From land mines to drones, fears about autonomous arms are growing

Swarms of killer drones are likely to soon be a standard feature of battlefields around the world. That has ignited debate over how or whether to regulate their use and spurred concerns about the prospect of eventually turning life-or-death decisions over to artificial intelligence programs. Here is an overview.

How new are they?

Autonomous weapons are hardly new.

Land mines, which are designed to discharge automatically when a person or object passes on top of them, were used as early as the 1800s during the Civil War.

While they were first used long before anyone could even conceive of AI, they have a relevance to the debate today because once put in place they operate with no human intervention — and without discriminating between intended targets and unintended victims.

Pentagon expansion

Starting in the late 1970s, the United States began to expand on this concept, with a weapon known as the CAPTOR Anti-submarine Mine. The mine could be dropped from an airplane or a ship and settle on the bottom of the ocean, sitting there until it automatically detonated when sensors on the device detected an enemy target.

Starting in the 1980s, dozens of Navy ships began to rely on the AEGIS weapon system, which uses a high-powered radar system to search for and track any incoming enemy missiles.

Homing munitions

The next step toward more sophisticated autonomous weapons came in the form of “fire and forget” homing munitions like the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-range Air-to-air Missile, which has a radar seeker that refines the trajectory of a fired missile as it tries to destroy enemy planes.

Homing munitions generally cannot be recalled after they are fired, and act like “an attack dog sent by police to run down a suspect,” wrote Paul Scharre, a former senior Pentagon official. They have a certain degree of autonomy in refining their path, but Scharre defined it as “limited autonomy.” .

‘Loitering munitions’

The war in Ukraine has highlighted use of a form of automated weaponry, known as loitering munitions. These devices date to at least 1989, when an Israeli military contractor introduced what is known as Harpy, a drone that can stay in the air for about two hours, searching over hundreds of miles for enemy radar systems and then attacking them.

More recently, U.S. military contractors such as California-based Aerovironment have sold similar loitering munitions that carry an explosive warhead.

Human sign-off is still requested before the weapon strikes the target. But it would be relatively simple to take the human “out of the loop,” making the device entirely autonomous.

Drone swarms

There is no question about where this is all headed next. The Pentagon is working to build swarms of drones, according to a notice it published this year.

This end result is expected to be a network of hundreds or even thousands of Ai-enhanced, autonomous drones carrying surveillance equipment or weapons.

Drones would most likely be positioned near China so they could be rapidly deployed if conflict broke out, and would be used to knock out or at least degrade the extensive network of anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile systems China has built along its coasts and artificial islands in the South China Sea.