Scholarly exploration of transitions in manned/unmanned combat | Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and...

Wired for War | Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century | P. W. Singer

books:


	• Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century P. W. Singer Penguin Press HC, The, 2009 - 512 pages average customer review:based on 55 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

The future of war?

"People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Isaac Asimov

Lot of the advanced new robot weaponry influenced and or inspired by science fiction writing. For example I Robot a company out of Burlington MA is named after the Asimov novel I robot.

Many jobs are lost and have gone Robot. War is no exception. The author mentions there are 12,000 Robots operating in Iraq. Lot of AI being used in war.

Unnamed robots used more often. FCS "Future combat program." The way of the future. The unmanned robot takes never miss and the jet fight pilot is on the way out.

"And when they start fighting no organized force could stand against them" *the Robots)

By the year 2025 war "largely robotic"

Already we hear often about Al Quida being taken out by unnamed drones with cool names. Human supervised robots.

Can go wrong the AGEIS system took out an Iranian Jet...that was a long time ago.

The strangest Robot discussed in this book was the vampire bot that runs on blood. Bizarre.

for more information click here

Scholarly exploration of transitions in manned/unmanned combat

Singer gives a balanced and thorough exploration of technology and issues as information and robotic capabilities penetrate military practices. It struck me that many chapters' conclusion was presented from an alternate perspective in a following chapter that showed complexity in the issues and arguments. The exposition of machine intelligence read more breathy and fanciful than the much harder information about combat robots, psychology of combat and legal issues. Moore's Law for War will continue...

Wired for War

I can recommend this book to anyone with an interest in robotics and airplanes. It discusses the future aspects of dealing with the ever increasing autonomous control of military weapons.It touches on the ethics of present and future UAV's and other autonomous vehicles such as small tanks for bomb removal and even ones mounted with .50 caliber machine guns and rocket launchers. It does have a few pictures towards the middle of the book which is nice, but i wouldn't mind seeing a few more pages worth of pictures. Overall i consider this an excellent book worthy of reading at least once, even though it does take some time to read.

for more information click here

Is There a Pilot on Board the Plane?

Japanese make robots to take care of elderly people and to fill the dreams of a society when children are becoming a rarity. Americans build robots to make war. Both uses make Europeans profoundly wary, as most people on the Old Continent have serious misgivings about the use of armed force and don't want to surrender part of their lives to machines.

But robots, be they in their caring version or as military auxiliaries, are already among us, and they are here to stay. This fact alone came to me as a surprise. Contrary to other online reviewers, I don't read popular books about war and about science, and I voluntarily limit my access to the printed media and to TV. In addition, I haven't received any extended training in technology or in defense. As a result, I have big holes in my understanding of these two important subjects. I didn't know drones were of such widespread use in combat zones, and I wasn't aware that robots had become an integral part of EOD bomb squads in Iraq. In fact, my knowledge of unmanned vehicles was limited to the plane models and remote-controlled car toys of my childhood. To that extent, this book was an eye opener as well as a badly needed course tutorial on the topic of war and technology.

The biggest shock was to learn that, if we believe P.W. Singer's projections, air force pilots are soon to lose their jobs to machines. Already reconnaissance missions are best handled by unmanned airplanes. They can stay alert for longer missions and, depending on the plane's size and shape, fly higher or peek from closer angles. Already drones can strike a target with surgical precision: of the top twenty al Qaeda militant leaders the United States sought out in 2008, eleven were killed by drone strikes. The next step might be the unmanned fighter jet. In fact, the only thing that holds a modern jet back is the man in the machine. The gravitational pressures unleashed when a fighter plane makes high-speed turns or accelerations can knock a pilot out. Without the pilot, the jet could climb higher, dive deeper, accelerate faster, and outmaneuver any manned aircraft. Nowadays the pilot isn't of much use anyway: most moves are automatic, and the airplane steers itself with only occasional input from the man in the driver's seat. This could be done from a distance, as is already the case with unmanned combat aerial vehicles or UCAV. An unmanned jet could work at digital speed and react to an incoming danger much faster than humans. In the world of aerial warfare, in which microseconds are the difference between life and death, this could not only save lives, but also give the drones-equipped air force complete hegemony over the skies.

But outsourcing the pilot's job to a machine raises a lot of issues. The US Air Force's professional identity is very much wrapped in the idea of piloting planes, and fighter planes at that. Indeed, over half of the air force's generals are fighter pilots, as has been every single air force chief of staff but one since 1982. So being a fighter pilot is not just in the air force leadership's organizational DNA, it is also seen as the pathway to advancing in the ranks. Now their professional identity is being challenged by computer geeks and dull office workers who have a radically different experience of war. The drones may be flying over Iraq, but they are launched out of a base in the Persian Gulf, and flown by men sitting behind a computer in Nevada. Fighting from a cubicle and commuting from home everyday changes the meaning of going to war. The fighting teams communicating through internet chat rooms are less like a true "band of brothers" and more like most of the Facebook "friendship" groups. The authority is being challenged, both from below by technicians having full control of their machines, and from above by commanders in chief who want to micromanage surgical strikes and battalion moves.

The pattern with unmanned planes in the early twenty-first century seems to be mirroring what happened with manned planes in the early twentieth century. There was initial skepticism and opposition to them in general, followed by limited use in observation and spotter role. Soon, however, they began to be used for ad hoc attack roles, and aerial warfare became an integral part of armed conflicts. Indeed, the most apt historic parallel to Iraq may well turn out to be World War I. Strange and exciting new technologies, which had been science fiction just years earlier, were introduced and then used in great numbers on the battlefield. But it then took more than a decade to develop new rules and doctrines on how to use these new technologies most effectively. Akin to the intense interwar doctrinal debates of the 920s and 1930s over how to use tanks and air planes, there is not yet agreement on how best to fight with the new robotic weapons. Right now, two emerging doctrines are developing, referred to in shorthand as the "mothership" and the "swarm", but new directions or a combination of the two could also emerge.

I was also surprised to learn how much the US military sets the agenda in robotics. The primary player in the world of funding new research in IT, computers, and robotics is DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA's overall mission is to support fundamental research on technologies that might be common twenty to forty years from now, and to try to make them happen earlier to serve the needs of the US military today. For all the claims that "big government" can never match the private sector, DARPA ha an impressive track record. The internet, email, cell phones, computer graphics, weather satellites, fuel cells, lasers, night vision, and the Saturn V rockets that first took man to the moon all originated at DARPA. Especially since 9/11 and the military operations in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the US military has gone into a huge research and buying spree, with a particular focus for anything unmanned. The US military funds as much as eighty percent of all AI research in the United States. Even robotics laboratories in Japan, a country with a pacifist constitution and a deep affection for domestic robots, receive research fundings from US military agencies.

As a book geared to a general audience, Wired for War has its limits. The author tries to please too many publics and puts in a little bit of everything, at the risk of losing focus and accuracy. Some references to popular culture such as StarTrek episodes or sci-fi novels were entirely lost to me. For a book that deals with moral issues, it is rather sloppy and cavalier on the ethical side, and it sometimes verges on the "war porn" voyeurism that it is condemning. Asimov's remark that "science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom" rings very true, and P.W. Singer often sounds more like the wild-eyed geek than the experienced sage. Singer fails in his attempt to provide the general reader with a moral map to navigate the world of automated battlefields, but he certainly goes a long way in exploring this uncharted terrain.

for more information click here

A military expert reveals how science fiction is fast becoming reality on the battlefield, changing not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself

P. W. Singer?s previous two books foretold the rise of private military contractors and the advent of child soldiers? predictions that proved all too accurate. Now, he explores the greatest revolution in military affairs since the atom bomb?the advent of robotic warfare.

We are just beginning to see a massive shift in military technology that threatens to make the stuff of I,Robot and the Terminator all too real. More than seven- thousand robotic systems are now in Iraq. Pilots in Nevada are remotely killing terrorists in Afghanistan. Scientists are debating just how smart?and how lethal?to make their current robotic prototypes. And many of the most renowned science fiction authors are secretly consulting for the Pentagon on the next generation.

Blending historic evidence with interviews from the field, Singer vividly shows that as these technologies multiply, they will have profound effects on the front lines as well as on the politics back home. Moving humans off the battlefield makes wars easier to start, but more complex to fight. Replacing men with machines may save some lives, but will lower the morale and psychological barriers to killing. The ?warrior ethos,? which has long defined soldiers? identity, will erode, as will the laws of war that have governed military conflict for generations.

Paradoxically, these new technologies will also bring war to our doorstep. As other nations and even terrorist organizations start to build or buy their own robotic weapons, the robot revolution could undermine America?s military preeminence. While his analysis is unnerving, there?s an irresistible gee-whiz quality to the innovations Singer uncovers. Wired for War travels from Iraq to see these robots in combat to the latter-day ?skunk works? in America?s suburbia, where tomorrow?s technologies of war are quietly being designed. In Singer?s hands, the future of war is as fascinating as it is frightening.

for more information click here