The thousands of US officer reports from Afghanistan appearing on
Wikileaks yesterday show how technology can imperil a military’s secrecy and
operations. But there is another side to that relationship. The technologies
used by militaries to kill by remote control, which are becoming increasingly
sophisticated and prevalent, are transforming warfare.
A senior United Nations official recently warned of the emergence
of a “PlayStation mentality to killing”, conjuring up an image of armies on the
battlefield being replaced by unseen, nerdy teenagers spraying bullets and
missiles with joysticks as wantonly as they already do when playing video games.
Israel is one of the pioneers of these technologies. The first remote-controlled
machines were surveillance aircraft built to fly over Lebanon in the early
1980s, as Israel invaded and then occupied the country for 20 years. Today
Israel is the world leader in developing and selling unmanned aerial vehicles –
or drones, as they have come to be called.
Israel’s disproportionate role in researching and developing this
technology should not surprise us. Despite being a tiny country with a small
population, Israel has had vast sums of military aid thrown at it by the United
States. As a result, its regional ambitions have sometimes outstripped the human
resources available to carry them out.
Israel has also had the benefit of more than four decades of
ruling over the Palestinians, an occupied population on which to test the
technology. Its latest piece of kit – called Spot and Shoot – involves
joystick-controlling machine-guns mounted on towers around the Gaza’s perimeter
fence.
For a highly militarised society, such developments have proved
incredibly lucrative. The growing demands of the global homeland security
industry are being met by small specialist Israeli companies, usually run by
former generals, whose business is devising hardware to keep suspect groups and
populations under surveillance and control. It only takes a small additional
step to customise these machines to eliminate the suspects. Drones seem to
fascinate and appal us in equal measure.
Most of us, however, instinctively recoil from the idea of
killing by remote control. Why does it so offend our sensibilities? One
suggestion is that it violates ancient codes of chivalry. Should the warrior not
be forced to confront his opponent directly before dispatching him? In executing
someone remotely, do we not strip them of the respect they deserve for fighting
and dying in a different cause?
Such reasoning is overly romantic. Mortal combat has not been the
norm in warfare since long before joysticks were invented. In fact,
remote-control killing is just the latest stage in the evolution of waging war
from afar that probably began with the bow and arrow, and has progressed through
the gun, tank and warplane.
Remote killing does, however, justifiably arouse deep-seated
fears about a future in which machines not only do the killing for us but decide
who dies – or even turn against their makers. What limits should be placed on
automation: should machines only carry out operators’ instructions, or should
they be allowed a degree of independence? And in cases of mistakes, who is to be
held accountable?
While valid, these concerns are largely hypothetical. Unmanned
machines are – for the time being at least – still operated by humans. Is there
really a moral difference between a drone operator firing a missile using a
joystick and a pilot doing the same seated in a cockpit? It is not clear that
there is.
A more significant ground for our revulsion is that automation
makes killing cheaper. Shlomo Bron, a retired Israeli general and now a defence
analyst, says the demand for remote-controlled machines is stoked by the large
savings in defence costs. A drone operator can be trained in a day; a pilot may
need years of expertise to fulfil the same mission.
It is this cheapening of life and death – financially,
politically and socially – that ultimately appals us, because it makes
state-sponsored killing easier and therefore far more likely.
What is to deter our rulers from waging wars if few, or no,
practical costs accrue? Typically, fighting comes to an end only when the price
– in treasure, blood or domestic political damage – becomes too high to bear.
Remote killing could be a prescription for endless wars.
Nowhere has the danger become more apparent than in Gaza, where
not only has Israel imprisoned the Palestinians behind walls but is starting to
create an infrastructure of automated armed guards. Gaza’s skies are filled with
drones, its coast is patrolled by remotely-controlled boats, and its walls
topped by unmanned machine guns.
But why must these systems be operated by relatively expensive
Israeli conscripts? Why not farm out the job to workers in the equivalent of a
call centres in other countries, as has occurred with so many services in our
globalised economies?
It sounds like a scene from a dystopian horror film, but it may
not end there. If governments lose authority and legitimacy, may they not one
day consider turning those remotely controlled guns and missiles on their people
too?
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