3.25.09

Never before has the future been so now.

Just when the bunny was all set to resuscitate his blog with an excoriation of the times in which we find ourselves mired (apologies for the long sabbatical, but he’s been working on a book), along comes Wired for War (Penguin Press), a look at military robotics by think tanker P.W. Singer (Children at War) of ye olde Brookings Institution down in D.C.

After such saturation coverage of the Great Unwinding Redux, the bunny welcomed the opportunity to delve into a field which has quietly burgeoned into a stealth growth industry.

How much so, Joe? queried the bunny by phone. “Some numbers that illustrate this massive growth are the US going into Iraq with a handful of drones [UAVs] in’03,” claimed the author. “We now have over 7,000 drones in the inventory. On the ground, we utilized zero robots during the invasion in ’03. We now have more than 12,000.” The bunny was particularly surprised to hear of ground applications for unmanned systems, to the extent that concerned companies contracted are tasked even to provide robot “hospitals” for their products which bear the brunt of unfriendly fire. Take Foster-Miller, manufacturer of the Talon, a tracked robot with an articulated arm that first saw service sifting through rubble at Ground Zero following the 9/11 attacks. According to the author, the Iraqi theater alone accounts for nearly $500 million in robot and repair contracts: “Foster-Miller’s got a $20 million contract to run a repair yard for robots, a robot hospital, in Baghdad.” This facility, he claimed, repairs 50-60 Talons per month (of an approximated 2,000 units in service). Or consider General Atomics, which makes the headline-grabbing Predator UAV, as well as its heavier-armed progeny, the Reaper.

Being that the bunny is both burrower and prey animal, he is not overfond of the proliferation of machines that can fly (or roll, or swim) for lengthy periods, equipped with high-resolution sensors which can spot a burrow from low geosynchronous orbit, and which in some cases are even equipped with “smart” munitions capable of hitting a yard-wide target from miles away with an accuracy measureable in inches. No, the bunny doesn’t care for such developments one bit.

However, taking the long view as he does, he cannot help but marvel at the rapid growth of humanity’s dependence upon its lethal new creations, especially given the age-old phobia of artificial intelligence gone amok. When and how did the pendulum swing?

Ah, the Sixties.

“The industry really takes off in the 1960s, where you start seeing factory line work being done by robots,” Singer explained to your leery lagomorphic reporter. “When you move into the realm of war, the industry predated 9/11, but as companies in the marketplace describe, it was very much a matter of trying to ‘push’ it onto the customer, the customer being the Pentagon. After 9/11, it becomes a ‘pull’ environment. It goes from their phone calls aren’t answered, they won’t endorse, the doors won’t open, to being told after 9/11 to ‘make them as fast as you can.’”

Naturally, the rise of robotics (as opposed to AI, the industry’s more cognitive but less operational offshoot) runs parallel to humanity’s ever-increasing dependence on computers. Military applications for unmanned systems are a logical (and cost-effective) extrapolation of this trend, particularly with increased miniaturization of wireless handheld computers. (Consider Vcom3D Inc.’s Vcommunicator system employed by the US Army in both the Iraq and Afghan theatres, which is an iPod-based translator designed to provide troops with appropriate speech and gestures in unfamiliar locales.) If necessity is the mother of invention, war is one big mother: “Most analysts I spoke with told me the robotics industry now is akin to where the auto industry was circa 1908,” Singer said. “In that year, Ford sold just under 300 Model T’s. With the spurring effect of WWI, by 1918 they were selling almost a million a year.”

Since the funding for most robotics R&D is military-based, sooner or later the government gets involved, which would make any bunny flatten its ears with derision. Consider the wayward VH-71 Kestrel, the new presidential helicopter designated to replace Marine One (built by a team of manufacturers led by Lockheed-Martin). Due to a pileup of add-ons and delays, the president’s new chopper is now more expensive than the 747 used as Air Force One (“This is something Obama will probably cut,” Singer claimed flatly). This is an example of the phenomenon known as “requirements creep”, a neat little fungus in the moist, fetid environment of human bureaucracy. “It starts out with the client [the Pentagon] asking for a system but not knowing exactly what it wants in that system, be it because it hasn’t worked out the right concept for its operation, or because the people making the decisions don’t actually understand the technology they’re buying,” Singer explained. “They often give a somewhat vague or incomplete contract out. Companies take that contract and soon after the Pentagon comes back and says, ‘We said we wanted X, but now we want X+2, or X and Y.’ The company says it’ll cost more, but they’re happy to do it. So you get this back-and-forth where the original idea and estimate is nothing like what you ultimately get.”

But that’s the manned world, and the unmanned one which Singer is so interested in seems to already be outstripping its skin-and-bones creators. It’s happening so fast, Singer says, that it’s bending the very notion of what war is and what it means to fight it. “For 5000 years the idea of going to war meant, to use my grandfather’s experience in WWII, he went to a place of such danger that the family didn’t think he’d come home again. Compare that to a Predator drone pilot. Their experience of going to war against insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan had them not leaving Nevada. Had them waking up in the morning, getting into work, spending twelve hours putting missiles on targets, then getting back in their car, and twenty minutes after being at war, being at the dinner table with their kids talking about their homework.”

Great googly-moogly.


Bunny bridges to nowhere:

"The Downside of Letting Robots Do the Bombing" by Mark Mazetti, New York Times, 3/22

“Intel, Lockheed Tell Obama on Taxes, Not In This Economy” by Mark Drajem and Holly Rosenkrantz, Bloomberg.com, 3/17

“iPods On The Frontlines” by Patrick Durkin, Tactical Weapons, 5/09 (p.34)

“In The Line Of Fire: Why America’s defence industry is in for some lean years”, The Economist, 3/21 (p.70)