Robotics, Autonomous Systems and Contemporary International Security

Ash Rossiter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000287103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Rapid technological advances in the field of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) are transforming the international security environment and the conduct of contemporary conflict. Bringing together leading experts from across the globe, this book provides timely analysis on the current and future challenges associated with greater utilization of RAS by states, their militaries, and a host of non-state actors.

Technologically driven change in the international security environment can come about through the development of one significant technology, such as the atomic bomb. At other times, it results from several technologies maturing at roughly the same pace. This second image better reflects the rapid technological change that is taking us into the robotics age. Many of the chapters in this edited volume explore unresolved ethical, legal, and operational challenges that are only likely to become more complex as RAS technology matures. Though the precise ways in which the impact of autonomous systems – both physical and non-physical – will be felt in the long-run is hidden from us, attempting to anticipate the direction of travel remains an important undertaking and one that this book makes a critical effort to contend with.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Reluctant innovators? Inter-organizational conflict and the U.S.A.’s route to becoming a drone power

Marc R. DeVore

ABSTRACT

Few innovations have marked the late-20th and early-21st centuries more than unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones. Drones’ current preeminence leads many to assume that their development was teleologically determined by technological advances. The empirical record, however, belies such assumptions and is filled with vicissitudes. The Air Force’s and Naval aviation’s pilot-dominated hierarchies never prioritized drones over manned aircraft of their own accord. Politicians, meanwhile, lacked the expertise to judge what technologies could achieve and therefore could not compel the military to embrace drones. It was, thus, competition from other organizations – the CIA, the Navy’s surface warfare community and the Army –that obliged reluctant aviators to embrace drones. My study’s key original finding is that inter-agency competition impels militaries to embrace technologies that they would otherwise reject. Warfare’s evolution means that non-military bodies – intelligence agencies, interior ministries and paramilitary forces – develop capabilities that rival those of traditional military services in specific domains and these organizations can prove more agile at adopting certain new technologies because of their flatter organizational structures.

Introduction

Few military innovations have marked the late-20^th and early-21^st centuries more than unmanned aerial vehicles, which are better known as drones. Long considered a marginal military tool, drones have first become central to great powers’ visions of future warfare. Predator and Reaper drones have spearheaded the United States’ campaign to kill insurgents and terrorist leaders. American military planners, meanwhile, envisage drones replacing manned aircraft and satellites for such missions as reconnaissance from the stratosphere, communications relays and mid-air refueling. All major powers even now are experimenting with stealth drones designed from air-to-air combat and attacking heavily defended targets. Many experts anticipate that drones will soon supplant manned combat aircraft in the foreseeable future given the meteoric development of artificial intelligence.

Drones’ current preeminence leads many today to assume that their development was straightforward; teleologically determined by technological advances. The empirical record, however, belies such assumptions and is rather filled with vicissitudes. The United States Air Force, which is today the world’s premier drone user, actually developed a sophisticated drone arsenal in the 1960s, which it used to collect intelligence on and conduct airstrikes against North Vietnam’s most heavily defended targets.

After the Vietnam War, however, the Air Force disbanded and scrapped its drone force. A decade then elapsed before the Navy reintroduced drones into front-line American service, by purchasing inexpensive Israeli drones to operate from antiquated American battleships. After the Navy brought back drones in the 1980s, it was the CIA that developed the Predator drone’s forebearer – the Gnat 750 – in the 1990s. Only at the end of this process, in the late-1990s, did the Air Force once again embrace drones, thereby setting the stage for the dramatic growth in their usage during the so-called War on Terror.

Drones’ convoluted evolution raises questions about the military innovation process. Why, for example, did the Air Force marginalize drones even after their value had been proven in combat? The corollary to this question is why did the Air Force’s leadership warmly embrace drones during certain periods, while it rejected them during others? To answer these questions, I assess the United States’ development of drones up until they achieved prominence after the September 2001 terrorist attacks.

To preview my conclusions, the case of drones highlights the central role of inter-organization competition in military innovation. The Air Force’s and Naval aviation’s pilot-dominated hierarchies never prioritized drones of their own accord because of their preferences for manned aircraft. Political leaders, meanwhile, lacked the expertise to judge what drone technologies could achieve and therefore could not compel the military to embrace them. It was, within this context, competition from organizations – the CIA, the Navy’s surface warfare community and the Army – that did not hold the preservation of manned aviation as a core belief that obliged reluctant aviators to embrace drones.

My study’s key original finding is that inter-agency competition impels military organizations to embrace technologies that they would otherwise reject. Warfare’s evolution means that non-military bodies – intelligence agencies, interior ministries and paramilitary police forces – develop capabilities that render them rivals of traditional military services in specific domains. Since such organizations feature different career trajectories and hierarchical structures from military services, they can prove more agile at adopting new technologies.

Agents of innovation

The over-riding importance of new ways of waging war – armoured divisions, aircraft carriers and radar-directed air defence – stirred many military professionals to regard the timely adoption of new technologies as crucial to success following the Second World War. French General Charles Ailleret best summarized this new reality when he wrote, ‘the greatest change in the art of war is that a military [today] is bound to be crushed if it does not apply itself intensely to ensuring that its weapons are both “up to date” and adapted to its future missions.’¹ Nuclear weapons’ and long-range missiles’ impact on the public consciousness in the years following the Second World War then drove scholars to first systematically examine how states innovate militarily. Despite the ensuing decades of academic inquiry, experts still disagree as to how military innovation occurs.

Political leaders constitute the first category of actor whom certain scholars argue are central to innovation. According to Barry Posen, political leaders force military organizations to embrace new technologies, tactics and modes of organization.² Military organizations, within this context, are conceptualized as parochial organizations whose ability to embrace new means of making war is hindered by their bureaucratic politics. Innovation, consequently, occurs when the international environment alarms politicians to such an extent that they force their militaries to embrace innovations essential to national security. Political leaders, according to Posen, accomplish this by partnering with ‘mavericks’ within the military, whose ideas are otherwise ignored by higher ranking officers.³

Although Posen offers a particular vision of how political leaders promote innovation, other scholars support his general message. Kimberley Marten Zisk and Sten Rynning, for example, detail how leaders can build up and then draw upon think tanks filled with civilian national security experts to develop and impose new military doctrines.⁴ Studying the Soviet case, Matthew Evangelista goes further, arguing that Soviet institutions were so hierarchical that only political leaders’ intervention could generate meaningful change, such as when Premier Nikita Khrushchev reallocated resources from conventional platforms to missiles.⁵

An alternative school of thought argues that military organizations develop innovations endogenously. Stephen Rosen led the way in this regard, arguing that political leaders lack the specialist knowledge needed to promote innovations and that military organizations are not as conservative as Posen asserted.⁶ Military officers, according to Rosen, possess more comprehensive understandings of tactical trends and enemy capabilities than their political superiors. Innovation therefore occurs when top-level commanders recognize emerging trends in war-making. Military leaders, within this context, promote junior officers in new specialities and thereby lay the basis for gradual, but critical innovations.

Recent scholarship on the Second World War supports this re-interpretation of classic military innovations. New studies of Germany’s blitzkrieg,⁷ Japanese aircraft carriers⁸ and American naval preparations for the Pacific War⁹ all highlighted the role of highly functioning, yet staid military bureaucracies in generating revolutionary innovations. Moreover, historians first and then political scientists recognized military organizations’ ability to generate innovations from the bottom up. Battlefield experience, whether in World War I trenches¹⁰ or Normandy’s hedgerows,¹¹ drove military organizations to rapidly re-evaluate and improve how they waged war.

Not all scholars, however, proved so sanguine as to military bureaucracies’ aptitude to reform themselves. Many scholars, indeed, view armed forces’ ingrained platform communities as an obstacle to their embracing radical innovations. Edward Katzenbach’s seminal study of the survival of the horse cavalry units until the mid-20^th century forcefully made this point.¹² According to Katzenbach, the fact that top cavalry officers had spent their entire careers mastering a particular form of warfare burdened them with motivated biases when it came to evaluating their branch’s future. According to Katzenbach, ‘Romanticism, while perhaps stultifying realistic thought, gives a man that belief in the value of the system he is operating that is so necessary to his willingness to use it in battle ….But faith [in a weapons system or tactic] breeds distrust of change.’¹³

Building on Katzenbach’s insight, Carl Builder argues that military services will embrace only those new weapons that enhance their dominant platform communities, while rejecting those that do not.¹⁴ Elizabeth Kier and David Johnson, in related arguments, postulate that military services’ distinctive organizational cultures often prevent them from adopting the optimal structures and tactics.¹⁵ Other scholars, meanwhile, argued that armed services’ self-conceptions can lead them to reject superior ways of waging war altogether.¹⁶

Examined holistically, neither of the two models detailed above – of civilian-led and military-led innovation – is wholly convincing. While political leaders, indeed, have incentives to force their armed forces to adopt the most innovative and effective ways of waging war, they generally lack the expertise and managerial leverage to do so. Robert Coulam’s study of American political leaders’ unsuccessful efforts to shape combat Cold War aircraft projects bolsters this finding.¹⁷ Military bureaucracies, however, after often loath to embrace radical changes that would threaten their dominant platform communities. If political leaders lack the wherewithal to promote innovations and military commanders will hesitate to enact reforms that could undermine their cherished combat arms, then the question remains as to how military innovation occurs?

Inter-organizational competition

One mechanism whereby otherwise reluctant military organizations can be prompted to adopt radical innovations lies in inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The impact of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) across the conflict spectrum
• 1 Reluctant innovators? Inter-organizational conflict and the U.S.A.’s route to becoming a drone power
• 2 Armed, unmanned, and in high demand: the drivers behind combat drones proliferation in the Middle East
• 3 U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan’s Pashtun ‘tribal’ region: beginning of the end under President Trump?
• 4 What’s in it for us? Armed drone strikes and the security of Somalia’s Federal Government
• 5 What’s wrong with drones? Automatization and target selection
• 6 Friend or frenemy? The role of trust in human-machine teaming and lethal autonomous weapons systems
• 7 Bots on the ground: an impending UGV revolution in military affairs?
• 8 Artificial intelligence, big data and autonomous systems along the belt and road: towards private security companies with Chinese characteristics?
• 9 The impact of Artificial Intelligence on hybrid warfare
• Index