When Technology Makes War Too Easy

As the weapons of war become ubiquitous, as unmanned and automated weapon systems proliferate and as large powers are able to use their rage-filled surrogates to wage their wars with sufficient “deniability,” the notion of an end to human military conflict seems to vaporize. Add sophisticated communication systems – we call them smart phones with the ability to aggregate masses (we call that “social media”) – it doesn’t take much to turn an angry rebel into a well-equipped soldier or to aggregate those angry combatants, often with no hope and nothing left to lose, into a treacherous army.

Look what happens when minimally-trained insurgents with limited access to the kind of intel network they really need to deploy tactical weapons properly, gets handed a truck mounted, radar guided surface-to-air-missile system (the Russian Buk aka the SA-11 missile) that can deploy against targets well over 30,000 feet, the increasingly probable scenario in eastern Ukraine. Boom! Malaysia Air Flight 17 is no more. They saw a fat aircraft but had no way of differentiating whether the plane was civilian or military. So someone pulled the trigger. And with reasonably well-documented reports, Russia is supplying even more Buk missile systems and heavier artillery to the rebels, while denying any direct involvement. Go, surrogates, go!

Russian has its “separatists.” Iran has Hezbollah, and the United States has a pretty horrific track record of supplying covert armies or brutal dictators with sophisticated weapons when they play by our policy directives. That some of the participants (controllers) in the surrogate wars have veto power at the United Nations Security Council often renders a meaningful international response to surrogate brutality practically impossible.

Aside from the ability to launch a region-destroying nuclear missile with lots of warheads or the ability to kill hundreds in one explosion of a chemical weapon, there is the very dehumanizing impact of drone strikes (deployed as if they were video games by distant operatives with no risk to themselves) or smart bombs or even fully automated weapon systems that determine their own targets from an internal imaging reference system that prioritizes various categories (we have cruise missiles with this capability). It’s too easy to kill people without serious risk to the attacking force.

Thus, we can wage war where the only possible casualties from such weapons are “the other guy.” The other guy will almost always get pissed (the ones that survive, that is), and since we are trying to insulate ourselves from nasty bloody consequences to ourselves, the other guy figures out that “all’s fair in love and war.” Antiseptic warfare often justifies a response of “whatever I have to do to kill my enemy” since I can’t afford such weapons (until they can!). Thus, rationale and justifications rise, terrorists feel vindicated, surrogates are satisfied, and the wars to end all wars (WWI and WWII) seem philosophically laughable. And little guys everywhere hunger for better weapons from those ready to supply them.

We seem to be falling into that lowest common denominator – one that makes humans just one more animal – where nature has to control over-population of one species over the others by whatever means she can. And since man has no superior predators… we implement nature’s needs by turning on ourselves. It’s hard to think that way, but perhaps there is no other explanation. Morals, ethics, and religious proscriptions against killing seem to have so many deemed exceptions as to be morally vacuous, almost meaningless. Just look at our own “stand your ground” and “open carry” guns that laws exist in our own nation, most powerful in our Bible belt, making it so much easier to kill people within one of these “exceptions.” Still, we are constantly searching for better ways to kill, particularly when we can insulate ourselves from the pain.

In the latest litany of making war easy comes the latest technology (relatively inexpensive). As Google explores driverless cars to ease domestic traffic congestion, DARPA is funding Oshkosh Defense, a company that turns military trucks into driverless vehicles. It’s a retrofit that does not require a new generation of trucks to be built. “The company has introduced the TerraMax conversion kit, which turns ordinary trucks and minesweepers into what the company calls unmanned ground vehicles. Marketed as the thing to buy ‘when you’d never send anyone,’ the retrofitting systems are designed to have unmanned vehicles travel in tandem convoys with troops in IED-filled territory. In essence, the unmanned vehicles are designed to either detect bombs or take the brunt of an explosion…

“‘It's not a box that you plug in 15 minutes,’ says John Beck, Oshkosh’s chief unmanned systems engineer, ‘but an architecture that uses communication to get precise control over steering and braking.’ The system also ensures a steady stream of diagnostic data, the ability to black out ‘no-go’ zones using GPS, and a combination of radar and lidar [laser-assisted]. ‘So vehicles can understand environments. If there’s a hole, ditch, or a cliff, it can understands trees, and big rocks, and things they shouldn’t be flying over.’” FastCompany.com, July 25^th. It’s not this particular technology that is disturbing; it is this desire to be able to kill easily with little or no risk to your own military personnel. Wouldn’t it just be easier to let the underlying “command and control” computers battle it out in cyberspace and just tell us who won?

I’m Peter Dekom, and in a world of escalating “defense” technologies, it’s just getting too easy to kill.