Ethics on the near-future battlefield; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 12/17/15

Michael L. Gross, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Ethics on the near-future battlefield:

"The US Army’s recent report “Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in the Year 2050” describes a number of future war scenarios that raise vexing ethical dilemmas. Among the many tactical developments envisioned by the authors, a group of experts brought together by the US Army Research laboratory, three stand out as both plausible and fraught with moral challenges: augmented humans, directed-energy weapons, and autonomous killer robots. The first two technologies affect humans directly, and therefore present both military and medical ethical challenges. The third development, robots, would replace humans, and thus poses hard questions about implementing the law of war without any attending sense of justice...

As we search for answers to these questions, we must remain wary of placing too much stock in technology. Contemporary armed conflict amply demonstrates how relatively weak guerrillas, insurgents, and terrorists find novel ways to overcome advanced technologies through such relatively low-tech tactics as suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, human shields, hostage taking, and propaganda. There is little doubt that these tactics gain purchase because many state armies endeavor to embrace the “laws of humanity and the requirements of the public conscience,” and, as democracies, often choose to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. The emerging technologies that will accompany future warfare only sharpen this dilemma, particularly as asymmetric war intensifies and some inevitably ask whether killer robots lacking a sense of justice might not be such a bad thing after all."