Hormuz should lead one to an obvious conclusion: the U.S. and possibly its special forces had some hand in this.

The reason I'm taking the time to even bring it up is because I think it offers something unusual to the traditional info-warfare paradigm: normally, cyberwarfare is considered to be the realm of supercomputers, upper-echelon hackers, and powerful coding schemes and virii for infiltrating the enemy's networks and subverting them internally. This sexy-sounding world of high-calculation intrigue has not been without its significant moments as of late, real or imagined.

As it turns out, China and the U.S. have a whole string of incidents between them, moments which often get a brief mention in the press before being forgotten either because of exceeding secrecy surrounding the actual event or the general population's disinterest in the technical nature of the topic. After all, it is so much easier to envision a Cold War played out with thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at each other, rather than thousands of supercomputers. Mutually Assured Destruction carries a much more obvious meaning than stolen passwords, corrupted kernels, and so on.

But if the cable cutting happening in the Middle East is in fact an act of sabotage, there is a whole new kind of cyberwarfare being played out. And it does not involve geeky Caltech grads compiling code in NSA superbunkers. It's a warfare of the much more traditional kind, probably involving some well-placed naval intimidation, a few submarines, and special forces operatives. Cutting cables may not have the elegance of a well-crafted icebreaker, but it gets the job done, and does so in a way that may prove harder to trace back to the culprit.

It may be that the cyberwarrior of the future will not use superb intellect and precise coding to conduct operations--not when there's a much more obvious and available "off-switch."

Call me crazy but this is one tomorrow that's beginning to sound a lot like yesterday.

Update: Wired has a piece up on the same subject. I tried to take it seriously but then he goes and mentions Al-Qaeda in the first paragraph... Really? The guys who carry their munitions across the mountains on donkeys? Are you kidding me? Are we now waterboarding them to the point they survive crush depths with scuba gear stitched out of Yak-skin? I guess that simulated drowning really is good for something after all.