Robotic warfare: Is robotic advancement going right way?

Machines have in one way or the other infiltrated our civilization since its dawn. However, in recent years our dependence on machines has increased manifold. Most of our everyday life is in their hands including our survival. Yes, Survival! Because if you consider the level up to which robotics has been implemented in our militaries. There is and has always been a good bit of the national budget of any nation, spent on its military, as it is important to protect all they are and all they have built. Due to the huge amount of expenditures there are always many companies and entrepreneurs willing and ready to work on research and development of war toys. Yet, the business of war is not a game and the stakes are very high – self preservation of a nation being amongst the top rationales.

Robotic Technology on, above and below the battle field has come a long way in the last couple of decades and yet this is only the beginning. Great strides have been made in recent years in the development of combat robots. The US military has deployed ground robots, aerial robots, marine robots, stationary robots, and (reportedly) space robots. The robots are used for both reconnaissance and fighting, and further rapid advances in their design and capabilities can be expected in the years ahead.

A robotic fly for visual surveillance

Coming soon will be many new applications such as robotic units to pick up the wounded and take them to military medical facilities. There will also be MAVs or Micro-Air Vehicles perhaps capable of swarming like insects. Bird sized MAVs are already nearly ready for service. Fully autonomous perimeter security mobile robots with weapons attached are already being deployed.

 There are now more than 7,000 UAVs ranging from the workhorse, the Predator, and it’s beefier, deadlier kin the Reaper, to army drones like the tiny hand-launched Raven and the larger Shadow. The drones are dramatically tilting the war in favor of the United States. Predators, for example, played a key role in killing al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2006. UAVs are credited with killing more than half al Qaeda’s top 20 leaders. It is estimated that of more than 600 Hellfires fired by Predators, over 95 percent hit their targets. Those that failed did so generally through mechanical fault, loss of guidance or a target moving at the last instant. For the U.S. military the gains more obviously outweigh the glitches. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of service men and women have had limbs and lives saved by bomb-detecting bots. Conservative estimates say that fighting from home and putting robots in to war has saved hundreds of millions of dollars. At Creech, tiny desert air force base in Nevada, the demand for Predator pilots is so intense that it is mobilizing Air National Guard and reservists. It has also introduced an experimental training program for air force cadets from the videogame generation. Now U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants more UAVs. Already he has said that the next generation of fighter planes — the F-35 that took decades to develop at a cost of more than half-a-billion dollars each — will be the last manned fighter aircraft. 

Predator loaded with hellfire missile

Whatever weaponry in the robotic warfare realm that is produced will be available to friend and foe alike. If the US Defense Contractors sell to allied nations and some quasi-friendly nations, it still only takes a few side transactions and a little bit of reverse engineering before your top secret technology is in the hands of your most brutal enemies. Yet if U.S. forces can have UAVs, so can other nations. An estimated 40 or more countries also are developing drones, with an Iranian UAV already shot down over Iraq a few months ago. Even Hezbollah — a political movement, not a state — has used them against Israel. Even if most nations agree to rules of engagement that are fair to humanity, war is still hell and in the end will anyone follow such rules, as there are no points for second place.

However, since a coin has two faces, some of these advancements are leading to marvelous technologies. Some of them are self-driving vehicles for civilian use an d mine detecting robots which save lives of soldiers afoot. These robotic defense technologies should be shared for peaceful endeavors and used for the common good, but we know all too well, that evil men and the innate characteristics of mankind will indeed intervene and they will be used against his fellow man. Self Driving Transportation could be used for many things increasing the flows of human civilization. Eventually these technologies will be available to free-enterprise for commercial uses. The sooner the better, in order to save lives.

A self driving car is worth research in robotics

Major research efforts also are being devoted to enabling robots to learn from experience, raising the question of whether we can predict with reasonable certainty what the robot will learn. The answer seems to be negative, since if we could predict that, we would simply program the robot in the first place, instead of requiring learning. Learning may enable the robot to respond to novel situations, given the impracticality and impossibility of predicting all eventualities on the designer’s part. Thus, unpredictability in the behavior of complex robots is a major source of worry, especially if robots are to operate in unstructured environments, rather than the carefully‐structured domain of a factory.

 The idea of robots sent to annihilate the enemy is troubling for many to contemplate, especially after watching some of the Hollywood Movies of the last couple decades. Some ask what if they mal-function, yet could it really be any worse than human soldiers who in the past have raped and pillaged? It is a fact of war, in past periods it was accepted, the spoils of war, today it is not acceptable, but it happens. Will robots left to their own recognizance be any less problematic with their rules of engagement? What about hackers, can you imagine terrorist hackers in the future taking over entire robotic armies? And what if and when these systems are damaged who is to say if that mal-function may cause unnecessary death of civilians or initiate friendly fire? The question with robotic war fighters has been pondered. Who decides who lives or dies?

Future shall hold no surprises as more lethal war robots will be manufactured.

 The civilians normally do not have a choice, if they protest they will be killed and so either way they are needless victims. Total War or complete annihilation of all life and complete surrender can take much longer as the human slaughter rages on. It is a gruesome spectacle, but is a fact of human history. Robotic rapid warfare might indeed speed things up and actually produce far fewer human civilian casualties. Robots would be unaffected by the emotions, adrenaline, and stress that cause soldiers to overreact or deliberately overstep the Rules of Engagement and commit atrocities, that is to say, war crimes. We would no longer read news reports about our own soldiers brutalizing enemy combatants or foreign civilians to avenge the deaths of their brothers in arms—unlawful actions that carry a significant political cost. So, it really is a two way sword. It is high time that we give a positive direction to the advancements in robotics or we could end up in an out of control situation.

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