Bernd Debusmann

Sometime in the next three decades, the U.S. military will be able to field robots that can make life-and-death decisions, operating without human supervision thanks to software and superfast computers.

But the technology to get to that point is running far ahead of considerations of the ethics of robotic warfare.

Or, as Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written widely on military robots has put it — technology grows at an exponential pace, human institutions at a linear, if not glacial, pace. That echoes an observation by the late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that “science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

The subject merits debate after the January 26 announcement that the Pentagon is planning to trim America’s armed forces by 100,000 while boosting the global fleet of armed drones, America’s most effective tool for the targeted killing of anti-American militants. So far, the drones are remotely operated, by pilots on bases in the United States.

But for a glimpse of how U.S. military thinkers see the future of the drone program, an 82-page report by the Air Force is recommended reading. Entitled “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047“, it says that “advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.”

Rather than just supporting humans in what the military calls the OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act), drones will be able to “fully participate” in each step of the process. Humans will no longer be “in the loop” but “on the loop” — able to veto decisions taken by the flying robot — if time permits in the split-second environment of combat.

While they make more headlines than other systems, drones are just part of an American inventory that has grown explosively over the past decade and includes ground-based robots whose tasks range from defusing improvised explosives devices and shooting down incoming artillery shells to evacuating wounded soldiers. From virtually zero, the drone fleet grew to more than 7,500 and ground based robots to an estimated 15,000.

“Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions,” the paper states. “Ethical decisions and policy decisions must take place in the near term in order to guide the development of future capabilities, rather than allowing the development to take its own path.”

In other words, let’s sort out ethics and policies before letting the robotics genie fully out of the bottle. It’s a point made with increasing alarm by a number of civilian scientists, robotics experts and ethicists who fear, among other things, that sending more robots and fewer humans into wars will make starting them easier.

REMOVING BARRIERS TO WAR

“We possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war,” Singer, author of Wired for War, wrote in an essay in the New York Times this month. “The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harms way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.”

This is a view shared by the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), a group formed in 2009 to press for an international debate on the regulation and control of armed military robots. ICRAC believes that the robotics revolution of warfare deserves the kind of debate that led to treaties on the use of poison gas or the ban on landmines.

None of the questions that prompted the formation of the group have been answered. For example: who would be accountable if an autonomous robot killed civilians? The manufacturer? The field commander in whose area the robot operates? The programmers who wrote the software? The procurement officer? The president?

The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross has begun looking into the implications of robots in war but those favoring more regulations should not expect support from the administration of Barack Obama, who has presided over a dramatic increase in the number of drone strikes on targets in Pakistan since he took office in 2009.

That campaign, run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) rather than the military, killed dozens of al Qaeda fighters and other militants using the rugged mountains on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan as a safe haven. The strikes also killed civilians and stoked anti-American hatred in a country of 180 million that is of strategic importance to the United States. There has been similar blow-back in Yemen and Somalia.

This is one of the reasons why some prominent experts on military robots favor slowing the pace of development. In December, philosopher Patrick Lin of the California Polytechnic State University ended a briefing to CIA officials with a line robotic warfare enthusiasts might do well to remember:

“Integrating ethics may be more cautious and less agile than a ‘do first, think later’ (or worse ‘do first, apologize later’) approach but it helps us win the moral high ground – perhaps the most strategic of battlefields.”

PHOTO: U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant Zachary Goff (L), and Chris Allen, a student from Ohio State University, operate the control console to run a test flight of a drone at the Micro Air Vehicles lab at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, July 11, 2011. REUTERS/Skip Peterson

In the flurry of statements on the killing of Osama bin Laden, a remark from Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, spoke volumes about how U.S. foreign aid tends to be perceived by its recipients. It’s not enough.

“The United States spent much more money in Iraq than it did in Afghanistan,” Haqqani said in a television interview. “And then it spent much more in Afghanistan than it did in Pakistan. So were there cracks through which things fell through? Absolutely.”

That twisted logic suggests that if only Washington had given Pakistan a few billion more than the $20.7 billion it provided over the past decade, bin Laden, a man with a $27 million bounty on his head, would not have “fallen through the cracks.” Those cracks were wide enough to swallow bin Laden’s one-acre walled compound with a three-storey building in a garrison town near the Pakistani capital.

The mass murderer’s six-year stay in Abbottabad has prompted some members of Congress to demand the immediate suspension of aid to Pakistan, others to look for reductions. Deep cuts, however, are unlikely. The 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan rely on supplies landed at the Pakistani port of Karachi and trucked through the Khyber Pass to bases in Afghanistan.

As Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s bin Laden unit, puts it: “They (the Pakistanis) know we need them more than they need us. They also know that the Saudis and the Chinese would step in with money and aid if we backed out.”

Consequently, military and civilian aid is likely to continue flowing and the strained marriage of convenience between the U.S. and Pakistan will survive this latest spat. But giving billions of dollars to a country where, according to President Barack Obama, “we think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden” will probably rekindle a long-running debate over the how and why of foreign aid as a whole.

The United States is the world’s biggest donor of foreign aid, giving more than the runners-up, France and Germany, put together. Last year, Washington provided assistance in one form or another to 149 countries, according to the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress. That’s almost four-fifths of all the countries on earth but the aid has not made the United States the world’s most popular country.

On the contrary. Why? There are a variety of reasons, including one that is not often mentioned in policy debates on aid. It has to do with human nature, according to Ken Adelman, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In a recent essay in Foreign Policy magazine, he wrote: “Giving someone a gift generates initial gratitude (often along with gripes about why it wasn’t bigger). The second time the gift generates less gratitude (and more such griping). By the third iteration, it has become an entitlement. The slightest decline engenders resentment.”

NEGATIVE VIEWS
Perversely, in Pakistan and Egypt, two of the four countries that topped the list of U.S. aid recipients in 2010, the publics hold overwhelmingly unfavorable views of the United States, according to the annual global attitudes survey by the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank.

For decades, Washington has seen foreign assistance as an essential instrument of foreign policy, meant in part to positively influence attitudes abroad. This works in some of the large variety of activities that come under the label foreign assistance – for example reducing poverty, widening access to health care and education, or promoting human rights. But even U.S. disaster relief, often prompt and efficient, does not always change attitudes, viz American emergency aid in the wake of last year’s devastating floods in Pakistan.

If foreign assistance does not buy gratitude, loyalty and cooperation, does it help to influence the decision-making of friendly governments? Not necessarily. Take the example of Israel, the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since its creation in 1948. Despite the aid, the government has continued building Jewish settlements on the West Bank contrary to U.S. wishes and contrary to international law.

So, is foreign assistance to 149 countries reflected in votes in support of U.S. positions at the United Nations (which has 192 members)? It is not. According to a study by the conservative Heritage Foundation, about 95 percent of U.N. member states that receive U.S. assistance voted against the United States in General Assembly votes between 2000 and 2008.

That helps explain why opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans are in favor of cutting foreign aid. The latest survey, in January by Gallup, showed 59 percent wanted reductions. Those results would probably look different if Americans had a clearer idea of how much of their tax money goes to helping foreign countries.

A series of studies shows that the public vastly overestimates the share of the budget that goes to foreign assistance – widespread perceptions put it at around 20 percent. In fact, in 2010, it was just 1.1 percent.  (You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)