Turning the firing decision over to the robots

McClatchy:

The unmanned bombers that frequently cause unintended civilian casualties in Pakistan are a step toward an even more lethal generation of robotic hunters-killers that operate with limited, if any, human control.

The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons.

"The trend is clear: Warfare will continue and autonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in its conduct," Ronald Arkin, a robotics expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, wrote in a study commissioned by the Army.

"The pressure of an increasing battlefield tempo is forcing autonomy further and further toward the point of robots making that final, lethal decision," he predicted. "The time available to make the decision to shoot or not to shoot is becoming too short for remote humans to make intelligent informed decisions."

Autonomous armed robotic systems probably will be operating by 2020, according to John Pike, an expert on defense and intelligence matters and the director of the security Web site GlobalSecurity.org in Washington.

This prospect alarms experts, who fear that machines will be unable to distinguish between legitimate targets and civilians in a war zone.

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I think they will get more sophisticated when they get to this level. I take issue with the suggestion that the UAV attacks in Pakistan have hit any civilians. There is little to no evidence of that. Usually the Taliban cordon off the area and evacuate their dead or al Qaeda's dead and you never see a suggestion that civilians were killed. This is very different from attacks across the border in Afghanistan where the Taliban usually claim civilian casualties whether there were any or not.

Future warfare is going to see more UAV and robotic attackers in the battle space. This will be especially true of counterinsurgency warfare.