The Growing Threat of ‘Robotic’ Warfare
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On October 7th, 2001, the first reported use of a weaponized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) (or drone) occurred in Kandahar, Afghanistan. In what appeared to be a mistake that would become all too common in the years to come, the CIA’s target, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, was nowhere near the scene of the strike.
At the time, many commentators saw these kinds of strikes as a net positive, in that the crews piloting UAVs were far from actual combat and it was believed that such attacks could be more targeted, supposedly resulting in fewer civilian casualties during the then expanding ‘War on Terror’. The latter argument was already dubious, as from that first unsuccessful strike until today, many innocent people have been killed by drones.
Though the legality of robotic killing machines is questionable at best, especially in countries where hostilities haven’t been officially declared, first under Obama and then under Trump, their use was continuously ramped up with terrible consequences for civilian populations in some of the world’s poorest countries.
One expert, Larry Lewis, the Director of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Naval Analyses wrote in 2021 that there had been at least one incident in which a civilian or civilians had been mistakenly killed by a strike every single week since September 11th, 2001.
Concurrently, the manufacture and use of drones has proliferated around the world with unpredictable consequences.
Like most technologies, less sophisticated but still lethal weaponized drones have become cheap enough for non-state actors like drug cartels to adopt them to fight against rivals and authorities. In the 2020 conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, cheap Turkish Bayraktar TB-2 drones were a game changer for the former.
In ways that were somewhat predictable, weaponized drones have made the world a more dangerous place for increasing numbers of people. In what may become another regretful precedent, on September 17th, a series of explosions targeting pagers said to be used by Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon rocked the country. The following day two-way radios blew up in a similar way.
The attacks which killed at least 37 and injured almost 3000 more were undertaken by Israeli intelligence which has yet to claim responsibility, although it was an open secret. Many of those injured were blinded and otherwise permanently disabled as a result of the attacks, which occurred as they were going about their daily business in places like supermarkets.
Just as they had with drones before, Western militarists found nothing to worry about in the corruption of supply chains to produce lethal consumer electronics that maimed and murdered not just bystanders but other innocent people like doctors and nurses, who were treating victims of the first explosions when the second wave blew up. Thankfully, no one carrying one of these pagers was on an airplane at the time or we would have seen even greater carnage.
Whether bombs raining down from above or activated in personal electronic devices the normalization of robotic warfare points towards a truly dystopian future. Coming to an iPhone in your pocket or to the screen on which you are reading this?
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