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When it comes to war, increasingly autonomous drones are now, it seems, the name of the game. Only the other day, in its stunning surprise attack on Israel, Hamas claimed to have launched 35 explosive-laden al-Zawari "kamikaze" drones that it had produced, destroying Israeli tanks and other equipment. Hamas videos also showed "multicopter drones dropping explosives on Israeli security towers, border posts, and communication towers." And mind you, Israel was already using swarms of drones as early as 2021 to strike targets in the Gaza Strip.
Of course, in the present world of war, they are anything but alone. The conflict in Ukraine, for instance, has become remarkably drone-ified on both sides. In drone terms, however, if there was one ominous thing about the recent reactions of Israeli officials to the Hamas attacks that took their country by surprise, it was the comparison of them to al-Qaeda's assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. ("This," an Israeli military spokesman typically said, "is our 9/11.") The disastrous American response to those events, the Bush administration's "Global War on Terror," has never truly ended and, from Afghanistan to the Middle East to Africa, it introduced drone warfare to the world (in the process killing countless innocent civilians).
In that context, take a trip with TomDispatch regular Michael Klare into a future world of conflicts in which drones may no longer need us to fight their wars. It should be a truly terrifying prospect and yet the "great" powers and various minor ones are already at work trying to create drones that will be able to do their damage without a human brain in sight. Tom
Swarms vs. Swarms
How Intelligent Artificial or Otherwise Is Any of This?
A war with China may not be inevitable, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks observed recently, but it's a genuine possibility and so this country must be prepared to fight and win. But victory in such a conflict will not, she suggested, come easily. China enjoys an advantage in certain measures of military power, including the number of ships, guns, and missiles it can deploy. While America's equivalents may be more advanced and capable, they also cost far more to produce and so can only be procured in smaller numbers. To overcome such a dilemma in any future conflict, Hicks suggested, our costly crewed weapons systems must be accompanied by hordes of uncrewed autonomous ships, planes, and tanks.
To ensure that America will possess sufficient numbers of "all-domain attritable [that is, expendable] autonomous" weapons when a war with China breaks out, Hicks announced a major new Pentagon program dubbed the Replicator Initiative. "Replicator is meant to help us overcome [China's] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people," she told the National Defense Industrial Association as August ended.
Because we can't match our adversaries "ship-for-ship and shot-for-shot," given the prohibitive costs of traditional weapons systems (which must include space for their human crews), we'll overpower them instead with swarms of autonomous weapons unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs and UASs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned surface vessels (USVs), and unmanned subsea vessels (UUVs, or drone submarines), all governed by artificial intelligence (AI) and capable of independent action.
"We'll counter the [Chinese military's] mass with mass of our own," she declared, "but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat."
Needless to say, Hicks' announcement of the Replicator Initiative has raised many questions in the military-industrial-congressional complex and elsewhere about this country's ability to produce such a vast array of technologically-advanced weaponry in a short period of time. The U.S. military does, of course, already possess an array of remotely piloted drones like the infamous Predator and Reaper aircraft used in this country's Global War on Terror to hunt and kill enemy militants (and often nearby villagers as well). Those are not, however, capable of operating autonomously in swarms, as envisioned by Hicks. Even if Congress were to vote the needed hundreds of billions of dollars to develop such weapons and, at the moment, there's no certainty of that and even if the Pentagon could overcome its own bureaucratic inertia in passing such funds on to defense contractors, will those companies be capable of developing the necessary advanced software and hardware anytime soon? Who knows?
After all, the Department of Defense has already awarded many millions of dollars to assorted AI start-ups and traditional contractors over the past half-dozen years to develop advanced UAVs, UGVs, USVs, and UUVs, and yet not a single one is in full-scale production. The Navy, for example, first began funding the development and construction of a prototype Extra-Large Unmanned Undersea Vessel (XLUUV) in 2019. But as of today, no finished submarine has yet been delivered, and none are expected to be combat-ready for years. Other major autonomous weapons projects like the Air Force's "loyal wingman" drone, intended to accompany fighter planes on high-risk missions over enemy territory, seem to be on a similar track.
Still, questions about this country's ability to deliver such systems on the tight timetable Hicks announced should be the least of our concerns. Far more worrisome is the likelihood that such a drive will ignite a major new global arms race with China and Russia, ensuring that future battlefields will be populated with untold thousands (tens of thousands?) of drone weapons, overwhelming human commanders and increasing the risk of nuclear war.
The Illusion of U.S. Drone Dominance
In making the case for the Replicator Initiative, Hicks touted America's advantage in technological creativity and know-how. "We out-match adversaries by out-thinking, out-strategizing, and out-maneuvering them," she insisted. "We augment manufacturing and mobilization with our real comparative advantage, which is the innovation and spirit of our people."
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