Brookings: Topics - Military Technology

President Barack Obama’s Counterterrorism Speech Nails it on Drone Strikes

Michael E. O'Hanlon — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism speech Thursday did not deliver any radical policy changes or huge revelations, but it was well done nonetheless. It explained his reasoning behind the use of certain techniques of warfare including drone strikes and Guantanamo detentions, even as he also promised to minimize the use of these methods in the future and try to move towards a world in which the 2001 authorization for war against al Qaeda and affiliates would no longer be needed. It was an intelligent blend of the tone of his more idealistic speeches, such as the Cairo address of June 2009, with his more muscular messages like the December 2009 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

But one section of his speech is worth particular focus – the use of armed unmanned combat vehicles or drones. Even though President Obama did not specify exactly how drone strikes would change in the future, and did not provide a great deal of new information about them, the modest amount of detail he did provide was welcome. That is because U.S. drone strikes are badly misunderstood around the world, a point underscored by a New York Times op-ed today contained the following statements:

“...the C.I.A. has no idea who is actually being killed in most of the strikes. Despite this acknowledgment, the drone program in Pakistan still continues without any Congressional oversight or accountability.”

Such statements are incorrect and inflammatory, causing problems for example in U.S.-Pakistani relations. Indeed, even so-called “signature strikes” have typically been conducted only after a great deal of surveillance of a given site, very robust establishment of the fact that such a site is an enemy headquarters or related facility, and considerable care in ensuring that noncombatants are not present (and as Obama said, Congress is “briefed on every strike that America takes”).

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Authors

Michael E. O'Hanlon

Publication: CNN

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

Finally, Obama Breaks His Silence on Drones

Peter W. Singer — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Over the last four years, there has been a strange irony. One of the greatest speakers of our era has largely kept silent about one of the signature aspects of his presidency.

Under President Obama's leadership, U.S. civilian intelligence agencies have carried out a series of not-so-covert operations in so-called secret wars that have reached a huge scale. There have been nearly 400 drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen since 2008, in periods of activity that have ebbed and flowed dependent on everything from the availability of intelligence to local political tides.

But the long-term nature and growth in scale of the "drone wars" campaign made targeted killings a key feature of the administration's foreign policy, both in its internal approach to counter-terrorism and external perceptions of America. The advantages were clear to an administration that throughout this period faced a daily drumbeat of terrorism threats. Targeted killings by drones offered new means for action in ways that were more accurate, more proportionate and less risky to American lives than previous alternatives. They have repeatedly been used in successful operations that eliminated key terrorist leaders.

However, the short-term benefits came with long-term questions. As these operations increasingly were leaked to the media, they grew more and more controversial, whether from concern over civilian casualties, disputes over the appropriate role of the CIA versus the military in what had evolved into a massive air war campaign, Congress' sense that it was the victim of an executive branch end run or broader worry about the danger to constitutional powers.

As this played out, the president's absence from the debate became more and more telling. Yes, there were a couple of speeches by presidential aides finally acknowledging the use of such technology, quick mentions on late-night talk shows and even presidential jokes about drone strikes. But the administration's case in the public debate remained disjointed, tentative and, as the controversy surrounding John Brennan's confirmation hearings as CIA director illustrated, far from strategic or satisfactory. The time was long overdue for the true stamp of presidential voice and authority on the topic to be heard.

That is what makes the president's speech Thursday at National Defense University so important, and simultaneously so challenging for him. He has to try to strike a balance between arguing that terrorism threats will remain with us for the long term, as recent events in Boston and London would illustrate, but that the structures we gradually built up in response, from the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the drone campaign, cannot remain with us in their ad hoc manner for the long term.

Beyond all the internal policy questions — such as what the CIA should control versus what the Pentagon controls — he has a broader task. He must lay out the overdue case for regularizing, so to speak, our counter-terrorism strategy itself, from the means to the ends. This will require touching on thorny issues such as how to bring more transparency to the ugly task of a targeted killings campaign, how to create more interaction with Congress — which both wants and avoids oversight — and, finally, how to find a path out of the Gitmo conundrum.

Beginning this kind of discussion has been described by some as just a way to change the topic in the midst of other would-be scandals dominating the news cycle. But let's be crystal clear: The president is making a big bet by speaking out on issues on which he still enjoys fairly broad public support.

The reason to take this bet is that the speech offers enormous advantages over the alternative of remaining silent. Though it may or may not assuage the genuine concerns at home about the drone campaign, the very act is hugely important inside government. Only the president can operate above the interagency disputes, and his vision will set the terms of internal policy development across multiple agencies (why those staff speeches and confirmation hearings never could substitute for his voice).

In turn, the public side of the speech matters in a manner beyond any blip in domestic poll numbers. Here again, only the president can truly stake out America's vision in a way the world notices. If well played, the speech might even be the foundation for future international norms that need to be set in the post-9/11, post-Osama bin Laden world. This is all the more important as our technologies proliferate and other nations, such as Russia, China and Iran, may seek to follow (or misuse) our precedents in drone strikes and targeted killings.

The issues at play are not just about which agency gets to do what and when to tell whom on Capitol Hill, but also how the United States might build a global coalition of the like-minded on the future of counter-terrorism.

In short, sometimes a speech is more than just a speech. By finally speaking out on some of the key issues that have grown to define his place in foreign policy history, Obama has his chance, finally, to set the terms of the debate and steer it toward more positive ends.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Los Angeles Times

Image Source: © Jason Reed / Reuters

Holder: We've Droned 4 Americans, 3 By Accident. Oops.

Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:39:00 -0400

In an extraordinary admission, Attorney General Eric Holder has told Congress that U.S. drone strikes since 2009 have killed four Americans — three of whom were “not specifically targeted.”

For all the effort that the Obama administration has gone to in asserting that its drones only kill the people that the administration intends to kill, Holder wrote in a letter today to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that Samir Khan, 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki and Jude Kenan Mohammad were “not specifically targeted by the United States.” The fourth American to die in a drone strike since 2009 was Abdulrahman’s father Anwar Awlaki, a radical propagandist whom the U.S. killed in Yemen in 2011.

The five-page letter, obtained and published by Charlie Savage of The New York Times, does not explain the circumstances that led to the unintentional killings of Khan, Mohammad and the younger Awlaki. Holder does not apologize for the killings, nor explain whether their deaths resulted from errant targeting, mistaken identity or another circumstance.

But after acknowledging that the administration did “not specifically targe[t]” those three Americans, Holder defended killing Americans the administration believes to be members of al-Qaida without due process, a constitutionally questionable proposition.

“It is clear and logical that United States citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted,” Holder wrote to Leahy. “Rather, it means the government must take special care and take into account all relevant constitutional considerations, the laws of war, and other laws with respect to U.S. citizens — even those who are leading efforts to kill their fellow, innocent Americans.”

Holder’s criteria are familiar, thanks to a Justice Department “white paper” on targeted killing that leaked in February. To target an American that American must be a “senior operational leader” of al-Qaida “or its associated forces”; capturing him or her must be “not feasible”; the strike would conform to the laws of war; and “a thorough and careful review” inside the executive branch determines that the American is part of an “imminent” attack. Oh, and the drone strike can only be done outside the U.S., Holder emphasizes, in an apparent nod to the concerns of Sen. Rand Paul.

Only the concept of “imminence” here is far broader than its conventional definition. Nor does Holder explain what undergirds the determination that an American cannot be captured; the relative ease of drone strikes creates a structural disincentive for a policymaker to opt for a risky capture operation.

Americans are a tiny fraction of the people killed by U.S. drone strikes. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently estimated that 4700 people have died from drone-launched missiles. An unknown percentage of those casualties are people whose identities are not known to the government but who are presumed to be terrorists based on their patterns of travel and other behavior.

It’s worth noting that this is not an exhaustive list of Americans killed by U.S. drone strikes. Kamal Derwish of Lackawanna, NY was killed in a November 2002 missile strike launched from a Predator drone, one of the first such cases. It’s unclear why Holder did not list American deaths from pre-2009 strikes in his tally.

Khan was the editor of Inspire, the English-language webzine of al-Qaida’s Yemen offshoot. He was killed in the September 2011 strike that killed Anwar Awlaki. Abdulrahman, a teenager born in Denver, was killed in Yemen shortly thereafter, alongside his 17-year old cousin.

Jude Kenan Mohamad travelled to Pakistan from North Carolina in 2008, allegedly to become a jihadi, and never returned. He was arrested in 2009 for trying to enter Pakistan’s tribal regions without the proper paperwork. But he skipped out on his court date, and vanished. Friends feared him dead after a November, 2011 drone strike. But his status — alive or dead — was never officially confirmed until now. Mohamad’s FBI wanted poster does not list his death. (“The FBI won’t declare a person dead until there’s physical evidence, DNA evidence,” a law-enforcement source explains to Danger Room.) Nor have outside terrorist trackers like the Long War Journal counted Mohamad among the droned. (“I don’t track him as being killed,” says Bill Roggio, the Journal’s editor.)

Buried within the letter is another startling admission from Holder. This week, Holder writes, Obama approved “a document that institutionalizes the Administration’s exacting standards and processes for reviewing and approving operations to capture or use lethal force against terrorist targets outside the United States and areas of active hostilities.” That would be the infamous Disposition Matrix, the bureaucratic codification of the administration’s so-called targeted killing program. Congress will now be “notified and briefed” on the document, so expect something resembling it to leak to the press.

It’s fitting that Obama has approved the disposition matrix and Holder has acknowledged the drone killings of Americans this week. Tomorrow, Obama will give a speech about the future course of the war on terrorism. It remains to be seen if he will acknowledge accidentally killing three American citizens without due process — one of whom was a teenager.

Authors

Spencer Ackerman
Noah Shachtman

Publication: Danger Room Blog

Lessons and Context of the Navy’s First Carrier Drone Flight

Peter W. Singer — Wed, 15 May 2013 16:33:00 -0400

The U.S. Navy recently made history with its flight of the X-47B UCAS, the first unmanned carrier drone (unmanned systems) to launch from an aircraft carrier. In 2009 and 2011, the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings had the pleasure of hosting then Chief of Naval Operations, ADM Gary Roughead, to discuss the future of unmanned operations. The vision he laid out is well on its way to fruition, making it especially useful to place what happened today in the context of the larger U.S. defense strategy and to look at what lessons have been learned in the development of unmanned systems. As I explored in a look at the past and future of naval aviation after 100 years of flight, this success is only one part of a much bigger story.

What this history tells us is that, now that the Navy has crossed yet another step that the naysayers said could never be done, the challenges are as much organizational and political, as they are technical. For example, now that unmanned systems have shown they can fly off a carrier, what will be their exact role? Whether they will be delegated to take on tasks on their own or paired with manned planes, for a package that is greater than the sum of its parts, is a crucial question of naval air combat doctrine moving forward. It is akin to the questions that early warplanes faced as to whether they were to be tethered to the existing surface force of battleships as scouts or serve as their own, as a new form of a battle fleet.

We are only at the start of this robotic revolution at sea, just around the World War I stage of things, if manned airplanes are a parallel. Just as the first Navy planes started out doing only observation, but soon began to be used for everything from bombing runs to carrier onboard delivery (COD), so we are seeing a similar expansion in the roles of unmanned systems. UCAS originally started out being just in the observation ISR role, but clearly has a more lethal future, while the Marines are already using robotic helicopters for roles like cargo delivery in Afghanistan. But just like back then, we don’t yet have all the answers as to the optimal doctrine. Even the basic design of this technology remains to be learned and adopted.

A second lesson is that despite its relentless advancement, there are no signs that technology will end the central role of humans in war and at sea any time soon. However, not “ending”, isn’t the same thing as not “changing.” The specifics of the human roles will be altered, but again, this is nothing new. Most Navy warplanes today don’t have tail gunners or navigators. The skill sets and ranks of those who wear the wings of gold might be altered, which opens up the kind of internal identity and qualification questions in the Navy that have also recently challenged the Air Force. Does the remote operator (note: “operator,” not “pilot” is the terminology so far in the Navy, as opposed to how the Air Force views the requirement) of a plane that can take off and land on its own, who is sitting behind a computer screen, actually need 20/20 eyesight or the ability to do 50 sit-ups? Do they even need to be an officer (akin to how the Army has handled UAS versus the Air Force)? The next few decades will be an exciting time, with new paths being forged, much like they were by the first generation of naval aviation pioneers.

This leads to a third challenge that may be the most vexing to the Pentagon in the years ahead. In an article entitled U-Turn, I explored how there are a series of speed bumps that loom for unmanned systems, not so ironically just as they are making their mark. These range from internal cultural resistance to budgetary battles, in which the new is often disadvantaged against the old. We are seeing this play out here again. Few realize that (according to figures from the DoD UAs office), at the very same time the X-47 knocked down yet another technical barrier, the Navy’s planned UAS budget is being cut by 24%, several times greater than the rest of the budget cuts. Indeed, the tension that the successful UCAS test created for F35’s longer term buy numbers is much like Voldemort in the Harry Potter books, not to be spoken about, but palpable.

Bottom line: Congrats to the Navy and the team behind the X-47B on yet again making history, but this history tells us we have an array of questions to explore in the years ahead.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Image Source: © Jason Reed / Reuters

Pentagon Paying China — Yes, China — To Carry Data

Noah Shachtman — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The Pentagon is so starved for bandwidth that it’s paying a Chinese satellite firm to help it communicate and share data.

U.S. troops operating on the African continent are now using the recently-launched Apstar-7 satellite to keep in touch and share information. And the $10 million, one-year deal lease — publicly unveiled late last week during an ordinarily-sleepy Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing — has put American politicians and policy-makers in bit of a bind. Over the last several years, the U.S. government has publicly and loudly expressed its concern that too much sensitive American data passes through Chinese electronics — and that those electronics could be sieves for Beijing’s intelligence services. But the Pentagon says it has no other choice than to use the Chinese satellite. The need for bandwidth is that great, and no other satellite firm provides the continent-wide coverage that the military requires.

“That bandwidth was available only on a Chinese satellite,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Doug Loverro told a House Armed Services Committee panel, in remarks first reported by InsideDefense.com. “We recognize that there is concerns across the community on the usage of Chinese satellites to support our warfighter. And yet, we also recognize that our warfighters need support, and sometimes we must go to the only place that we can get it from.”

The Apstar-7 is owned and operated by a subsidiary of the state-controlled China Satellite Communication Company, which counts the son of former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao as itschairman. But the Pentagon insists that any data passed through the Apstar-7 is protected from any potential eavesdropping by Beijing. The satellite uplinks and downlinks are encrypted, and unspecified “additional transmission security” procedures cover the data in transit, according to Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a Defense Department spokesperson.

“We reviewed all the security concerns, all of the business concerns with such a lease,” Loverro said. “And so from that perspective, I’m very pleased with what we did. And yet, I think the larger issue is we don’t have a clear policy laid out on how do we assess whether or not we want to do this as a department, as opposed to just a response to a need.”

Every new drone feed and every new soldier with a satellite radio creates more appetite for bandwidth — an appetite the military can’t hope to fill with military spacecraft alone. To try to keep up, the Pentagon has leased bandwidth from commercial carriers for more than a decade. And the next decade should bring even more commercial deals; in March, the Army announced it was looking for new satellite firms to help troops in Afghanistan communicate. According to a 2008 Intelligence Science Board study (.pdf) — one of the few public reports on the subject — demand for satellite communications could grow from about 30 gigabits per second to 80 gigabits a decade from now.

The Chinese are poised to help fill that need — especially over Africa, where Beijing has deep business and strategic interests. In 2012, China for the first time launched more rockets into space than the U.S. – including the Chinasat 12 and Apstar-7 communications satellites.

Relying on Chinese companies could be a problematic solution to the bandwidth crunch, however. U.S. officials have in recent years publicly accused Chinese telecommunications firms of being, in effect, subcontractors of Beijing’s spies. Under pressure from the Obama administration and Congress, the Chinese company Huawei was rebuffed in its attempts to purchase network infrastructure manufacturer 3Com; in 2010, Sprint dropped China’s ZTE from a major U.S. telecommunications infrastructure contract after similar prodding. Last September, executives from the Huawei and ZTE were brought before the House intelligence committee and told, in effect, to prove that they weren’t passing data back to Beijing. “There’s concern because the Chinese government can use these companies and use their technology to get information,” Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, said at the time. The executives pushed back against the charges, and no definitive links to espionage operations were uncovered. But the suspicion remains. And it isn’t contained to these two firms.

“I’m startled,” says Dean Cheng, a research fellow and veteran China-watcher at the Heritage Foundation. “Is this risky? Well, since the satellite was openly contracted, they [the Chinese] know who is using which transponders. And I suspect they’re making a copy of all of it.”

Even if the data passing over the Apstar-7 is encrypted, the coded traffic could be used to give Chinese cryptanalysts valuable clues about how the American military obfuscates its information. “This is giving it to them in a nice, neat little package. I think there is a potential security concern.”

And even if the Chinese don’t intercept the data, there’s always the danger of them suddenly deciding to block service to the American military.

For his part, Loverro says the Department of Defense will be reviewing its procedures to ensure that future satellite communications deals both let troops talk and let them talk in private. The Pentagon will get another opportunity shortly: the Apstar-7 deal is up on May 14, and can be renewed for up to three more years.

Authors

Noah Shachtman

Publication: Danger Room (Wired)

At a Dollar a Shot, Lasers Bring Down Missiles and Costs

Peter W. Singer — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: In an interview with the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research on emerging developments in warfare and defense technologies, Peter Singer sheds light on some of the pressing security concerns facing the Gulf Cooperation Council region and the need for greater defense coordination.

ECSSR: In your enlightening lecture, you raised very important questions about leadership issues regarding selecting and investing in the right kind of military technologies. What kind of new approaches and technologies should peace-loving countries like many GCC states with relatively small militaries invest in to ward off threats posed by big nations in their vicinity, like Iran, to strike a balance of power?

Peter Singer: I think there are several important issues to be put on the table here. First, while GCC member states are small countries, they do have relatively powerful defense budgets, when you sum them together. So while individually they may not be a match for the size of a large neighbor, like an Iran, collectively that is certainly within their power; particularly when you add in the advantage that they have of being able to purchase high technology.

In most areas, they are a generation ahead of Iran. For example, in terms of jet fighters they are literally a generation ahead. Secondly, they can have partnerships with allies like the US and France that aren’t accessible to a nation like Iran. So that gives them certain opportunities.

The challenge for the GCC, as I see it as a defense analyst from the outside, is a couple of issues. There hasn’t been as much cooperation and coordination as there might be both within the states of the GCC and with their allies, like the US and France. We can see this when it comes to areas like air defense and missile defense, where we still don’t have a well-integrated relationship despite the very clear threat from an Iran, particularly when it comes to missiles.

Another area of cooperation will be if you look for a low level threat from Iran. There is fear that they may not engage in direct hostilities but do something like mine the seaways nearby, which is something they had done previously in their history. And yet we don’t see the kinds of investment being made in mine-detection and mine-clearing at sea by the local states here that might match that threat. The United States, for example, has had to push almost all of its mine-sweeping capacity into the Gulf right now.

The second issue is focusing on spreading out your investments. There is a clear amount of technological change going around in the world today, ranging from the rise of unmanned systems to directed energies etc., and so each of the nations —whether it is the United States or the states of the GCC —have to figure out how to make smart investments. In many ways, like an investor on the stock market, you don’t put all you money in one place but spread out the risks. Again, you particularly don’t put all your money in the thing that is most shiny and most appealing. That’s a challenge, which is facing many militaries and we see that playing out in the market today. So I think that given the amount of transition that is going on, locking into any one program, or locking into any single system is not the way to go. There is enough uncertainty right now that you spread out the risk.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: The Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research

Image Source: © Ho New / Reuters

America's Care in the Use of Force (and Use of Drones)

Michael E. O'Hanlon — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:36:00 -0400

American University professor Akbar Ahmed’s new book, The Thistle and the Drone, is elegant and erudite in many ways. He demonstrates a rich historical and anthropological understanding not only of his native Pakistan but of other tribal societies around the world relevant in the broader “war against terrorism.” He cautions wisely about the geostrategic dangers that can result if Washington is seen as using force disproportionately or carelessly in ways that hurt innocent people in these areas. Ahmed is right to question whether the United States needs to reassess its approaches in these matters.

However, as someone who has followed these same issues myself, albeit from a somewhat different vantage point as a national security scholar with close ties to the U.S. military and intelligence community, I have a different perspective on several of the issues Ahmed raises. In some of his specific arguments, Professor Ahmed is not fully fair, accurate, or up to date.

He makes insufficient effort to understand trends in drone warfare including the huge progress that the United States has made in minimizing civilian casualties. While mistakes are sometimes still made, I believe after following the use of drones closely for years that the United States Armed Forces take a great deal of care in their use of force. It is dangerous for Ahmed to suggest otherwise, since in doing so he can fuel the very fires of hatred and distrust that he decries.

For example, in Afghanistan, ISAF forces have made extraordinary efforts to reduce their use of firepower, and accidental or inadvertent strikes now account for less than 10 percent of all civilian fatalities there according to UN figures. This is still far too many—a few hundred a year—but it is incredibly precise by the standards of warfare. Indeed, under General McChrystal three years ago, some NATO troops felt they were even being asked to accept greater personal risk to themselves and their fellow troopers when engaged in firefights so as to ensure maximum safety for Afghans. NATO troops do not fire on Afghan homes or other buildings unless in dire peril, and their care has produced a huge improvement in our track record.

In Pakistan, U.S. forces have had essentially a zero-casualty policy for at least three years. Attacks are not made if there is any realistic risk to civilians—with only a partial exception if al Qaeda’s top two or three leaders might be in the crosshairs. Yes, mistakes have been made. But these have been extremely rare. Peter Bergen tallies the number of accidental deaths of innocents as well under 10 percent of the total in recent times. To be sure, critiques are warranted, and we can afford to scale back our use of force now that bin Laden is dead, top al Qaeda leadership in general is decimated, and some key Haqqani leaders are out of the picture (we have already reduced the pace of attacks substantially, as Bergen’s data repeated at www.brookings.edu/afghanistanindex show). But the insinuations that we have not been extremely careful and have not tried to learn further lessons along are simply incorrect.

Ahmed goes further. On p. 39 of his book, he even says that "There appears to be a deliberate attempt by official agencies in the war on terror to obfuscate and distort." This is a big charge that he makes without substantiation or specificity.

There are a few other specific matters where dissent is warranted, as well. On p. 305 he suggests that many if not most American scholars blame Islam and its basic nature for terrorism. This is not accurate. Far more American scholars go out of their way to argue just the opposite in the last 12 years.

On p. 309 he actually suggests that a mainstream strand of American national security thinking wants to "eradicate Islam." This is, frankly, a preposterous and irresponsible allegation.

On p. 311 he suggests that it was a serious idea to carpet bomb Muslim villages with videos of Baywatch, and that Americans would take such nonsense seriously. Perhaps here Ahmed is being tongue in cheek, but in light of his other arguments, I couldn’t tell. I hope so!

On p. 313, he says that al Qaeda is now blamed for every outburst of violence around the world, and that Americans live on pins and needles because of fear of another attack. In fact, most Americans have moved on. They worry far more about the economy. In national security terms, recent policy has focused as much on the so-called rebalancing towards Asia, and the problems with North Korea. More than anything else, though, what typifies the current American public policy debate is less paranoia over al Qaeda than Americans' growing isolationism. Ahmed would have been more fair to criticize the country for its indifference towards the Syrian civil war than for hypervigilance towards militants.

Finally, on p. 319, Ahmed suggests that anthropologists were brought into U.S. foreign policy decisionmaking to help determine how to properly torture Muslim prisoners. This too is wrong.

Ahmed is a remarkable scholar who has made big contributions, but on the above matters, I simply disagree.

Authors

Michael E. O'Hanlon

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

A Discussion About Drones

Peter W. Singer — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: In an interview with Charlie Rose, Peter W. Singer joins Michael Boyle of LaSalle University, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University, and Scott Shane of The New York Times to discuss the revolutionary nature of drone technology as well as the dilemmas—strategic, ethical, political—that they present. Read an excerpt below.

Charlie Rose: Peter Singer, put this in the context of warfare overall.

Peter Singer: Well you have a revolutionary change that’s happening in the technology of war. Now, the question here is, are we talking about war or counterterrorism—we’ve got things conflated. But when you look at the technology of drones, it’s a gamechanger in war. It’s something along the level of the introduction of gunpowder or the steam engine or the airplane. By that I mean it gives you a series of capabilities that we didn’t imagine we’d have a generation ago, but also it’s giving us a series of dilemmas that we also didn’t imagine we’d be having a generation ago. And they’re dilemmas that are political, strategic, tactical, all the way down to ethical and legal.

Now one thing that’s happening here I think that’s a challenge is that we’re seeing things conflated. So, just as the example that Scott gave of the conflation between the JSOC kill list and process—the Joint Special Operations Command on the military side—and the one that the CIA is doing, both of which are taking place in the shadow wars that are out there.

Peter Singer: Signature strikes is an illustration of this, where on one hand we’ve seen administration officials say either “we don’t do that,” and other times we’ve heard them say “we do do that, but this is why.” But then we also have a variety of tactics beyond signature strikes that, for example, in an overt military operation you would never utilize.

One’s called a 'double tap strike,' which is where you strike at a target and then you wait for the rescuers to come about and you strike again. Now that’s been something that we’ve pointed out that if adversaries did that in Afghanistan or Iraq we would say “how dare you, this is evidence of how bad they are.” Yet there have been reports that we may have conducted strikes in a similar manner. Don’t know whether they’re confirmed or not.

But what I’m getting at here is that a civilian, political appointee lawyer, operating under a very different set of laws and priorities, looks at that issue and the question of what tactics you might bring, what rules of engagement you operate under, very differently from how a military lawyer would. And that’s part of the importance of whether these do shift from intelligence agency to military, but also whether they stay in the complete black ops world or whether we own up to the fact that these are not covert operations anymore, they’re frankly not so covert, and we need to stop running away from them and embrace the fact that we are doing them and these are the rules we’re going to operate under and actually stick and follow those rules.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Charlie Rose

Image Source: © KCNA KCNA / Reuters

The Future of the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal

Steven Pifer — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: In an interview with WKAR on the future of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Steven Pifer, co-author of The Opportunity, discusses prospects for future international arms negotiations as well as the stability of the U.S. and Russian bombs, submarines and planes. Read an excerpt below.

WKAR: Before we get into the details, can you give us a sense of the scale we’re talking about here? I’m sure the exact number is a guarded secret but about how many nuclear warheads does the U.S. maintain?

Steve Pifer: Well actually it’s not a secret. In 2010 the United States released a number and said that as of September 2009 the total American stockpile was 5,113 weapons.

WKAR: Okay

Pifer: Which is a huge decrease from the Cold War, at the height of the Cold War there were 25,000- 30,000 weapons. But you still have to ask the question; does that number make sense twenty years after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union?

WKAR: What about the dollar cost of maintaining that arsenal?

Pifer: The dollar cost in terms of maintaining them, on a day to day status, is estimated at say thirty to forty billion dollars a year. So it’s a part of the defense budget…

WKAR: Wow

Pifer: But where the costs get really big is if you look, say five or seven years down the road, where the Navy’s going to have to start building a new ballistic missile submarine to replace the Ohio class submarines which have to be retired in about 15 years and then you’re talking about an estimate of $6 to $7 billion dollars, per boat, not counting the missiles or torpedoes.

Listen to the audio »

Authors

Steven Pifer

Publication: WKAR

Image Source: © Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters

Security Challenges During a Time of Transition

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

March 13, 2013
10:00 AM - 4:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

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The 21st Century Defense Initiative’s Fourth Annual Military and Federal Fellow Research Symposium

On March 13, the 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings hosted its fourth annual Military and Federal Fellow Research Symposium, featuring the independent research produced by the members of each military service and the federal agencies who have spent the last year serving at think tanks and universities across the nation. Organized by the fellows themselves, the symposium provides a platform for building greater awareness of the cutting-edge work that America’s military and governmental leaders are producing on key policy issues.

The theme of this symposium was “Security Challenges During a Time of Transition,” reflecting the war drawdowns, new fiscal realities, and upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review. Panel discussions focused on fellows’ independent research findings in the areas of military leadership, the composition and structure of military forces, an increasing reliance on technology, and emerging maritime challenges. Thomas E. Ricks, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, delivered opening remarks, and Dr. Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Agency, gave a keynote address.

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Event Materials

20130313_security_challenges_transcript

The Global Swarm: An International Drone Market

Peter W. Singer — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

"One plan was to use an unmanned aerial vehicle to carry 20kg of TNT to bomb the area, but the plan was rejected because we were ordered to catch him alive." This is what Liu Yuejin, director of China's public security ministry's anti-drug bureau, described of the manhunt for Naw Kham, the ringleader of a large drug trafficking outfit based in the Golden Triangle, who was suspected of killing 13 Chinese sailors. Ultimately, they got him via a cross-border nighttime ambush, the Chinese version of the Abbottabad raid.

This case, however, is useful to think about when talking about the global market for unmanned aerial systems (aka "drones") and where it is headed, a topic that got new energy last week with a New York Times report on the confusion as to whether it was American or Pakistani drones that carried out a controversial airstrike.

Too often in policy and media circles, we discuss a supposed American monopoly on drones that is potentially ending. Or, as Time magazine entitled a story, "Drone Monopoly: Hope You Enjoyed It While It Lasted." The article goes on to say,"It is going to happen; the only question is when."

The answer is: several years ago.

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Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Foreign Policy

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

Why The U.S. Is Not in a Cyber War

Ian Wallace — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

For several weeks, it has been difficult to open a newspaper or watch a Sunday talk show without hearing about the advent of “cyber war.” The media has been filled with an avalanche of cyber threat-related stories: the hacking of leading newspapers, evidence of Chinese government involvement in intellectual property theft, and now, further distributed denial of service attacks against U.S. banks. All these events present real and serious national security challenges. But cyber-espionage, cyber-crime and the malicious disruption of critical infrastructure are not the same as war, and the distinction is important.

The idea that America is in the middle of a “cyber war” isn't just lazy and wrong. It's dangerous. The war analogy implies the requirement for military response to cyber intrusions. America genuinely needs effective civilian government cyber defense organizations with strong relationships with the private sector and the active engagement of an informed general public. Creating and even promoting the fear of “cyber war” makes that more difficult. Here’s why:

First, while the U.S fights its wars using the highly-trained professional within the U.S. Armed Forces, defending against cyber threats does not necessary require military expertise or prowess. True, most private individuals and corporations lack the knowledge and training needed to fight off attacks from elite Chinese, Iranian and Russian cyber “warriors.” As a result, there is and will continue to be a pressing need for highly qualified information security experts to help defend the larger U.S. cyber landscape. Nonetheless, there are relatively simple ways to make it more difficult for the bad guys without escalating to a “war” standing. In 2011, the Australian Defence Signals Directorate (their equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency) showed that by taking just four key measures--“whitelisting” (i.e., allowing only authorized software to run on a computer or network), very rapid patching of applications and of operating system vulnerabilities, and restricting the number of people with administrator access to a system--85 percent of targeted intrusions can be prevented. These might appear more like prophylactic public health measures than warfare--and that’s the point. The United States does not need to declare “war” and call up the military to fend off cyber threats.

Read the full article »

Authors

Ian Wallace

Publication: The Daily Beast

Image Source: © Samantha Sais / Reuters

The Predator Comes Home: A Primer on Domestic Drones, their Huge Business Opportunities, and their Deep Political, Moral, and Legal Challenges

Peter W. Singer — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:09:00 -0500

At the turn of the last century, a strange new technology began to appear in America. As a January 4, 1900 article about one of the very first sightings in the state of Florida described, “The Locomobile resembles a rubber-tired driving buggy in its outward appearance, except that no allowance is made for attaching a horse…A brake is attached to the rear axle that will stop the machine in a much shorter space than a horse can be stopped.”[1]

The locomobile, or “horseless carriage,” caught people’s fancy and powered a huge new industry. Businesses opened up in places that ranged from Basic City, Virginia, home of the Dawson Steam Auto-Mobile, a two-cylinder runabout with single chain drive and tiller rather than a steering wheel, to the Southern Automobile Manufacturing Company of Jacksonville, which assembled five cars a day that sold for a princely sum of $400 each.

Soon, the industry rippled out into all sorts of directions. It was only two years after the first car hit the roads of Florida that the first car dealership was created. This led to new endeavors in areas like the logistics and support “garages,” which had ripple effects out into other areas. For instance, just three years after the first news article on the locomobile appeared in The Florida Times-Union & Citizen, the very first newspaper advertisement for one appeared.

But this new technology also brought strange new questions, such as how to protect people from them. The first fine for “speeding” came just a year later in 1904, when a man was arrested for endangering the lives and property of pedestrians in downtown Jacksonville. He had exceeded the 6 mile per hour speed limit

The new technology also created new demands on governments, like an entire new type of infrastructure. Staying in Florida for the moment, it was in 1907 when the first of what we now call “snow birds” arrived via horseless carriage. Mr. Ralph Owen “accomplished the amazing feat of driving an Oldsmobile motorcar from New York to Florida in only 15 days.”

The reason this took so long is that no one was ready for it, especially the government. There were no real roads, at least as we think about them now, and no truly reliable maps for the pathways that did exist. Indeed, as late as 1921 the Automobile Club of America recommended that motorists traveling from New England to Florida simply bypass the entire state of Virginia because of these problems.

It wasn’t just the poor state of transportation that required a network of roads and highways to be funded but also basic issues like what safety equipment the new technology required. For example, early horseless carriages often had headlights but no turn signals. Drivers had to use hand signals to indicate their intentions to turn or slow down. A new business started selling a seeming solution, Devilseye Reflector Rings.[2] Drivers would wear large red rings on their fingers at night so that when they held their hand outside the car the rings reflected other headlights and allowed other drivers to see the signal. Soon, this concept was replaced by the novel idea of requiring the reflector be embedded in the car rather than carried by the driver.

These stories of the early days of “horseless carriages” and “locomobiles” aren’t just fascinating but they should serve to help us frame the issues we face today in “unmanned systems” and robotics. They were a technology that once seemed alien but we figured it out.

Where are we now? Robots and War

While unmanned systems have a long history dating back to Da Vinci’s designs for a robotic knight, and first emerged in war with German remote-controlled torpedo boats in the First World War, it wasn’t until just a decade ago that they truly took off.[3] Advances in technology made unmanned systems more usable, especially through the incorporation of GPS technology that allowed such systems to locate themselves in the world. At the same time, the new conflicts that followed 9/11 drove demand. When U.S. forces first went into Afghanistan, the U.S. military had only a handful of unmanned aerial systems (UAS, also called “remotely piloted aircraft” or, more colloquially, “drones”) in the air, none of them armed, and zero on the ground. Now it has a force inventory of more than 8,000 in the air and more than 12,000 on the ground. Another example of how far the change has gone is that last year, the U.S. Air Force trained more unmanned systems operators than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

But when we think about technologies like the Predator or the PackBot, we need to remember that they are just the first generation, the Model T Fords and Wright Flyers compared to what is already in the prototype stage.[4] We are still at the “horseless” stage of this technology, describing these technologies by what they are not rather than wrestling with what they truly are. These technologies are “killer applications” in all the meanings of the term. They are technologies that advance the power of killing. They are also technologies that have a disruptive effect on existing structures and programs. That is, they are akin to advancements like the airplane or the steam engine in allowing greater power and reach in war, but they are also akin to what iPods did to the music industry, changing it forever.

What Next? The Robotics Revolution

While many are surprised by the existing use of robotics, the pace of change won’t stop. We may have thousands now, but as one three-star U.S. Air Force general noted in my book Wired for War, very soon it will be “tens of thousands.”[5]

But the numbers matter in another way. It won’t be tens of thousands of today’s robots, but tens of thousands of tomorrow’s robots, with far different capabilities.

One of the laws in action when it comes to technology is Moore’s Law, which states that the computing power that can fit on a microchip doubles just under every two years or so.[6] It has become an encapsulation of broader exponential trends in technology that have occurred throughout history, with technological power constantly doubling in everything from power to storage to broader innovation patterns.[7] If Moore’s Law holds true over the next 25 years the way it has held true over the last 40 years, then our chips, our computers, and, yes, our robots will be as much as a billion times more powerful than today. But Moore’s Law is not a law of physics. It doesn’t have to hold true. What if our technology moves at a pace just 1/1000^th slower than it has historically? In this slowed-down scenario, we’d only see a mere 1,000,000 times the change.

The bottom line is that what was once only fodder for science-fiction conventions like Comic-Con is now being talked about seriously in places like the Pentagon. A robotics revolution is at hand.

We should be crystal clear here. The robot revolution happening is not the Robopocalypse that Steven Spielberg was preparing to film.[8] It is not the type where you need to worry about the former governor of California showing up at your door, à la The Terminator.[9]

Instead, every so often, a technology comes along that changes the rules of the game. These technologies – be they fire, the printing press, gunpowder, the steam engine, the computer, etc. – are rare but truly consequential.

The key to making technology truly revolutionary is not merely its new capabilities but its questions. Revolutionary technologies force us to ask new questions about what is possible and consider things that weren’t conceivable a generation before. But they also force us to relook at what is proper. They raise issues of right and wrong that we didn’t have to wrestle with before.

The historical comparisons that people make to the robotics revolution illustrate this. When I conducted interviews for my book, I asked people to give historical parallels to where they think we stand now with robotics. As I noted earlier with the comparison to the “horseless carriage,” many of them, especially engineers, liken where we are now with robotics to the advent of the automobile.

If the horseless carriage is the parallel, think of the ripple effects that cars had on everything from our geopolitics to our law enforcement. A group of people who were, at the time, desert nomads became crucial players in the global economy simply because they lived over a sticky black substance previously considered more of a nuisance than anything else. The greater use of that same – now crucial – resource has changed the global climate. The growing use of cars, in turn, led to new concepts that reshaped the landscape, whether through highways and suburbia, or through new social notions, like dating (teens previously could only court on parents’ front porches).

And of course a whole new world requires the establishment of rules of the game, or rather new rules of the road. It wasn’t just a matter of fines for “speeding,” but also changes to the very structure of American law enforcement. The rise of easy cross state crime enabled by the speed and reach of horseless carriages, such as the string of bank robberies by Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, helped lead to the rise of the then Bureau of Investigation, now the modern FBI.[10]

Others, such as Bill Gates, make a different comparison to the computer in 1980.[11] Much like robots today, the computer back then was a big, bulky device for which we could only conceive a few functions. Importantly, the military was the main spender on computers’ research and development and a key client driving the marketplace, again comparable to the development of robots.

But soon, computers changed. They got smaller. We figured out more and more functions and applications that they could perform, both in war and in civilian life. And they proliferated. It has reached the point that we have stopped thinking of most of them as “computers.” I drive a car with more than 100 computers in it. No one calls it a “computerized car.” I have a number of computers in my kitchen. I call them things like “microwave” or “coffee maker.”

The same thing is happening with robotics – not just the changes in size and proliferation, but also the reconceptualization. Indeed, if you buy a new car today, it will come equipped with things like “parking assist” or “crash avoidance” technologies.[12] These are kind ways of saying that we stupid humans are not good at parallel parking and too often don’t look in our blind spots. So, the robotic systems in our car will handle these things for us.

But again, just as the story of the automobile reveals more than just the shift from owning horse stables to garages, so, too, was the computer about more than never having to remember long-division tables again. What were important were the ripple effects. The game-changing technology reshaped the modern information-rich economy, allowing billions of dollars to be made and lost in nanoseconds. It led to new concepts of social relations and even privacy. I can now “friend” someone in China I’ve never met. Of course, I may now be concerned about my niece social networking with people whom she’s never met. It became a tool of law enforcement (imagine the TV show CSI without computers) but also led to new types of crime (imagine explaining “identity theft” to J. Edgar Hoover).[13] And it may even be leading to a new domain of war, so-called “cyber-war.”

This comparison is a striking one because it illustrates how bureaucracies often have a hard time keeping up with revolutionary change. For example, the FBI director was so averse to computers that he didn’t have one in his office and never used email as late as 2001. Sound amazing? Well, the current Secretary of Homeland Security, the agency in charge of the civilian side of American cyber-security, doesn’t use email today.[14]

The final comparison that is made is perhaps a darker one: work on the atomic bomb in the 1940s. Scientists, in particular, talk about the field of robotics today in much the same way they talked about nuclear research back in the 1940s. If you are a young engineer or computer scientist, you will find yourself drawn towards it. It is the cutting edge. It is where the excitement is and where the research money is.

But many worry that their experience will turn out just like that of those amazing minds that were drawn towards the Manhattan Project, like a moth to an atomic flame.[15] They are concerned that the same mistakes could be repeated – of creating something and only after the fact worrying about the consequences. Will robotics, too, be a genie we one day wish we could put back in the bottle?

The underlying point here is that too often in discussions of technology we focus on the widget. We focus on how it works and its direct and obvious uses. But that is not what history cares about. The ripple effects are what make that technology revolutionary. Indeed, with robotics, issues on the technical side may ultimately be much easier to resolve than dilemmas that emerge from our human use of them.

How Our Robots Are Changing

The first generations of aerial robots were much like the manned systems they were replacing, even down to some of them having the cockpit where the pilot would sit looking like it’d been painted over. Now we are seeing an explosion of new types, ranging in size, shape, and form. With no human inside, they can stay in the air not just for hours, but for days, months, and even years, having wings the length of a football field.[16] Alternatively, they can be as small as an insect.[17] And, of course, they need not be modelled after our manned machines, but can instead take their design cues from nature, or even the bizarre.[18]

The other key change is their gain in intelligence and autonomy. This is a whole new frontier. Traditionally, we’ve compared weapons based on their lethality, range, or speed. Think about the comparison between a Second World War B-17 bomber plane and a B-24 bomber plane. The B-24 could be considered superior because it flew faster, further, and carried more bombs. The same could be said in comparing the MQ-9 Reaper UAS with its earlier version, the MQ-1 Predator. The Reaper is better because it flies faster and further and carries more bombs. But the Reaper is also something else, which we couldn’t say about previous generations of weapons: It is smarter, and more autonomous. We are not yet in the world of The Terminator, where weapons make their own decisions, but the Reaper can do things like take off and land on its own, fly mission waypoints on its own, and carry sensors that make sense of what they are seeing, such as identifying a disruption in the dirt from a mile overhead and recognizing it as something that we humans call a “footprint.”

From these changes comes a crucial opening up of the user base and the functionality of robotics. Much as you once could only use a computer if you first learned a new language like “Basic,” so, too, could you once only use robotic systems if you were highly trained. To fly an early version Predator drone, for instance, you had to be a rated pilot. Now, just as my three-year-old can navigate his iPad without even knowing how to spell, so, too, can you fly some drones with an iPhone app.

The Civilian Side Opens

This greater usability opens up the realm of possible users, lowering the costs and spreading the technology even further. So, we are seeing the range of uses expand not just in the military, but also, once proved on the military side, moving over to the civilian world. Take aerial surveillance with UAS. It’s gone from a military activity to border security to police to environmental monitoring.[19] Similarly, the notion of using a robotic helicopter to carry cargo to austere locations was first tested out in Afghanistan, but is now being looked at by logging companies.[20]

A key step in moving this forward in the U.S. will be the integration of unmanned aerial systems into the National Airspace System (NAS) and expanded civilian use. While there has been a huge amount of energy around the topic of domestic drones, such that many politicians speak about them as if they are already “watching everything from above,” the present laws restrict civilian use. An ever growing number of special permits, however, have been issued to domestic operators, now summing 1,428.[21] These early users range from small police departments like Mesa County in Colorado, which found they cost over 90% less to operate than police helicopters, to universities conducting environmental research in Alaska.[22]

Congress has set a deadline of September 2015 for the Federal Aviation Authority to figure out how to make this happen on a more regularized basis, in essence opening up the national airspace to the civilian public and private sector use.[23] As part of this process, there are to be six test sites created around the nation, which some twenty states are competing to be awarded. While it is unclear if the FAA will meet the deadline, the step is coming, and with it, the next ripple effect outwards in the market.

Indeed, what the opening of the civilian airspace will do to robotics is akin to what the Internet did to desktop computing. The field was there before, but then it boomed like never before. For instance, if you are a maker of small tactical surveillance drones in the U.S. right now, your client pool numbers effectively one: the U.S. military. But when the airspace opens up, you will have as many as 21,000 new clients – all the state and local police agencies that either have expensive manned aviation departments or can’t afford them.

The scale of this market is estimated to be in the tens of billions in its first years, but it is frankly too early to know where it will end up.[24] If history is any lesson, we shouldn’t just focus on the sale of drones in roles we already know but recognize that there are many more ways we don’t yet know of where robotics might be applied to other fields. Who saw agriculture as a field to be computerized? And yet the application of computers has led to massive efficiency gains. So, too, is agriculture appearing to be an area in which robotics will drive immense change. Agribusinesses nationwide such as Monsanto are lobbying for the use of domestic drones in roles that range from the monitoring and surveillance of the fields to the crop-dusting to the picking and harvesting.[25]

Impact on U.S. military

There are a huge set of ripple effects that will emerge from the opening up of the airspace to domestic drones. One is a potential role reversal. What will be the impact on the U.S. military as a technology area that it once led in, blossoms on the civilian side?

Take the areas of acquisitions. What happens when manufacturers have a wider set of clients than just the DoD and therefore become less responsive to its needs? If the parallel is computers, microchips and IT networks, the U.S. military once was in the lead in the research and development and then purchasing of computing. Now it is often behind the civilian side and, indeed, in areas like microchips can’t get makers to shift to its unique demands.

Beyond the obvious applications moved over from the military side, the real change occurs when imagination and innovation cross with profit-seeking. This is where parallels to computer or aviation history hold most, as the civilian side then starts to lead the way for the military. For instance, the idea of moving freight via airplanes was not originally a military role. It started out in 1919 with civilians. Today, it’s both a major military role (the U.S. military’s Air Mobility Command has some 134,000 members) and an industry that moves more than $10 trillion in global trade.[26] And, yes, a number of airfreight firms are starting to explore drone air cargo delivery, from large-scale trans-oceanic movement to small movement of medical supplies or even fast food.[27]

Similarly, what will it mean for training, when more and more young service men will come in with experience using the technology at home, or even when they see more advanced versions on the market than what they get from the Pentagon? The bottom line is that discussions of the civilian side also matter to the military.

Economic Winners and Losers: Nations and Communities

A new industry raises another ripple effect: Who will be the winners and losers?

One can certainly think about this issue on the global level. The U.S. faces a strange situation of trying to compete in a world economy, where technologic knowhow is a key differentiator, and yet has an education system that too often moves in an opposite direction. American high school students rank 23rd in science and 31st in math among wealthy nations, and 27th in college graduates with degrees in science and math. And the trends aren’t improving greatly. In 2004, the number of American computer science majors was 60,000. In 2013, it had shrunk to 38,000. (It is all not bad news, we are graduating twice as many journalists.) [28]

But the issue of winners and losers isn’t just a matter for Washington policymakers; it should have huge resonance for state and local leaders. That is, if what is playing out in the field of robotics is comparable to horseless carriage, who is Detroit, which became the epicenter of this industry for the 20^th century, and who are going to be like Basic City or Jacksonville that had early automobile companies around the same period? Or, if the comparison is to computers, who is going to be akin to Philadelphia, a key node in the early days of computing, and who is going to be the robotics version of Silicon Valley?

Answering this question turns on challenging a false notion that has taken hold, that in today’s world of globalization distance doesn’t matter. But despite our new technologies, we have repeatedly seen at the state and metropolitan level, success happens in clusters.[29]

As Maryann Feldman writes in her study Location, Location, Location: Creating Innovation Clusters, “Grounded in place, innovation and entrepreneurship rely on an ecosystem of firms (both suppliers and customers), universities and community colleges, government agencies, and trade associations, all systematically aligned to encourage creativity and experimentation. Once started, concentrations of industries within places become self-reinforcing as talent is attracted to opportunity, the flow of ideas increases, and their potential is understood and appreciated. With that dynamic, it becomes easier and less costly for entrepreneurs to realize their dreams.”[30]

The role of the government is central in developing these clusters. While entrepreneurship is a private-sector activity, it is public policy that sets the stage. For example, I am from North Carolina. Like that old Saturday Night Live joke, we were really happy there was a South Carolina and District of Columbia whenever the education rankings came out, as that meant we had someone to look down on from our lofty perch of 49^th in the nation.

Yet, when North Carolina’s textile manufacturing economy declined, the local government did something brilliant. It fostered a new “innovation cluster” centering around the Research Triangle Park that is now the home to more than 130 research facilities and helped North Carolina become one of the hubs of the biotech industry. This boom then benefited the rest of the state and made it one of fastest growing states in the nation during this period. The success didn’t happen overnight. As Feldman noted, the policy world can nurture these kinds of success stories via “…steady and consistent state policy, investment tax credits, and quasi-governmental, sector-specific agencies.”

Job Gain and Loss

The rise of domestic robotics use holds the potential to create a number of jobs. Indeed, the AUSVI industry trade group has claimed some 70,000 new jobs will be created in just the first few years once the airspace opens up, arguing (with an obvious self-interest) that the US loses some $27 million per day in economic activity the longer it waits to do so.[31]

This boom for the robotics industry, though, raises deep questions not just of which areas will win out, but also which individuals will win and lose.

Just as the horseless carriage made titans of Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, computers created a whole new generation of billionaires and millionaires. But, of course, just like with the craftsmen before the first industrial age, there were also losers. For hundreds of years, there was a highly skilled profession of men who did mathematics for hire. They were well paid, many making the equivalent of $200,000 a year. They were called “calculators.” They have gone the way of so many other professions reshaped by new technology like the blacksmith making horseshoes or the elevator operator.

Indeed, robots have already and will continue to shape the economy both as an issue of growth and job loss. As a recent MIT study found, automation is "destroying jobs and creating prosperity," explaining both the gains in efficiency and the loss of as many as six million jobs over the last decade.[32] Robots are a large part of the reason the automobile companies of Detroit are back, but so many automobile workers are not back to work. (Already, one in ten has been replaced by a factory line robot, with many companies across a wide array of industries planning to fully automate their assembly lines.)[33]

Such trends mean that a part of our economy will make a great deal of money from robotics, which is why there is so much lobbying behind the area today. Last year, drone manufacturers gave $2.3 million in contributions to the House Unmanned Systems Caucus, while the industry’s trade group spent a quarter million lobbying for the FAA bill that opens up the airspace (the group proudly told donors that “Our suggestions were often taken word-for-word” in the language of the bill).[34] But these very same trends also mean the expansion of the industry will be seen as a threat to livelihoods, further stoking tensions and underlying suspicions of the technology.

Law and Privacy

One profession that will be busy, though, is the lawyers.

While some say drones are no different than manned planes or fixed surveillance cameras on the street, and so raise no new privacy issues, this is incorrect at face value. There are similarities but also fundamental differences.

To operate, a robot is always gathering and storing information about the world around it. Always. This is different from a regular plane, for example, where the human operator is gathering most of this information but cannot store it for playback. A robot’s operating requirements mean that even in the course of regular operations, it is gathering and storing information about everything that crosses its path. This gives robots an advantage over human operated planes, where a conscious decision to acquire and store data must be made. The other main advantage of unmanned systems is their ability to loiter for long periods of time, which again allows them to draw in more information, and as the ACLU's Jay Stanley and Catherine Crump have written, also allows them to “...pose a more serious threat to privacy than do manned flights."[35]

Taking in vast quantities of information even unintentionally is a key part of the concern. For example, a robot on a “Where’s Waldo?” mission to hunt down one person in a city will still be gathering data on the entirety of the city throughout the search process.

Visual information is not the only type of data being gathered. Unmanned systems also carry out electronic surveillance. A drone unveiled at the DefCon hacking conference in 2011 can crack Wi-Fi networks and intercept text messages and cell phone conversations – without the knowledge or help of either the communications provider or the customer.[36] This type of drone draws in electronic information on a wide group of people beyond the intended target – and, different from a computer, includes those who have not signed a user agreement or otherwise signaled they accept this intrusion upon their privacy.

Finally, the size and mobility of robotic systems is fundamentally different – many are being designed in increasingly smaller sizes, and they are able to move and track targets covertly when required. A robotic system can watch from above, but can also get up close and personal, unlike a fixed security camera or a high altitude spy plane.

These differences lie at the heart of a lot of the worries over domestic use of unmanned systems. Such suspicion has mobilized left wing groups like the ACLU, but also those on the right, such as the Tea Party movement, perhaps best illustrated by the speeches and legislation of Senator Rand Paul, who has attempted in the words of one article to launch “a Preemptive Strike Against Domestic Drone Use.”[37] While some 20 states from Nevada to North Carolina are competing to be the home of the six FAA drone test sites, the anti-drone movement has crystallized into efforts to ban the use of drones in at least ten state legislatures, ranging from Virginia to Oregon. Indeed, Charles Krauthammer, a right wing commentator on Fox News, even urged Americans to use their Second Amendment powers to shoot down drones (something already done by a group of hunters in Pennsylvania, who shot down a drone doing environmental monitoring).[38]

Building Code

With these concerns brewing, we are starting to see some steps forward to respond. For instance, an industry “code of conduct” has been put forward by the same trade group that prompted the current controversy over domestic drones with its successful lobby to open the airspace. The AUVSI code took on many of the concerns circulating, grouping them into three core themes of Safety, Professionalism, and Respect.[39] It laid out how the industry and users would "commit" to not operating drones "in a manner that presents undue risk to persons or property;" to planning for "all anticipated off-nominal events;" and to share such contingency plans with "all appropriate authorities." It made great sense and was reported widely.

The challenge for the robotics code of conduct, however, is much the same as other industries' attempts at self-regulation, ranging from banking to the private military industry. It's a laudable start, but it doesn't change the underlying issues and concerns. Like such other would-be "codes of conduct," it lacks a key ingredient: consequences.

It is a voluntary code with no results if one violates it. Indeed, much of what is laid out is actually restatements of responsibilities the firms and users already should abide by, regardless of any code. For example, the code says that the firms "will comply with all federal, state and local laws." So, before the code, they could violate the law at will? Of course not.

But more importantly, the code is not able to deal effectively with all the areas where the law is absent or vague. It says that "We will ensure that UAS are piloted by individuals who are properly trained and competent to operate the vehicle or its systems." Who will determine this, and what does "trained and competent" mean in a world where some believe drones should only be operated by rated pilots, even though new versions can be flown by teens using iPhone apps?

Likewise, the code pledges to "respect the privacy of individuals," which is a bold statement. But "Respect" could be anything from avoiding the monitoring of individuals without their express permission to showing them "respect" only in the public-relations sense.

Of course, these are thorny issues. Indeed, it's their very thorniness that is why an industry self-regulatory code is the beginning of the discussion, not the final answer

The Police Weigh In

The same could be said of a push by police chiefs, who have offered a code of conduct for their use of drones.[40] This effort asserted that police wouldn’t let any images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles be open to inspection by the public, and that the images would not be stored, unless they are evidence of a potential crime or part of an ongoing investigation. Of course, that’s a pretty large out clause.

More importantly, the police chiefs’ effort is a proposal, not yet policy, with some huge gaps. Even worse, it has a big dose of unrealism. For instance, it suggests that police would use a “Reverse 911 telephone system to alert those living and working in the vicinity of aircraft operations. If such a system is not available, the use of patrol car public address systems should be considered.”

In reality, such a system would be unworkable and even laughable. Each and every time a UAS flies, the police are going to call all of an area’s residents’ home phone (setting aside the growing number who only have mobile phones)? Or, alternatively, the police are planning to ensure public awareness of potential privacy losses by recreating the scene from the movie The Blue Brothers, driving through the streets yelling out on a car’s bullhorn?

Similarly, we have next order questions, like whether drones should be armed. This is cast aside quickly in the proposed codes, but again definition and context matters. Law enforcement in Texas has shown interest in unmanned aerial systems armed with a shotgun that shoots “less than lethal” rounds.[41] One person’s shotgun or taser is another person’s unarmed drone.

The bottom line is that, as with revolutionary inventions of the past, no amount of handwringing by pundits late to the game will see a technology of such great promise banned.

Instead, a revolutionized world requires the establishment of new rules, which in turn requires an understanding of the new technology. Much of the substance of these rules will likely come from both public discourse and the private sector. For example, the origins of the modern way we drive can be found in Rules of the Road, published in 1903 by William P. Eno. Known as "the father of traffic safety,” Eno’s book contained such revolutionary ideas as cars only passing on the left, stop-lights and one-way streets. (Ironically he never drove himself; he was always chauffeured).[42]

We are seeing a similar evolution now, whether in the development of industry codes of conduct or guidelines for university research groups. But much like the early “rules of the road,” these will need enforceable laws to make them real. Early cars and planes, for instance, needed more than Eno’s book – mainstream use of these inventions demanded the drafting of traffic laws and the creation of regulatory institutions like the Federal Aviation Administration. Similarly, the increasing use of unmanned systems has highlighted a gap at the state and federal level that demands action.

Where the Law Goes Next

As these laws are hopefully built by Congress, we need to recognize that much of what is written in the law is just the first draft. For instance, federal district court judges have spoken about how, much like with computers and the privacy questions they created, questions over the proper use of drones by law enforcement will end up as Supreme Court cases.

But even then what will the Court decide? A case that is frequently spoken about as a potential precedent is 2001's Kyllo vs. U.S.[43] In this instance, a federal government agent used a "thermal imaging device" to scan a home in Florence, Oregon. They did not have a warrant, but it allowed them to learn that marijuana was being grown.

When the case made its way up to the Supreme Court, the majority opinion, written by Judge Scalia, was that when the "government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment 'search,' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant."

Many point to this as evidence that the Supreme Court will be less likely to approve domestic use of drones in an intrusive way by police. But they ignore the caveat. What about when a technology becomes in “general public use,” as drones are evolving to?

Similarly, last January in the U.S. v. Jones case, the Supreme Court ruled that placing a GPS tracking device on a vehicle is considered a search under the Constitution and required a warrant. Notably, though, it was the physical placement of the GPS on the vehicle that mattered most.[44] The Court said other evidence obtained without using the GPS device was admissible because the suspect had no "reasonable expectation of privacy" for a vehicle on the public streets. One way to read it is that your car can’t be tracked without a warrant; another is that your car can be tracked without a warrant, just as long as the police don’t place anything on the vehicle, which is no longer required with our current technology.

The underlying point is that the precedents cited with certainty by analysts and lawyers are often not as clear as they might be. And, when there are questions, or even potential abuses, it will be years before the legal system resolves them. The GPS case happened in 2005, but didn’t get resolved until 2012, well after the technology of a physical tracker was no longer needed. Moreover, just because the Supreme Court ruled one way, doesn’t mean it won’t rule differently on very similar issues, just at a different time. As everything from voting rights to abortion rulings demonstrates, all it takes to reorder the law is just a few seats changed on the court. Neither technology nor laws are written in stone, and justices don’t live forever.

User Questions

The innovation spread of robotics represents another trend of opportunity and peril. An ever-wider set of users is innovating for all sorts of positive purposes with robotics, from the great work being done by young students at robotics labs at McGill University to the team in Australia that built an autonomous drone to help find lost hikers.[45]

But not all of the people behind machines have only the best in mind. Take the traditional notion of using a robotic drone for surveillance. The new users have not just been militaries or police, but have also been civilians. These include news journalists who have reported on natural disasters with drones, as well as parents who want new ways to watch their kids.[46] A father in the U.S. gave new meaning to the term “helicopter parent,” using an automated quadcopter drone to escort his child to the school bus stop.[47]

The problem is that each and every technology has its darker side. The technology is enabling a new field of drone journalism (already taught at University of Nebraska and University of Missouri) that reports important stories with a whole new level of fidelity.[48] But the same phenomenon also advances the field of paparazzi. For instance, Gary Morgan, chief executive officer of Splash News, a celebrity-photo agency, has already said he’d like to be buzzing his quarry soon with silent, miniature drones mounted with tiny cameras: “It would strike fear in the hearts of every celebrity having a birthday party.”[49] And, one has the sense that the child may end up telling a therapist one day about his father loving him a bit too much, to the extent of following him with a drone.

Open Source

More seriously, just as software has gone “open source,” so has warfare. Robotics is not a technology like the atomic bomb or aircraft carrier, where only the great powers can build and use it effectively. Instead, just like with the “app” in the field of software, it is not just the big boys who control the field. The barriers to entry are not exceptionally high, and that means that bad actors will be able to gain and use this advanced technology.

If history is any guide, the repurposing of a low-entry revolutionary technology tends to happen fairly quickly. The first car bomb was set off as early as 1905, used in an assassination attempt on the Ottoman sultan. Similarly, the first hijacking of a plane took place in 1931, very early in civilian air travel.

A particular area of concern, then, is the use of robotic systems by terrorists and other non-state actors. Israel as a state has long used drones, and now so does its non-state opposition. Hezbollah, for example, is not a major state military, but it has already operated UAVs, as too has Hamas.[50]

The impact of this trend is twofold. The first is that it reinforces the empowerment of individuals and small groups against the power of the state. During the Second World War, for example, Hitler’s entire Luftwaffe could not manage to reach across the Atlantic to strike at Canada or the U.S. Just a few years ago, a blind 77-year-old man managed to build his own drone that flew itself across the Atlantic.[51]

And one man’s hobby may be another man’s plot. In 2011, the FBI arrested Rezwan Ferdaus, a man who wanted to recreate the 9/11 attacks (not so ironically, he had been angered by drone attacks in the Mideast intended to stop terrorism).[52] Unable to hijack planes, he instead obtained a large drone and planned to fly it into the Pentagon. Fortunately, he made the mistake of asking an FBI informant where he could obtain C-4 explosives. The plot was averted, but it showed we are now in a world where it is easier to get the drone than the bomb.

This greater reach and power may also see a lowering of the bar. One does not have to be suicidal to carry out attacks that previously might have required one to be so. This allows new players into the game, making al-Qaeda 2.0 and the next-generation version of the Unabomber or Timothy McVeigh far more lethal.

Just as car bombs are not the only way automobile technology has been misused, we should not make the mistake of only focusing on terrorism when it comes to the potential criminals uses of robotics. The early horseless carriage may have been reworked into a car bomb by turn-of-the-century terrorists, but the main illegal use was as a getaway device for criminals. Similarly, the best example of innovation in the field of robotics last year might be the team of thieves in Taiwan, who used tiny helicopters equipped with pinhole cameras to carry out a jewellery heist. They made away with $4 million worth of loot before being caught.

Accountability

The challenge for the law is not just how to prevent bad guys from doing bad things, but what to do when things go wrong without someone having bad intent, such as when the Google car was in a wreck in August 2011. Like most wrecks, the various sides involved blamed each other, just now they did it via online social networks.

Now take these issues and move them into the air. Congressional investigators report that there were over 200 drone accidents in Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of four years. This doesn’t include the many that happened in the not so covert world of strikes in Pakistan and Somalia. Perhaps the most amusing, but also maybe scary case took place at a base in Djibouti in March 2011.

As The Washington Post reported, a Predator parked at the Camp Lemonnier started its engine without any human direction, even though the ignition had been turned off and the fuel lines closed. “Technicians concluded that a software bug had infected the “brains” of the drone, but never pinpointed the problem…“After that whole starting-itself incident, we were fairly wary of the aircraft and watched it pretty closely,” the Air Force squadron commander testified to an investigative board.”[53]

The issue here isn’t that Predators are poised to take over the homeland, but rather another vexing question of law, politics, and ethics. Robotics has a long history of what one Vice President of a technology firm described to me as “oops moments.” These are when things don’t work out with your machine as planned and you have to take it back from the field. With military robotics, the examples range from the machine gun armed UGV that went “squirrelly” and started spinning around during a demonstration to the automated anti-aircraft system in South Africa that had what investigators thought was a “software glitch” during a training exercise. It shot nine soldiers by accident in a real world version of the famous scene from Robocop.[54]

Today, these oops moments might even be intentionally caused by hostile man-made threats, including criminal or adversarial efforts at UAS communications interference or hacking. Here again, this scenario is not science fiction, but was recently demonstrated in a test in Texas, where a university team hacked the navigation system of a drone.[55]

The issues this phenomenon presents are not just how to avoid them through technology improvements and deconfliction protocols, but also more vexing questions of process, policy, and even philosophy. How do we investigate and apportion out accountability in a realm where more and more is happening outside our old concepts of control and responsibility?

For instance, aviation law and insurance right now focuses on determining if the problem was a hardware error (a widget broke), wetware error (the human pilot made an error), or spiritual (an “Act of God” caused the loss). Now we have much in between, the role that software plays. And in the software field, responsibility and accountability is not something easily assigned. It can be stretched over the long periods of time between design and use, over the large numbers of people involved in writing and selling and buying and upkeeping software, by a business approach that often intends to let the customer find the errors, and by the fact that software will repeatedly be put in real world circumstances for which it wasn’t originally designed. In short, we have to figure out how to catch up our 20^th century laws, with our 21^st century technologies.

The Psychology Side

The irony in all this is that while the future may involve more and more machines watching us, whether it is police watching city streets from above, or the NSA reading your email, or your phone letting Starbucks know you are walking nearby, how we react to it will still be driven by the very fuzzy combination of our human programming, our identity and emotions – our chemical makeup that drives human psychology.

So what then will be the reaction to this next level step in the surveillance state? Will we redefine our notions of privacy, reacting like how teenagers have handled their online behavior on Facebook and Twitter? Who cares if all my behavior is shared with the world? Instead, I’ll embrace a loss of privacy that would have shocked my parents generation, and even mock it. One can already see this in the new offerings of anti-drone “stealth clothing” for any “style-conscious” terrorists the U.S. seeks, as well as “fashionistas who value their privacy.” As its designer told the media, it also doesn’t fall along clear partisan lines, making it the “Project Runway” version of Rand Paul’s filibuster. “It interests people on the far right as much as it interests people on the far left. Ultra-conservatives see it as anti-government and ultra-liberals see it as anti-military.”[56]

Or will we fear it? And is this a good or bad thing? Some, such as one senior State Department official, believe that our unmanning of war “…Plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology.”[57] The carryover of this belief to the domestic side is the belief that a world of more drones will be a safer world, via a deterrent value. Where’s Waldo won’t mug me if he knows he’ll be caught on screen,

But the psychology of scaring people with technology is a tricky business. It’s the domestic version of the problem we face in our counterterrorism today. Abroad the U.S. government is wrestling with the robot’s impact on our very human “war of ideas” that we are fighting against radical movements. U.S. troops in Afghanistan describe having drones overhead as reassuring, saying they can sleep better as they feel like someone is always above, watching out for them. On the other hand, many civilians there say it’s intrusive, and creates a climate of fear and distrust. That is, on the domestic side, the risk is that robotic surveillance will instead be perceived as an intrusive “Big Brother” figure, as the Russian police who have already used drones to monitor protesters have been called.

The broader issue might not be one of fear, however, but a redefinition of how those who are watched look at the watchers. There is the potential that the drone could become emblematic of those trying to police people they don’t know, on the cheap, from afar. The drone becomes like the cameras favored by the disconnected Baltimore police force of the TV show The Wire, who watch a world of crime play out that they don’t understand.[58]

Conclusions

The ripple effects of robotics will continue to push out into all sorts of domains, in ways both expected and unexpected. Through it all, though, one fundamental principle will hold true as it has in the past: There are always two sides to technologic revolutions. From our new technologies we gain amazing capabilities that seem like they are straight from science-fiction. But from our new technologies we also gain new human dilemmas that seem like they are straight from science-fiction. Moore’s Law is operative, but so is Murphy’s Law.[59]

The issues of domestic “drones” all seem futuristic, but notice how none of the examples that were explored in this article were from the distant future. The questions they raise are fundamental policy questions of today. We can ignore them, or we can embrace and engage in the opportunities and dilemmas of these exciting times.

The above paper includes sections explored in the article The Robotics Revolution, for the Canadian International Council. The author would also like to thank the Christopher Newport University Center for American Studies.

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[57] P. W. Singer, Wired for War.

[58] The Wire, created by David Simon (Blown Deadline Productions/Home Box Office, 2002-2008), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1.

[59] Ranaan Avidor, Murphy’s laws site, http://www.murphys-laws.com/.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

It's Time to Recognize the Valor of Cyber Warriors

Peter W. Singer — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: In an interview with NPR's Celeste Headlee, Peter Singer argues that outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the military will award a new medal to recognize exceptional accomplishments in areas including drone and cyber warfare. Read an excerpt below.

Celeste Headlee: What is different about this medal from other military medals?

Peter Singer: Oh, it's an odd sort of medal, in that the very description of it, the official description says that it, quote, "may not be awarded for valor in combat under any circumstances," which we've never seen happen in a medal before. Essentially, the idea is that it's to recognize accomplishments that are exceptional and outstanding, but not bounded in any geographic or chronologic manner - that is, it's not taking place in the combat zone. And so, essentially, it's recognizing that people can now do extraordinary things because of the new technologies that we're using in war, drones and cyber, but that the system wasn't prepared to recognize them.

Headlee: But, you know, explain for me exactly how - when a person distinguishes themselves if they're a drone pilot, for example. I mean, how do you go above and beyond if you're sitting at a computer, piloting a drone?

Singer: Well, you're putting your finger on one of the controversies that surrounds this, and that's what a lot of the spin around has been. But let's use the case of the mission that got the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Zarqawi. So there was a team of unmanned aerial systems, drone operators, that tracked him down. It was over 600 hours of mission operational work that finally pinpointed him. They put the laser target on the compound that he was in, this terrorist leader, and then an F-16 pilot flew six minutes, facing no enemy fire, and dropped a bomb - a computer-guided bomb - on that laser. Now, who do you think got the Distinguished Flying Cross?

Headlee: Whoa. The...

Singer: The people who spent 600 hours, or the six-minute pilot? And so that's really what we're getting at. Actually, the drone operators, in that case, they didn't get the medal, but they did get a nice thank-you note from a general. This is a true story, here.

So, essentially, you know, what we're hitting at is, one, you have this growing portion of the military that's engaged in these kind of operations. It's important to the future of the military. But at the same time, the system wasn't set up to recognize some of their accomplishments. But the other thing that's playing out here - and it's what I went into in the piece - is that we have to recognize that technology has always changed what we think of as heroism.

So, you know, when the first guns came out in the 1400s, there was a nobleman back there who, you know, essentially said: Anyone who uses a gun is a coward. We've change our notion of that. Or there's a great saying from a - in World War I where this French general was complaining that three men with a machinegun can defeat a battalion of heroes. I mean, we've seen this play out. We've seen the story play out before. It doesn't make it something, you know, that we should celebrate or be happy about. It's just the cold, hard reality of war, is that technology continually reshapes our notions of the values that we look for in it.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: NPR

Obama, Own Your Secret Wars

Peter W. Singer and Thomas Wright — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Irony pervades President Obama’s place in foreign policy today. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to roll back the nuclear bomb, the signature weapon of the 20th century, but he has also broken new ground in the use of revolutionary military technologies — from the armed drone to cyber weaponry — that may well become the signature weapons of the 21st century.

As the controversy continues about secret drone strikes and leaked legal documents, Obama promised in his State of the Union address last week to work with Congress to make the drone program, now shrouded in secret, more transparent.

But the problem is that a tipping point has already been reached, and it’s not just a matter of playing nice with Congress. A veil of official semi-silence surrounds these new technologies, the policy that guides them and their growing use in what can only be described as not-so-covert operations. When crucial information does come out, it’s most often through leaks to the press.

It is time for a new approach. And all that is required of the President is to do the thing that he does perhaps best of all: to speak.

Obama has a unique opportunity — in fact, an urgent obligation — to create a new doctrine, unveiled in a major presidential speech, for the use and deployment of these new tools of war.

Read the entire opinion piece at nydailynews.com >>

Authors

Publication: New York Daily News

A Military Medal for Drone Strikes? Makes Sense.

Peter W. Singer — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

It is an odd medal indeed that “may not be awarded for valor in combat under any circumstances.” But that definition is precisely what drives the need for and the controversy surrounding the military’s new Distinguished Warfare Medal.

Announced by Leon Panetta this past week in one of his final acts as defense secretary, the medal recognizes achievements in post-Sept. 11 military operations, accomplishments “so exceptional and outstanding as to clearly set the individual apart from comrades or from other persons in similar situations.” But what makes the medal so noteworthy is that there is no geographic limit on where the action took place. It was created to catch up to the military’s growing use of unmanned systems (i.e., drones) and cyber-warfare tools, and can therefore be awarded “regardless of the domain used or the member’s physical location.”

Before this medal, a Predator pilot carrying out an important mission, such as the 2006 operation that found the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, or a cyber-warrior taking down a key enemy network couldn’t receive such a high recognition.

The notion of granting medals to those who don’t physically go into harm’s way has elicited indignation (“Awarding war medals to those who operate America’s death-delivering video games” was the headline on a column by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald) as well as mockery (“Medals have jumped the shark when drone operators get higher medals than dudes on ground,” tweeted defense blogger Jason Fritz).

Yet, a medal of this kind was bound to come about eventually. New technologies have changed the operations and makeup of the military; a growing segment of our warriors are fighting from afar. Over the past decade, we’ve gone from a mere handful of unmanned systems to more than 20,000 in the air and on the ground. The Air Force now trains more unmanned-systems operators than it does manned fighter and bomber plane pilots combined. And military spending on cyber-operations measures in the billions of dollars, with Cyber Command set to quintuple in size.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Washington Post

On FAA Announcement of Domestic Drones Test Sites

Peter W. Singer — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 20:51:00 -0500

This week the FAA announced the selection process for domestic drone test sites. This is a key step in the opening up of the national airspace to unmanned systems, which has huge implications, from potentially determining which states might become the robotics versions of Silicon Valley to opening up huge privacy and legal concerns.

I gave a speech on these opportunities and challenges of the coming domestic drone boom, which might be of interest given this news.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Image Source: Reuters

The Implications of North Korea's Third Nuclear Test

Richard C. Bush III and Jonathan D. Pollack — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 09:37:00 -0500

We do not yet know how much North Korea has advanced its nuclear weapons program as a result of today’s test. Specialists are intensely curious about the fissile material used (plutonium or enriched uranium) and the design of device. Pyongyang claims that the latest test was of a smaller, lighter weapon, and the available seismic data indicates an appreciably greater explosive yield than either of the prior tests. The North is undoubtedly making progress, and it is not too early to assess the implications of this test – and the successful ballistic missile launch in December – for the interests of all countries immediately affected by the detonation.

Kim Jong Un very likely sees himself as the big winner from today’s test. Kim became North Korea’s top leader following the death of his father Kim Jong Il fourteen months ago. His principal goal since then has been to establish his own personal legitimacy and preserve that of the Kim Royal Family. In that regard, securing progress on the missile and nuclear programs is the coin of the realm.

For the United States and Japan, the two tests confirm past judgments about Pyongyang’s long-term intentions. That is, the DPRK is intent on acquiring the ability to strike the continental United States as well as Japan with nuclear weapons, an objective that no package of outside incentives is likely to prevent. The stakes are high. Should North Korea succeed in its quest, it will significantly destabilize the security of Northeast Asia and increase the dangers of proliferation to other regions.

Some will fault Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul for not having engaged Pyongyang to head off the tests of recent months, but there is little or no evidence that Kim Jong Un would have been any more responsive to engagement than his father. Instead, the U.S., Japan, and South Korea have sought in recent years to “sharpen North Korea’s choices,” between sustaining its nuclear and missile programs, in contrast to heightened economic and political benefits with the international community. All three states will likely respond to today’s test by seeking to tighten sanctions. There is ample room to improve the implementation of existing measures, and new financial sanctions are available (see the current Iran menu). But a question lingers, are we indeed shaping North Korea’s choices or is it shaping ours?

The third nuclear test puts China’s new leadership on the hot seat. Under its previous leader Hu Jintao Beijing had multiple objectives in its North Korea strategy: restrain DPRK provocations; limit the impact of multilateral sanctions so that they do not stabilize the North Korean regime; provide economic support to Pyongyang to enhance stability and encourage better behavior; and facilitate a diplomatic approach for managing the problem, if not solving it. By testing in defiance of China’s wishes, Pyongyang has once again demonstrated that it has a very different agenda. It is betting that Beijing’s threats of punishment (as under Hu Jintao) are all bark and no bite. In effect, it is testing China’s new paramount leader, Xi Jinping. Will he cooperate with Washington in tightening sanctions and withdraw material and political benefits to Kim Jong Un? Or will Xi accommodate to a new status quo? Those questions will occupy the Beijing leadership during the Chinese New Year holiday.

The DPRK’s action probably has the greatest impact on South Korea’s president-elect, Park Geun-hye, who will be inaugurated on February 25^th. Madame Park had campaigned on the premise that the North Korea policies of the current president, Lee Myung Bak, had been too tough and one-sided. She had proposed the creation of a “trust-building” process with Pyongyang and a focus on areas of potential mutual benefit. Much of the South Korean public supported that stance when they cast their votes. With today’s nuclear test, Kim Jong Un has signaled that any acts of accommodation must come solely from the South Korean side, thus putting Madame Park on the defensive. Her initiative is now very unlikely to get off the ground. Any claims that the test was directed against outgoing President Lee will ring hollow to the new president, compelling her to rethink her approach to future dealings with the North.

Authors

The Opportunities and Challenges of the Coming Domestic Drone Boom

Peter W. Singer — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: In his January 28, 2013 Alexander Hamilton Society Keynote Lecture at Christopher Newport University, Peter Singer spoke about the revolutionary effects of drones and the issues policymakers will face as such robotics become more prevalent. A portion of the speech is below; the entire speech is available via Vimeo.

In 1899, a strange thing appeared on the streets of Norfolk – it was loud, ungainly, and ugly. It was also the first of its kind. It was the first quote “horseless carriage” to appear on the streets of Virginia – a steam-powered car. It was also called a “loco-mobile.” Now, within a decade after that, there were more than 2,705 of these strange things. This strange new technology registered with the Commonwealth of Virginia, and by 1915 there were more than 37,000 of these now what we call automobiles in Virginia.

Now this new technology brought all sorts of new opportunity to the area. The first Virginia-made car called the “Dawson car” was built in Basic City, what is now called Waynesboro, in 1901. And the Piedmont and Klein car were manufactured in Lynchburg and Richmond respectively. Virginia manufacturers would make over 2,500 horseless carriages before Henry Ford shifted to the assembly line and basically moved the industry to Michigan.

Now this strange new technology didn’t just bring opportunity, it brought all sorts of new questions that nobody was ready for in Virginia – especially the state government. There were no real roads, there were no maps to the paths that existed, and indeed as late as 1921 the Automobile Club of America recommended that motorists driving from New England to Florida bypass the state of Virginia.

As with revolutionary inventions of the past, like the horseless carriage and manned airplanes, no amount of handwringing by pundits late to the game will see a technology of such great promise banned. That said, new technologies bring with them the need for revising old laws. Early cars and planes, for instance, led to the creation of newfangled things like "traffic laws" and the Federal Aviation Administration.

Watch Peter Singer's speech on the CNU Center for American Studies Vimeo page »

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Christopher Newport University Center for American Studies