Western airstrikes on
the Middle East : déjà vu all over again.
Twenty years ago, the USA
attacked Sudan and Afghanistan USA
attacked Syria
Just
you wait. In the next decade, that strategic calculus will change a lot,
and probably not in a good way. Consider this sharp one-liner from Kelsey
Atherton last week:
the future of war is million-dollar gray triangles hunting hundred-dollar
quadcopters
— Kelsey D. Atherton
(@AthertonKD) April 9, 2018
Of course cheap drones
are already being used on the battlefield in small-scale ways: by Daesh, by
Hezbollah, by Hamas, by drug cartels, and of course by traditional nation-state
militaries worldwide. But those are piloted drones, used in short-range, often
improvisational ways; interesting but not really strategically significant.
Meanwhile, across the
world, we are in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of artificial intelligence
and automation technology. Consider Comma.ai, the startup that began as a
literal one-man self-driving-car project. Consider the truly remarkable Skydio,
a self-flying drone that can follow you wherever you go, avoiding obstacles
enroute.
…Do you see where
we’re going here? Right now only major powers can toss a few explosives at a
faraway enemy to drive home a political point. But imagine a flock of bigger
Skydios, reprogrammed to fly to certain GPS locations, or certain visual
landmarks, or to track certain license plates … while packed full of
explosives.
A Tomahawk costs
$1.87 million. It seems to me that we are not far at all from the point where a
capable and wealthy non-state actor like Daesh, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Sinaloa
cartel … or any unsavory group willing to be used for plausible deniability by
a nation-state … could build a flock of self-flying targeted kamikaze drones,
then smuggle them into the Western destination of their choice, for a lot less
than the price of a single Tomahawk. The self-flying and targeting software /
AI models won’t need to be nearly as perfect as that of a self-driving car. A
50% failure rate is more than acceptable if you only want to show force and sow
panic.
It’s chillingly easy
to envision a future of mutual assured terror, a multipolar world in which
nations and terror cells and drug cartels and starry-eyed cults alike have the
capability to inflict faraway havoc on thousands and constant dread on
millions, a smoldering kaleidoscopic landscape of dozens of factions enmeshed
in tit-for-tat vengeance and vendettas — ceaseless cycles of sporadic attacks
which rarely kill more than a hundred, but send entire populations into
perpetual fear and fury. Fury which will be very hard to direct. Like hacking,
autonomous drone attacks will be extremely difficult to attribute.
You may call this
science-fiction scaremongering, and you may have a point. It’s true that
nothing like this has happened yet — though the existing adoption of commercial
drones for warfare is a distinct warning sign. It’s true that it would be
wrongheaded and ridiculously preemptive to try to slam the barn doors before
any drone horses arrive. I’m definitely not suggesting that the West should
start thinking about restricting research, or trying to comtrol either hardware
or software. (Even if that worked, which it wouldn’t, it would be pointless;
drone hardware is cheap, and R&D is global.)
But it’s not too early to
start thinking about how we will cope if and when self-flying kamikaze drones domake
asymmetric strategic warfare possible. And it’s definitely not too early to try
to minimize such warfare before it happens, ideally by actually trying to deal
with the root causes of the conflicts burning around the world, rather than
lobbing a few cruise missiles their way every time we feel the need to seem
particularly outraged. Because one day, not long away at all, that approach
will begin to rebound on us disastrously.
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