Progress in Autonomous Land Vehicles: What Does it Mean?

Just a quick one today.  I’ve got a couple more substantive post brewing that I hope to get out this weekend.  Grading papers has been a bit of an impediment to blogging recently.

There is continuing progress in the development of driverless automobiles.  You will recall that a team from Stanford (GO STANFORD!) won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge by building a car that could traverse a 132 mile course through the desert by itself.  (The “technical paper” describing what the Stanford team did is here.)  Then in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge a Stanford team came in second behind a team led by Carnegie Mellon University.  (Stanford was first across the finish line, but was set back a bit by penalties.)

For those interested in more, PBS’ Nova did an episode on the Grand Challenge and an exhibit in the Smithonsian’s Museum of American History deals with both Challenges.  The the winning car from 2005 is actually there…right near Julia Child’s kitchen.

But the story continues.  Now Stanford has modified an Audi and intends to send it up Pikes Peak.  The “road” that the car will go up is  partially paved and partially gravel.  It is 12.4 miles long, climbs 4700 feet, has 156 turns, and provides plenty of opportunities to fall off a cliff.  Undaunted, one of the team leaders says: “There are some sheer drops at Pikes Peak in which any sort of self-preservation kicks in and you [a human driver] slow down a bit. We want to go up at the speed that few normal drivers would ever think of attempting.”

This particular bit of research is funded by automobile companies, not DARPA, but one can readily imagine that the Defense Department is paying close attention.  After all, the Department has an announced goal of making something like a third of its ground vehicles driverless by 2015, though I don’t know the precise parameters of that goal.  Imagine the potential not only for driving trucks (remember how vulnerable trucks were in Iraq for so long).  Imagine also the potential for ground reconnaissance or, for that matter, for tactical deceptions or feints.  Armed versions of such vehicles might someday even provide a commander the ability to order a subordinate unit to make a suicidal stand to cover everyone else’s retreat without actually requiring any friendlies to actually sacrifice themselves.

In any event, aside from the sheer whiz-bangery (that is a word, right?), all of this research strikes me as fascinating in the way that illuminates the difference between us and some of our adversaries.  One of the continuing jihadist taunts  aimed at the U.S. military is that it is made up of wusses who are afraid to go mano a mano, instead relying on high-tech widgets and airpower.  Efforts to take drivers out of trucks and perhaps even other vehicles will further confirm to the jihadists what they think they know about us.  Meanwhile, we believe blindly–and not necessarily incorrectly–that technology is good and if it can substitute for humans, all the better.  The jihadists live in a heroic society and we live in a post-heroic society.  I gotta say that heroic societies may generate better stories but in the long run post-heroic societies tend to be the winners.

In addition, I think that the progress on driverless ground vehicles is yet another example of how high-tech militaries are progressively taking the people off of the battlefield.  Troop densities are getting lower and lower.  Recall, for instance, that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld pushed for what appeared to be a preposterously small force to overthrow Saddam’s regime.  And yet it worked.  It wasn’t a large enough force to deal with an insurgency, but that fact shouldn’t be allowed to conceal that in March and April 2003 a few did a job that would only recently have required many.  Then, of course, there is the ever increasing use of UAVs which are rapidly becoming UCAVs, unmanned combat aerial vehicles.  Meanwhile, there are all sorts of unmanned projects in the air-to-air realm, apparently.

Certainly, for the foreseeable future warfare will continue to be a human activity.  Nevertheless–and it pains me to say this–I do wonder if some aspects of “friction” may not be reduced.  Clausewitz teaches us that friction is omnipresent, and he’s right, but some of the major causes of friction that he highlights, things like fear, fatigue, hunger, etc., either don’t happen to machines or happen to a far lesser degree to the remote control operators of these machines as these sit in air conditioned rooms thousands of miles away.

In short, stay tuned.

The Fog of Modern War

Wikileaks has acquired and decrypted (!) a copy of a tape of an Apache helicopter attacking and killing two Reuters reporters in Iraq in 2007.  The Apache crew thought that the photographers were carrying weapons when what they were really carrying was camera equipment.

The video has gone truly viral by now, (predictably it has made its was to jihadist websites: here and here and here) but I strongly recommend Anthony Martinez’ commentary (which is what I linked to above) on the tape.  Anthony has personal experience with these sorts of engagements and offers an expert assessment on his blog.  Aside from some stray mistakes that he points out, like the Wikileaks annotation not understanding what a Bradley IFV crew was saying when it said “drop ramp,” and referring at one point to HMMWVs as Bradleys, he also notes that the Wikileak people failed to notice that there really was a guy in the video near the photographers with an AK and another with an RPG.  Anthony rightly takes the Wikileaks people to task for not pointing out that fact.  On the other hand, he also notes that he’s very troubled by the fact that the Apache engaged the van that came to pick up a wounded survivor.

What do we have here?  We have a non-governmental organization affecting the public debate by:

1)  Engaging in activities that we would normally think of as those of intelligence agencies (acquiring the tape from an anonymous source in the US military and then figuring out how to decrypt it); and

2)  Publishing a one-sided annotated version of it, at least in part because of their own technical ignorance, that is being seen around the world and negatively affecting the war effort.

While the incident had lamentable consequences (two dead reporters, two dead children, probably some other dead innocents), it does appear to have been justifiable in that there do appear to have been some bad guys present.  [Correction.  The children survived.  I regret the error.] That said, the Apache crew made a mistake in misidentifying camera equipment as weapons.  This is precisely the sort of thing that Clausewitz tells us happens in war all the time.  People make mistakes in real life and they make them even more so in wartime, when time is short, when adrenaline is flowing, when people are in danger, when people are tired, when looking at small black and white video screens, etc.  (Malcolm Glad well in his book, Blink, has a good discussion of some of these phenomena in the context of police shootings.)  The incidence of this sort of thing can be reduced but it can never be eliminated.  EVER.  Unless there is no war and I’m not going to hold my breath for that.

The problem is, that such incidents can have strategic effects.  As one commenter a jihadist site put it:  “After publishing this video.  Some ppl in my country said ‘I hate america and I support what Al-Qaeda is doing”“

Welcome to modern war.  Have a nice day.