by Jared Cohen
The forecast of fewer civilian casualties, less collateral damage and the reduced risk of human injury are welcome, but the shift toward a more automated battlefield will introduce significant new vulnerabilities and challenges. Chief among them will be maintaining the cybersecurity of equipment and systems. The data flow between devices, ground robots and UAVs, and their human-directed command-and-control centers must be fast, secure and unimpeded by poor infrastructure, just like communications between troop units and their bases. This is why militaries set up their own communications networks instead of relying on the local one. Until robots in the field have autonomous artificial intelligence, an impeded or broken connection turns these machines into expensive dead weight—possibly dangerous, too, since capture of an enemy’s robot is akin to capturing proprietary technology. There is no end to the insights such a capture could yield, particularly if the robot is poorly designed—not only information about software and drone engineering, but even more sensitive data like enemy locations gleaned through digital coordinates. (It’s also hard to imagine that countries won’t purposely crash-land or compromise a decoy UAV, filled with false information and misleading technical components, as part of a misinformation campaign.) In wars where robotic elements are present, both sides will employ cyber attacks to interrupt enemy activity, whether by spoofing (impersonating a network identity) or employing decoys to disrupt enemy sensor grids and degrade enemy battle networks. Manufacturers will attempt to build in fail-safe mechanisms to limit the damage of these attacks, but it will be difficult to build anything technologically bulletproof.
Militaries and robotics developers will face simple error as well. All networked systems have vulnerabilities and bugs, and often the only way they become known is when they are revealed by hackers or independent security-systems experts. The computer code necessary to operate machines of this caliber is incredibly dense—millions upon millions of lines of code—and mistakes happen. Even when developers are aware of a system’s vulnerabilities, it isn’t easy to address them. The vulnerability the Iranians said they attacked in bringing down the U.S. drone, a weakness in the GPS system, had reportedly been known to the Pentagon since the Bosnian campaign of the 1990s. In 2008, U.S. military troops first discovered laptops from Shiite insurgents in Iraq containing files of intercepted drone video feeds, which the Iraqis had been able to access by simply pointing their satellite dishes up and using a cheap downloadable software, SkyGrabber, available for $26, that was originally intended to help people pirate movies and music. The data links between the drone and its ground control station were never encrypted.
For the near future, as humans continue to drive the implementation of these technologies, mistakes will be made. Placing fragile human psyches in extreme combat situations will always generate unpredictability—and can trigger PTSD, severe emotional distress or full psychotic breaks in the process. As long as human beings conduct war, these errors must be factored in.
Until artificially intelligent systems can mimic the capability of the human brain, we won’t see unmanned systems entirely replacing human soldiers, in person or as decision-makers. Even highly intelligent machines can have glaring faults. As Peter Singer pointed out, during World War I, when the tank first appeared on the battlefield, with its guns, armor and rugged treads, it was thought to be indestructible—until someone came up with the antitank ditch. Afghanistan’s former minister of defense Abdul Rahim Wardak, whom we met in Kabul shortly before he was dismissed, chuckled as he described how he and his fellow mujahideen fighters targeted Soviet tanks in the 1980s by smearing mud on their windows and building leaf-covered traps similar to the ones the Vietcong used to ensnare American soldiers a decade earlier. In a modern parallel, Singer said, “The ground robots our soldiers use in Iraq and Afghanistan [employ] an amazing technology, but insurgents realized they could build tiger traps for them—just deep holes that [they] would fall into. They even figured out the angle necessary for the incline so that the bot couldn’t climb its way out.” The intelligence of these robots is specialized, so as they are tested in the field, their operators and developers will continually encounter enemy circumventions that they did not expect, and they’ll be forced to evolve their products. Asymmetric encounters in combat like these will continue to pose unpredictable challenges for even the most sophisticated of technologies.
Human intelligence contains more than just problem-solving skills, however. There are uniquely human traits relevant to combat—like judgment, empathy and trust—that are difficult to define, let alone instill in a robot. So what is lost as robots increasingly take over human responsibilities in battlefield operations? In our conversations with Special Forces members, they emphasized the supreme importance of trust and brotherhood in their experiences in combat. Some had trained and fought together for years, coming to know each other’s habits, movements and thought patterns almost instinctively. They described being able to communicate with just a look. Will robots ever be able to mimic a human’s ability to read nonverbal cues?
Can a robot be brave? Can it selflessly sacrifice? Can a robot, trained to identify and engage targets, have some sense of ethics or restraint? Will a robot ever be able to distinguish between a child and a small man? If a robot kills an innocent civilian, who is to be blamed? Imagine a standoff between an armed ground robot and a six-year-old child with a spray-paint canister, perhaps sent out by an insurgent group. Whether acting autonomously or with human direction, the robot can either shoot the unarmed child, or be disabled, as the six-year-old sprays paint over its high-tech cameras and sensory components, blinding it. Faced with this decision, if you were commanding the robot, Singer asks, what would you do? We can’t court-martial robots, hold them accountable or investigate them. Accordingly, humans will continue to dominate combat operations for many years to come, even as robots become more intelligent and integrated with human forces.
New Interventions
The advent of virtualized conflict and automated warfare will mean that states with aggressive agendas will have a wider range of tools available to them in the future. Interventions by other actors—citizens, businesses and governments—will diversify as well.
For states, the U.N. Security Council will remain the only international body that is both inclusive of all nations and capable of bestowing legality to state-led military interventions. It’s unlikely that the international community will stray far from the great power dispensation of 1945 that established the United Nations, even with the vociferous calls of empowered citizen populations increasing the pressure on states to act. New mandates and charters for intervention will be almost impossible to pass given the fact that any amendment to the U.N. charter requires 194 member-nations to approve.
But there are areas of high-level statecraft where new forms of intervention are more viable, and these will take place through smaller alliances. In an extreme situation, we foresee a group of countries, for example, coming together to disable an errant country’s military robots. We can also imagine some member-states of NATO pushing to establish new mandates for intervention that could authorize states to send combat troops into conflicts to establish safe zones with independent and uncompromised networks. This would be a popular idea within intervention policy circles—it’s a natural extension of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) doctrine, which the U.N. Security Council used to authorize military action (including air strikes) in Libya in 2011 that NATO subsequently carried out. It’s very possible that we will see NATO members contribute drones to enforce the world’s first unmanned no-fly zone over a future rebel stronghold, which would not involve sending any troops into harm’s way.
Beyond formal institutions like NATO, the pressure for action will find other outlets in the form of ad hoc coalitions involving citizens and companies. Neither individuals nor businesses are able to muster military force for a ground invasion, but they can contribute to the maintenance of the vitally important communications network in a
conflict zone. Future interventions will take the form of reconnecting the Internet or helping a rebel-held area set up an independent and secure network. In the event of state or state-sponsored manipulation of communications, we’ll see a concerted effort by international stakeholders to intervene and restore free and uninterrupted access without waiting for U.N. approval.
It’s not the connectivity that is crucial per se (civilians in conflict zones might already have some form of communications access) but rather what a secure and fast network enables people to do. Doctors in makeshift field hospitals will be able to coordinate quickly, internally and internationally, to distribute medical supplies, arrange airdrops and document what they’re seeing. Rebel fighters will communicate securely, off the government’s telecommunications network, at ranges and on platforms much more useful than radios. Civilians will interact with members of their families in the diaspora on otherwise blocked platforms and use safe channels—mainly an array of proxy and circumvention tools—to send money in or information out.
Coalitions of states could send the equivalent of Special Forces troops to help rebel movements disconnect from the government network and establish their own network. Today, actions like these are taken but in independent fashion. A group of Libyan ministers told us the story of a brave American soul called Fred who arrived in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in a wooden boat, armed with communications supplies and determined to help the rebels build their own telecommunications network. Fred eliminated the Gadhafi-era wiretaps as his first task. In the future, this will be a combat operation, particularly in places not accessible from the sea.
The composition of intervening coalitions will change in turn. States with small militaries but strong technology sectors will become new power players. Today, Bangladesh is among the most frequent contributors of troops to international peacekeeping missions. In the future, it will be countries with strong technology sectors, presently including Estonia, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Chile, who lead the charge in this type of mission. Coalitions of the connected will bring the political will and digital weaponry like high bandwidth, jerry-rigged independent mobile networks and enhanced cybersecurity. Such countries might also contribute to military interventions, with their own robot and aerial-drone armies. Some states, particularly small ones, will find it easier, cheaper and more politically expedient to build and commit their own unmanned drone arsenal to multilateral efforts, rather than cultivating and deploying human troops.
Technology companies, NGOs and individuals will also participate in these coalitions, each bringing something uniquely valuable to the table. Companies can build open-source software tailored to the needs of the people inside a country, and offer free upgrades for all of their products. NGOs can coordinate with telecoms to build accurate databases of a given population and its needs, mapping out where the most unstable or isolated pockets are. And citizens can volunteer to test the new network and all of these products, helping to find bugs and vulnerabilities as well as providing crucial user feedback.
No matter how advanced our technology becomes, conflict and war will always find their roots in the physical world, where the decisions to deploy machines and cyber tactics are fundamentally human. As an equal-opportunity enabler, technology will enhance the abilities of all participants in a conflict to do more, which means more messaging and content from all sides, greater use of robots and cyber weapons, and a wider range of strategic targets to strike. There are some distinct improvements, like the accountability driven by the permanence of evidence, but ultimately technology will complicate conflict even as it reduces risk on a net level.
Future combatants—states, rebels, militaries—will find that the tough ethical, tactical and strategic calculations they are used to making in physical conflicts will need to account for a virtual front that will oftentimes affect their decision-making. This will lead aggressors to take more actions in the less risky virtual front, as we described earlier, with online discrimination and hard-to-attribute cyber first-strike invasions. In other instances, the virtual front will act as a constraining force, leading aggressors to second-guess the degree of their aggression on the physical front. And as we will see even more clearly in the following pages, the mere existence of a virtual front paves the way for intervention options that are still robust, but minimize or reduce altogether the need to send troops into harm’s way. Drone-patrolled no-fly zones and robotic peacekeeping interventions may be possible during a conflict, but such steps are limited. When the conflict is over, however, and the reconstruction effort begins, the opportunities for technology to help rebuild the country are endless.
1 If such an exception was made for the Israeli ultra-Orthodox on religious grounds, what kind of precedent would it set? What if the ultraconservative Salafis in Egypt followed suit, demanding a special white-listed Internet?
2 In policy circles, this is known as the CNN Effect, and is most frequently associated with the 1992–1993 U.S. intervention in Somalia. It’s widely believed that the images broadcast on television of starving and desperate Somalis prompted George H. W. Bush to send in military forces, but when, on October 3, 1993, eighteen Army Rangers and two Malaysian coalition partners were killed and the images of one of the Americans dragged through the streets in Mogadishu reached the airwaves, the American forces were withdrawn.
3 There is a start-up today called Storyful that does this for many of the major news broadcasters. It employs former journalists and carefully curates content from social media (e.g., by verifying that the weather in a YouTube video matches the weather recorded in that city on the day the video was supposedly shot).
4 Computer enthusiasts will remember this agency’s central role in creating the Internet, back when the agency was known as Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
5 Two PackBots were deployed during the Fukushima nuclear crisis following the 2011 earthquake in Japan, entering the damaged plant, where high radiation levels made it dangerous for human rescue workers, to gather visual and sensory data.
6 Singer’s statement was corroborated by several active-duty Special Forces soldiers we spoke to.
CHAPTER 7
The Future of
Reconstruction
It’s now eminently clear how technology can be used to turn societies upside down and even tear them apart, but what about putting them back together? Reconstruction after a conflict or a natural disaster is a long and arduous process, hardly something a flash mob or viral video campaign can carry out. But while communication technologies alone can’t rebuild broken societies, political, economic and security efforts can all be enhanced and accelerated because of technology. Tools that we use for casual entertainment today will find new purpose in the future in postcrisis countries, and populations in need will find more information and more power at their fingertips. Reconstruction efforts will become more innovative, more inclusive and more efficient over time, as old models and methods are either updated or discarded. Technology cannot thwart disaster or halt a civil war, but it can make the process of putting the pieces back together less painful.
Just as future conflicts will see the addition of a virtual front, so too will reconstruction efforts. We will still see cranes and bulldozers restoring roads, rebuilding bridges and resurrecting destroyed buildings, but we will also see an immediate and simultaneous focus on key functions that in the past have often come later in the process. Getting communications up and running, for example, will enable the rebuilding of the physical infrastructure and the economic and governance infrastructure at the same time. Here we will outline how we envision the approach future reconstruction planners will take to a postcrisis society, discuss the wave of new participants that connectivity will spur to action and offer a few ideas for innovative policies that can put societies on a faster path toward recovery.
Communications First
For societies emerging from a man-made or natural disaster, reconstruction is a daunting task. Fro
m rebuilding roads and buildings to reconnecting the population to the services it needs, these challenges require immense resources, different types of technical expertise and, of course, patience. Modern technology can aid these processes significantly if employed in the right ways, and we believe that successful reconstruction efforts in the future will rely heavily on communication technologies and fast telecommunications networks.
There will be a reconstruction prototype: a flexible and segmentary set of adaptable practices and models that can be tailored to fit particular postcrisis environments. Technology companies use prototypes and “beta” models to allow room for trial and error—the underlying philosophy being that early-stage feedback for an imperfect product ultimately yields a better result in the end. (Hence the tech entrepreneur’s favorite aphorism: Fail early, fail often.) A prototype-like approach to reconstruction efforts will take some time to develop, but ultimately it will better serve the communities in need.
The main component of a reconstruction prototype—and what distinguishes it from, say, more traditional reconstruction efforts—is a communications-first, or mobile-first, mentality. The restoration and upgrading of communication networks have already become the new cement in modern reconstruction efforts. Looking ahead, upgrading broken societies to the fastest and most modern version of telecommunications infrastructure will be the top priority of all reconstruction actors, not least because the success of their own work will depend on it. Even in the last decade we’ve witnessed such a shift.