George R. Lucas

International Governance of Autonomous Military Robots

Unarmed aerial vehicles (i.e., drones) are already starting to transform the conduct of military engagements, and these systems are projected an increasingly prominent role in military forces in the future. A number of factors will push these systems toward increased autonomy, raising the possibility of the future development of lethal autonomous robotics (LARs). This article seeks to proactively address the ethical, policy, and legal aspects of ALRs. It first describes the technological status and incentives for LARs, and then reviews some ethical and policy concerns that autonomous systems present. The paper then describes three potential routes for proactive governance of LARs: (i) existing legal and policy regimes such as rules of engagement, laws of war, and international humanitarian law; (ii) arms control agreements; and (iii) “soft law” mechanisms such as codes of conduct and international consultative bodies.

INDUSTRIAL CHALLENGES OF MILITARY ROBOTICS

Abstract This article evaluates the ‘drive toward greater autonomy’ in lethally-armed unmanned systems. Following a summary of the main criticisms and challenges to lethal autonomy, both engineering and ethical, raised by opponents of this effort, the article turns toward solutions or responses that defense industries and military end users might seek to incorporate in design, testing and manufacturing to address these concerns. The way forward encompasses a two-fold testing procedure for reliability incorporating empirical, quantitative benchmarks of performance in compliance with formalized and programmable rules of engagement, and a conception of ‘due care’ in product liability. This would be designed in analogy with procedures currently followed by well-intentioned governments and militaries with their own (human) military personnel, both to ensure against failure, and to accept responsibility and compensate victims of inadvertent and unintended accidents. The procedure is designed specifically to address objections first posed by Robert Sparrow (2007) and Noel Sharkey (2007), and echoed in P.W. Singers critically acclaimed Wired for War (2009), that lethal autonomous systems cannot be meaningfully held accountable for commission of war crimes, and thus the development, manufacture, and deployment of such systems would constitute a violation of international law.

Advice and Dissent: ‘The Uniform Perspective’

Abstract I examine, and provide a rejoinder from the military (i.e., the ‘uniform’) perspective on, two controversial issues in this essay: (1) the so-called Revolt of the Generals (2006) focused on the responsibility of US senior military officers to give frank and reliable professional advice, including their willingness to disagree with and even dissent from decisions made by their civilian leadership that strike them as professionally ill-advised; and (2) the alleged right of military personnel of lesser rank to refuse to participate in wars they individually deem unjust or illegal. Recent arguments by Jeff McMahan, Brian Orend, Paul Robinson, and Jessica Wolfendale focus primarily on the latter question, and equivocate between defending a right of dissent and a duty to dissent. The right of dissent would grant permission to individuals, within a reasonably just state or professional organization, to refrain from cooperating with policies whose legal or moral justification provoked widespread public dispute (e.g., the US-led military intervention in Iraq in 2003). I agree that granting a measure of latitude in individual moral judgment would constitute an important element of policy for any just state or professional organization, though providing such latitude in the militarys case may still be fraught with procedural difficulties. The latter and more controversial argument by McMahan and Wolfendale, however, imposes a duty of dissent as a professional obligation upon all military personnel to withhold their professional service whenever providing such service would implicate them in the commission of unjust or illegal acts. While I concur that a meaningful notion of professional autonomy requires withholding professional service whenever providing it might result in professional malfeasance, I maintain that both these versions of the duty to dissent improperly impose the responsibility for adjudicating widespread public controversies wholly (and inappropriately) on the members of the military profession, especially its most vulnerable junior members. While widely-shared notions of professional autonomy do routinely encompass the right of disagreement and dissent, none imposes a duty to dissent upon a professions most junior members, especially when the normal procedures for adjudicating legal or moral issues fail to result in clear and unmistakable guidance. In cases of widespread public controversy, professional autonomy and expertise may impose a duty, even at some personal risk, upon senior members of the profession to engage in principled disagreement with publicly-declared policy. It is both sharply at odds with prevailing professional practice, as well as morally unjustifiable in the extreme, however, to impose (as do McMahan and Wolfendale) a duty to dissent on the most junior, least experienced, and potentially most vulnerable members of a profession under such contested circumstances.

The Morality of ‘Military Anthropology’

Abstract This article describes the use of anthropologists ‘embedded’ with military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq to provide onsite knowledge, interpretation, and practical advice regarding local cultures and practices. The specific development of this ‘Human Terrain System’ (HTS) project is distinguished from other, related employment of anthropologists to assist in the writing or revision of military policy and doctrine (as in the U.S. Armys new Counterinsurgency Field Manual), provide pre-deployment education and orientation to military troops in language and regional cultural studies, or even to engage in anthropological field research focused on military services and organizations themselves. All of these distinct activities are customarily grouped under the broad heading of ‘military anthropology,’ a distinct subfield of the discipline that has provoked public controversy, and which poses a number of interesting ethical dilemmas for those engaged in such efforts. This article addresses specific features of the moral challenges associated with each of the several different varieties of military anthropology. The HTS project, in particular, invites analysis from two distinct perspectives: the anthropologists’ own professional code of ethics, governing their responsibilities toward individuals and cultures studied; and features of classical just war theory, governing the role of those (whether combatants or support personnel, such as civilian academics or scientists) who find themselves participating in conflicts which may (or may not) satisfy the basic criteria of moral or legal justification. I focus in particular on the role of ‘embedded’ anthropologists participating in wars of intervention that might not satisfy just war criteria, in order to determine whether or not the various forms of assistance they might render to the intervening military forces would necessarily be proscribed.

‘Methodological Anarchy’: Arguing about War—and Getting It Right. Brian Orend, The Morality of War

Just war theory, or the just war tradition (JWT), is notoriously inchoate, so much so that the eminent Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant disparagingly accused the entire tradition citing Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel specifically of serving merely as ‘sorry comforters’ to warmongers. Nowhere was this radical indeterminacy more dramatically evident than in the widespread international debate over the legitimacy of the intervention in March 2003 of U.S.-led coalition forces to effect ‘regime change’ in Iraq. The three divisions of the American Philosophical Association, for example, considered a resolution opposing the proposed American-led intervention in Iraq. They offered as their chief justification for such opposition the claim that: ‘Both [JWT] and international law say that states may resort to war only in self-defense’. Neither, of course, says any such thing without considerable ambiguity. This resolution was passed in the Eastern Division by a margin of nearly five to one. The Pacific Division, by contrast, passed a modified resolution expressing ‘serious doubts about the morality, legality, and prudence of a war against Iraq led by the United States’, on somewhat less than a three-to-one majority, only after deleting as inaccurate the characterization of just war doctrine and international law contained in the earlier draft. The Central Division wisely deferred the motion, on the grounds that its substance exceeded the range of their collective expertise. Meanwhile, in the summer of 2002, one hundred theologians from across the United States voiced similar concerns. They published a resolution in prominent American newspapers condemning the proposed invasion in no uncertain terms as a violation of just war doctrine, which (they argued similarly) holds that only wars of self-defense are justifiable. Jean Bethke Elshtain, a leading American just war theorist at the University of Chicago Divinity School, however, declined to endorse this public declaration, partly on the grounds of its inaccurate historical portrayal of the dilemma. Writing

The automated battlefield

A sober treatise on the future of warfare warns of the perils of autonomous robotic combatants In Army of None, Paul Scharre offers an authoritative and sobering perspective on the automated battlefields that will very soon come to characterize military conflict, predicting that autonomous robots, many fully armed and capable of independent targeting decisions, will inevitably come to rule the waves, as well as prevailing on the ground, in the air, and especially in space.