The Drone War

One of sci-fi's most enduring prophesies is finally coming to pass -- the Drone War. Visionaries from Wells to Orwell to Lucas have long predicted that warring surrogate machines would someday take the humans' place in a new kind of conflict with enormous political implications as military technology evolves. Battles by machines are entirely different -- socially, politically and culturally -- from anything in the history of warfare, as we are seeing in Afghanistan.

There are plenty of human casualties in the Afghan conflict -- though few among Americans -- but the fight seems especially significant in terms of technology and military conflict.

The Predator spy plane and other unmanned drones and gunships (along with satellites, thermal imaging devices, X-ray scanners, etc.) not only search for the enemy, but fire guided missiles, drop powerful oxygen-sucking hyperbaric bombs, and guide bomb strikes from afar. There is no war in recent human history that involved so few humans, at least on one side of the conflict. The most staggering statistic out of Afghanistan might be that the first American combat casualty died nearly three months into the "war."

Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops. Even as the Afghanistan campaign began, pundits flooded cable talk shows asserting that air power alone wasn't enough, that there would be substantial human sacrifice. Both Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq and the Kosovo conflicts involved the growing used of so-called "smart" laser-guided weaponry, deployed with varying degrees of reliability. But those conflicts also involved either the use of enormous numbers of soldiers on the ground and were controversial in terms of the bomb's precision and effectiveness.

The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight. Early reports suggest the civilian casualties may be lower than in any other large-scale military operation in modern history. Although dangerous and complex for the military on the scene, it's hard to imagine a conflict more remote to the majority of Americans, asked to go about their business as usual.

Orwell's "Drone Wars" come very much to mind here. So does Sir Arthur Clarke's machine warfare and AI military stories. A handful of human soldiers guide and direct the increasingly sophisticated technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks with stunningly few U.S. military casualties and American civilian casualties beyond September 11 and the anthrax attacks. The Taliban and their terrorist friends seem to have been totally unprepared for this variety of war, such a stark contrast to the Soviet's ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan just a decade ago.

It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.

Winston Churchill repeatedly asked his countrymen for brutal sacrifices in World War II. In the new kind of American war, political leaders ask citizens only to keep shopping and traveling.

Military historians like John Keegan have recently argued that the devastating toll of warfare in the 20th Century makes conventional conflicts increasingly less likely. Once a means of expanding territory and amassing wealth, the brutish wars of the 20th Century have rendered both objectives hard to attain. Even before Drone Wars, artillery and aerial warfare along with nuclear weapons suggested that wars can't really be won in the conventional sense any longer; even the victors will suffer unacceptable losses. But drone warfare radically alters the equation. Technologically advanced civilian populations -- just as Orwell foresaw -- can send their technological surrogates off to battle one another while humans stay home to wait for the outcome.

A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery? War has recently seemed so terrible that civilized societies view it as a last resort. But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible.

Comments

Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars

[corvi42]

Actually with the advent of more and more innovative "less than lethal" weapons; everything from teargas and rubber bullets to tranquilizers, sticky-spray and bolo-net guns.

We may see the arrival of a technocracy who can effectively ignore the political demands of the masses because any violent unrest can be subdued without the massive loss of life and its consequent political fallout.

In past times one has been forced to negotiate with mobs, or unleash violence upon them which brings your image low in the opinion of the greater population. However if you simply spray a mob or a military enemy with a sleeping gas, and they all wake up in prison, the general population is less offended and you suffer no political fallout.

OK, let's kill soldiers instead.

[Tackhead]

Sorry, but if you've got technology that allows you to kill your enemy, without getting (as many of) your own soldiers killed, it's moral to use it. That's right - moral, as in, it's a Good Thing.

It's a Good Thing for the soldiers, who don't get killed.

It's a Good Thing for the generals, who no longer have to order their men to die.

It's a Good Thing for the families of the soldiers, who no longer have to get The Letter from The Men In Dress Uniform.

About the only group of people it's bad for are the companies that make the flags that get draped on coffins.

Katz, if you wanna talk about how "drone wars" are somehow less moral than wars with casualties, I suggest you visit the Somme (60,000 on the first day, about 1.2 million casualties for the whole battle), or Ypres (400,000, and first use of mustard gas), or Verdun (750,000) any of the other WWI slaughterhouses.

If you don't like "smart weapons", look at the pictures from WWI where artillery shelling stripped the land of trees down to the ground - the closest thing I've seen to it was the aftermath of Mt. St. Helens. Nothing but mud and matchsticks that used to be trees, as far as the eye can see.

Better yet, find a WWI veteran and tell him that you think the techno-wars we fight today are somehow "worse" than the way he fought war.

Even from a wheelchair or hospital bed, I'll bet any one of them would gladly kick your ass all the way back to 1914.

Question

[Byteme]

Sorry international readers... some specific 'we' content pertaining to the USA.

Did we actually declare war?

That takes an act of Congress.

Section 8:

The Congress shall have Power To...

Clause 11: To declare War... and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water...

Of course, Congress hasn't formally declared war against anyone since World War II. Since then, the United States has engaged in military conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Our soldiers are fighting overseas. We feel as though we're at war at home, but we're not at war under the U.S. Constitution because Congress hasn't declared war.

All Congress did was approve the necessary budget items related to the Sept. 11th.

That being said, what do we do with all the 'detainees' in Guantanamo Bay? Does international law require us to be at war to hold them for any length of time?

Sacrifice without War

[Orne]

I am reminded of a Star Trek (Original Series) episode about a completely computerized war.

Two planets had been warrior for centuries, perhaps millenia. Originally, they built great starfleets, rockets, atomic weapons, and launched them against their enemy planet. Thousands would die per attack.

Then they used their advanced computer networks to design new attack patterns, so they would build newer rockets, bombs, etc etc. On the other side, the computers would design new defenses, anti rocket, etc etc And vice versa.

So, with each new interation, the computers could calculate just how effective the new weapon would be, and calculate how many thousands of the enemy would die in the attack. And vice versa on the other side. For example, for every 100 missiles, 1 would get through, 20 square miles would get nuked, and 100,000 people would die.

Both sides could perfectly predict the results of their attacks before the attack even began, or even before the missiles were built to be used in the attack, they could tell by just the design. They could predict the enemy attacks also, perfectly, and could predict when and where their defenses would fail. The two enemies were locked at a stalemate.

So, the two planets made a decision... they would continue to fight the war, but instead of fighting with physical objects like missiles, the war would be fought entirely by computer. The computer would design new attacks and communicate the attacks to the enemy computer, where the enemy computer would make a defense calculation, predict the number of people dead, and the citizens would march themselves into suicide chambers to represent the losses without the mes of nuclear fallout and all that wasted manufacture.

And they did it, for additional millenia, until the survivors on both planets had forgotten what it was that they were fighting about in the first place.