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The MQ-9 Reaper drone earned notoriety during the Global War on Terror as the “slaughterer from the sky,” due to collateral damage amidst weddings, funerals and other social gatherings. Now, after 20 years in the Middle East, the military is seeking to home-base a squadron of six Reaper drones in Hawaii, the land of aloha.
The Draft Environmental Assessment (DEA) commenting period for this plan at Kaneohe Bay is wrapping up; the deadline is Wednesday.
The reason for the arrival of the Reapers in the Pacific? It’s a signal that the U.S. is ensconced in a full-on arms race with China, rife with satellites, air, land, surface and submarine drones, nukes at sea, and hypersonic weapons. In anticipation, Hawaii is being jockeyed into a “ground zero” position.
A new arms race warrants a seismic shift in how wars are fought, or so goes the thinking. This is why we see warfare undergoing what some call its “third revolution,” as it puts artificial intelligence (AI) in the driver’s seat. Gunpowder was the first revolution; the atom bomb was the second.
The risks of AI-driven warfare are high — increased civilian deaths and heightened chances of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Is it worth it?
The operating system for this new, AI-driven war, called the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), will be overseen by the Space Force. It will enable unmanned warfare to be carried out by a chain of command that functions in the cloud. The goal is to give the United States the ability to summon, at once, unmanned military forces to rain terror down on any spot in the world — a swarm of drones, hypersonic missiles, submarine torpedoes and bombers — all with the ease of calling an Uber.
Within the new JADC2 context, the Reaper’s role is envisioned to be much more specialized than it was in the Middle East. It will no longer climax in a spray of Hellfire missiles after hours, days and weeks of continual circling overhead while the personal lives of targeted individuals play out on a video screen for human operators on the ground.
Instead, arrays of machine sensors on the Reaper and on satellites will be responsible for spying and deciding who should die. The Reaper will aggregate all the sensor data and pass it to a set of algorithms that will determine the target’s “signature.” If that signature qualifies the target for assassination, then the JADC2 will determine how and when that will take place. And if deemed necessary, the Reaper still will be equipped to fire Hellfire missiles.
As machine decision-making accelerates warfare, it is plain to see how conflict would easily escalate. Compressed time and space creates the incentive for each side to strike first and strike fast in a perceived crisis. This is a recipe for crisis instability.
Unintended escalation is one risk of turning decision-making over to machines. The other is the increased numbers of murdered innocents.
Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, who co-wrote “The Drone Paradox: Fighting Terrorism with Mechanized Terror,” explain that the U.S. government’s commitment to using “signature strikes” against targets will increase the likelihood that civilians will be harmed by drone strikes. A signature strike involves targeting a person or group of people based on their geographic location and broad patterns of behavior that are determined to be suspicious. This means that humans cannot be sure exactly who is being killed by drone strikes.
Oddly, the decisively banal DEA makes no mention of the ethical implications of the artificial-intelligence revolution. It blandly describes the Reaper’s role as conducting “persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.” It never mentions the JADC2. That omission is like trying to assess a quarterback’s performance without ever mentioning football. The exclusion of the Reapers’ real function from the draft assessment deceptively paints the weapon as something far more demure than it actually is.
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