2012/06/11
by Robert Morris
The Pakistani affiliate of the International Herald Tribune has a great summary run down of recent drone strikes under the Obama administration. http://tribune.com.pk/story/391839/unmanned-war-on-terror-no-longer-a-covert-war/ It details strike after strike against militants that are operating freely in Waziristan and the tribal areas. It also produces a summary statistic of civilian casualties which, even if taken at face value, seems to indicate that these strikes exhibit a very high degree of proportionality and discrimination.
I’m out here in San Francisco and I sometimes get some troubled reactions when I tell people that I led a drone unit when I was in the Army. Eventually telling these people that my drones were not armed quiets them down, but there is a fundamental misunderstanding about how drones are different and similar from other types of war. Drones unfortunately have some misperceptions about how they compare to other types of military engagements.
I would like us each to sit in the chair of senior commander or official who has just received intelligence from multiple sources (as it seems these strikes are probably based on) that is really good, but not 100% certain. There is a militant–who the Pakistanis allow to travel, train, and organize unmolested–who is intent on killing not only U.S. soldiers, but also our civilian allies and females who dare to leave the home to get an education. He believes that it is his god-given moral imperative to kill all these people. What would you do?
A) Nothing
B) Ask the Pakistanis who have been arming this guy to arrest him
C) A drone strike
D) A manned aircraft strike
E) A commando or sniper raid
Okay, even Marines get this one: when in doubt, Charlie out. Seriously though, C is the only ethical choice.
Doing nothing means that you have let an evil, violent man go about his plans to kill someone’s son or daughter because he or she believed in a world where everyone has the freedom to make something of themselves. By the same token, B is even worse, because now you’ve not only let him go free, you’re endangering your sources and methods of finding him in the first place by telling the Pakistanis what you know.
On the other side of the spectrum, there is every probability that any method besides a drone attack would be worse when measured by the standard of proportionality and discrimination. Drones usually strike using the smallest guided air to ground missile in the U.S. arsenal, meaning they tend not to cause more damage than is absolutely necessary to destroy valid military target. Would a commando team be as precise? What if the team itself was attacked by our Pakistani ‘allies?’ Could it or a manned plane follow the target and wait until this small missile was the appropriate munition to use to ensure the destruction of the target? The answer is no, they could not.
Of most concern to all of us who treasure innocent life is the principle of discrimination which means that you are only attacking legitimate targets. Although this is where drone are most criticized, this is where they beat all other methods of apply force. Can you imagine any other weapon so precisely attacking only legitimate targets? There is no other weapon system where every action of the user is recorded, second guessed, and subject to real time absolute supervision by higher authorities. Once a pilot is over a target his judgment of the scene and need to protect himself while completing the mission takes precedence over a second guessing boss back at base–and rightly so. Even more so with a commando team, the commander of that mission has complete autonomy and discretion once his forces are committed.
But let’s be clear, commandos and pilots make more mistakes, not less, by being on scene. They are affected by all kinds of pressures, are in mortal danger, and are being asked to make snap judgments on their own. They screw-up. They drop bombs on the wrong house–or even the wrong army. Snipers in over-watch shoot civilians all the time–they don’t mean to, they just do. None of these things are war crimes, they are just mistakes–unacceptable tragedies–but still just mistakes not crimes. I think that most of us, civilian or military accept this.
Drone operators on the other hand work in secure locations, can loiter over their target, and stalk him for days or weeks until they get a clean shot. They even have lawyers looking over their video feed as they work! These are carefully supervised, deliberate operations. That said, this is still war, where even professionals make mortal mistakes with the best information available. But even or especially in war, we must do our best to protect those principles we hold dear and every analysis says that drones are the most moral option. To those who would say that drones are immoral, I would ask in comparison to what?
It is well that war is so terrible–otherwise we would grow too fond of it. -Robert E. Lee
Before we can even have a bubble in robotics…
2012/06/29 by Robert Morris Leave a comment
Our industry needs a better methodology for managing robotics development.
I just a had a great entrepreneurship conversation. My entrepreneur friend opened my eyes to the possibilities for robotics in an industry, platform space, and application that I had pretty much written off. The application was using robots to collect data–the simplest and earliest task for any class of robots. He had taken a fresh look at an industry he knew intimately and seen that there was an opportunity to do something extraordinary and make some money.
This friend is not a robotics expert, but he’s been awakened to the potential in the robotics field. His big concern and great hesitancy to jumping into this business is establishing a workable business model. He sees the potential in the opportunity with the vividness of an insider, but when it comes to the robotics he could use, he sees the immature, expensive junk of an outsider’s eye. He’s vividly aware of the danger he might not structure the business or implement the technology in such a way as to be the guy who becomes profitable and grows first. He saw that it would take a lot of money and time just to prove out the concept and that it might take much longer to figure out the right business model. Meanwhile, his fledgling robotics company would be burning cash at the combined rate of a software, hardware, and an operations company with a direct sales force–not a very pretty proposition.
I didn’t really have anything to say to him on that front other than hackneyed cliches about iterating, pivoting, and the value of moving early. It really occurs to me that my friend is already following what little we know about how to build a robotics company. Be a great whatever-you-are first (medical device, logistics solution, toy, etc.) then have it be a robot. Don’t market the thing as a robot; market it as a new technology solution to a real problem that is worth money to solve. Be willing it iterate (fail on first attempts). Go to market with the least capability that you can get paid any money at all for. All great principles, but it seems like we’re still missing the kind of prescriptions that have developed for software.
The Lean Start-up movement, combined with movements like Agile Development have brought much more rigor to how software development in early stage companies is managed. More traditional software and engineer models are still applicable to projects where the desired outcome is well known. In most of my conversations with engineers, it seems like robotics engineering has not reached a similar stage of maturity. It is difficult for robotics engineers to communicate to business leaders when they will know something that allows for opportunities in business decision making, let alone accurately forecast the true cost of a development job.
The most successful robotics companies do a great job managing development. However, when you talk to their founders or engineering leads, they are often at a loss to explain what they did differently from failed efforts. They might explain how they avoided some basic pitfalls–like outsourcing design work–but they often have a very difficult time offering an affirmative description of what they did, why it worked, and how they kept the engineering process and the business on track towards the correct goal. If robotics is ever going to be the semi-conductors of the 80’s, web of the 90’s, or social and mobile of today, our industry will need to develop a compelling description of how to stay on track towards successful technology and business outcomes.
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