Abstract
Unmanned systems in military applications will often play a role in determining the success or failure of combat missions and thus in determining who lives and dies in times of war. Designers of UMS must therefore consider ethical, as well as operational, requirements and limits when developing UMS. I group the ethical issues involved in UMS design under two broad headings, Building Safe Systems and Designing for the Law of Armed Conflict, and identify and discuss a number of issues under each of these headings. As well as identifying issues, I offer some analysis of their implications and how they might be addressed.
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Notes
The research for this paper was supported by the Australian Research Council, through the award of an ARC Discovery Grant to Dr. Jessica Wolfendale, Professor Tony Coady, and Dr. Robert Sparrow. I would like to thank Neil McKinnon for assistance with locating sources for this paper and with preparing it for publication. I would also like to thank Jessica Wolfendale, Linda Barclay, Jim Sparrow, John Canning, and Ron Arkin for comments and discussion which have improved this paper.
It would be preferable to maintain a terminological distinction between “uninhabited” systems, which include a remote pilot or human operator, and “unmanned” systems, which do away with human involvement altogether (Foster 2006). The vast majority of existing systems are uninhabited rather than unmanned. Describing these systems as “uninhabited” also has the advantage of avoiding any implication about the gender of the warfighters such systems displace or replace. However, the literature on robotic weapons systems, with a few exceptions, primarily refers to both these sorts of systems as unmanned and, for the sake of consistency, this is the approach I will adopt also.
This paper is but a small portion of a much larger manuscript on the ethical issues raised by the development of robotic weapons systems, funded by the Australian research Council via the ARC Discovery Grant mentioned in footnote 1 above.
It may not prove a welcome recognition amongst many of the audience for whom this paper is written but there is clearly a question about the ethics of computer scientists and engineers choosing to work on military applications at all. There are many more urgent human needs than any that will be met by military robots (Anonymous 2007). In the context of contemporary global inequality, widespread poverty, and looming environmental catastrophe, the amount of human ingenuity, labour, and physical resources devoted to the military is, frankly, morally obscene. It is also a live question whether the objective of achieving national security or a just peace could not be better served by non-military spending (Baard 2003). Researchers face a personal choice about whether they wish to participate in and contribute to such an unsatisfactory state of affairs. Whether they should speak out against their members working for the military is also an important question for professional associations of engineers, computer scientists, and roboticists (Baard 2003). However, this question arises in regards to research and development of military technologies more generally and is by no means unique to research in robotics (Mitcham 1989); consequently, I will not discuss it here.
Wall (2006) cites a Major Paul Tombleson, from the British army, testifying that the lives of British troops have already been endangered trying to recover crashed Pioneer UAVs.
At the time of writing, this danger looms large in relation to US operations involving the use of Predator drones to attack targets inside of Pakistan. It seems highly unlikely that missile strikes alone will be capable of producing “victory” in the struggle against the Taliban (and their allies) in this region. However, the policy of carrying out such strikes involves a significant political risk of exacerbating anti-US sentiment in the region and thus increases the risk that the US will need to commit further (manned) forces to this conflict.
The risk that the enemy may gain intelligence from a captured system may be reduced by building proper “anti-tamper” measures into the system. My thanks to John Canning for drawing my attention to this issue.
A particularly important limitation of such systems is their inability to provide emergency medical care to wounded warfighters and/or civilians where required.
See Sparrow (2007) for further discussion.
A search for “Predator” AND “ UAV” on YouTube on 27.6.07 produced at least four distinct pieces of footage purportedly taken by Predator UAVs.
It must also be acknowledged that military socialisation prior to combat may play a large role in producing these emotions. Whether this will affect the operators of UMS depends on the type of training they receive.
It is also worth observing that locating the operators of UMS in the nation in which a conflict is occurring, but confining them to a military base that is entirely isolated from the local culture, will not address the issue identified here. If security and/or other operational reasons mandate isolating military personnel from the local culture then it will make no difference whether the operators are isolated at a military base in their own country or isolated at a forward operating base.
It might also go some way towards reducing the stress associated with fighting a war in a country in which one has never set foot, discussed above.
This fact also has significant implications for the ethics of the return of fire from such systems when they come under attack. Klein (2003) suggests that UAVs and UCAVs need to be classified as “national assets” in order to ground a right to defend these systems if they come under enemy fire; presumably the same would be true of UGVs, UUVs, and USVs as well. While finessing the legal nomenclature may establish the legal right to fire upon enemy combatants who attack UMS, the fact that the life of the operator of UMS is not threatened when the system is attacked undercuts the moral justification for returning fire directed against them—at least insofar as this justification proceeds from the right to self-defence.
Because the communication infrastructure required to keep a “human in the loop” is a weakpoint in UMS, systems which dispense with a human operator will be more survivable. As the tempo of battle increases as a result of technological developments, including the development of UMS, systems which rely on human input may be at a substantial disadvantage in combat against fully autonomous systems. There is therefore a substantial incentive for designers of UMS to provide systems with a capacity for autonomous operations (Adams and Thomas 2001; Blackmore 2005; Excell 2007; Featherstone 2007; Lerner 2006; Szafranski 2005).
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Sparrow, R. Building a Better WarBot: Ethical Issues in the Design of Unmanned Systems for Military Applications. Sci Eng Ethics 15, 169–187 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9107-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9107-0