A recurring theme in military history is the advancement of technology; more specifically, technology that allows soldiers to be farther and safer from the thing they are attacking. From clubs, to swords, to arrows, to guns, to machine guns, to bombs, to bombs dropped by aircraft, to ICBMs: we constantly get better and better at destroying things far away. We haven’t completely eliminated the risk, obviously. The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq will probably pass 4,000 within the next month, and seven times as many soldiers have been wounded.
What I’m interested in is what happens when we do eliminate the risk, when we are able to entirely replace the soldier patrolling the streets of Iraq with a robot of some sort? This currently only exists in the realm of science fiction, but the reality may not be far off. The U.S. currently uses remote missile attacks to attack those it believes are terrorists.
If a country was able to completely eliminate its risk (in human life terms) in going to war, how does that affect the laws of war? Does this completely change the playing field? Or perhaps this is simply a question of an imbalance of technology among fighting forces, a question that is as old as war itself.
Continue reading "BattleBots, or: Why the Cylons Are Scary" »
