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I've been meaning to get back to this Cornelia Dean piece from last week's NYT Science Times. It's about one of my favorite topics: military robots. Except it confounds some of my assumptions, which makes it all the more worth thinking about.
First off: The "killing machines" I keep writing about are just drones. They're fully controlled (except for malfunctions and weather) by human pilots. Dean is talking about something way more unnerving: machines that make their own killing decisions. I had assumed that for safety reasons, this kind of technology was still confined to the computer equivalent of drawing boards. Wrong. Army software contractor Ronald Arkin tells Dean that armed mechanical border guards are already on the job in Israel and South Korea. Here in the United States, the Army is paying Arkin and others to explore, among other things, how to design such robots to "operate within the bounds imposed by the warfighter." In other words, before we give them guns, we'd better figure out how to keep them from screwing up royally or turning on us.
What's really interesting about Arkin is that he directly contradicts my paranoid prejudice. It's not the armed robots I should worry about. It's the armed humans. Dean summarizes his argument:
In a report to the Army last year, Dr. Arkin described some of the potential benefits of autonomous fighting robots. For one thing, they can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness, Dr. Arkin wrote, and they can be made invulnerable to what he called "the psychological problem of ‘scenario fulfillment,' " which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.
His report drew on a 2006 survey by the surgeon general of the Army, which found that fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents. More than one-third said torture was acceptable under some conditions, and fewer than half said they would report a colleague for unethical battlefield behavior. Troops who were stressed, angry, anxious or mourning lost colleagues or who had handled dead bodies were more likely to say they had mistreated civilian noncombatants, the survey said.
That makes sense: In war, emotion is more hindrance than help. Same goes for my previous speculation that pilots will become more brutal as they're insulated from physical risk. Arkin's data suggest that in fact, exposure to physical risk makes troops more aggressive, not less. Again, the theory makes sense: You shoot first and ask questions later when failure to shoot jeopardizes your safety. Take the ego out of it—make you a robot instead of a person—and the self-protective instinct to shoot first disappears.
That leaves the problem of ethics. Hormones, mirror neurons, socialization, and love, among other things, make most people reluctant to kill one another. Robots lack these inputs. Will they be ruthless? Arkin's answer, as related by Dean, is that "because rules like the Geneva Conventions are based on humane principles, building them into the machine's mental architecture endows it with a kind of empathy."
Well, I wouldn't go that far. It's not empathy, exactly. But maybe empathy isn't so hot as a guide to behavior in combat. Maybe one lesson of the Army's Iraq survey is that empathy too easily morphs into tribalism. Maybe mechanical soldiers programmed with ethical rules, like the machines of I, Robot, are more likely to behave decently.
But then comes the hitch: What happens when the grainy realities of war defy the simplicity of the robot's program? What happens when the hard part isn't restraining yourself from firing on civilians, but distinguishing them from enemy forces in the first place? That's where Arkin's dream bogs down. He admits it would be hard for robots to recognize physical changes that entail moral changes, such as an enemy fighter with a wound or a white flag. And that's basic stuff compared to the multiplying subtleties of modern counterinsurgency. It's not as though al-Qaida hands out uniforms. Is the guy with the backpack a student or a terrorist? Is the woman across the street chubby or wearing a belt full of explosives?
Here's my preliminary take on Arkin's idea: He's right that we can and should substitute robots for humans in some lethal jobs. Where the categories are clear and cold reason is crucial, let the robots do the guarding and killing. But don't give the early generations of robots any jobs that require nuanced judgments about who's a bad guy and who isn't. And be prepared for the bad guys to learn the loopholes in the robots' algorithms. If the robots respect white flags, the terrorists will use white flags. If the robots presume women are civilians, the terrorists will use women. That's what terrorists do: They study our habits and exploit them. It's a human skill. And it will take humans, not robots, to defeat them.
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A week ago, when we last checked in on the drone war in Pakistan, the news wasn't good. Insurgents had bombed a Pakistani hotel and a security checkpoint, apparently in retaliation for drone strikes on them. The Pakistani government, in turn, was asking the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, to call off the drones. Petraeus said he'd listen. It looked as though the United States might buckle.
Then Petraeus went to Afghanistan and praised the drones. "It is hugely important that three of 20 extremist leaders have been killed in recent months," he told the AP. And on Friday, the Pakistanis got their answer. A drone attack killed another dozen suspected militants at a Taliban commanders' house.
The machines have now racked up more than 100 kills in Pakistan since August. Petraeus has been lobbied, and Barack Obama has been elected, but the drone strikes go on.
How is Pakistan greeting this aggression? Is it threatening to fight? Hardly. Yesterday the country's president told the AP, "We feel that the strikes are an intrusion on our sovereignty, which are not appreciated by the people at large, and the first aspect of this war is to win the hearts and mind of the people."
"Feel"? "Not appreciated"? It's hard to come up with weaker language than that. The real message seems to be: Do what you must, but try not to give us political trouble.
From that standpoint, drones are a lot less harmful than the alternatives. The biggest popular anti-American protests in Pakistan recently were triggered not by drones but by a U.S. ground incursion. Likewise, in Afghanistan, recent politically incendiary mass killings of civilians have been inflicted (accidentally) by human operators on the scene. Yes, the drones have killed some Pakistani civilians. But not nearly as many, it appears, as Pakistani forces have killed in their own clumsy campaign against the insurgents.
Why do the drones have a better record of minimizing mistakes? For one thing, they don't have to make quick decisions. They can hover, watch, and wait. The intelligence they collect can be sifted and weighed by multiple supervisors before reaching a decision to fire. And in Pakistan, they seem to have an additional asset: human sources on the ground. The Washington Post explains:
Brig. Gen. Mahmood Shah, former longtime head of [Pakistani] government security in the tribal areas, said the missile attacks have become noticeably more precise, leading some to believe that local tribesmen in the border areas are supplying the U.S. military with better information about targets. Shah said rumors about so-called U.S. spies among the tribes have fed paranoia about the possibility that signaling devices have been deployed in area villages. Tribesmen have lately made a habit of sweeping the areas around their homes for such devices, he said. "They're not sitting outside in their compounds anymore because they are afraid that they will be struck by these missiles," Shah said.
All this time, I've been looking for technological answers to the mystery of the drones' precision, their increasing ability to find the bad guys. But maybe the answer isn't machines. Maybe it's people.
And if it's people, then the bad guys don't have to fight the machines. They can do what they already know how to do: kill some people and intimidate the rest. That seems to be what they're trying. A day after Friday's drone strike, Agence France-Presse reported:
Taliban militants killed two Afghan men Saturday in Pakistan's restive tribal belt after accusing them of spying for US-led forces. ... The executions were the latest in a string of similar killings and come a day after a suspected US drone fired missiles and destroyed an Al-Qaeda sanctuary in North Waziristan, killing 14. ... Executions routinely follow suspected US missile strikes against militant targets in Pakistan, which officials say are often conducted on intelligence provided by paid local informants.
According to the AP, the two bodies were thrown onto a road, each pinned with a note that said, "See the fate of this man. He was an American spy."
Were the men really spies? If so, were they scouting targets for the drones? I don't know. But for the last three months, somebody's been doing a heck of a job finding the bad guys in northwest Pakistan. Maybe, as U.S. military sources have let on, it's the drones themselves. Or maybe that's the cover story for what's still the world's greatest enemy-detection device: the human being.
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I can't keep up with the drone war in Pakistan.
This morning, I posted a piece on the evolution of the Pakistan border conflict into the world's first robot proxy war. There have been so many drone strikes along that border in the last four weeks that when I linked to the reports on all of them, it felt like-pardon the reverse metaphor-overkill.
Now it turns out I missed one. The machines' body count is now 20 higher, thanks to a strike last night. It's the 19th drone attack since August. According to an update this morning on the New York Times Web site, the strike occurred 20 miles inside Pakistan and took out two Taliban commanders who have launched raids on U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
How good are the drones? According to the Times, one of the targeted commanders "was believed to have been visiting the compound ... to pay his respects to the families of those killed in an American drone strike on Friday" in a different location. The machines find and kill you, and then, when your boss shows up somewhere else to console your relatives, the machines are waiting for him there, too.
Down the road, we should all be scared of what this technology can do. But for now, I'm enjoying our ability to find and kill these guys without putting boots on the ground.
Now, about those other 18 casualties ...
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The female suicide bombers have struck again. And again. And again.
Yesterday morning, I wrote about a woman who blew herself up in Iraq last Thursday. The body count in that attack was eight. I don't remember what the count was in terms of how many women had done the deed this year.
Anyway, that number is already obsolete. By the end of the day, three more women had killed themselves. The body count in yesterday's attacks exceeds 60, with more than 200 others wounded. The Los Angeles Times reports:
According to U.S. Army figures, 27 suicide attacks this year have been carried out by women, compared with eight in all of 2007 ... A tally by The Times indicates that about a quarter of all suicide attacks this year in Iraq have been conducted by women.
Again, the Washington Post explains why women are delivering the bombs:
Wearing their flowing black garments, they can carry hidden explosives past most checkpoints because customs of modesty prevent male guards from frisking them. On Monday, four female suicide bombers in two Iraqi cities used this tactic to enter areas defended by hundreds of soldiers and police officers.
The New York Times adds:
Police officers interviewed at the scene said that the authorities had heard that six women would blow themselves up in the area. "We can't search women," complained Atheer Allawi, a police officer. "They are wearing abayas, and God knows what they can hide under them."
And again, Iraq failed to provide enough female security officers to do the job. The Associated Press reports:
Iraqi security forces had deployed about 200 women this week to search female pilgrims in Kazimiyah, but the attacks took place along the procession some six miles southeast of the shrine. There were too few women guards to search people in the procession itself.
The bombings will continue until we get the message: Stop treating women as though they're too meek to fight and kill. They're already killing. Search women. Deploy women.
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Another suicide bombing in Iraq last week. Another female perpetrator. The bomb "killed a pro-American Sunni militia leader, an Iraqi police captain, a local politician, and five other people," according to Friday's New York Times. Apparently, it's "at least the 16th time that a woman has donned a bomb and exploded herself in Diyala Province since last year."
Why women? The Times explains:
Wearing billowy, black head-to-toe garments, the female bombers have been able to conceal powerful explosives and slip into crowded areas too heavily guarded for a male suicide bomber to ease through undetected. While men often undergo physical searches, Islamic rules do not allow male security officers to pat down women.
How many more women have to blow themselves up before we get the message? Female suicide bombing is a logical extension of suicide bombing. Suicide bombing exploits your disbelief about what people will do. Female suicide bombing exploits your disbelief about what a particular group of people—women—will do. Your biases are no longer somebody else's problem. They're your problem. Look for Arab bombers, and terrorists will send an American-born Hispanic instead. Look for men, and they'll send a woman.
Actually, I don't like the way I wrote that. These women aren't just "sent" by somebody else. We've had enough socio-babble about how women commit such atrocities because they've been "marginalized" and "exploited" by men. It reminds me of the pro-life dogma that women shouldn't be prosecuted under abortion bans because the woman is just the abortionist's pawn. Spare these women your condescension. If you're going to make abortion a crime, charge the woman. If you're handling security where bombs are a threat, search everyone. And if you don't have enough female security officers to search the women, go hire some.
But this is just a Muslim problem, right? We Judeo-Christian Americans don't have these hang-ups, right? As the Washington Post noted two months ago:
In Afghanistan as well as Iraq, female soldiers are often tasked to work in all-male combat units -- not only for their skills but also for the culturally sensitive role of providing medical treatment for local women, as well as searching them and otherwise interacting with them.
But—oops!—the Post story is about Pfc. Monica Brown, who won
a Silver Star in March for repeatedly risking her life on April 25, 2007, to shield and treat her wounded comrades, displaying bravery and grit. She is the second woman since World War II to receive the nation's third-highest combat medal. Within a few days of her heroic acts, however, the Army pulled Brown out of the remote camp in Paktika province where she was serving with a cavalry unit -- because, her platoon commander said, Army restrictions on women in combat barred her from such missions.
Enough with the sexism. We can't afford it.
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A week ago, I crunched some data and concluded that suicide bombing, despite its brutal rationality as a weapon, had not increased in recent years outside of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Many of you pointed out that this was one heck of a caveat. The number of attacks inside those countries is appalling and has been increasing.
Now there's a new twist to the trend in Iraq: Many of the people blowing themselves up are women. According to Farhana Ali, a former U.S. adviser who presented data at a Washington conference yesterday, women executed 12 suicide attacks in Iraq during the first four months of this year. That's already more than the number of such attacks executed by women in Iraq over the previous five years.
In an interview with Agence France Presse, Ali blames this trend on male violence and the invasion, which she says has widowed many women and "marginalized" others. But then the AFP story gets to the really interesting point:
Ali warned that U.S. soldiers face a cultural barrier in detecting women bombers. "A marine officer coming back from Fallujah said to me: 'How are we supposed to detect these women if we are taught before we are deployed to not even look at them?'" she explained.
And here's Ali's solution: "If you want to gain entrance into female jihadi organisations, you need female case officers. You need female police officers. You need women in Iraqi law enforcement."
Suicide bombing has always exploited common disbelief about what people will do: You don't expect somebody to walk into a market and blow himself up. Nor do you expect him to take 20 or 30 civilians with him for no apparent reason. Why shouldn't this tactical exploitation of disbelief extend to sexism? You certainly don't expect somebody to blow herself up, much less kill a bunch of innocents.
This is one of the lessons terrorism will gradually teach us: Stereotyping is an exploitable security weakness. To overcome it, we'll have to overcome our sexism about women in the military and in law enforcement, as well as our sexism about women in crime and terrorism. If the moral faults of such stereotypes aren't enough to make you push them aside, do it for your country.