News » January 9, 2008

RoboCop in Iraq

In the next five years, according to DefenseLink, the Pentagon plans to spend $2 billion on robots, breaking the monopoly of human soldiers in an army

By Allen McDuffee

A remote-controlled bomb-defusing robot carries back the blasting cap of a roadside bomb to clear it from a Baghdad street.

Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have killed 1,678 U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan since July 2003, according to Georgia-based Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. The death toll could have been much higher without the help of 5,000 IED-detecting robots that, according to CBS News, have found 10,000 roadside bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the next step in the evolution of wartime robots looks to go from saving lives to taking them.

The U.S. Army soon plans to deploy armed robots with firepower into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Designed by Foster-Miller, these robots, known as SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detections Systems), are operated and fired by remote control. They can be outfitted with M240 or M249 machine guns or Barrett .50 caliber rifles.

The 5th Special Forces in Iraq evaluated the system, and three other systems have completed evaluation with the 3rd Infantry Division and deployed to Iraq in 2007. Meanwhile, the Army continues to assess alternative weapons, including grenade launchers and anti-tank rocket launchers. Each unarmed version of the robot costs $60,000.

SWORDS first received major media attention in 2005, when the Associated Press reported, “Military officials like to compare the roughly three-foot-high robots favorably to human soldiers: They don’t need to be trained, fed or clothed. They can be boxed up and warehoused between wars. They never complain. And there are no letters to write home if they meet their demise in battle.”

In addition to Foster-Miller, iRobot, founded in 1990 by MIT roboticists, is one of several robotic companies contracting with the military—though it may be most well known for its Roomba, the popular robotic, home vacuum cleaner. On Oct. 21, 2007, CBS reported that iRobot’s Warrior is expected in Iraq by 2009. The Warrior “is a serious robot,” said Joe Dyer, iRobot’s president of Government & Industrial Robots Division. “This is a 250-pound robot that will be able to run a four-minute mile.” Depending on the intensity of the mission, the Warrior could last up to 16 hours.

Warrior, like SWORDS, is currently being designed to have human operators, but engineers are simultaneously testing the ability of robots to “think” for themselves. This “disruptive technology,” Dyer said, is “going to change the way we fight, the way we live—it’s going to change our entire lives.”

Max Boot, senior fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees. “These are periods of momentous change when new technologies combine with new doctrines and new forms of organization to transform not only the face of battle but also the nature of the state and of the international system,” he says.

Boot, author of War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, notes that the U.S. budget for research and development for military technology alone—$71 billion in 2006—is more than any other country spends on its entire defense. And it’s only a fraction of the annual U.S. military budget, which is now at $500 billion—almost as much as the rest of the world combined.

In the next five years, according to DefenseLink, the Pentagon plans to spend $2 billion on robots. As Jim Braden, project manager of the Army’s Joint Robotics Program, told CBS, “It’s a tremendous capability to put a robot where you do not want to put a man.”

But it also raises serious concerns about the likelihood for increased military aggression when the potential for deaths for U.S. soldiers is eliminated or decreased in the equation of war. The problem, according to Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the forthcoming book, Wired for War, is that “we have an assumption of who fights wars that is increasingly outdated. While our understanding of war … assume[s] that combatants are only soldiers serving on behalf of states, the reality of war today is that combatants range from soldiers to terrorists to warlords to contractors, and now to unmanned systems.”

Singer adds, “To be clear, it doesn’t mean that the state or human soldiers are disappearing by any means, but that their monopoly is being broken.” He says history will look back at this period as “notable for the loss of the state’s 200-year-old monopoly over warfare and that of humankind’s 4,000-year-old monopoly over doing the job of fighting wars.”

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• Reader Comments

  For those who think the poor serve as cannon fodder (however misguided that view may be), the use of robots as soldiers should be welcome indeed. Still, making war too clean and sanitary does not make me more comfortable., but then again neither does the crazy Islamic nuts who place no value on human life.

  Posted by wolf on Jan 9, 2008 at 6:34 PM

  I can see it now — instead of kids saying, “My Dad can lick your Dad,” we’ll have Secretaries of State with, “Our Robos can whip your Robos.”

  If you think you’re frustrated when your screen gives you a no can do message, picture the guy in the field whose robot’s batteries conk out.

  We built fighter jets without machine guns, let’s not trash the small arms training (or Medics) quite yet.

  Posted by whattheheck on Jan 9, 2008 at 10:46 PM

  I think the key reasoning is that a robot soldier insures that it will fire upon whoever it’s told to and without conscience.  Our soldiers should have a conscience to decide (even in combat) whether a need to kill is there.

  Posted by felixfelix006 on Jan 11, 2008 at 1:03 AM

  On the other hand, a robot soldier need not panic or even protect its own “life”. It could, in principle, reduce civilian causalities.

  But if the Islamic crazies get them, they could become mobile IEDs. And these crazies have no compunction about killing and maiming anyone, children included (hell, they happily kill other Islamic crazies too!).

  Posted by wolf on Jan 11, 2008 at 4:25 PM

  Felixfelix,

  Robots are neither good nor bad in themselves, but rely on the ethics of the operator. Our soldiers have at least as much conscience as any of us and, like the currently used drone aircraft and missiles, they will be controlling these robos.

  As Wolf points out, it is the other side which plants IEDs which kill without control or conscience and suicide bombers who kill as many as possible regardless of age, gender, or any other consideration.

  The last couple of paragraphs of this article is foolish rambling. Perhaps I should say this may be the assumption of the author regarding the participants in violent conflicts and no serious reader of history would be so simplistic. But then I foolishly thought that was obvious.

  Posted by whattheheck on Jan 12, 2008 at 3:14 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 24 posts.

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