Americans let robots vacuum their floors, mow their lawns, and build their cars. Now, they're even letting them fight their wars. In June, with little fanfare, the U.S. Army deployed the first armed robots to Iraq, marking a new era in modern warfare.
Although militaries have used robots for everything from minesweeping to defusing bombs, the new "special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system"--or SWORDS--is different. For one, it's packing heat: an M249 machine gun, to be exact. It can fire on a target from more than 3,000 feet away. So far, three of these $250,000 robots have been deployed to Iraq to conduct dangerous ground operations that would otherwise put soldiers' lives at risk. And reinforcements are coming: More than 100 SWORDS robots have either been built or requested, and the U.S. government has budgeted about $1.7 billion on ground-based military robots between 2006 and 2012.
However, the military isn't quite ready to shelve their human counterparts just yet. The SWORDS robots now seeing action in Iraq are manned by soldiers who remotely control their every move. But this new development does raise serious ethical and technological issues about the future of intelligent machines in war. As Peter W. Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, says, "If something goes wrong--and it always will--who is responsible? It's a classic question from science fiction, and yet our laws are so far silent on it."
Perhaps, though, after seeing more than 4,000 soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is ready to try something different. Even if that means writing a new chapter in the story of man vs. machine.Send this article to a friend.
[Photo: Foster-Miller]
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