On a scorching early afternoon in August 2007, Col. David “Diesel” Sullivan was doing his daily rounds at Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas when he got the call. A pilot under his command at the base, remotely flying an armed, unmanned MQ-9 Reaper aerial drone in eastern Afghanistan, had spotted four men perched on an Afghan hilltop. Were they Taliban? If so, they were perfectly placed to ambush an American raiding party just hours away.
Sullivan walked out of the heat and into the small, single-wide trailer operations room (the “ops cell”) to assess the situation firsthand. Maneuvering the Reaper by joystick, the pilot pointed to the screen: Four human shapes were silhouetted against a tarp some 7,500 miles away. The local time was 2 a.m. These were hardly goatherds, and with no coalition soldiers reported on the hill, consensus emerged that the four figures were insurgents. Sullivan ordered the countdown for lethal force, and his pilot began the 10-minute sequence for launch of a laser-guided Hellfire missile. Then Sullivan noticed a detail that gave him pause. Two of the men were doing sit-ups and push-ups. “I’ve been watching the Taliban for years now in small units like that,” he said. “They would not be doing exercises.”
Ultimately U.S. commanders on the ground were asked to check with their field units one last time. Sullivan watched via infrared video feed from half a world away as one of the silhouettes picked up a portable phone. With only minutes to spare, Sullivan stopped what would have been a deadly friendly-fire missile strike on American troops.
Robotics experts call what Sullivan exercised “discrimination,” the ability to target enemy forces while keeping fire away from civilians, friendly troops, and prisoners of war. In the move toward increasing use of unmanned military machines, discrimination is the elephant in the room.
Rise of the MachinesThousands of unmanned aerial drones, tanks, and submarines have been developed and deployed by militaries in up to 50 nations. These include unpiloted planes such as the MQ-9 Reaper and its more famous predecessor, the MQ-1 Predator, as well as ground vehicles such as the unmanned minitank Talon SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System) and the multipurpose PackBot, which has been widely used to defuse roadside bombs in Iraq and which can also gather intelligence and detect snipers.
