Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

For the near future, as humans continue to drive the implementation of these technologies, mistakes will be made. Placing fragile human psyches in extreme combat situations will always generate unpredictability—and can trigger PTSD, severe emotional distress or full psychotic breaks in the process. As long as human beings conduct war, these errors must be factored in.

Until artificially intelligent systems can mimic the capability of the human brain, we won’t see unmanned systems entirely replacing human soldiers, in person or as decision-makers. Even highly intelligent machines can have glaring faults. As Peter Singer pointed out, during World War I, when the tank first appeared on the battlefield, with its guns, armor and rugged treads, it was thought to be indestructible—until someone came up with the antitank ditch. Afghanistan’s former minister of defense Abdul Rahim Wardak, whom we met in Kabul shortly before he was dismissed, chuckled as he described how he and his fellow mujahideen fighters targeted Soviet tanks in the 1980s by smearing mud on their windows and building leaf-covered traps similar to the ones the Vietcong used to ensnare American soldiers a decade earlier. In a modern parallel, Singer said, “The ground robots our soldiers use in Iraq and Afghanistan [employ] an amazing technology, but insurgents realized they could build tiger traps for them—just deep holes that [they] would fall into. They even figured out the angle necessary for the incline so that the bot couldn’t climb its way out.” The intelligence of these robots is specialized, so as they are tested in the field, their operators and developers will continually encounter enemy circumventions that they did not expect, and they’ll be forced to evolve their products. Asymmetric encounters in combat like these will continue to pose unpredictable challenges for even the most sophisticated of technologies.

Human intelligence contains more than just problem-solving skills, however. There are uniquely human traits relevant to combat—like judgment, empathy and trust—that are difficult to define, let alone instill in a robot. So what is lost as robots increasingly take over human responsibilities in battlefield operations? In our conversations with Special Forces members, they emphasized the supreme importance of trust and brotherhood in their experiences in combat. Some had trained and fought together for years, coming to know each other’s habits, movements and thought patterns almost instinctively. They described being able to communicate with just a look. Will robots ever be able to mimic a human’s ability to read nonverbal cues?

Can a robot be brave? Can it selflessly sacrifice? Can a robot, trained to identify and engage targets, have some sense of ethics or restraint? Will a robot ever be able to distinguish between a child and a small man? If a robot kills an innocent civilian, who is to be blamed? Imagine a standoff between an armed ground robot and a six-year-old child with a spray-paint canister, perhaps sent out by an insurgent group. Whether acting autonomously or with human direction, the robot can either shoot the unarmed child, or be disabled, as the six-year-old sprays paint over its high-tech cameras and sensory components, blinding it. Faced with this decision, if you were commanding the robot, Singer asks, what would you do? We can’t court-martial robots, hold them accountable or investigate them. Accordingly, humans will continue to dominate combat operations for many years to come, even as robots become more intelligent and integrated with human forces.

New Interventions

The advent of virtualized conflict and automated warfare will mean that states with aggressive agendas will have a wider range of tools available to them in the future. Interventions by other actors—citizens, businesses and governments—will diversify as well.

For states, the U.N. Security Council will remain the only international body that is both inclusive of all nations and capable of bestowing legality to state-led military interventions. It’s unlikely that the international community will stray far from the great power dispensation of 1945 that established the United Nations, even with the vociferous calls of empowered citizen populations increasing the pressure on states to act. New mandates and charters for intervention will be almost impossible to pass given the fact that any amendment to the U.N. charter requires 194 member-nations to approve.

But there are areas of high-level statecraft where new forms of intervention are more viable, and these will take place through smaller alliances. In an extreme situation, we foresee a group of countries, for example, coming together to disable an errant country’s military robots. We can also imagine some member-states of NATO pushing to establish new mandates for intervention that could authorize states to send combat troops into conflicts to establish safe zones with independent and uncompromised networks. This would be a popular idea within intervention policy circles—it’s a natural extension of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) doctrine, which the U.N. Security Council used to authorize military action (including air strikes) in Libya in 2011 that NATO subsequently carried out. It’s very possible that we will see NATO members contribute drones to enforce the world’s first unmanned no-fly zone over a future rebel stronghold, which would not involve sending any troops into harm’s way.

Beyond formal institutions like NATO, the pressure for action will find other outlets in the form of ad hoc coalitions involving citizens and companies. Neither individuals nor businesses are able to muster military force for a ground invasion, but they can contribute to the maintenance of the vitally important communications network in a conflict zone. Future interventions will take the form of reconnecting the Internet or helping a rebel-held area set up an independent and secure network. In the event of state or state-sponsored manipulation of communications, we’ll see a concerted effort by international stakeholders to intervene and restore free and uninterrupted access without waiting for U.N. approval.

It’s not the connectivity that is crucial per se (civilians in conflict zones might already have some form of communications access) but rather what a secure and fast network enables people to do. Doctors in makeshift field hospitals will be able to coordinate quickly, internally and internationally, to distribute medical supplies, arrange airdrops and document what they’re seeing. Rebel fighters will communicate securely, off the government’s telecommunications network, at ranges and on platforms much more useful than radios. Civilians will interact with members of their families in the diaspora on otherwise blocked platforms and use safe channels—mainly an array of proxy and circumvention tools—to send money in or information out.

Coalitions of states could send the equivalent of Special Forces troops to help rebel movements disconnect from the government network and establish their own network. Today, actions like these are taken but in independent fashion. A group of Libyan ministers told us the story of a brave American soul called Fred who arrived in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in a wooden boat, armed with communications supplies and determined to help the rebels build their own telecommunications network. Fred eliminated the Gadhafi-era wiretaps as his first task. In the future, this will be a combat operation, particularly in places not accessible from the sea.

The composition of intervening coalitions will change in turn. States with small militaries but strong technology sectors will become new power players. Today, Bangladesh is among the most frequent contributors of troops to international peacekeeping missions. In the future, it will be countries with strong technology sectors, presently including Estonia, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Chile, who lead the charge in this type of mission. Coalitions of the connected will bring the political will and digital weaponry like high bandwidth, jerry-rigged independent mobile networks and enhanced cybersecurity. Such countries might also contribute to military interventions, with their own robot and aerial-drone armies. Some states, particularly small ones, will find it easier, cheaper and more politically expedient to build and commit their own unmanned drone arsenal to multilateral efforts, rather than cultivating and deploying human troops.