Introducing #WarBots

Wars have been and are presently fought amongst and with robots. This is true today and will be unmistakable tomorrow. These computers are called many things—remotely piloted aircraft, unmanned systems, loitering munitions—but to the public, they are drones and robots. And they are only becoming more ubiquitous. Drones, and the computer technology on which they rely, are a confluence of possibilities found in information technology combined with military demands. But there’s more to the debates than commercial off-the-shelf quadcopters, Atlas’ box jumps, or the popular images in Hollywood films like Good Kill or Eye in the Sky.

Robots complicate land and sea battlespace, and drones congest air space and the electromagnetic spectrum. The assets of today, though, are only harbingers of future automated and artificially intelligent systems. Loitering munitions with artificial intelligence could be a new means for precision fire support or a mechanism of assassination. Moreover, these assets will continue to fuse cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, artificial intelligence, and information theory with intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, target acquisition, and fires, challenging command and control for the asset and the operation as a whole.