THE BIG CEBROWSKI AND THE REAL RMA: THINKING ABOUT REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGIES

Guns and violence have the potential to override any theory, no matter how sound.

“Here at the end of a millennium we are driven to a new era in warfare. Society has changed. The underlying economics and technologies have changed. American business has changed. We should be surprised and shocked if America’s military did not.”

Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski was talking about his vision of future war, called “network-centric warfare.” Cebrowski was a former U.S. Navy pilot who had flown combat missions in Vietnam and commanded an aircraft carrier during the first Gulf War. “But there was another side to Cebrowski,” describes one biographical sketch, “a nervous energy and maverick streak that made him prone to trendy theories and sky-high philosophyzing—which for a long time kept him out of the Defense Department’s inner sanctum.” For example, the admiral was known as “an obsessive Powerpointer.” He made sure to use computer slide shows and substitute corporate jargon wherever he could, often sounding more like a management consultant than a military officer. For example, Cebrowski described the events of 9/11 as “a systems perturbation” and argued that military operations should be “value-added processes.”

In 1998, Cebrowski became president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. From his perch outside the Pentagon, Cebrowski began to agitate that change was afoot. The cold war was over and the U.S. military’s task, he argued, was not to face off against an equivalent superpower. Instead, it should plan to “baby-sit the petri dish of festering problems we have around the world.”

It was with this in mind that Cebrowski, along with his writing partner John Garstka, a retired air force pilot, published a seminal article in Proceedings, the navy’s official journal. The article, entitled “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future,” became the centerpiece of a whole new approach to war. Like much of the writing in this era of dot-com Internet hype, it offered a grandiose vision that frequently veered from cool military analysis to the writings of an acolyte. Cebrowski wrote with an admiration, bordering on obsession, of the many wonders of the new technology companies whose stock prices were then soaring and the triumphant business models that were seemingly changing the fabric of business and society. He cited lessons from Cisco, Dell, and even American Airlines, as to how information technology was giving American businesses newfound advantages, which, in turn, presented a new model of fighting and winning wars.

Seeing a parallel with the U.S.’s strategic position, Cebrowski was particularly fascinated by market behemoths. He was extremely impressed with companies like Wal-Mart, whose IT backbone allowed it to link together disparate operations, react quickly to a changing marketplace, and thus stomp out pesky mom-and-pop stores. Just as Wal-Mart had “total information awareness” over the marketplace, so too could the Pentagon have a perfect picture of the battlefield. In turn, just as the behemoth of Microsoft had supposedly reduced its competitor Apple into what he called a permanent market “niche,” Cebrowski argued that the United States could do the same to its foes in war. “Locking-out competition and locking-in success can occur quickly, even overnight. We seek an analogous effect in warfare.”

Cebrowski’s idea was not merely that information technology was changing the way organizations operated, but that the shift to IT networks was a change of a whole different order of magnitude for the history of war. It would “affect the where, the when, and the how of war.” As he concluded, “For nearly 200 years, the tools and tactics of how we fight have evolved with military technologies. Now, fundamental changes are affecting the very character of war....We are in the midst of a revolution in military affairs (RMA) unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age, when France transformed warfare with the concept of levee en masse.”

“A SUDDEN TEMPEST WHICH TURNS EVERYTHING UPSIDE DOWN ”

When people think about change in business, technology, or war, they usually imagine a linear process. Over time, slight improvements are made that make systems better, faster, cheaper, or give them a bigger bang. Every so often, however, a change comes along that wipes the table clean. It rewrites the rules, changes the players, and alters the organizations, strategies, and tactics. The parallel in the business world is “disruptive technologies” that fundamentally transform an industry, even to the point of ending it. The most recent example of this would be how the music industry has been inalterably revolutionized by the world of online file sharing.

The key to such shifts is that they have not only first-, but also second- and third-order effects that act like bow waves, sweeping the field and beyond, almost like societal versions of Kurzweil’s Singularity. These broader effects are often unpredictable to those living at the time when the technology is introduced. When the automobile was invented in the 1880s, it soon became clear to many that these “horseless carriages” were going to affect transportation in some way. But who could have predicted that cars would reshape American cities by creating “suburbia,” burn enough carbon dioxide to help heat up the planet, provide what were then Arab nomads with a stranglehold on the world economy, and give teenagers freedom from their parents’ supervision while courting, thus creating social phenomena like “dating” and the subsequent “Sexual Revolution”?

In the military realm, these paradigm shifts are called “revolutions in military affairs” (RMAs), something essential to understanding Cebrowski’s excitement over information technologies, as well as the real impact of robotics. RMAs typically involve the introduction of a new technology or organization, which in turn creates a whole new model of fighting and winning wars. A new weapon is introduced that makes obsolete all the previous best weapons, such as what armored, steam-powered warships did to wooden, wind-powered warships. Or it may be that a military figures out how to organize itself in a new way around an already known weapon, which makes all the old ways of fighting futile. An example of this would be how the English made longbow archers an integral part of their army in the Middle Ages, ending the dominance of horse-mounted knights.

Such technologies need not be purely military in nature to change the field of battle. The horse stirrup and the railroad, for example, both spurred RMAs that led to the rise and fall of empires, but neither could be described as an exclusively military technology (much like robotics today). Indeed, the most radical shifts in war tend to parallel similarly major changes in the economy. Whether it’s adjusting to steam-powered warships or steam-powered factories, a hallmark of revolutions is that, as management guru Peter Drucker puts it, leaders “must prepare to abandon everything they know.”

From the longbow to nuclear weapons, historians identify at least ten revolutions in military affairs since 1300. And each time, these RMAs felt like being in “a sudden tempest which turns everything upside down.” This is how a fifteenth-century Italian politician described what it was like to watch cannon easily flatten the castle walls that had protected his city for centuries.

Not everyone is enamored with the idea of RMAs. Their main problem is that almost every time a new technology is introduced in war, its long-term impact is overpromised. Retired army officer and military analyst Ralph Peters, for example, jokes that “when the first early man discovered that he could bind a sharp stone to a stick with a leather thong, you can be certain that he turned immediately to his pals across the campfire and shouted, ‘I’ve just achieved the ultimate revolution in military affairs!’ ”

However, it is indisputable that technology-driven RMAs do shape history. That Italian politician witnessed the start of the RMA that became known as the gunpowder age. At its start, 1450, the Italian city-states were the leading powers in Europe, while Europe, in turn, was a relative weakling on the world stage, only controlling 15 percent of the globe. Within a century, the dominant powers were unified kingdoms like Britain, France, and Spain that had figured out how to best use this revolution to their advantage, and Europe was on its way to controlling 84 percent of the globe. Much of this conquest came through encounters with local powers, where the massive numerical disadvantage of the European colonists was more than outweighed by their technologic advantage. The Spanish conquistador Cortés, for example, conquered the eight-million-strong Aztec empire with a force of just eight hundred men.

“How do you become a winner in an era of technologic upheaval and avoid becoming road kill? You might think it is to get the best and most gadgets. But you’d be wrong,” says Max Boot, author of War Made New, a history of RMAs. The key to success is not just inventing or buying a new technology, but also how you harness it. The Germans, French, and British, for instance, all had tanks, aircraft, and radios at the start of World War II, but the Germans figured out how to combine them all together into the blitzkrieg, a new way of mechanized warfare that revolutionized war in the twentieth century. Or as air force officer Scott Murray explains, “Imagine for a moment that you could go back in time and give a knight in King Arthur’s court an M-16. If he takes the weapon, gets back on his horse, and uses the stock to knock his opponent’s head, it’s not transformational. Transformation occurs when he gets behind a tree and starts shooting.”

For this reason, RMAs often take a while to bear fruit. The English army didn’t just roll out prototypes of the longbow for its peasants to use in the historic defeat of the French knights at the battle of Crécy in 1346, which helped end the age of feudalism. Instead, the weapons and tactics that proved so revolutionary were perfected in the English civil wars more than a century before. However, the pace and duration of these transitions seem to be coming faster and faster. The changes brought by gunpowder played out over centuries, those of steam engines, telegraphs, and railroads (the first industrial RMA) over a century, and internal combustion engines, radio, and flight (the second industrial RMA) over a few decades.

This is also why a good sign of an RMA is the rise of hybrid technologies. There are always early and late adaptors of any technology. Much like what is going on with our cars today, hybrids are usually last gasps of those who recognize something is up, but aren’t willing to fully change. They want to have it both ways, by layering new technologies onto old platforms. The Spanish did their best to stave off the Age of Sail with galleasses, which were oar-powered galleys that they also mounted sails and cannon onto and sent out as part of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Of course, these rickety hybrids proved useless compared to the purpose-built English sailing ships that were both more seaworthy and packed more cannon. Most galleasses never even made it home. Similarly, steam-powered warships in the British navy still mounted sails until 1880. Boot calls such hybrids “the military equivalent of a duck-billed platypus.” While marginally better than the old way, they are not only typically ugly, but also far less effective than a full transition to the new technology RMA (the robotic equivalents are the convertible systems).

In turn, just because the old technology sticks around doesn’t mean that a revolution hasn’t occurred. For example, many people around the world still push plows behind donkeys, the same way people did two thousand years ago. That doesn’t mean that industrialization and biotech haven’t revolutionized the overall field of agriculture. The same holds true in war. The German army that launched the blitzkrieg at the start of World War II still had horse cavalry divisions, but it was the tanks in its panzer divisions that signified the RMA.

Often, no one even recognizes that an RMA has happened until after the fact. For example, machine guns allowed tiny European armies to beat huge tribal forces in the late 1800s. But it wasn’t until after the slaughter of the first few years of World War I that generals would finally acknowledge that machine guns had also revolutionized the way fighting would take place on European battlefields.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE NETWORK, BABY

To Cebrowski and the movement he would come to signify, the twenty-first-century revolution in war would be information technology networks. The key to what was called “network-centric warfare” was the shift to the new information technologies of computers, the Internet, fiber optics, and so forth, which allowed an enhanced level of connection and information sharing. Planes or ships or soldiers in the field didn’t have to communicate via carrier pigeons, telegraph, or radios but could now instantly e-mail each other. This would infinitely speed up the pace of operations, they argued. Soldiers and generals a continent away could look at the same image online, at the same time, which they felt would provide shared awareness of what was going on. This ability to “network information” would allow various military units to “self-synchronize” their efforts. They could operate with a speed and cohesion that would “dramatically increase force effectiveness.”

Central to the network-centric concept was, as the name suggests, the power of the network. That is, a network linked together would be quicker, smarter, and more lethal than the sum of its individual parts and would quickly overwhelm whatever foe lay in its path. This “information advantage,” argued Cebrowski, would be huge. The sharing of information across the system, as well as the ability to crack into the enemy’s systems, would create “near-perfect” intelligence. The side that was networked would not only know exactly where its own soldiers were, so that they could be deployed to perfect efficiency, but it would also know where the enemy was, even better than the enemy troops’ own leaders. Your side could destroy an enemy unit not only before it saw you, but even before the enemy’s own commanders knew his units had arrived on the battlefield.

This advantage of networking created two fundamental differences with past RMAs, argued proponents like Cebrowski. The first is that it was the software, not the hardware, of war that mattered. Indeed, the corps of followers that sprang up to back the network-centric concept described “a move away from platforms to networks” as the ideal model of war. That is, for the very first time in war, the weapon system you were using was beside the point. What now mattered was whether you were “networked” into a “system of systems.”

The second difference, they argued, arose from its focus on sharing information. This RMA would do something that no other had been able to achieve: lift the proverbial “fog of war.” The term “fog of war” originally referred to the immense clouds of smoke created by musket fire that often obscured what was happening in battles. Today it refers to all the confusion, mistakes, delays, and misperceptions that happen in war because of the difficulty of coordinating operations in an atmosphere of fear, fatigue, and uncertainty while another side is trying to kill you. The famous nineteenth-century Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, whose textbook On War is taught at every U.S. military school, argued that the combined problems of “fog” (getting good information was difficult in battle) and “friction” (actions rarely work out as planned in battle) were inherent, enduring, and inevitable aspects of war. “Everything in war is very simple,” he observed, “but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.”

According to its supporters, this new RMA had solved these problems. The networked approach meant that commanders could command and soldiers could fight, as one report put it, with “near-perfect clarity.” “Lifting the fog of war” (as one book was even titled) would “result in a quantum leap in operations.” Or, as another report on this new philosophy of war put it, “technological innovation, particularly in information technology, will purge the conduct of war of the uncertainties and ambiguities of the past. For those happy powers that set the technological pace, war will become an essentially frictionless engineering exercise.”

The network-centric crowd had huge expectations for such a shift. Through achieving “information dominance,” a networked military force would be like a Wal-Mart at war with a bunch of small-town mom-and-pop stores; it would inevitably be “a winning force.” Even better, they argued, this new revolution was tailor-made for the United States. As one later argued in an official magazine of the U.S. military, “The U.S. is the only nation that is successfully and at great speed adapting to the new information-based technologies.... By linking a system of systems, the U.S. can develop battle space awareness for commanders while preventing enemies from doing the same.”

Cebrowski and Garstka’s famous article even made historic comparisons, hinting that history would one day look back at the networking revolution as comparable to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. As one report on the movement he helped start said, “The IT-RMA was pitched as nothing short of a paradigm shift in the character of conflict and the conduct of warfare. It entailed the combination of new technologies and innovative operational and organizational concepts that fundamentally altered how one thought about war and war fighting. Consequently, the RMA involved much more than merely overlaying new technologies and hardware over existing force structures—it was necessarily a process of far-reaching, disruptive change.”

GULPING DOWN THE KOOL-AID

The idea of a network-centric revolution in war, at which only the United States could win, was immensely appealing. Indeed, soon after the article, presidential candidate George W. Bush laid out his vision of the future of the U.S. military in a key speech at the Citadel. At the center of it, Bush proclaimed, would be “a revolution in the technology of war,” which would allow the United States to “redefine war on our terms.”

As conservative analyst Fred Kagan notes, “Bush was (and remains) a firm believer in the idea of an RMA; he had proclaimed it a priority as early as 1999, long before anyone imagined that Donald Rumsfeld would again become secretary of defense.” While it is unclear to what depth Bush grasped the nuances of the network-centric model of warfare, it was indeed a mantra among the “Vulcans,” who had drafted Bush’s speech. Led by Condi Rice, the Vulcans were a group of conservative defense intellectuals and former national security officials who advised the then Texas governor on security and foreign policy issues. When Bush won, they all moved into top leadership positions at the Pentagon, State Department, and White House.

Once in power, as historian Max Boot (himself a conservative commentator) phrased it, they sought to fully “harness the technological advances of the information age to gain a qualitative advantage over any potential foe.” Retired marine officer Frank Hoffman even argues that the new team went beyond Cebrowski in their fandom. “They accepted the presumptions of the RMA school and took them to a higher level.”

After Bush’s inauguration, his new leadership team at the Pentagon, led by Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, moved quickly to make the vision of network-centric warfare a reality. The cantankerous Rumsfeld saw this as his opportunity to put his own stamp on the U.S military. In February 2001, just days into office, the new team announced that it would increase by $20 billion the research and development spending on “transformational” technology that would “propel America’s Armed Forces generations ahead in military technology.” In turn, the continuation of any existing military project would hinge on whether it fit into this new idea of a “transformation” to network-centric warfare.

Rather than a mass change in what weapons the Pentagon bought, Rumsfeld’s transformational vision was that the networking of these weapons together meant that it should change the way military operations were conceived. With the fog of war lifted and the “system of systems” working to perfection, fewer forces could be sent into battle and they could be lighter, quicker, and more decisive. The “platforms” were almost beside the point. “Today,” Rumsfeld stated, “speed and agility and precision can take the place of mass.” More could be done with less.

Perhaps the greatest sign that the new team at the Pentagon was drinking the network-centric warfare Kool-Aid was what happened next for Admiral Cebrowski. As an article in the U.S. Navy’s official journal put it, “If ‘Rummy’ was the president’s high priest of Defense Transformation, Cebrowski was his major prophet, or better yet messiah, announcing the New World Order just on the horizon.” The recently retired admiral was empowered in a way that he could never be while in active service, even when he had been in charge of the Naval War College. One of Rumsfeld’s signature organizational shake-ups at the Pentagon was the creation of a new Office of Force Transformation. For the next four years, Cebrowski would be its director. As one article on his role describes, Cebrowski was no longer an acolyte clamoring for change from the outside. “In this position, he was responsible for serving as an advocate, focal point, and catalyst for the transformation of the United States military.”

A few months later, the 9/11 attacks occurred and the vision of network-centric warfare was put to the test. As America struck back in Afghanistan, it soon appeared that the theories had proven correct. The key figures in the movement soon were declaring that it was the networking which had allowed U.S. forces to prevail where 80,000 Soviets had failed just a decade earlier. The few hundred American special forces that were first sent in were smaller in number than their Taliban foes, but they had beaten them convincingly. Networking meant that even individual soldiers riding on horseback could tap into information and awareness that altered the whole equation of battle.

With this “Afghanistan model” seeming to validate the whole vision of network-centric warfare, the idea took hold in the Pentagon that earlier notions of what it would take to topple a regime like Saddam Hussein’s no longer held true. This lowering of expected costs made the idea of invading Iraq far more appealing. Fully 680,000 coalition troops may have been needed to take back tiny Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War, but the acolytes argued that by using the network-centric approach, far fewer troops would be needed in 2003 to do far more (indeed, many originally wanted just 20,000 troops sent for the Iraq invasion, but after some pushback from the generals, the force was ultimately raised to 135,000). As historian Max Boot tells it, “Iraq, in turn, was set up from the beginning to be the ultimate test of network centric warfare: a small, high tech invasion force, moving quickly and striking at only those targets necessary to instill ‘shock and awe’ in the Iraqi government.”

The early success in Iraq seemed to indicate once again that the network-centric way of war had changed everything. The previous RMA “gold standard” of invasions had been the German blitzkrieg in 1940, in which the Nazis took over France in just forty-four days, “at a cost of ‘only’ 27,000 dead soldiers.” For the United States to seize Iraq in 2003, it took half the time, at .005 percent the cost (161 U.S. soldiers lost during the invasion, many of them actually killed by “friendly fire”). Again, the network-centric crowd cited that the key wasn’t that the United States was using fundamentally different weapons than its previous war, but that the networking into information technology had proven “central to American military dominance.” The transformation movement led by Admiral Cebrowski, and embraced by those in power, had seemingly proven that a revolution in war truly was at hand. Cebrowski, suffering from cancer, left the Pentagon at this high point in the movement, and passed away in 2005.

FACT AND FRICTION

Not all was well with the revolution, however. The first problem turned out to be the business assumptions upon which the whole movement was based. Battlefields are not the same as corporate boardrooms. The stakes are higher, the measures of victory and defeat different, and, while a company can selectively invest only in markets it could succeed in or shut down business units that don’t turn a profit, a military can’t always choose when, where, how, and who it will fight—the enemy gets a vote. Plus, there’s that little matter of violence. As one critic put it, “No one is shooting at the Coca-Cola Company.”

Even worse, the business assumptions behind network-centric warfare had been particularly selective. Cebrowski and his movement pulled their inspiration from the Internet boom in the late 1990s, when it seemed that having an IP address was all that it took for a business to succeed. Unfortunately, at almost the same exact time as the network-centric crowd was moving to put their supposed lessons from the market into place at the Pentagon, the market was learning its own new lessons. The fast money of “dot-com” was turning in to the crashing stock portfolios of “dot-bomb.”

What had worked for almost all the companies that Cebrowski, Rumsfeld, and others cited as models of success was not only difficult to translate into the setting of war, but wasn’t even working for these companies anymore. Almost every one of the companies they had adoringly name-dropped, like Cisco, Dell, American Airlines, and even Enron, were struggling or bankrupt within a few years, while the market behemoths they wanted to emulate, like Microsoft and Wal-Mart, faced both renewed competitors and new troubles. “Sloppy thinking” was how retired marine Frank Hoffman described it. “Theories and business models drawn from the exuberance surrounding the IT revolution displaced quite a bit of history and factual context.”

The same sorts of results from “irrational exuberance” were experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq. The seemingly “perfect” military operations proved to be anything but. As one retired officer noted, “We will never operate under perfect conditions. We will always lack something, whether it’s time, resources, or even a clearly defined mission.”

In Iraq, for instance, the fog of war cropped up in all sorts of places, even before the invasion morphed into the ensuing insurgency. Indeed, in the largest tank battle of the war, even the traditional sense of the term came back. An Iraqi Republican Guard counterattack was able to sneak right up on American forces simply because, as one soldier explained, “We kind of lost track of them in the smoke, haze, and confusion of the battle.”

The U.S. forces were all networked together, with a “blue force tracker” letting them know the position of all the friendly units, just as the network theorists had claimed would revolutionize war. The only problem is that they still didn’t know who the enemy (“the red force”) was or when and where he was coming. As one report dryly put it, “Situational awareness was proving to be more theoretical than actual.” Or, as a marine joked, “When do we get red force trackers?”

While the concept behind the Iraq war plan may have been IT-dominated, war itself couldn’t be turned into a perfect execution of commands merely by linking people by e-mail. Instead, all the various forces of chance, confusion, and error common in every previous war (Clausewitz’s “fog” and “friction”) still were present.

Moreover, when authentic experts in information technology examined the situation, they actually found a huge difference between the theories of networking and the reality in the field. Joshua Davis is a correspondent from Wired magazine, published in the Silicon Valley cyber-culture that had so excited the Pentagon’s network-centric crowd. As he recounts of embedding with U.S. forces during the invasion, “What I discovered was something entirely different from the shiny picture of techno-supremacy touted by the proponents of the Rumsfeld doctrine. I found an unsung corps of geeks improvising as they went, cobbling together a remarkable system from a hodgepodge of military-built networking technology, off-the-shelf gear, miles of Ethernet cable, and commercial software. And during two weeks in the war zone, I never heard anyone mention the ‘revolution in military affairs.’ ”

Rather than a seamless flow of information, soldiers wrestled with everything from Web browsers constantly crashing due to desert sand to heat fouling up equipment designed for use in offices, not battlefields. Indeed, at one point in Davis’s reporting, an army lieutenant resorts to navigating a convoy using an improvised GPS and some handheld walkie-talkie radios that he had bought from a hardware store back home. The soldier joked that “if we run out of batteries, this war is screwed.”

Little did Davis or the soldier know how true that statement really was at the time. One of the many unanticipated aspects that the network crowd didn’t take into account was how new technologies were creating new, unforeseen demands. The most widely used power source in the military is the BA 5590, a standard twelve-volt battery that powers everything from radios to antitank missiles. With all the networking, the demand for the batteries turned out to be much higher than ever planned (the marines alone were using up 3,028 of them a day). But there were no stockpiles. Explains the DefenseTech journal, “Major combat missions during Gulf War II almost ground to a halt—because of a shortage of batteries.” The only reason that the plug wasn’t literally pulled on the Iraq invasion is that thirty other nations loaned the United States extra batteries. Ironically, many of these nations were the very same ones from “old Europe” that politicians like Rumsfeld had lambasted during the “freedom fries” period of anger at traditional allies who had chosen not to send troops to Iraq.

As the fighting evolved from the invasion into a confusing and painful insurgency, it became all too clear that war would remain imperfect in Iraq, despite the supposed RMA of networking. While the network-centric crowd had been right that linking up would multiply the fighting power of each soldier, it was soon beside the point when forces couldn’t figure out who was an insurgent and who was a civilian and how they were organized. “Information dominance” became an ironic joke. In describing what followed the supposed “gold standard” invasion of Iraq, Milan Vego, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, tells how “there is probably no conflict in which U.S. forces have fought in such ignorance of the enemy’s purpose, strength, and leadership.”

IGNORING THE REAL REVOLUTION

In late 2006, over two hundred of the top thinkers and leaders in American security policy gathered for a discussion on “Rethinking the U.S. Military Revolution.” Held in a Washington, D.C., conference center, replete with the mandatory stale breakfast muffins and bad coffee, the session featured speeches by leading professors, analysts, and even the air force general who had helped plan the opening round of the Iraq invasion. Over the course of the session, they debated back and forth the future of network-centric warfare, what it had delivered on and where it had failed, and even what might become of Cebrowski’s old office, now that the venerable thinker had passed away.

More notable is what the gathered leaders and experts didn’t talk about. At this session, exclusively focused on what was revolutionary in war today and tomorrow, robotics and other unmanned technologies never came up, not even in a passing mention. The network-centric buzzword of “transformation” was used twenty-one times, despite the fact that by late 2006 it was clear that the advantages promised by its originators had not played out as expected. But words like “unmanned” or “robot” were never spoken, not even once.

Compare this scene with a different sort of meeting, just a few months earlier at a military base. General William Wallace, the four-star general in charge of U.S. military training, held a question-and-answer session about new technologies of war with a group of army troops, most of whom were just back from Iraq. Instead of the general giving the answers, he was the one asking the questions. The very first question he posed, focusing on a captain, was, of all the revolutionary new technologies the unit had tested out, “which one single piece would you deploy today?” The soldier answered, “Sir, the PackBot.” Or, as another soldier replied to a survey about what it was like to use this new unmanned system, “I believe that we are the pioneers of the Star Wars systems of the future.”

The Cebrowski-led network-centric crowd was right. Something truly big is going on in war. But they were wrong on everything else. In focusing purely on the 1990s Internet boom as their mantra, the network-centric folks, as well as the broader security studies field at that conference, missed the revolutionary part. They ignored not just what the soldiers in the field were saying, but the far more interesting and important developments in technology just coming to fruition.

The Internet has certainly affected how people shop, communicate, date, and even how they fight. That the network-centric crowd noticed this, particularly amid all the booming stock prices of the 1990s, was not all that difficult or surprising. But that did not make it an RMA, and certainly not one that would lift the fog of war.

Instead, when both soldiers in the field and scientists back in the labs talk about what is now revolutionary in technology, today they point to something else. As Rodney Brooks says, what is far more important is a robotics revolution, now at its “nascent stage, set to burst over us in the early part of the twenty-first century. Mankind’s centuries-long quest to build artificial creatures is bearing fruit.” As opposed to the IT networks that simply allow information to flow easier, robotics and AI are the real “tsunami that will toss our lives into disarray.”

And yet such technologies are almost completely without discussion among today’s theorists of war and politics. Indeed, the failure to even use the word “unmanned” in that sterile conference hall was only one example of how networks get attention, but robotics don’t even merit mention. I found it repeated again and again at major conferences and in publications on military history and strategy. Something big is going on in war, technology, and politics, and yet very few who study security issues are talking about it.

The result is that, as retired army lieutenant colonel Thomas Adams writes, we are “in something like the position of monarchies witnessing the democratic revolution at the beginning of the 19th century. Something profound and far-reaching is going on all around us, even within our own societies. But the advisors, courtiers, and generals that surround the throne are at a loss to determine what it means, much less what to do about it.”

It is not that the great minds who study war are willfully ignoring what is going on. Rather, as Bill Joy put it, “It is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of change.” Like any other change, RMAs do not happen in one single discrete event, one rush of wholesale change. Many seemingly important changes can occur (and distract) before the truly revolutionary part becomes clear. In turn, most revolutions don’t actually grow from one single invention, but from a convergence of technologies. For example, the Industrial Revolution that transformed society and then war in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries actually kicked off with the invention of the steam engine back in 1782. But the steam engine had to be brought together with everything from railroads to telegraphs for it to culminate as the industrial RMA that shaped World War I.

A good person to explain is actually another of the major thinkers behind the RMA movement inside the Pentagon, Andrew Marshall. Despite being eighty-three years young, Marshall is the Pentagon’s officially designated “futurist-in-chief,” directing its Office of Net Assessment, akin to an internal think tank for the Pentagon. While he was a huge supporter of Cebrowski’s and Rumsfeld’s excitement over networks, Marshall also warned that what they saw as key leaps in technology could just be the beginning, not the end, of a different sort of RMA. “There is a tendency to talk about the military revolution. This could have the sense that it is already here, already completed. I do not feel that this is the case. Probably we are just at the beginning, in which case, the full nature of the changes in the character of warfare have not fully emerged. . . . What we should be talking about is a hypothesis about major change taking place in the period ahead, the next couple decades.”

As Iraq soon illustrated, the network crowd was wrong that the fog of war would be lifted and wrong that the other side would be permanently locked out of the marketplace of war. Most important, it is becoming evident that they were wrong in their argument that the network, not the platform, was the only part that mattered.

“Historians will see the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade or two of the 21st century as a turning point in the evolution of armed conflict,” states a U.S. Army report, but not for the reasons that Cebrowski and the network acolytes originally believed. The networks of e-mail and Internet fiber optics that now bind military units together certainly do matter. They allow them to share information quicker than when they were using radios, phones, or faxes. But as we are beginning to learn, history will care far more about what these linkages enable. That is, these new digital links are important, but not as much as the platforms they now allow. What will stand out, what is historic for war, and human history in general, are the robotic weapons now playing greater roles on the battlefield. This is what future historians will find far more notable, not the difference between units connected by a fax versus an e-mail that so intrigued the network-centric acolytes. It is far more important that humans’ 5,000-year-old monopoly over the fighting of war is over.

This aspect of a fundamentally changed platform is also key to the story of whether an RMA is at hand. At their fundamental level, all the past RMAs in history were about changing how wars were fought. Whether it was the longbow, the gun, the airplane, or even the atomic bomb, the essential changes were new weapons and/or ways of using them that transformed the speed, distance, or destructive power of war. By contrast, the introduction of unmanned systems to the battlefield doesn’t change simply how we fight, but for the first time changes who fights at the most fundamental level. It transforms the very agent of war, rather than just its capabilities.

It is difficult to weigh the enormity of such a change. John Pike of the Global Security organization puts it into this broad historic context. “First, you had human beings without machines. Then, you had human beings with machines. And, finally you have machines without human beings.” Security analyst Christopher Coker comments, “We now stand on the cusp of post-human history.”

Such broad strokes, though, don’t help us understand exactly what these changes actually bode for war. While some have argued that the new technologies of precise weapons offer to take humankind into “a very different age; perhaps a more humane one,” it is becoming clear that robotics and unmanned systems are still a revolution in war. If it is a different sort of RMA, it is an RMA all the same.

The modes, manners, and character of war have changed in past RMAs, and will do so with this one. But it doesn’t mean everything will change. There the network-centric crowd was wrong again. Even in this most fundamental revolution of who fights in war, the foundations of war remain the same. Even with robots and other new unmanned technologies, war is still about using violence to make the other side do what you want. It is still against an enemy, trying to figure out how to use its strengths against your weaknesses. And it will still involve all the unexpected confusion, mistakes, and dilemmas that go hand in hand with both technology and war. The fog of war ain’t going anywhere. Even with robots, we are learning that war will remain as unpredictable as it is enduring.

WOE-BOT, WHOA- BOT!

January 25, 1979, was to be a special day for Robert Williams, a worker at Ford Motor Company’s Flat Rock casting plant in Michigan. The twenty-five-year-old man’s son was celebrating his second birthday. Unfortunately, it was also the same day that the robot operating an automated parts retrieval system near Williams’s workstation went on the fritz. In reaching out for a part, the robot’s arm swung up unexpectedly and smashed into the man’s head. As a report at the time tells, “The robot kept operating while Williams lay dead for about 30 minutes.”

While one report described Williams as the first person in history “to be murdered by a robot,” the reality is that his death was a result of a simple but tragic accident. He may have been the first, but he would be far from the last. A survey of American factories where robots are present found that 4 percent have had “major robotic accidents.” Just what defines a “major robotic accident”? This category includes anything from robots smashing into people, like what happened to Williams, to pouring molten aluminum on them, or mistakenly picking up workers and placing them on conveyor belts, in order to be turned into cars.

These sorts of incidents are not just limited to American robots. In Britain, for example, seventy-seven robot-related accidents were reported in 2006. In Japan, the incidents range from an unfortunate janitor who was accidentally turned “into sausage meat” by a robot to the time that Prime Minister Koizumi was literally “attacked by a humanoid robot” that malfunctioned and swung at him during a factory tour.

One engineer puts it this way: “Robots are very complex, autonomous tools; they make their own decisions. You know how hard it is to program a VCR? A robot is like a VCR on crack.” The dark irony is that the more advanced robots get, the more complex they become, and the more potential they have for a failure in either their hardware or software. One small widget cracks, slips, or breaks, and everything designed to work smoothly falls apart. Get even one icon wrong in billions of lines of code, and the whole system can either shut down or act unexpectedly.

While Clausewitz would describe these as “fog” or “friction,” there might be another way to think about this. The oft-cited Moore’s law about growing technology capabilities is not the only law that applies to robotics. So does Murphy’s law, the rule that “anything that can go wrong, will.” (Murphy’s law originally came from an air force researcher in the 1950s, Edward Murphy, who came up with it to capture the essential “cussedness” of inanimate objects.)

Yet on the rare occasions when people in the political or military field do talk about unmanned systems and robotics, they tend only to comprehend the growing capabilities, not the accompanying complexities. They come across sounding like the slogan for Michael Crichton’s Westworld, a movie about robots going murderously berserk at a theme park. “Nothing can possibly go wrong . . . go wrong...go wrong.” Indeed, at the start of my research for this book, I asked the then secretary of the army if he could identify any challenges that the greater use of unmanned systems would bring to the military. His response: “No.”

“OOPS MOMENTS”

Just before nine in the morning on October 12, 2007, the 10th Anti-Aircraft Regiment began its role in the South African military’s annual Seboka training exercise. The operation involved some five-thousand troops from seventeen other units, so the pressure was on to get everything right. But the unit’s automated MK5 antiaircraft system, sporting two 35mm cannons linked up to a computer, appeared to jam. As a follow-up report recounts, this apparently “caused a ‘runaway.’ ” The description of what happened next is chilling. “There was nowhere to hide. The rogue gun began firing wildly, spraying high-explosive shells at a rate of 550 a minute, swinging around through 360 degrees like a high-pressure hose.”

The young female officer in charge rushed forward to try to shut down the robotic gun, but, continues the report, “she couldn’t, because the computer gremlin had taken over.” The automated gun shot her and she collapsed to the ground. The gun’s auto-loading magazines held five hundred high-explosive rounds. By the time they were emptied, nine soldiers were dead (including the officer) and fourteen seriously injured, all because of what was later called a “software glitch.”

The story of unexpected things happening with robotic systems in war did not start in 2007. Indeed, it goes back to 1917, among the very first tests of unmanned weapons. The Sopwith AT was an experimental, radio-controlled version of the Sopwith Camel biplane (familiar to more people as the plane that Snoopy flew against the Red Baron). The drone was to be loaded up with dynamite and kamikazed into the German zeppelin blimps that were bombing Britain during World War I. At its first demonstration, the robotic biplane took off as planned, but then proceeded to dive at a crowd of generals watching below, who ran for cover.

These sorts of errors and breakdowns continued through the nascent history of automated military systems in the twentieth century. The scariest had to have been when World War III almost started over a computer error. The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System was a detection system based in Greenland that was to warn if the Soviets launched their nuclear missiles. On October 5, 1960, the system “detected” a launch “with a certainty of 99.9%.” NATO went on alert and prepared its retaliation. But, with just minutes to spare, the military figured out that the Soviets had not attacked; instead of flames from intercontinental ballistic missiles flying at the United States, the computer had detected the rising moon. It is fortunate for all humankind that this incident happened in October 1960, not two years later, which would have placed the computer’s mistake right in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when fingers were on more of a hair trigger.

Such a narrowly averted crisis sounds like something out of the movies, but these Hollywood scenarios played out far too often in reality. On November 9, 1979, a real-life version of the movie WarGames occurred, when a test program was mistakenly loaded into the actual missile warning system. The program contained war games simulating missile launches. But not knowing these were games, the system interpreted the launches as real. The U.S. Strategic Command had reached the point of scrambling alert bombers into the air before the error was caught.

Similarly, Eddie Murphy’s otherwise forgettable movie Best Defense played out in real life when the prototype of the automated DIVAD (division air defense) cannon was first tested in the 1980s. Instead of aiming at the target helicopter flying overhead, it mistakenly targeted a port-a-potty toilet behind a review stand full of visiting dignitaries (the toilet had a rotating fan in the vent, which fooled the gun system into thinking the potty was the target helicopter). Fortunately, the gun was unloaded, so the only people hurt were those who jumped from the top of the stands to run away.

Even with the advanced robotic systems in use today, these same sorts of “incidents” still crop up. This is partly why the trend toward arming more and more automated systems, perhaps before they are ready, concerns so many. As technology journalist Noah Shachtman explains, “We’ve all had problems with our PCs freezing up, frying their little computer minds. That’s inconvenient. But it’s much more worrisome if it’s a laptop computer armed with an M-16.”

A major cause of these sorts of “oops moments,” as one roboticist at iRobot kindly termed them, comes from interference from electromagnetic signals. Every electromagnetic device has a bandwidth, but overlapping frequency bands create crosstalk and disruption. For instance, when you fly on an airplane, they ask you not to use cell phones or any other electronic devices during takeoff and landing, for fear that the various signals they send out might jam or disrupt the plane’s communications and systems. The same can happen to a robot. One sergeant just back from Iraq described how his Talon robot “acts erratically” if it gets any radio-frequency interference. Another told how his robot would “go squirrelly” sometimes if it lost the signal. The robots are supposed to shut themselves down if the signal is compromised or cut off for any reason, so I asked him to explain what he meant by “squirrelly.” He responded, “It will drive off the road, come back at you, spin around, stuff like that.”

The SWORDS is essentially a Talon robot with a machine gun or rocket mounted on top. So stories like these may explain why the system supposedly started spinning in a circle during one early demonstration (again, fortunately, the gun was not loaded at the time). A roboticist at a rival firm described this incident as the SWORDS doing “a Crazy Ivan” (making a reference to the movie The Hunt for Red October, where a submarine would go in a complete circle, as if the driver was drunk). This problem is not exclusive to the Talon or SWORDS. The Marine Corps’ Gladiator combat robot prototype (the one the size of a golf cart) also had a similar Crazy Ivan experience during its testing, driving about in a circle that left the marines at the exercise not knowing whether to laugh or run away.

War zones have no kindly stewardesses to tell everyone to “turn off your cell phones and other electronic devices.” Instead, between the radio signals, computers, machines, and electronic equipment (all the connections that define network-centric warfare), the modern-day battlefield is literally awash with electromagnetic waves and other potential interference. In turn, many of the robots used in the military use “over-the-counter” components that were not planned for the rigors of war. Even more, tells an engineer who tests robotic systems for the army, there are also great demands from the higher-ups to get the systems out to the field as quickly as possible. He described “pressure to try to pass safety tests only with the paper version [of the robot’s design]; that is, no field tests.”

Matters get worse when the realities of war kick in. A particular tactic of the insurgents is to use radio signals and cell phones to trigger their IEDs to explode. U.S. soldiers have responded by equipping their vehicles with electronic jammers that block the signals, so that the insurgents can’t order their roadside bombs to blow up.

Unfortunately, the jammers are just as lethal to the robots. The Raven drones, for example, are supposed to fly themselves home if they lose their signal, but reportedly sometimes just crash when they fly over a unit using jammers. One (not so politically correct) army EOD team even nicknamed its Talon “Rainman the robot.” because whenever the robot got near a unit using jammers, it “starts acting even more autistic than usual.”

DEEP-FRIED ROBOTS

The Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke the elder is credited with the truism of war, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” No matter how good the strategies and technologies one side has at the start, it can be counted on that the other will react, adjust, and change. The French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre offered a parallel from sports: “In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”

Whether it is Superman and Kryptonite or Wimpy and hamburgers, everything has a weakness. Indeed, even the Death Star, the most powerful weapon ever imagined in science fiction, was taken out by a young insurgent (yes, that’s what Luke Skywalker was) dropping a bomb through a ventilation shaft. The same is true with real technologies of war. As writer and retired army colonel Ralph Peters explains, “The more complex any system becomes, the more inherent vulnerabilities it has. You just need to find one chink in the armor, change one integer in the code.”

Fog and friction don’t just come from accidents, but also from an enemy. The robots of today may be revolutionary, but they have all sorts of weaknesses that are just being discovered. And when they are, they will be exploited. For example, what happens accidentally with electromagnetic interference might be done intentionally. Many robots are steered using GPS signals that help them find their location anywhere in the world. However, these signals are “weak and easily jammed,” according to one U.S. Army report. Some companies reportedly offer GPS “blockers” commercially for as little as two-hundred dollars. One jamming device is even powered by plugging it into a car’s cigarette lighter.

Instead of jamming a system, an enemy might also try to use the interference to literally fry it. When the first nuclear bombs were tested, researchers discovered that, in addition to the explosion and radiation, the bombs also could create a massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP). When gamma rays collide with air molecules, they send out an intense burst of voltage that can cause surges and other kinds of damage to unprotected electric devices, even causing some systems to shoot sparks and catch on fire. It was because of this that, if the cold war ever turned hot, both the United States and the Soviet Union planned to detonate massive EMP bombs over each other’s territory, to fry the other side’s electricity and communications (a 100-kiloton EMP detonated at an altitude of fifty miles would burn out the electronics of any unprotected semiconductor within a 600-mile radius).

While the effects of EMPs on electronic devices were originally discovered during cold war nuclear bomb tests, it is not necessary to use nukes to create them. The United States, Russia, and China are all reported to have ongoing work on radio-frequency weapons, which cause a similar effect, just without all the fuss and muss of a nuclear holocaust. Such weapons would also be quite deadly to robotics (indeed, in the Matrix movies, EMP weapons are the only thing that defeat the Sentinels, the bad guys’ robots). As Bill Baker, an air force researcher, explains, “The smarter the weapons, the dumber HPM [high-power microwaves] can make it.”

By all reports, the physics behind building such radio-frequency weapons, or “e-bombs,” to take out twenty-first-century technology requires only a 1950s level of technology. For this reason, many military officers worry about the continued trend toward using commercial components in their robotic weapons. They may be cheaper, but they often are not hardened against such attacks.

Electronic devices can’t just be jammed or fried; they can also be hacked or even hijacked, with the enemy taking over to make the system do whatever it wants. In a U.S. Army journal article, Ralph Peters described how future wars would also include electronic “battles of conviction,” in which opposing combat systems struggle to “convince” each other’s electronics to do things their own side doesn’t want. “Robot, drive yourself off a cliff.” Or, even worse, “Robot, recode all American soldiers and civilians as enemy combatants. Authorized to fire at will.”

The U.S. military is, some fear, particularly vulnerable to hacking attacks. Ninety-five percent of its communications travel over commercial telecommunications networks, including satellite systems. Indeed, this reliance on “information superhighways” was identified by the Chinese Academy of Military Science as making the United States particularly “vulnerable to robots equipped with ‘electrical incapacitation systems.’ ”

While manufacturers are continually trying to protect their systems’ software from intruders, not everyone is convinced that this will always be possible. “The idea that they can make software unhackable, I just don’t buy it,” says Peters. Indeed, hackers often find cracking into seemingly impregnable systems surprisingly easy. Hackers once posted on the Internet how to build a “BlueSniper rifle,” a device that basically taps into wireless devices from more than a mile away. At the “Defcon” hacker convention, they even talked about successfully testing it out on the One Wilshire building in Los Angeles. This building, “the world’s most interconnected facility,” is notable as it houses nearly every major telecommunications giant in the field, making it the “premier communications hub of the Pacific Rim.” How hard was it for the hackers to make a weapon to tap in? Told one hacker, it only took a trip to Radio Shack. “The parts are easily available for a few hundred dollars and you can make this gun in a long afternoon.”

Of course, military systems have firewalls to keep unwanted guests out (though the telecom companies likely thought they did too), and the military’s internal computer network, “SIPRNet” (the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network), its internal Internet used for classified communications, is supposed to be completely cut off from intruders. And yet, asks information security expert Richard Clarke, “Why is it that every time a virus pops up on the regular Internet, it also shows up in SIPRNet? It is supposed to be separate and distinct, so how’s that happen?... It’s a real Achilles’ heel.”

No matter how great the capabilities a new RMA delivers, modern enemies aren’t just going to sit back and accept defeat. Every new technology always produces new countermeasures, sometimes just as sophisticated, sometimes quite simple. Insurgents in Iraq have already resorted to digging “tiger traps,” deep holes for ground robots to roll over and fall into.

Adversaries might also break the old rules of what was fair in war, using the same sort of tactics to puzzle robots that have recently confounded human forces, from disguising their equipment as civilian to using human shields. War journalist Robert Young Pelton even jokes that the most effective counter against robots like the SWORDS may turn out to be a “six-year-old kid armed with a spray paint can.” As he explains, it would take a bloody-minded military indeed to program a robot to shoot an unarmed kindergartner. And yet all the kid has to do is spray some paint into the camera and the technologically advanced robotic system would be defeated.

More than forty years ago, navy admiral Charles Turner Joy explained a cardinal rule of war, even in RMAs. “We cannot expect the enemy to oblige by planning his wars to suit our weapons; we must plan our weapons to fight war where, when, and how the enemy chooses.”

UNMANNED CONFUSION

The fog of war can even emerge when accidents don’t happen, or the enemy reacts as originally planned. One challenge cropping up with the first wave of military robots is coordinating and controlling all the different unmanned systems in the incredibly complex environment of battle.

The use of drones has increased significantly because they help the mission and save lives. But this growth, in turn, causes new problems. There are so many UAVs buzzing above Baghdad, for instance, that it is the most crowded airspace in the entire world, with all sorts of near misses and even a few crashes. In one instance, an unmanned Raven drone plowed into a manned helicopter.

A linked problem of coordination is what is known as the “bandwidth battle.” Essentially, there is only so much space in the spectrum to convey all the instructions, commands, information, and requests going back and forth. But the changes in war are creating far greater demands on this limited space. “During Gulf War I in 1991, the bandwidth I was able to put together added up to 100 megabits, and that took care of about 540,000 troops we deployed,” says retired air force lieutenant general Harry Raduege. By 2003, the bandwidth needed was 4.2 gigabits; basically, the use of bandwidth went up by forty times, despite there being about a quarter of the people.

The challenge is not just the raw demand. Much like how the cell phone networks in New York City and Washington, D.C., effectively shut down on 9/11, when everyone tried to call their loved ones simultaneously, the same swamping effect can happen in war. Colonel Jeffrey Smith of the 22nd Signal Brigade set up the very first networks in Iraq. He describes what might happen if an intelligence officer received an important image on a robotic sensor and needed to pass it to a commander. “For him to deliver that to a command post, he would have to navigate a pipe that had competition from 20 to 25 command posts for basic voice communications.”

In fact, unmanned systems may become part of both the problem and the solution. Navy vice admiral Lewis Crenshaw complains about drones that are “staring at the ground and see nothing interesting; we don’t need to see that and soak up 512 kilobits of my precious bandwidth.” Meawhile, Lieutenant General Steven Boutelle, chief information officer of the army, wants to place wireless transponders on UAVs so they could create roving wireless “hotspots on the battlefield.”

How this will play out remains to be seen, but it illustrates that another problem of coordination will persist: interservice rivalry. One air force pilot exploded when asked about this aspect: “Who’s overseeing all this crap? The army has more UAVs than the air force. Who’s integrating it all? Who’s passing the needed information back and forth? These structures are not in place. We’ve created systems without regard to linkages. So we have a fancy Predator, but no link to the back-end crew doing analysis to make it all worthwhile. We are setting up our people for mediocrity!”

THE COMING REVOLUTION

Admiral Cebrowski seemed like a prophet of a new era, but he turned out to be a false one. War is still far from perfect, nor are networks the aspect that will prove to be the most revolutionary or historic.

As the following chapters in part 2 explore, robotics is a revolutionary technology that is truly changing war as we once knew it. But the fog of war is still there, just like in every previous revolution in military history. More broadly, this latest RMA will be like every other in creating a wide variety of new questions, concerns, and dilemmas that will ripple out beyond the confines of the battlefield. When FDR approved the development of the atomic bomb at the start of World War II, for example, he could anticipate that it might make a powerful weapon, perhaps even one powerful enough to end the war. But little could he have known that this new technology would spur such second-order effects as a new form of “cold” war, or even the third-order effect of a space race that would take man to the moon (which, of course, led to the ultimate fourth-order effect of the atomic bomb, a generation of kids sugared up by drinking Tang every morning). RMAs are not mere pebbles tossed into the pond of history. They are boulders. The robotics revolution will likely be the same, just in a whole new way.

If the previous chapters in part 1 were about understanding the technologic changes that we are creating, part 2 is about exploring what these winds of change will create for us. The increasing development and use of unmanned systems in war will, as one Army War College report put it, “unleash a hurricane of political, legal and ethical problems.” As the following chapters lay out, wars will be fought in new ways, perhaps even leading to the rise and fall of global powers. New actors will gain greater strength than ever before, even altering the relationships of states and their citizens, while conflict will be spurred on by whole new grievances. The way warriors think about their weapons and their fellow soldiers will be rewritten. The public’s relationship with its warriors will shift, which will reshape where wars begin and end. Soldiers and their commanders will wrestle with new dilemmas of how to fight and how to lead, while the scope of who fights in war will be expanded, leading to new issues of warriors’ identity. And, finally, the laws and ethics that surround and seek to regulate war will be presented with new challenges, even ultimately leading to questions of whether humans can maintain control of the wars and weapons that we unleash.

In many ways, the full scope of these various changes explored in the following chapters are not just illustrations that an RMA driven by robotics is at hand. They are evidence of its historic importance. As an army report on the future of war concluded, “Ultimately no one can fully predict the second order effects of innovations, much less third and fourth order effects. But this does not justify ignoring them.”