T welve years ago, Frank Kendall, then under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics at the Department of Defense, pulled up a PowerPoint slide to show a group of senior military officials who deliberate over budgets. It showed the choices he thought the military had to make in space, since China and Russia were working on weapons to take down American satellites that provide everything from intelligence to communications to navigation. The country, Kendall said, could either keep building the relatively few hyper-expensive satellites of yore, easily attacked and hard to defend; dream up a more resilient satellite infrastructure; or lean back from dependence on satellites.
Spacecraft, living in orbit as they do, already work more independently than other systems. BOOK REVIEW**—** “Lethal Autonomy: The Future of Warfare Whether We Like It or Not,” by Frank Kendall (Knox Press, 288 pages). Ultimately, a study recommended reimagining military space, primarily through creating smaller, cheaper satellites that collaborate and can continue their job if a few are taken out, or can be relaunched quickly.
The military is still working on that plan, and in Kendall’s view, it’s necessary: Conflict is coming for space. Conflict, though, is also changing on the ground, and should change even more, Kendall’s book argues. But the issues of whether that mastery is something U.S. residents and the military want, whether it’s ethical, and how such a shift would change the nature of war, aren’t settled yet. > Kendall envisions a future where vehicles and weapons operate largely on their own — including making some decisions to strike people or infrastructure.
As innovations like self-navigating technology and automated image analysis have increased, the ability for weapons to kill or destroy under their own power has become a nonfictional reality. According to Kendall, the U.S. military has been reluctant to embrace and move forward with those possibilities. There are many arguments against lethally autonomous weapons: flaws in targeting, the potential for rogue behavior, and a lack of accountability for such mistakes.
But humans also make those mistakes. In “Lethal Autonomy,” Kendall lays out what such a bot military would look like. The book is not pleasure reading — it parses more like a how-to manual.
It’s structured according to how different domains of the military would look, were it not centered around human combatants, then laying out the complications in each case. Its pages seem meant primarily for military strategists or those interested in the details of that strategy, and also, likely, as a warning for those in other countries, who can also buy books and see how retired American leaders envision the future of the world’s most powerful military. > “I continue to believe that the appropriate response is to master technological change rather than resist it.” On land, for instance, Kendall envisions crewless aerial systems that can take off and land vertically. These drones, working together in small units, gather data for automated decision-making, detecting and identifying things the data suggests they should destroy, and then doing so.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
