>> p.w. singer senior fellow at the brookings institution discusses the rise of robotic warfare and the impact of the technological revolution on future wars. this event hosted by the united states military academy at west point is that the minutes. >> it is a real honor for me to be here this place of great tradition but also with the future leaders. what i thought would make the most sense is i would like to start with a scene actually from iraq. you have to imagine yourself alongside a road there in what looks in front of view seems like a piece of trash but

actually that insurgents has hidden in ied, an improvised explosive device with great care. by 2006 there more than 2500 ied attacks in iraq every single month. they were the leading cause of casualties among both american soldiers and the iraqi civilians. the team that is hunting for that ied is called an explosive ordinance disposal other the pointy end of the spear in the effort to stop these roadside bombings. an exit bickel tort at demo god onset mccallsburg of that is the will be asked to diffuse to bombs every single day. the number that is probably the better indicator of the value of these teams to the war effort is that that the insurgents report $50,000 bounty on the killing of an eod soldier. unfortunately this particular bomb call would not end well. by the time that soldier that

was enough to see that piece of trash was really an ied by the till till wires coming out from it, it exploded. depending on how much explosive is packed into one of these ied's you have to be as far away as 50 yards to escape injury or death from the fragments coming out. in fact, even if you are not hit just the sheer force of the blast itself can break your bones. the soldier had been right on top of that ied. so when the dust cleared, and the rest of the unit advanced they found left. that night the unit commander said down to do his duty andy wrote a letter back to the u.s.. in it he apologize for not being able to bring that soldier back to the u.s.. we talked about how tough that loss had been on that unit, how they lost what they consider their bravest soldier, how they lost a soldier they thought it say the other's lives time and again. they then tried to talk up the silver lining that they took away from it.

this is what they wrote. quote, at least leneigh robot dies, you don't have to write a letter to its mother. now, that scene may have sounded like science fiction, but it was the actual battlefield reality. as you are going to see in the pictures here, that soldier was a 42-pound robot. that letter that the unit commander wrote did not go back to some form house and i would like is always the story in the old war movies. it went to a factory just outside of burlington, massachusetts and alongside it says i, robot, that is it is a world factory named after the fictional novel, and the not so great movie, in which robots start out by taking on a day-to-day chores, and move on to carrying out life-and-death decisions. now, they told me i couldn't give a speech at any military

facility in mufsud hitted powerpoint said you are going to see some slides here. is there anything we can do about the feedback on this? we are going to seasons lights t-rec play, and i'm not going to time these to my exact top. it is just simply to give you a sense of the reality of where this technology is already. everything you see in these images playing behind me are systems already active in iraq or afghanistan right now, or already at the prototype stage. it is nothing you see in these systems is science fiction. nothing is powered by falcon technology. nothing is hollywood magic or fantasy. nothing is poli-- powered by teenage four months. these are systems already here today. to pull back on this, there is something big going on in the history of warfare and maybe even the history of humanity

itself. the u.s. military went into iraq with just a handful of the unmanned aerial systems, drones, the pilotless planes, whatever you want to call them, just a handful in the 03 evasion. we now have over 7,000 military inventory. our invasion force and the ground with zero unmanned ground vehicles. we now have over 12,000 in the u.s. military inventory. now, these predator drones, there that model-t fords, the wright brothers flyers compared to what is coming and the technology term killer app, short for a killer application does not just describe what ipod's did for the music industry. when you are talking about systems like this, they are armed with everything from machine guns to rockets, to missiles, you name it. that is where we are at right now. one air force three star general i met with describe how soon we

will be using tens of thousands of these robots in our complex. that is his quote, tens of thousands. >> met there's in another way. one of the things that you have in technology is what they call more's lauper got the idea that just about every two years such that they double in their capacity. moore's the reason if you gave your sweetheart a valentine's day card that opened up and played a little song, that's greeting card had more computing power than the entire pentagon had in 1960. that one greeting card. if moore's law holds true and we have that doubling affect every two years doubling in the power of capacity within 25 years our computers, our robots will be a billion times more powerful than today. i don't mean to bill n.t. a

morpheus austin powers 1 billion. i mean take the power of your computer, take the power of that drone and malta flight it with a one and nine zeroes behind it. that means something important is happening here. it means the kind of things we only used to talk about in science fiction like comecon need to be talked about by folks like us, need to talk them about by people in the pentagon. we are living through a robot revolution. now, i need to be clear here. i don't minner robot revolution, where the governor of california is going to show up at your door. it is a different kind of revolution. it is a war-- revolution and war in history. ebbers often there is a technology that comes along that rewrites the rules of the game, the technology this of forces us to ask questions about not only what is possible, that was not before but also what is proper,

things like the printing press, the computer, the atomic bomb. robotics are like that but there's an interesting thing in terms of revolutions in war. all the previous ones have been about changing the howl of war. it was a technology that headed drastically bigger boom like the atomic bomb for coat with the technology that could shoot drastically faster like the machine gun. it was technology that allowed you to shoot drastically further like ben powder. that is robotics, but they are not just affecting the house of four come they are affecting the who of war at its most fundamental level. that is they are affecting warriors experience, and warrior's very identity. in other way of phrasing this, humankind has had a 5,000 year monopoly on the fighting of for an up monopolies breaking down in our lifetime. now i thought that was the kind of a big deal so for the last several years i went around

interviewing anyone and everyone that connected to robotics and war today, so interviews with the scientists to build the systems, interviews with the science fiction authors to actually inspire them and quietly canceled for the pentagon. what is it like to be a 90-year-old drone pilot sitting in the fatah flying a system that is over iraq or afghanistan? what is it like for the four-star generals were commanding those forces? what about the civilian politicians interviews with secretary of the army, secretary of the navy to make the decisions on when and where we send those forces out? the other side of the coin. what are the insurgents think about our robots? what do they think about us using these robots? what about news editors in places like lebanon are pakistan or india the were going to report on them and create the environment of the war of ideas out there. what about the people and places like the international red cross or the jag officers are human rights loss it will argue about the loss of wars. it is a gathering of stories

behind these people and what they are dealing with today but also it shines a light on some of the ripple effects that robotics are having on our politics, honor war fighting, are ethics and our laws, you name it so what i would like to do is basically give you a sense of some of these ripple effect playing out with robots in war today. the first of these is while the future of war may involve more and more machines they are not just going to be american machines. that is, there's several when it comes to both technology and war. there is no such thing as a permanent first mover advantage. that is, how many people in this classroom right now still use commodore computers? how many of you play the atari video games? this may have been the dominant players when computers and video games furs came out but they are not anymore. it is the same thing in war. the british and the tank, the germans figure out how to use the tank better.

said the u.s. is definitely had the military robots that we are not the only player in town. their 43 other countries working on military robotics, countries like britain, israel, france, russia, china, pakistan, iraq. three weeks ago we shot down an iranian drone that was flying over iraq. one of the things we have to question is, where does the state of american manufacturing today as well as the state of science and mathematics training in our schools take us in this revolution? another way of putting it is what does it mean to be sending out more soldiers, whose hardware is made in china and his software is increasingly being written in india? but, warfare, just like software is going open source. that is the other ripple effect that is happening here. these systems are like an aircraft carrier, unlike the

atomic bomb we need an industrial structure to put them together. a lot of them are commercial, off-the-shelf. you probably saw that video of the hand tossed runs, one of the most widely used drones. you can build your own version for $1,000. what that means is that we have a flatling effect when it comes to war and high technology, not just the big boys can utilize the best technology in war any more, so this can go in interesting directions for the one of the stories in the book is a group of college students who wanted to do something about the genocide in darfur, so they held a fund-raiser for. it turned out better than expected. they ended up breathing hat million dollars on which these colored kids entered into negotiations with a private military company for the rental of a set of drones that they were going to deploy to sudan. they held the negotiations within the private military company out of their dorm room. there is the threats line in this, the war between israel and

has led the took place over a year-and-a-half ago may have been between the state and a nonstate actor, but both sides flu drones against each other. hezbollah may not have a former military, still flu for drones in israel so we have this trend comes from when we have to worry about what does this mean for the realm of terrorism and i think there to ripple effect. one is that it reinforces the power of small groups of individuals against the state. one of the people in the book is a scientist for the pentagon and he says look, kiki me $50,000 i want to i could shut down manhattan right now. he came up with a pretty scary scenario of current robotics. the other though is the changes the effect of suicide bombing, takes away the effect on those organizations. that is you don't have to be suicidal to have many of the same lethality in impact which allows new actors into the game and reframes the way we have to

look at it al qaeda 2.0 but the next version of a timothy mcveigh because you don't have to persuade a robot that is going to be received by seven virgins and haven't to convince it to blow itself up. but these ruppel lookbacks the what to other areas. for example on art and politics, one of the people i-- was assisted-- ronald reagan and this is what he had to say. quote, i like the systems because they save lives. but i also worry about were marketed station, hamar shock and awe talk to defray discussion of the cost of war. people are more likely to support it did they view it as cost lisper coe i thought that was a pretty interesting quote in terms of capturing the effect on our politics and some of the trends that are active right now, the robotics may take the final logical and in point. that is as you well know, we don't have a draft anymore. we don't declare war anymore.

we don't buy bonds to pay higher taxes for wars anymore. nally habit trend it takes more and more of those who would be going into harm's way and out sources that to machines, so we may be taking those already low farce to warren dropping them to the ground. the way i think about this is we see this right now in the strikes and the pakistan. in terms of targets hit, we have actually equaled over the last year the same amount of the opening round of the kosovo war. but we don't talk about these unman strikes in to pakistan in our politics. we don't hear about it in our media. the way we did with the kosovo war and i think it is in part because the risks aren't on our side, they are only on the other side. but the future of war is also going to be a youtube war, that is these technologies don't just removed the human from

risk, they record everything that they see so they don't just delink the public, the reshape its relationship with war other already several thousand video clips of combat footage from iraq and afghanistan up on line right now. you can download them and you can watch them. this could be a very good thing in terms of the relationship between the public and its wars but there links between the home front in the war front that never existed before but we need to remember these technologies may be like science fiction but they are playing out in our very real from a very human, very strange world so for some people the ability to watch a clip of combat on their iphone is turning wore into a form of entertainment. the soldiers have a name for it in the field. the call it war. a typical example that i got was an e-mail that in the title line said, watch this. we'll get e-mails like this, watch this and the clip attachment b of a really cold dawn devitt basketball game or a

clip of some kid in his basement dancing. we'll get those cliffs. in this case the clip, the watch this was the the predators drone strike. the missile drops, goes to target, explosions, bodies tossed into the air. id was set to music. it was set to the pop song, i just want to fly. so, we have this ability to watch war but experience less when it comes to our wars. they have this warping effect because it is very easy to forget when you are watching the eclipse the of the violence is real. it is easy to forget that not everyone is fighting from afar. even more so, it is just the clips so it is almost imagine, the difference in the terms of a basketball game, watching the basketball game on tv where the basketball players are tiny figures. first is watching the basketball game in person where you can see

what someone who is 7 feet tall really does look like. versus the experience of playing in that basketball game yourself and knowing exactly what it is like to be dumped on by lebron james, but remember it is just a clip show. you are not watching the whole game. you are walking-- watching a highlight of the war, the espn sports center version of the battle so all the context, all the strategy, it all just come slam dunk with smart bombs. the irony of all this is while the teacher of more bay be involving more and more these machines all of the ripple effects are about humans, wars are still driven by error human failings and the effect that come out of them are about human psychology, human politics that we have a policy example of this right now. what are robots impact on the very real, very human, more of ideas that were fighting against radical groups around the world? it is, what is the message we think we are sending as we use

more and more unmanned systems versus what is the message actually being receipt? so i want to know this so i went around again interviewing people and one of the people i met with come in terms of what we think we are sending and it was a senior bush administration official. our a manning of four plays to our strength, the thing that scares people is the art technology. what about when you speak with those people, and this is what the leading news editor of lebanon had to say, and he said quote, and he is saying this while there is a drone flying above them at that moment. this is just another sign of the cold hearted, cruel israelis and americans who are so-called-- ours because they send the machines to buy this. they are afraid to fight, so we just have to kill a few of their soldiers to defeat them. it is an absolute disconnect between message sent a message

received. there's one pentagon analyst that put it, the optics of-- look bad and makes us look like the evil empire from star wars and the other side look like the rebel alliance. but, war is also involving a new experience of war. think about the phrase, going to war. going to war is meant the same thing of the last 5,000 years whether you are talking about ancient greeks going to war against troy or my grandfather going to war in world war ii against the japanese fleet. going to war and its fundamental level whatever the period meant going to a place where there were such danger that you might never come home again. your family might never see you again if you went to war. compare that to the experience of a predators drone parlett describing what was like to fight insurgents in iraq and never leading nevada. quote oman you are going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons that targets, directing kills

noncombatants and then you get in the car and you drive home. 20 minutes later you are sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework. this disconnect between being at war and afcom is actually proving challenging. one of the surprising things we are finding is the levels of combat stress among those units that are fighting remotely are actually higher than among many of the units physically deployed into iraq and afghanistan. it is also changing the experience of combat itself and killing. this is what one young pilot described him what it was like to take out enemy combatants. quote, it is like a video game. an interesting question is, as you well know there's certain things we might do in the video world that we wouldn't do perhaps in the real world. we are also seeing ripple effects on the demographics of war. who can go to war? so we are it was points a you will like the story better than

they did it at the air force academy but one of the top pilots in the u.s. military right now is actually 19-year-old high-school dropout, who has unlisted, who joined the army wanted to be a helicopter mechanic, wasn't qualified because the field high-school english of they asked them if they want to be drawn pilot instead. he turned out to be so good that after service in iraq they promoted him and made him a specialist, and he is now an instructor at the training academy. 19 and lifted high school dropout, instructor. now, when you tell that to an airports audience that is not a cool story to them and in fact when you add in the fact that this young soldier has taken out more enemy targets, saved more american lives then every single f-15 pilot combined, this is a ripple, this is the change when it comes to who can fight. probiotics don't just happen

outside, they happen within us. one of the particular calling cards of these ied's is how they are seeing lots of one did lose arms and legs. we have applied robotics to that problem. there over forded soldiers that have lost arms and legs and not just gotten prosthetics that allowed them to move the their lives but over 400 that have returned to their combat units. the head of the program calls it the luke skywalker eric peck. you remember, but it's his hand cut off, he gets a robot hand and is ready to return. that is not science fiction anymore. over 400 that had similar experience and are well. we are seeing the effect on unit cohesion. one of the scenes in the book is of taking out in the enemy mortar site just outside of fallujah. to drones chordate, the teams behind the drawn never once met face-to-face, never once talked

either over the radio or over the phone. the entire battle was carried out in an internet chapter-- chat room and i remember asking one of them, tell me about one of your buddies. there is mother goose. who is mother goose? i don't know, that is all i know him as that when he talks about the buddies to made in the war is going to be less like band of brothers and more like facebook fringe ships. much of what you are hearing here is there is always two sides to a revolution so for example well we have moore's law in action this not mean we haven't gotten rid of murphy's law, so you have these incredible technologies and what they allow you to do but the fog of war is not being lifted. the enemy still has a vote on what happens and the mistakes still play out. even more so what you have science-fiction capabilities, they are also getting new policy and political and military dilemma is that you have to

figure out. now, sometimes he will say okay when things don't work out with their robot, it is just an hoops moment and that is actually wet the vice president of one of the robot company said. what are these moments when you are talking about robots and war? sometimes moments are kind of funny, like one time when they tested a machine gun on the robot, it when squirly. during the demonstration started spending in a circle by accident and pointed his 50-caliber machine gun at the reviewing scan of vip's. they were not impressed. there were also glad there were no bullets in the 50-caliber machine gun. other oops moments can be tragic for the last year in south africa and anti-aircraft canon had a quote software klipsch. in citify airy up boards during a training exercise that level and fired in a circle. soldiers.

we have new categories of lot to figure out these situations. for example on manslaughter, what happens when you accidently killed the wrong person like the three times we thought we got osama bin laden with one of our drone strikes and we didn't and one situation was an afghan civilian who was unlucky enough to look like bin laden through the predators drawn. these are systems where we still have a human link up. they are completely autonomous but don't believe that is not-- i found over four different pentagon projects on a farm economist systems and there you get into koln areas to figure out so for example think about the issue of war crimes. on one hand you might think we could have less war crimes with arm systems because robots are emotionless, it robot does not care of their buddy gets killed, they don't commit a crime of range-- rage or revenge. but robots are a motionless, a

robot has no empathy or sense of guilt. a robot look 780-year-old grandmother in her wheelchair the same way it looks eddie the 80 tang other both just zeros and ones in the programming language. so we have this challenge of how do we catch up our 20 a century laws of war that are so old right now that they were people that would qualify for medicare? to these 21st century technologies like the drone that by the way are being used against 21st century adversaries, like terrorists who hideout in a hospital or use an ambulance to move weapons so the loss of court are under challenge on both sides. so, in ending, a lot of this sounds like i been talking about the future of war, but notice out every single one of those pictures that you saw was already something that is here. notice that every single example i gave you except that very last one of the 80-year-old

grandmother in a wheelchair, every single one of those examples has already happened, what forces us to ask the question, which is arby going to let the fact that this looks like science fiction, sounds like science fiction keep this in denial that this is already reality? another way of thinking about this, are we going to be like a previous generation that looked at a science fiction like technology which h.g. wells client atomic bombs, but h.g. wells is the one that came up with the names in the first to come up with the concept. that previous generation to us look at atomic bombs and said, this is not something we have to wrestle with all of the political, moral, military, legal dilemmas that will come out of these until after pandora's box is already open. are we going to do the same? i could be wrong in it that one scientist to work for the pentagon told me i was wrong and this is what he said. there is no real ethical, legal,

moral problem that he can contemplate what robots. quote, that is unless the machine kills the wrong people repeatedly. then it is just a product recall issue. now, i'm going to jump into science fiction, then in closing right here which is a couple of years ago the american film institute, the afis gathered a list of the top 100 hollywood he rose and hollywood villains of all time. that is out of every single character in every single hollywood movie ever made, which character is represented humanity at its best and humanity at its worst? there was only one character who made it on to both top 100 hero and top 100 villain lisper cow it was the terminator, the robot killing machine. so, i think it shows a couple of things. one is inches the duality of our technology. it can be used for both good and evil.