Killing Without Heart: Limits on Robotic Warfare in an Age of Persistent Conflict

by M. Shane Riza

The days of large force-on-force engagements with conventional fielded armies are seemingly gone. Today’s persistent conflict, conducted among civilian populations and fought by small bands of combatants, will be remembered for this alteration in the tapestry of war and for the first large-scale use of unmanned vehicles. According to M. Shane Riza, this “war among the people” and the trend toward robotic warfare has outpaced deliberate thought and debate about the deep moral issues affecting justice and the warrior spirit. The pace of change, Riza explains, is revolutionizing warfare in vitally important ways. A key development is risk inversion, a shifting of risk away from technologically superior combatants and onto all noncombatants. For the first time in history, warriors are not the ones primarily shouldering the dangers and horrors of battle. This inversion and the search for impunity undermine the idea that how we win actually matters as much as winning itself. Though warfare involves human fallibility, there are ethics in striving that give meaning to war on a personal level. In just war theory, this sense of purpose imposes a practical limit on what belligerents can and should do to their opponents. Contemporary robotic warfare, however, may remove combatants’ moral equivalence and it adversely affects the mutual respect upon which to build a lasting peace. Killing without Heart postulates today’s technological wars of combatant impunity may ultimately render unmanned weapons useless with the realization that robotic lethality undermines our strategic objectives. Riza has crafted a timely examination of the moral, ethical, and legal implications of the U.S. military’s future course toward armed unmanned and autonomous robotic warfare. This is a book that will change the way we look at warfare—both for today and well into the future.

Genres: War

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 30, 2013

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing from the perspective a career Air Force officer and fighter pilot, Riza ably summarizes the literature on the laws of wars and autonomous systems (primarily Michael Ignatieff and Ron Arkin, but also Patrick Lin, Peter Singer, and many others). His twist is based on the existential credo of Sartre that "to kill one must be willing to die", and a warrior ethos that is vital both to the ability of officers to command and the legitimacy of winning wars against technologically inferior enemies. As Riza argues, the immunity that autonomous weapons platforms provides against harm may make wars easier to start and dialog leading to peace more difficult to develop. The overall thrust is that while autonomous weapons certainly *can* kill people, and may even be able to kill people in accordance with the laws of war, the use of autonomous lethal robots undermines the moral foundation which makes war and peace possible.

There are several moments in this book that are quite interesting. Riza's comments on the changes in air force manning and potential loss of tactical skill development in junior officers are a new take on the issue. However, I think that several major points are not addressed by this book.

First is the American orientation of < href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlesp... Dominance. Since WW2, American military superiority has been based on the ability to bring overwhelming fire to bear on vital parts of the battlefield, while monitoring areas around strategic assets and allowing the whole system to manuever freely. Battlespace is a technocratic doctrine of making lists of target coordinates and knocking them down as efficiently as possible. How does this practice of war comport with warrior codes?

Second is a romanticization of air combat. Fighter pilots surely do have The Right Stuff and go in harm's way, but conversely air tactics are not about dueling but about clobbering the other guy as fast as possible, ideally getting a kill shot before they even know they're dead. And in the long occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, American pilots faced essentially no opposition in the air.

And third is an under examination of robot vs robot combat. Al Qaeda doesn't have any robotic capability (unless you count IEDs), but a nation like China or Russia might. While losing an autonomous platform might not be the same as suffering human casualties, these systems aren't free, and are in fact quite expensive. I've heard that recent military exercises have involved trying to run down the enemy's inventory of precision guided munitions by offering bait targets at the edges of effective engagement envelops. Robot vs robot combat brings in the tricky issues of procurement policy and economic warfare, but it is substantially under theorized and could be addressed by someone with Riza's background.

I know it's a little unfair to criticize a book for what's not in, but I wanted a lot more. This is an area of emerging concern, and compared to Singer's Wired for War, Riza's book is less tied to specific programs and evolving robots, and more towards the big picture moral and legal issues in warfare.

[hank · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am going to be honest. When I began the first chapter title "A FIGHTER'S ENTRY INTO THE ROBOTIC AGE", I truly believed this was going to have an arrogant fighter pilot point of view. This was not the case at all. Not only did I pick up this book because I used to work for Mr. Riza, but also I knew, based off of my current profession, I would have to support remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) at some point or another during my career. Lo and behold! My next assignment was to an RPA unit. So as I am currently at a school to work for RPAs, I figured this was more than an appropriate time to read this. There are a multitude of excellent thinking points and arguments to bring up in this piece concerning RPAs and even the future of robotic warfare. One of the main ones that did stand out was the concept of being 18 inches from the battlefield. My training is currently at the location that this statement was said and I can confirm that the mentality of the entities out here is as stated. You do some have people in this community that have been boots on ground on the battlefield, not 18 inches away, but as this community gets more and more manning, the young personnel coming in have not been boots on ground. I was in training to go to Afghanistan and our group was told that our mission set was going to take us outside of the wire a lot. One individual in the group got overly excited looked over at us, stated "I cannot wait to do this", and make a motion like he was some secret assassin slicing someone's throat from behind. As this is an extreme example of someone not knowing what it is like to experience war, how many more people are like this? The young enlisted and officers coming into the military nowadays have two main sources of understanding how war is. Those two are what they are seeing on the internet which is unregulated and very exaggerated for the most part and video games. Yes, I said video games. I have met so many people that ask about my experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and then compare them to Call of Duty. This is sort of unnerving and it is the responsibility of every individual in the military to do their best to sway these concepts. One other point I would like to highlight from this piece is the concept of an established international code of ethics for RPAs and robotics. Because of my rank and position in the military, I do not always think at such strategic levels, but this highlight definitely instilled some thought. Of the other nations that have RPAs currently, even if there was an established code, will they follow? If they are out allies and do not follow, how will our nation handle this? There is a huge paradigm shift in the way the world conducts military warfare and Mr. Riza foreshadows this as being troublesome. This book should be on all military services' reading lists as the concepts in here really need to hit home for our future military leaders.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

fantastic book that looks at the morality of the use of robotics and autonomous weapons systems on the battlefield

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I agree with Riza's moral dilemma in using UAVs, I disagree that the removal of an Airman from the battlefield somehow puts our own citizens more at risk. The mere involvement in conflicts overseas is the baseline on whether we would be targeted, not the choice of the system we use. And while he provides a good starting argument for using autonomous systems in the future, I don't think we're as close to putting such technology into fruition as Riza believes.