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| The Hi-Tech Defense Wizard: Dr Peter Singer |
Q1. In your
enlightening lecture, you raised very important questions about leadership
issues regarding selecting and investing in the right kind of military
technologies. What kind of new approaches and technologies should peace-loving
countries like many GCC states with relatively small militaries invest in to
ward off threats posed by big nations in their vicinity, like Iran, to strike a
balance of power?
Answer: I think there are
several important issues to be put on the table here. First, while GCC member
states are small countries, they do have relatively powerful defense budgets,
when you sum them together. So while individually they may not be a match for
the size of a large neighbor, like an Iran, collectively that is certainly
within their power; particularly when you add in the advantage that they have
of being able to purchase high technology.
In most areas, they
are a generation ahead of Iran. For example, in terms of jet fighters they are
literally a generation ahead. Secondly, they can have partnerships with allies
like the US and France that aren’t accessible to a nation like Iran. So that
gives them certain opportunities.
The challenge for
the GCC, as I see it as a defense analyst from the outside, is a couple of
issues. There hasn’t been as much cooperation and coordination as there might
be both within the states of the GCC and with their allies, like the US and
France. We can see this when it comes to areas like air defense and missile
defense, where we still don’t have a well-integrated relationship despite the
very clear threat from an Iran, particularly when it comes to missiles.
Another area of
cooperation will be if you look for a low level threat from Iran. There is fear
that they may not engage in direct hostilities but do something like mine the
seaways nearby, which is something they had done previously in their history.
And yet we don’t see the kinds of investment being made in mine-detection and
mine-clearing at sea by the local states here that might match that threat. The
United States, for example, has had to push almost all of its mine-sweeping
capacity into the Gulf right now.
The second issue is
focusing on spreading out your investments. There is a clear amount of
technological change going around in the world today, ranging from the rise of
unmanned systems to directed energies etc., and so each of the nations —whether
it is the United States or the states of the GCC —have to figure out how to
make smart investments. In many ways, like an investor on the stock market, you
don’t put all you money in one place but spread out the risks. Again, you
particularly don’t put all your money in the thing that is most shiny and most
appealing. That’s a challenge, which is facing many militaries and we see that
playing out in the market today. So I think that given the amount of transition
that is going on, locking into any one program, or locking into any single
system is not the way to go. There is enough uncertainty right now that you
spread out the risk.
Q2. I would like to
know about the benefits of the new laser technology that reportedly would be
deployed by the US navy in the Arabian Gulf next year to bring down possible
Iranian drones and missiles? The pictures of these weapons show remarkable
similarity to Star Warslaser
weapons. Is it another case of life imitating science fiction?
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| Real Life Star Wars |
So when you are
talking about the fear of an Iran shooting missiles into the region, the
challenge for the defender is that it has to spend more on its defense to shoot
down a missile than the one firing it. So, in the last battle between Israel
and Hamas, Israel was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on its Iron Dome
Defense System to shoot down hundred-dollar rockets. This cost disparity will
be the same situation with Iran shooting missiles and the allies using more
expensive Patriot and the THAAD defense programs intercepting and destroying
them.
So the ultimate
problem is that you get caught in a situation where your enemy can cost impose
on you. The benefit of directed energy (lasers) is that it flips the cost
equation. The United States and even Germany recently tested rocket defense
systems using lasers, which can shoot down an incoming rocket. Even more
important than their effectiveness is that it costs roughly a dollar a shot. So
now it is your enemy that is spending more than you and moreover with a laser
you can fire multiple times. It is something very worthy of investment, and
very worthy paying attention to.
On a broader level
to your question, science fiction as I mentioned, has always been an
inspiration for real world technology and it seems to work in a couple of ways.
One is that the scientists themselves, when they are looking for new ideas,
often get them from the world of fiction. My favorite example for this is the
cell phone. The man who invented the cell phone explicitly talks about how he
was sitting in his lab, taking a break from his work, watching an episode of
the TV series Star Trek,
when he saw the characters using what they called ‘the communicators’ and he
thought it would be really neat if we could build something like this.
Similarly, Star Trek: The Next
Generation inspired digital
sound recordings (MP3s) that came from someone watching the 1990s series. There
was a robot playing music on his computer and they felt ‘Wow, hold it! That
would really be neat if we could do that in reality.’
Q3: Another thing
they are trying to invent now from Star
Trek is the medical tricoder.
Isn’t it?
Answer: Exactly. So,
sometimes it is direct inspiration from science fiction. Another fascinating
part of it is when the military is looking for things to buy, sometimes science
fiction shapes our image of what the future is going to be like, in a way that
is persuasive to the military. So, when you meet with defense companies and
they talk about how they sell their systems to the military, they tell them
“this system is just like it is in Star
Wars or Star Trek etc.,” so it allows the military to
visualize it and even more see it as something new and futuristic. In a way we
can find the same thing in the way that architects sell their buildings, such
as the futuristic high rises one sees popping up in Abu Dhabi. They are
futuristic, because they match our images of what the future is supposed to
look like.
There is another
part of science fiction that we should pay attention to, which is that science
fiction is not just about giving you ideas about technology. It also talks
about the dilemmas — the legal, the moral, the ethical — that come with new
technologies that often people forget about.
Q4: Just as the I-Robot talked about some ethical dilemmas and
rules?
Answer: Exactly! Science fiction can be
an inspiration when it comes to technology, but also a warning and a guide and
too often we do not listen to the other part of it. The good example is the
atomic bomb. The original idea of the atomic bomb was in a story by H.G. Wells.
In it, the author talked about using radioactive materials to build bombs. At
the time when H.G. Wells wrote it, most scientists thought this could never
happen. But some of them were inspired to build the real world version.
However, if we read the story we find Wells describing this world of horror in
which entire cities are brought under the threat of this new kind of bomb. He
wasn’t writing it as a good thing but he was writing it as a warning of the
costs of modern technology and war.
Q5: But then if by
the same token we look into laser technology, its devastating potential could
be huge. If I am not wrong and if we go by the parallel of the Death Star as in Star Wars, the technology has
the potential to annihilate cities and large populations. It could even
potentially make nuclear weapons redundant. Isn’t it?
Answer: Maybe, but so far that doesn’t
seem to be a possibility for it, because of the limitations of power.
Essentially, the energy you are using in a direct energy weapon depends on your
power source and we have not yet cracked anything equivalent to a nuclear bomb.
So in the ones that they have used so far in testing, it has been good for
shooting down rockets, drones and small airplanes. It has not yet reached the
capacity to cause a wide-area damage. Now obviously, anything could happen 200
years from now. But for now the reality is that splitting the atom still
creates more energy than anything we can store in a battery.
Q6: The old school
of military believes that it is the man behind the weapon who wins the war.
However, with war becoming increasingly automated do you think that the
paradigm has changed substantially and will change even more drastically in the
future?
Answer: There are a few
things that will never change in war and then there are those areas that will
be reshaped and changed. So, the parts that will never change relate to human
nature. War is a human activity. The causes of war are human in nature; wars
are caused by our human mistakes, our anger, greed and arrogance. The ultimate
cost of war is human; we cannot just describe the cost of war in monetary terms
or digital costs. War comes at human cost and that makes it war by its very
definition. Again, there has to be motivation for war. A machine doesn’t
have a motivation. So these things will remain the same.
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| Laser Turret: Star Wars |
And now we are
seeing this shift from new technologies on the ideal attributes of warrior.
Take how our image of a jet fighter pilot is now at variance with those of a
drone pilot or a cyber warrior. You can now be a phenomenal pilot, but wear
prescription glasses or be overweight. One of the top pilots of drones today is
a teenager. He is not even an officer. He never went to a flight school or
college. So these changes again are reshaping the demographics too.
Can a drone pilot
win a medal? This is a big controversy raging right now in the US military.
Some of the military says ‘No! Medal should only be for bravery and for someone
who goes into harm’s way.’ Other people argue that drones are the future of war
and if the people who fly them can never win medals (and never advance in their
careers), then why would anyone go into that part of the service. In fact, this
debate has reached to the level of the Secretary of Defense, who is trying to
decide this controversy in the US today.
Q7: Technology —
particularly robotics in war — has raised a host of ethical and operational
issues. There are some experts who are even calling in the media for a ban on
‘killer robots,’ as it is claimed that now machines can themselves select their
human targets and kill them. Do you support the position on banning such
machines?
Answer: Well there are two things to
say, one is where we are right now and where we might be next. Where we are
right now is unmanned systems, robotics, are starting to be used globally.
Besides the United States, there are 86 other countries that now have military
robotics. They range from Great Britain, to France, Australia, Russia, China,
Israel, Iran, Pakistan, the UAE and so on. The great benefit of this
technology, particularly in drones, is that you can send them into dangerous
situation where you might not want to send a man. That benefit though comes
with a risk for broader security and stability. A politician can send something
into harm’s way and not be worried about a man being killed; the risk is that
it might make it easier for him to go to war. It is described as a ‘slippery
slope’ because you do something that seems easy and you start doing more and
more of it. This is part of the debate in the US. So even at this level, when
we do not have the ‘Terminators,’ we have such risk.
The next generation
risk is what happens as you move from drones being remotely piloted toward them
having more and more autonomy and a robot doing more and more of its decision
making. That’s when you enter an area where law and policy is not yet ready
because so much of it is based on the idea that ultimately a human is
responsible if something goes wrong. But when you talk about an automated
system, the human who made the decision that matters most may have been the
scientist who programmed it a year earlier, not anyone on the battlefield. So
this is all very complex.
Q8: Can you tell us
about some of the emerging technologies that have the potential to change our
world in the near future?
Answer:I am part of a
project called NeXTech and the idea of it is to identify technologies today
that are looming game changers. The parallel would be where the computer was 30
years ago or where the drone was 10 years ago. It’s not science fiction, it’s
real, but it is only prototype stage and hasn’t yet changed the world. So the
computer existed 30 years ago, but it had not fundamentally changed the world
then. So we first did a survey of scientists and asked them what they thought,
as well as a survey of investors to find out what they were putting their money
in to and what they think are really game-changers.
The critical
technologies they identified for us were areas like the next generation of
Robotics (Autonomous Robotics, smaller robotics), 3D printing also known as
‘Direct Digital Manufacturing’, bio-enhancements (basically where you are
changing and modifying human performance with technology), energy breakthroughs
both in terms of energy sources and directed energy, and then finally is what’s
known as the ‘Internet of Things,’ where it is not you interacting with the
Internet but objects being wired into the Internet — whether it is your car or
your building and then these things being connected to each other. These
technologies are seen as monumental game-changers. They offer possibilities we
didn’t imagine we had a generation earlier. But they also raise questions of
right and wrong that we did not imagine we would be dealing with a generation
earlier. So they are both powerful capabilities, but they pose powerful
questions for us all.
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