Rise of the Drones – UAVs After 9/11

[Peter Lemkin]

Friday, 27 January 2012

The Future of Warfare

Up Front:

• I'm currently proof reading, and enjoying immensely, the new book "Kill Decision" by my good friend Dan Suarez. It's about autonomous drones. That's legendary timing for a new book (on top of that, his approach to the genre blows away Clancy at his best). So, as you can see, I'm particularly jazzed about this topic right now.
  
• I've done some consulting with Northrop Grumman on the future of drones.
  
• Finally, if you want to get ahead of the curve on this, read some of my older posts on drones and supermpowerment over the last four years.
  

Onto the post:::Here's the future. Courtesy of Northrop Grumman.

It's an autonomous aircraft/drone that has a full weapons bay (4,500 lbs). Say that word again: autonomous. That's the breakthrough feature. This also means:It can make its own "kill decision." Again and again and again. That decision is going to get better and better and cheaper and cheaper (Moore's law has made insect level intelligence available for pennies, rat intelligence is next).It isn't vulnerabe to a pilot in Nevada directing it to land in Iran. Oops.It will eventually (sooner than you think) be the "Queen," making decisions for thousands of smaller swarmed (semi-autonomous) drones it lays on a battle zone (aka "city"). In sum: It allows an unprecedented automation of conventional violence. Granted, it will be possible for small groups to put together systems like this on the cheap. For offensive or defense reasons.However, I'm much more worried about their ability to automate repression, particularly if combined with software bots that sift/sort/monitor all of your data 24x7x365 (already going on).

Posted by John Robb on Friday, 27 January 2012 at 11:10 AM | Permalink

Very sick stuff! Drones that 'make their own decisions'....even worse than the human-guided drone. No one to blame in court or by any means if someone is killed or injured by mistake or unjustly. It is a sad commentary on the world today that I sometimes think I'm glad I'll be dead before the world goes much further in this completely wrong and fascist direction. America - about face or become the leading tyrant of the World - including to your own subjugated serfs.