Alexander Kott is chief of the Network Science Division at the Army Research Laboratory; in a new paper,
he rounds up several years’ worth of papers that he wrote or
co-authored, along with some essays and articles by others, on what an
“Internet of Battle Things” will look like.
Kott describes a future in which sensing/actuating militarized devices
are capable of gathering intelligence and acting on it, sometimes with
lethal force (everything from launching a missile to firing a gun to
using “directed energy weapons”), and predicts that “constraints” in
“cognitive bandwidth” (that is, the ability of humans to interpret and
act on the intelligence from these devices) makes these things
effectively autonomous, dealing out death untouched by human hands.
Of course, Kott also anticipates that malware will be a big problem for
these systems – once you trust a lethal robot to act autonomously to
kill your adversaries and not your own troops, anything that compromises
that robot could turn it into a fifth columnist that wiped out its own
side. Kott proposes that active-defense software will be common – that
is, software that detects other software trying to compromise it and
strikes back by attempting to compromise the enemy’s automatic systems.
Kott describes how these battlefields will consist primarily of gadgets
with a small rump of people who oversee and maintain them, but what he
omits is the political dimension of this: American wars of aggression
are often ended when Americans sicken at the deaths of their children on
the battlefield; the incredible staying power of the perpetual wars in
the Middle East and Afghanistan (not to mention Yemen) owes much to the
use of ranged weapons that are deployed with a minimum of exposure to
American lives; and the use of contractors to do the dirtiest, most
dangerous jobs in the battlefield, so that the official soldier
body-count is low.
As battlefields become roboticized, Americans engaged in military
adventurism primarily become riskers-of-treasure, not riskers-of-blood.
What’s more, a battle that kills a bunch of expensive robots is a
profit-center for the company that replaces those robots for the next
battle, producing excess capital that can be used to lobby for more
battles and more wars and more blown up robots and more purchase orders
for robots to replace them.
But also unspoken and implicit in the essay is that the typical American
adversary is long on blood and short on treasure, pitting insurgent
human flesh and IEDs against drones and other advanced materiel. The
robots will not merely be killing other robots – they will be shedding
oceans of blood. It just won’t be American blood, and thus the blood
will only do a little to shift American public opinion away from more
and more war.
