The Applied Ethics of Emerging Military and Security Technologies

Braden R. Allenby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351894821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Sciences et technologies militaires

The essays in this volume illustrate the difficult real world ethical questions and issues arising from accelerating technological change in the military and security domains, and place those challenges in the context of rapidly shifting geopolitical and strategic frameworks. Specific technologies such as autonomous robotic systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, cybersecurity and cyberconflict, and biotechnology are highlighted, but the essays are chosen so that the broader implications of fundamental systemic change are identified and addressed. Additionally, an important consideration with many of these technologies is that even if they are initially designed and intended for military or security applications, they inevitably spread to civil society, where their application may raise very different ethical questions around such core values as privacy, security from criminal behaviour, and state police power. Accordingly, this volume is of interest to students of military or security domains, as well as to those interested in technology and society, and the philosophy of technology.

Part I
Changing Context and Overview

[1]
THE IMPLICATIONS OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES FOR JUST WAR THEORY

Brad Allenby¹

1. INTRODUCTION

Technological evolution and military activity have been linked throughout history. The relationship is not, however, straightforward. The existential challenge to society represented by warfare, combined with the immediate advantage that new technology can deliver, tends to accelerate technological innovation and diffusion; the inherent conservatism of military personnel, the emphasis on tradition and culture that marks many military organizations, and the high costs of experimentation in conflict environments serve as a powerful brake on technological evolution. Similarly, the relationships among military and security technology systems and consequent institutional, cultural, and social changes are profound, complex, unpredictable, and often subtle. Many technologies of sufficient power to be of interest militarily have at least the potential to be deeply destabilizing to existing economic, social, and technological systems, especially as they are introduced into civil society.² As military radio frequency identification (RFID) and sensor systems, and robots and cyborgs at many different scales, are shifted from theatre intelligence and combat to civil society environments, for example, the implications for privacy, and for the balance between national security and civil rights, could be substantial. Technologies that can accelerate the development of human varietals within the overall population could be very effective for warriors, but raise difficult issues for social stability (many cultures, after all, do not deal very gracefully or equitably with the race, gender, and sexual preference differences that have long been part of the human story).³ Equally important, emerging technologies are likely to have similar destabilizing effects within the military as well, potentially affecting not just operations, but military culture and organization as well. A military leadership class that has developed in traditional combat environments will not have the same values, nor behave in the same way, as a military leadership class selected for its ability to play video games in high school (an issue that Singer points to as the US Air Force leadership,⁴ at present consisting almost entirely of pilots, is affected by incoming gamers who are proficient at flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)). A military that prizes physical and mental toughness in marines and special operations forces will have a difficult time embracing and retaining the computer geeks and nerds necessary for effective cyberconflict operations.

Equally important, it is clear that leading contenders for great power status– including at least the United States, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and, to some, South Africa), the EU and certain member states, and perhaps others such as Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, and Mexico–realize that scientific and technological capability is a critical competency for achieving and defending such a position. This is not just true in the obvious terms of economic performance, and in the less obvious but equally critical realm of “soft power,”⁵ but in a purely military sense as well. Especially as more traditional great power conflicts, such as that between the rising power of China and the existing power of the United States, are reframed informally or formally as confrontations that must be engaged across all domains of culture and society,⁶ the importance of broad technological competence and innovation is enhanced.

Such issues are particularly pertinent given the accelerating technological change that characterizes the current era, combined with the changes in military operations discussed below. Accordingly, this article will provide an overview of emerging technologies and the environment within which such technologies are being developed, and suggest some of the concomitant implications for just war theory. It should be emphasized, however, that because of the complexity and unpredictability necessarily associated with such an evolutionary process, any such effort should be regarded as illustrative and partial, rather than predictive (as many reviews of the implications of emerging technology for the military and security domains have emphasized⁷).

2. TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS: TALE OF THE RAILROAD

It is very common for both technologists and social scientists to misunderstand both the essence, and the implications, of technology systems. To begin with, technology systems are not just artifacts; rather, they are integrated cultural, social, psychological, economic, institutional, and built phenomena.⁸ Moreover, any technology system of more than trivial power tends to be profoundly destabilizing of existing institutions, norms, and power relationships–as well as of the technology systems that it replaces, along with the firms and employment patterns built on the now-obsolete technologies–the well known capitalist “gale of creative destruction,” as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter famously put it. Accordingly, emerging technologies tend to generate substantial and potentially powerful opposition.⁹ In societies where conservative forces are able to dominate, they are therefore highly likely to impede technological evolution, thus creating less competitive cultures; whether a culture will evolve technologically may therefore depend to a large extent on whether conservative forces are able to merely hinder technological evolution, or whether they can stifle it completely.¹⁰ Thirdly, technology systems are complex adaptive systems, which means that trying to predict their future evolutionary paths, as opposed to exploring possibilities through techniques such as scenario analysis, is essentially impossible. One can prepare for the future by, for example, creating agile institutions through war gaming and scenario exercises; one cannot predict it.¹¹

Consider the seemingly simple and mundane example of the railroad, a technology system that to moderns may be trite, but that was frightening and, indeed, devastating to the societies it affected as it diffused across the global landscape and through cultures and societies in the early 1800s. Like all foundational technologies, it was a seemingly inexorable juggernaut that profoundly disrupted not just other technologies, local economies and family businesses, and small farms, but also cultural, institutional, and psychological verities.¹² The railroad may indeed have been critical in building a new world, but the cost was the destruction of much of the old, the comfortable, and the familiar. It is not surprising, therefore, that the story of the railroad is in some ways the framing of the nineteenth century.

The rapid increase in speed and performance of railroad technology over that century, while impressive, does little to provide an idea of its real impacts.¹³ Remembering that technologies are coevolving parts of complex adaptive systems rather than causal mechanisms, the breadth of change of which railroads were a major forcing component, is still remarkable. For example, because railroads were a network technology, they required a uniform, precise system of time that was coextensive with, and matched to the characteristics of, their physical network;¹⁴ accordingly, our modern structure of time coevolved with the railroads. Similarly, large integrated networks also require coextensive signaling and communications systems if they are to be coordinated. Thus, the railroads not only provided a convenient right of way but also a raison d’etre for telegraph technology (including the “software,” Morse Code).¹⁵

But this by no means exhausts the social and cultural impacts of railroad technology. Before railroads, or in areas where railroads were less common (e.g., the American South because of its plantation agrarian economy, or Austria and Russia by mandate¹⁶), local, fairly isolated economic institutions were the norm. This changed because railroads could inexpensively transport bulk commodities, people, and information rapidly over long distances. They therefore provided a technological basis for economies of scale in industrial operations, which in turn led to the growth of national economic institutions such as trusts and monopolies in commodities such as sugar, tobacco, oil, and steel.

More subtly, railroads enabled a fundamental shift in the essential nature of industrial economies: it was not only that economic power passed to industrial firms from agriculture. So, too, did cultural authority; the yeoman farmer was replaced by the urban factory worker and the capitalist, and economists began measuring national status not by agricultural prowess but by industrial production; the “nature as sacred” teleology that still energizes environmentalism today was challenged, and in many instances replaced, by a human-designed, human-built, high-technology sublime.¹⁷ Agriculture in continental cores in countries such as Canada and the United States was significantly expanded and transformed to industrial scale, and entire continental ecologies were altered; Chicago grew where and how it did, and enabled an economically, politically, physically, and environmentally new American Midwest, because of railroads.¹⁸

In institutional terms, railroad firms represented a significant increase in the complexity and size of private firms. In terms of finance, railroad firms with their vast need for land (rights of way) and material demanded far more substantial flows of capital than the simpler factory capitalism they replaced (in western Europe, railroad construction was the single most important stimulus to industrial growth by the 1840s).¹⁹ In terms of management, railroad firms encouraged the expansion of the principle of division of labor from blue collar to white collar positions, a critical development supporting the evolution of the modern hierarchical firm.

In psychological terms, travel by railroad was different in kind, not just degree, from the forms of personal travel it replaced. The horse and carriage and canal had a pace and simplicity, and energy sources (e.g., animal and wind power), that led people to experience them as “natural.” The mechanical railroad was faster and went where its designers intended, through rather than with its landscape, substituting a technological sublime for the natural sublime that characterized earlier modes of transport.²⁰ More subtle was the commodification that many felt with the routine mass movement of people enabled by railroad technology; contemporary travelers complained of feeling like packages rather than individuals.²¹

The military and national security implications of the railroad were also non-trivial, especially in large, relatively unpopulated countries such as the United States, where efficient and inexpensive long distance transportation systems were critical. But although the military advantage of more rapid and efficient transportation of men and war materials to areas of immediate need was direct and explicit, there were other, perhaps more important, advantages. During the Civil War, for example, the Northern war manufacturing economy relied to a far greater extent than that of the South on railroad infrastructure, enabling greater productivity and industrial efficiency.²²

Another example of the integrated strategic and cultural power of railroad technology is provided by the rise of Prussia. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna concluded the Napoleonic Wars and left Prussia as one minor state among many in Central Europe. But tensions between reactionary absolutism and the citizen nationalism that the French Revolution had unleashed continued, and a series of popular revolts broke out across Europe in 1848. In Prussia, the uprisings were controlled because the Prussian military used its railroads to rush troops from trouble spot to trouble spot, illustrating the strategic value of rail technology to Prussian leaders such as Helmuth von Moltke.²³ Consequently, the Prussian military constructed a “dual use” railroad network, supporting both commercial and military functions. Prussian commercial railroad cars, for example, were explicitly designed so that, in addition to their routine commercial purpose, they could carry soldiers, horses, military supplies, and military equipment if necessary, while Prussian railroad networks were integrated into strategic military planning (in contrast, the French were lukewarm on railroads, and Russian and Austrian elites deliberately stifled railroad construction because of the potential for perturbing feudalistic structures²⁴).

The results became obvious in 1866 at the battle of Koniggratz, where the upstart Prussians stunned and essentially destroyed the Austrian Empire (which, remember, had eschewed the new technology because of its socially destabilizing potential–a possible caution to societies that attempt to avoid the creative destruction of powerful new technology systems). A major factor in this battle was the Prussian feat in managing to transport 197,000 men and 55,000 horses to the front using railroads, an accomplishment that caught the Austrians by surprise in part because of their lack of familiarity with railroad technology.²⁵ Of course, railroads weren’t the only factor; the Prussians also had the needle gun, arguably the most advanced rifle in Europe, as well as world class military management (no one else had von Moltke) and highly advanced training. In the event, as Austria fell, Prussia rose, a point that was lost on no one when the Prussians defeated the French in 1870 (again, partially because of their sophisticated use of railroad technology).

In this systemic restructuring of society and its institutions, railroads are not unique. Economic historians have developed a theory of “long waves” or “Kondratief waves” of innovation, where periods of economic expansion are driven by constellations of technologies and institutions that form around core technology systems, with concomitant social, cultural, legal, psychological, technological, and economic change. This is a theory of developed, industrialized systems, so the first Kondratief wave is generally understood to involve the mechanization of textile manufacture, the basis of the Industrial Revolution in the UK.²⁶ Although this is not something about which the literature is exact, subsequent examples might include railroads and steam technology as discussed above, which powered a wave from about 1840 to 1890; a following wave from about 1890 to 1930, which developed around steel, heavy engineering, and electricity; and an automobile, fossil fuel, and aviation wave from about 1930 to 1990.²⁷ Each wave is characterized by coevolution of the core technology cluster with institutional, organizational, economic, cultural, and political institutions and systems, leading to profound and unpredictable change, as the railroad example illustrates. Thus, for example, some have suggested that modern developed economies are reacting to an information and communication technology wave by shifting from a mass production, heavy industry paradigm of specialized professional managerial systems and associated “Taylorism” industrial efficiency techniques to a far more networked, adaptive, and flexible structure characterized by, for example, virtual offices and informal and protean regional and global information networks.²⁸

Technology systems, both i...