How the U.S. Military Can Win the Robotic Revolution

In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq with just a handful of unmanned vehicles. Now, less than a decade later, we have 7000 robots overseas in the air alone. The U.S. dominates the robot war room, for now. Here, military analyst P.W. Singer lays out a plan for how the U.S. can stay ahead, and avoid building the Pontiac Aztek of war, an over-hyped but underperforming dud.

By P.W. Singer
MQ-9 Reaper

MQ-9 Reaper

May 13, 2010 6:00 AM Text Size: A . A . A
1  of  3 »
One of the great conundrums of war and technology is the odd fact that there is no such thing as a permanent first-mover advantage. Commodore was an early leader in personal computers, developing and marketing the world's best-selling desktop computer, the Commodore 64; it went bankrupt in 1994. The Ottoman Turks were the first to successfully master the use of gunpowder in fluid battle plans, becoming a powerful empire that spanned three continents; soon after, their armies were routed and they were pitied as "the sick man of Europe." Time and again, whenever a remarkable new technology came along, the early leaders soon fell far behind.

Today, the U.S. military may be wrestling with a similar challenge. In the bureaucratic blink of an eye, it's become a dominant power in the potentially game-changing field of military robotics. When the U.S. military went into Iraq in 2003, it used only a handful of unmanned systems in the air, none of them armed. On the ground, the invasion force used zero unmanned ground vehicles. Today, we have over 7000 unmanned aerial systems in our inventory—48-foot-long Predators, micro-aerial vehicles that a single soldier can carry in his rucksack, as well as lawnmower-size PackBots on the ground and Talons that help find and defuse deadly roadside bombs.

Such war bots may be part of an important turning point in history. Scientists describe unmanned systems today as being where the horseless carriage was back at the turn of the last century. Chief James A. Roy, the head of the Air Force, says they are the equivalent to the advent of the airplane, while Bill Gates has compared robotics today to where computers were back in 1980.

Indeed, as much as they seem like science fiction, such PackBots and Predators are merely the first generation—the equivalent of the Model T Ford or the Wright Brothers' flyer. Even so, they are having a huge impact already on everything from when and where we go to war ( the U.S. has carried out over 120 air strikes into Pakistan, using unmanned systems, without any congressional debate) to the warrior's very experiences (a young pilot can now "go to war" without ever leaving Nevada). Even more, the next generations of this technology are becoming ever more intelligent and autonomous, which bodes even greater change.

Military Robots Photo Gallery

The Military's Slow March to Embracing Technology

Often, militaries are slow to adapt to such revolutionary technologies, including even the sometimes technology-obsessed U.S. military. The machine gun, for example, was invented in 1861, but even with the Civil War raging at the time, it was eschewed by military leaders and wouldn't be used, in fact, for decades.

Even when the machine gun began to be used widely during World War I, over a half-century later, it still took several bloody years before the generals acknowledged that they had to change the way they planned battles. The devastating firepower of the machine gun meant that charges across no man's land weren't just ineffective, but suicidal. As one French officer said in 1916, after the battle of Verdun left 700,000 killed or maimed, "Three men and a machine gun can stop a battalion of heroes."

Working in a realm where reliability can mean life or death, it is not surprising that militaries are often slow to adapt to emerging technologies. Indeed, in 1938, when U.S. Army Gen. Hamilton Hawkins lamented the "foolish and unjustified discarding of horses" in favor of the tank, he actually was making what seemed like a pretty good point at the time. Horses had over 4000 successful years of war behind them, while tanks barely had two years of not all-that-remarkable experience toward the end of World War I.

Change is also slow because of turf battles and bureaucratic wars. Those whose talents or training could become outdated by new technologies will often fight anything that threatens their prestige. The engineers on the early Navy steamships, for instance, weren't even allowed to eat at the same table with the other officers, because to work with such a messy technology as a steam engine wasn't considered worthy of gentlemen who had grown up in the age of sail.

All these barriers have been in play with military robotics. The Predator may seem like a new technology, but it dates to the early 1980s. It wasn't until after the 9/11 attacks, as the Predators began to prove their worth in Afghanistan, that the Air Force started buying the system in appreciable numbers. Senior leadership was viewed as somewhat resistant to unmanned systems, while the internal culture was less than hospitable. Early pilots assigned to operate the unmanned planes flying out of Nellis and then Creech AFB describe "going kicking and screaming" because of the harm they feared assignment to flying robotics planes would do to their long-term careers.

Yet, now, this corner seems to have been turned. The current Air Force leadership has gone out of its way to describe unmanned systems as the future of the force. This year, the Air Force will train more unmanned systems operators than it will manned fighter plane or bomber plane pilots combined. And the service has adopted a road map that plans out an ever-growing use of robotic aircraft to the year 2047 (the service's 100th anniversary). The same change is also playing out in the Army, which actually flies just as many unmanned systems as the Air Force, and has its own robotic roadmap out to 2035 which plans for everything from tiny micro-drones to unmanned versions of the Apache helicopter.


Post a comment

Featured Video