Based on my quick reading, the article fails to establish that autonomous drones are actually a clearly defined category about which treaties could plausibly be enforced. The WMD category is not just about indiscriminate destruction, it's also crucially about being able to cleanly distinguish WMDs from non-WMDs. Biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons are, with only a few exceptions, fairly precise categories. (Part of the criticism of bunker-buster nuclear bombs is that they risked blurring the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons.)
How often does a remote operator need to check in with a drone for it to no longer be "fully autonomous"? How many such drones could the operator be monitoring at once? How many drones constitute a swarm?
A sovereign power can plausibly regulate blurry categories by just picking arbitrary but clearly defined cut-offs, e.g., the difference between a moped and a motorcycle is defined as an engine with a certain number of cc's. But this is a lot harder when you need to get dozens of different countries to all agree on a rule. International law is more dependent than domestic law on appealing to clear moral boundaries, since there is no higher earthly power to appeal to.
Reading this [0] Wikipedia article, it sounds like "Weapon of Mass Destruction" is not a super well-defined term to begin with:
"The most widely used definition of "weapons of mass destruction" is that of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons (NBC) although there is no treaty or customary international law that contains an authoritative definition. Instead, international law has been used with respect to the specific categories of weapons within WMD, and not to WMD as a whole."
However, there is one definition given in the Wikipedia article that seems to be sufficiently precise:
"""
(1) Any explosive, incendiary, poison gas, bomb, grenade, or rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces [113 g], missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce [7 g], or mine or device similar to the above.
(2) Poison gas.
(3) Any weapon involving a disease organism.
(4) Any weapon that is designed to release radiation at a level dangerous to human life.
"""
I definitely agree with your overall point that defining AFADS as a WMD will require careful navigation of the blurriness surrounding the category. On the other hand, it seems like that second definition is already in the territory of choosing arbitrary cutoffs (ie 113 grams).
An alternative perhaps is to focus on handling the "autonomous" part, rather than the "swarm" part, as the USMA article suggests. The definition here can be more precise/less arbitrary I think: a weapon that can at any time be overridden by an operator is not fully autonomous. However, if its regular operation includes a period where there is no operator in the position to override it (eg the drone(s) keep doing their thing while the operator is away from the controls), it would then count as fully autonomous. Having some authentication that the operator is at the controls at all times, available to override and legally responsible for the behavior of the drone(s) is the key to this approach I think.
> However, if its regular operation includes a period where there is no operator in the position to override it (eg the drone(s) keep doing their thing while the operator is away from the controls), it would then count as fully autonomous.
Whelp, I guess artillery and grenades are fully autonomous.
For the purposes of evaluating morality of actions, yes artillery shells with variable fusings are a primitive version of an autonomous weapon.
It is much more useful to think about the reverse situation: how does viewing future autonomous weapons as a sort of artillery shell with high CEP (or whatever feature you imagine the future weapons has) clarify the morality of its use?
In my opinion, no. Killing people with dumb artillery shells vs. smart microdrone swarms seems equally horrific morally. The primary question is about whether one is more dangerous on global scales than the other. Although I think the smarter drones may in fact be more dangerous globally, I haven't seen anyone define a clean criteria for distinguishing them. Without such clean criteria, it looks infeasible to enforce through international law.
Yes, killing is morally reprehensible. But given that we'll not end the practice of war anytime soon, how can you regulate all the senseless killing people are determined to carry out so that it at least some pretence at morality is upheld. That is the sort of problem I had in mind.
I think it’s abundantly obvious to anyone looking at this with good faith that the autonomy refers to the targeting of the weapon and the decision to fire the weapon.
If you're arguing about whether some weapon is a WMD after the fact, good faith isn't really something we can count on. The whole point of precise definitions is eliminating subjectivity. Anyway, that definition includes cruise missiles, which can't be WMDs because they're in widespread use. This line of inquiry is dead in the water.
That's a broadening of the term WMD in the US civilian and criminal legislation, basically defining any "destructive device" as WMD so that anyone setting off hand grenades or pipe bombs can be charged under their extremely severe terror legislation.
The US military, like every other organisation outside the US, doesn't include conventional explosives under WMD.
The first definition line comes from a definition of a weapon of mass destruction as related specifically to criminal terrorism charges in the US federal code. In this case they are basically setting the lower bound for what could be classified as a 'bomb'. Nothing more. The WMD definition you are probably thinking of (and the one which is more relevant to the original article) is the military definition outlined in various conventions and treaties.
I think that you have to focus on whether you have a human in the loop and can the human reliably interrupt an automated kill chain before there is a release of ordinance (much less fuzing)
If there's any point that a human cannot 'abort', then it needs to be classified as a WMD.
Out of human control I view swarm UCAVs as an unrecallable remote shotgun for the same reason as the article author, it's "inherently indiscriminate".
How long can the delay be between the fire button and they actual violent act? People shot un-recallable missiles and artillery that doesn't land for minutes but does sophisticated tracking and maneuvering in the meantime. Is that a drone?
Stop with the stupid nitpicking. You should already know the reason why we have humans in our war machines is that they are the ones with the authority to designate targets and deploy the weapon against the designated target.
It's not stupid nitpicking at all. If I designate Jon Doe as a target and have a swarm of drones do facial recognition the laws have to be clear enough to distinguish this from me putting a tracking device in Jon Doe's pocket and have a missile home in on that signal.
The counter-argument: it wouldn't be hard to design a system where a human remote-operator in Arizona is paid minimum wage to push a button whenever a screen in front of them turns red and says "FIRE".
Any regulation of lethal autonomous drones will require some nuance in the wording.
Also, what number of drones. At why point does a swarm become a WMD?
To me, it’s more about intelligence than numbers. You could have a single rocket but if it’s smart enough to evade enemy defenses, that rocket could level a city.
Only if that rocket had a nuclear bomb on it.
You'd be surprised how not powerful individual bits of munitions are. Sure a 2000 pound bomb sounds scary. But they work really well against point targets. Cities are not point targets.
The US is that strong, provided they don't have to fight in or near China or Russia. No one besides those three even has a seat at the table. China and Russia could probably defend their own territories, but projecting power is an entirely different can of worms.
> But they would fight in or near China or Russia — I don't see any chinese or russian bases in Canada or Mexico.
Sure. Because they know their limits.
But in the context of the thread, the point is that the US can institute whatever "international law" it sees fit (as long as it as the strength of will to do so) outside of the spheres of influence of China and Russia.
(I think we're heading for the classical Oceania/Eurasia/Eastasia split, but I could have read too many entirely fictional books in my formative years. Personally, I'd have preferred to have been in the timeline with centrifugal bumble-puppy and feelies)
A grenade is not that different from a bomb, and although most grenades have a relatively small blast radius, there's nothing stopping you from making really big grenades (at which point the main differentiator between it and a bomb is the integrated timed fuse).
I was kind of shocked to find that US law defines it as "any destructive device" and goes on to define that as "having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce." Which is 1/26th the explosive in an M67 grenade. 1/4oz is more like a couple of M80s stuck together.
As someone else said, this is presumably so they can charge people with terrorism for using basically any kind of explosive.
I think it’s a pretty good case. But it’s also iffy. I mean you could say an army corps armed with machine guns are capable of destroying half a city or a column of tanks is capable of destroying half a city too.
But I think the autonomous part and the fact capabilities will keep ratcheting up and more actors enter the arena make it a type of WMD.
WMD is characterized by the low effort needed to sew massive destruction (and inability to distinguish civilians from military) once you have the tech —but getting the tech can be difficult. A full invasion army takes effort. A swarm of drones once you have the tech, is not much effort.
It's a bit like a botnet. 3 killer drones probably isn't a WMD. Maybe 100 is. 10,000, yeah I think so.
Thought there wouldn't be a whole lot of destruction like older weapons. Maybe it's more of a WMM (M is for Murder).
Thought experiment: What's the MVP for killer drones? Single use explosives like the Slaughterbots video? Or are there viable reusable weapons systems on drones that fit in your hand?
Bee swarm? Small, lightweight, fast drones with no projectile weapons, just a foot long sharp narrow blade. Kill by swarming with precise diving stabs, detach the blade if it gets stuck.
Most would say an army isn't a weapon, it has weapons. (Edit: completely missed my chance for a composition-over-inheritance joke here!)
Given that mass destruction can be performed, the distinction to me is whether the "WMD" is a weapon (and not a collection of weapons). Like a MIRV with many warheads, we consider that one WMD don't we? If instead it had thousands of drones in it, what's the difference?
To be fair the swarms themselves without payload are also not weapons. It’s the capability to carry weapons autonomously in great swarms coupled with an inability to only target military installations/personnel.
Obviously depending on the type of drone traditional WMDs could be deployed with them.
> inability to only target military installations/personnel.
I think that's a good point that I missed. The "mass" part of it. But even if we coded drones to only target military, this could be turned off or changed.
Maybe we need code signing and weapons inspectors before determining if a swarm is a WMD or not.
Pretty much the premise of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint:
Prior to the events of the game, Skell Technology comes under increasing public scrutiny when they are faced with mounting evidence that its products are falling into the hands of corrupt regimes, whilst its technology is implicated in an assassination of a political candidate by an armed drone.[c] The situation escalates further when the USS Seay, an American cargo ship sinks off the coast of the Auroa archipelago and all contact with both the island and its inhabitants are subsequently cut off from the outside world. Determined to investigate the cause, CIA Deputy Director Peter Miles initiates Operation Greenstone, deploying a Ghost Recon platoon from the USS Wasp to re-establish contact with Auroa and determine the circumstances of the Seay's sinking. The insertion ends in disaster when the helicopters carrying the platoon to the island are attacked by a swarm of drones. Nomad is the sole able-bodied survivor of his squadmates, whilst Holt is seriously injured in the crash, and Midas is missing in action.
Shortly after obtaining a weapon and attempting to find a working radio to communicate with the Wasp, Nomad witnesses a firefight between several Ghosts led by Weaver and multiple unidentified individuals. The firefight abruptly ends when Weaver is executed by Cole Walker, a former member of the Ghosts who is now leading the assault force, known as the "Wolves." Additionally, Nomad discovers a private military company called Sentinel is also operating on the island alongside the Wolves. Eventually, Nomad manages to reach Erewhon, a secret mountain hideout that is kept hidden from both Sentinel as well as the Wolves. With the assistance of ex-U.S. Marine Mads Schulz, Erewhon's de facto leader and his wife Maria, Nomad learns that the drone swarms that ambushed the platoon have imposed a defensive perimeter around the island; preventing anyone from entering or leaving the Archipelago. To help bring down the drones protecting the island, Nomad works with another survivor, fellow Ghost Recon Sergeant Major Josiah Hill and is instructed to locate Maurice Fox, Skell Tech's chief mathematician, his daughter Harmony, and eventually Jace Skell himself.
Upon reaching Skell, Nomad discovers that Hill has been secretly working with Walker and the two offer Nomad a place by their side. Nomad refuses and manages to evacuate Skell to Erewhon.
I think there would be absolutely no possible way to restrict drone technology of this kind, and so the article is built on an irrelevant foundation.
Nuclear weapons are restrictive because the enrichment process is difficult.
Biological weapons are restrictive because the cultivation process is difficult.
Drones are easy, machine learning is becoming more approachable for every person in civilized society.
Better to make a counter-drone-swarm technology company than worry about what regulators are going to do when a terrorist cell starts to manufacture killer drones - you cannot stop that with regulation, you can only stop that with your own drone swarm.
This is a new age of war, and if free society is to stand a chance it needs to develop and research countermeasures for this sort of stuff - classification and regulation is meaningless as deterrence.
Biological weapons are more restricted by the fact that they're impossible to control, and so using an effective one is a suicide mission.
Honestly I find them far scarier than the other two because as technology improves, it's becoming easier and easier to build designer diseases in a back yard lab.
Most mass produced biological weapons are things like anthrax or tularemia that aren't human to human transmissible. The USSR did have several tons of weaponized smallpox but nothing on the scale of their anthrax production.
> Biological weapons are more restricted by the fact that they're impossible to control, and so using an effective one is a suicide mission.
It isn't a suicide mission if your side is immune to it. For example, biological warfare against the natives were instrumental in the conquest of the americas. Not only did it quickly thin down and weaken the native population, it also left the infrastructure intact.
I assume you don't mean nuclear device EMP -- that's probably what whoever downvoted you thought.
Yes, small EMP devices might be a good way to temporarily or permanently disable individual drones and swarms of drones hanging out to close to each other. Good idea.
NewSTART is being intentionally scrapped is more accurate description, since there are provisions for automatically renewing it for five more years that the Trump administration are just neglecting to use.
But Chemical weapons are not so difficult to make. There is a chance that some weapons are forbidden if the Nuclear Powers don't want other countries to have nice toys.
What I means is say we apply that to landmines. Anyone selling, manufuring or deploying landmines risks prosecution if they travel to another country. Because a lot of them will arrest, try and imprison you the moment you step on their soil.
Here's some legitimate drone swarm military applications that wouldn't qualify as WMD:
* reconnaissance drone swarms; the drones can be as small as a hummingbird, but they can also be larger; their "weapon" is their camera.
* armed drone swarms aimed for saturation attacks against military naval assets.
* armed drone swarms for area denial. Think defense of a large uninhabited border area between Russia and China. If you detect a mass of tanks crossing the border and send a drone swarm to kill everything in that area, the danger of killing non-combatants is nil
We should be thinking about all sorts of ways in which autonomous systems can create a whole new style of warfare. The combination of deep learning and targetted weaponry create extremely efficient killing machines. "Off the shelf" lasers combined with facial recognition, actuators and cameras could permanently blind a battalion in seconds, before anyone even had time to know what was going on. I think it's only a matter of time before we see 'dazzlers' used both on and off the battlefield.
> On May 6th, 2002, the United States, in a position shared with Israel and Sudan, having previously signed the Rome Statute formally withdrew its signature and indicated that it did not intend to ratify the agreement.
I mentioned "off the battlefield" for a reason. Lots of people have already made paintball "sentry guns" from off the shelf equipment. I don't think it will be long(10-15 years)before we see non-state actors using similar tricks.
The whole WMD classification distracts here I think.
Plus nobody is stuffing this genie back in its bottle. Unlike nuclear or chemical it doesn't require a complicated precursor and is much easier to sell as "well be careful OK".
Think about it...your Roomba cleans your floor autonomously and your kid has a 100 buck drone as a toy. Yeah some pieces of the swarming puzzle are missing but give it a year or three and even that is will be widespread.
Meanwhile Trump is rolling back mutual agreements, Putin is posturing as usual and China is building drones faster than anyone else (see toy above).
Well, these drone swarms would have to be solar, and possibly have downtime, be easy to shoot down, vulnerable to jamming perhaps, etc. As long as there's a counter, it's not that bad. Still, I'm surprised the U.S. isn't going more for this than, say, the F-35.
Anyways, how would you verify that signatories don't have drone swarms and can't make and deploy them quickly even if they don't have them? It seems to me that verification is practically impossible.
While fiction (and not the most realistic) there is a scene with a drone swarm in 'Angel Has Fallen' that hints at the potential lethality of autonomous swarms.
A fully autonomous drone might sound cool because they are less prone to jamming but they essentially threaten the concept of human sovereignty. Unless there is a human to supervise them and provide targeting data they shouldn't exist. The reason why the AI control problem is dangerous is that it assumes that the AI can project force beyond the ability of a human army.
A swarm of non lethal drones equipped with 3D/depth cameras that collaborate in order to establish a dynamic 3D map of the terrain. A user consuming data from the swarm would enjoy a live "God's view" on what actually happens in reality, but through a 3D view displayed on a screen, very much like in Starcraft but without an artificial "fog of war".
This isn't a weapon of mass destruction nor a weapon in the classical meaning of the word.
But is this a weapon system, i.e. a system meant to ensure or enhance a weapon's function, such as targeting and guidance ?
I think you would be hard pressed to classify cameras as weapons. No one is being harmed by the action of taking a picture - you would have to introduce a separate weapon, such as a missile or gun, to cause any damage, and those are all governed by existing regulations.
>Banning AFADS from use in outer space and the seabed may have secondary national-security benefits, such as reducing the risk from drone swarms to sea-based nuclear forces.
big guys from the elite nuke wielding club naturally wouldn't want small guys being able to threaten them. Reminds this saying "God created men equal. Colonel Colt made them equal."
I’m sorry but big guys aren’t much threatened by this. They can squash any upstart in a blink. It’s the instability it brings along with future potential among the big players that’s of concern.
Would you prefer every nation of note have nukes and delivery capabilities? Because it sounds like you would prefer that.
If every nation has nukes, plausible deniability for suitcase nukes goes out the window, and, with it, MAD. That's a guarantee that nukes will then be used.
Well that's irony right? If Iraq had actually had credible WMDs they would never have been invaded.
Not like these lessons have been lost on North Korea or Iran. There's the things the international community says about nukes on one hand, and there's how they actually treat you when you don't have them on the other.
The realpolitik view is that you don't have actual sovereignty without nukes. In my opinion this is why the U.K. for example (which, let's be honest, doesn't really have any practical use for the damn things and wastes a lot of money on them) is nuclear armed.
Realpolitik says Airstrip One gets a better deal from Oceania with that veto; otherwise it could only hope to get treated as well as, say, Japan. (aren't you all impeding the free market by preferring unchlorinated chicken?)
Non-sequitur. I did not and do not deny that nukes buy you immunity from conventional attacks -- they clearly do. I said that too many countries having them will lead to their being used with plausible deniability. Got an answer to that?
Agree we're talking past each other a bit. Sorry. I agree with you that proliferation is bad, but I'd like to elaborate.
Summarising as I see it:
OP's point was that WMDs (of all kinds) are an equalizer between nations.
Your response was that nuclear proliferation creates instability. You also I think unfairly characterised OP's position as being pro-nuclear proliferation. You assumed OP was talking about nukes but I believe they were making a broader point.
My response to you was that nuclear anti-proliferation efforts create a kind of hegemony where dominant nations get cemented in power forever.
For the record, I'm also anti-nuclear-proliferation, but I wanted to point out that from the point of view of anyone not under the protective nuclear umbrella of a dominant nation there's a heavy element of hypocrisy involved.
Circling back around to drones, I can see why the U.S. might want to restrict them or classify them as WMDs. I think the following is where OP was coming from:
They have the potential to undermine conventional power and effectively turn war into a competition of mass cheap manufacturing capability. It's not at all clear in 2020 that the U.S. (in particular) would be able to dominate in such a situation.
They're super hard to regulate in the sense that a nation aligned to a major manufacturing power could acquire or stockpile them in massive quantities with little oversight.
It would create a possibly surprising shift in power where the U.S. might not be able to project conventional force into areas where they would normally expect to be able to do that.
They're also tricky in terms of message management (big part of warfare) because when used defensively, a nuclear response to them is not politically credible. So you can't use the big stick.
This doesn't create nuclear instability but it does create "instability" in the sense that it has the potential to shift the balance of power for the existing nuclear and conventional hegemony.
Which I think was the crux of the OP's original point.
> Your response was that nuclear proliferation creates instability. You also I think unfairly characterised OP's position as being pro-nuclear proliferation. You assumed OP was talking about nukes but I believe they were making a broader point.
My question to OP had been whether they are pro-proliferation. You're free to take the question as "characterizing their position as pro-proliferation" all you want, but I think it's a fair question.
How often does a remote operator need to check in with a drone for it to no longer be "fully autonomous"? How many such drones could the operator be monitoring at once? How many drones constitute a swarm?
A sovereign power can plausibly regulate blurry categories by just picking arbitrary but clearly defined cut-offs, e.g., the difference between a moped and a motorcycle is defined as an engine with a certain number of cc's. But this is a lot harder when you need to get dozens of different countries to all agree on a rule. International law is more dependent than domestic law on appealing to clear moral boundaries, since there is no higher earthly power to appeal to.