It is all very nice to play soldier, but it is dangerous. Our technology is reaching the point were we
simply get the biological component completely out of the loop. Our drone planes are a good start and the
next generation of fighters will certainly be drones. A bipedal configuration slaved to a human
operator getting superior sensory input but a long way from the point of danger
is very plausible.
The reality is that it is expensive to salvage human damage and dirt
cheap to salvage a drone soldier. What
do you think we are going to do? That
makes the human soldier a last resort fighter which means he gets a great
training of great benefit to society and is never wasted.
Of course a few will want a little of the adrenaline high though likely
briefly.
More Than Human? The Ethics
of Biologically Enhancing Soldiers
FEB 16 2012, 3:57 PM
ET 87
Our ability to
"upgrade" the bodies of soldiers through drugs, implants, and
exoskeletons may be upending the ethical norms of war as we've understood them.
If we can engineer a soldier
who can resist torture, would it still be wrong to torture this person with the
usual methods? Starvation and sleep deprivation won't affect a super-soldier
who doesn't need to sleep or eat. Beatings and electric shocks won't break
someone who can't feel pain or fear like we do. This isn't a comic-book story,
but plausible scenarios based on actual military projects today.
In the next generation, our
warfighters may be able to eat grass,communicate telepathically,resist stress, climb
walls like a lizard, and much more. Impossible? We only need to look at nature
for proofs of concept. For instance, dolphins don't sleep (or they'd drown);
Alaskan sled-dogs can run for days without rest or food; bats navigate with echolocation;
and goats will eat pretty much anything. Find out how they work, and maybe we
can replicate that in humans.
As you might expect, there are
serious moral and legal risks to consider on this path. Last week in the UK,
The Royal Society released its report " Neuroscience, Conflict and
Security." This timely report worried about risks posed by cognitive
enhancements to military personnel, as well as whether new nonlethal
tactics, such as directed energy weapons, could violate either the Biological
or Chemical Weapons Conventions.
While an excellent start, the
report doesn't go far enough, as I have been explaining to the US
intelligence community , National Research Council, DARPA, and other
organizations internationally. The impact of neural and physical human
enhancements is more far-reaching than that, such as to the question of
torturing the enhanced. Other issues, as described below, pose real challenges
to military policies and broader society.
Why Enhancements?
Technology makes up for our
absurd frailty. Unlike other animals, we're not armed with fangs, claws,
running speed, flight, venom, resilience, fur, or other helpful features to
survive a savage world. We naked apes couldn't survive at all, if it weren't
for our tool-making intellect and resourcefulness.
And therein lies a fundamental
problem with how Homo sapiens wage war: As impressive as our weapon
systems may be, one of the weakest links in armed conflicts-as well as one of
the most valuable assets-continues to be the warfighters themselves. Hunger,
fatigue, and the need for sleep can quickly drain troop morale and cause a
mission to fail. Fear and confusion in the "fog of war" can lead to
costly mistakes, such as friendly-fire casualties. Emotions and adrenaline can
drive otherwise-decent individuals to perform vicious acts, from verbal abuse
of local civilians to torture and illegal executions, making an international
incident from a routine patrol. And post-traumatic stress can take a
devastating toll on families and add pressure on already-burdened health
services.
To be sure, military training
seeks to address these problems, but it can do only so much, and science and
technology help to fill those gaps. In this case, what's needed is an upgrade
to the basic human condition. We want our warfighters to be made stronger, more
aware, more durable, more maneuverable in different environments, and so on.
The technologies that enable these abilities fall in the realm of human
enhancement, and they include neuroscience, biotechnology, nanotechnology,
robotics, artificial intelligence, and more.
While some of these
innovations are external devices, such as exoskeletons that give the
wearer super-strength, our technology devices are continually shrinking in
size. Our mobile phones today have more computing power than the Apollo rockets
that blasted to the moon. So there's good reason to think that these external
enhancements someday can be small enough to be integrated with the human body,
for an even greater military advantage.
The use of human enhancement
technologies by the military is not new. Broadly construed, vaccinations could
count as an enhancement of the human immune system, and this would place the
first instance of military human enhancement (as opposed to mere tool-use) at
our very first war, the American Revolutionary War in 1775-1783. George
Washington, as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, ordered the
vaccinations of American troops against smallpox, as the British Army was
suspected of using the virus as a form of biological warfare. (Biowarfare
existed for centuries prior, such as in catapulting corpses to spread
the plague during the Middle Ages.) At the time, the Americans largely were not
exposed to smallpox in childhood and therefore had not built up immunity to the
disease, as the British had.
Since then, militaries
worldwide have used caffeine and amphetamines to keep their troops awake and
alert, an age-old problem in war. In fact, some pilots are required to take
drugs-known as "go pills"-on long-distance missions, or else lose
their jobs. And there's ongoing interest in using pharmaceuticals, such as
modafinil (a cognitive enhancer), dietary supplements, as well as gene therapy
to boost the performance of warfighters.
The Questions
Some of the issues with military
enhancements echo now-familiar debates, such as: whether the use of
anabolic steroids by athletes is harmful to their health; whether that would
set a bad example for impressionable children; whether Ritalin use in academia
is cheating and unfair to others; whether longevity would bankrupt pension
plans; whether manipulating biology amounts to " playing God";
and so on. But there are new concerns as well.
Ethical and safety issues
Established standards in
biomedical ethics-such as the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, and
others-govern the research stage of enhancements, that is, experimentation on
human subjects. But "military necessity" or the exigencies of war can
justify actions that are otherwise impermissible, such as a requirement to obtain
voluntary consent of a patient. Under what conditions, then, could a warfighter
be commanded (or refuse) a risky or unproven enhancement, such as a vaccine
against a new biological weapon? Because some enhancements could be risky or
pose long-term health dangers, such as addiction to "go pills",
should military enhancements be reversible? What are the safety considerations
related to more permanent enhancements, such as bionic parts or a neural
implant?
Tactical and logistical
implications
Once ethical and safety issues
are resolved, militaries will need to attend to the impact of human
enhancements on their operations. For instance, how would integrating both
enhanced and unenhanced warfighters into the same unit affect their cohesion?
Would enhanced soldiers rush into riskier situations, when their normal
counterparts would not? If so, one solution could be to confine enhancements to
a small, elite force. (This could also solve the consent problem.) As both an
investment in and potential benefit to the individual warfighters, is it
reasonable to treat them differently from the unenhanced, such as on length of
service and promotion requirements? On the other hand, preferential treatment
to any particular group could lower overall troop morale.
Legal and policy issues
More broadly, how do
enhancements impact international humanitarian law, or the laws of war? The
Geneva and Hague Conventions prohibit torture of enemy combatants, but enhanced
soldiers could reasonably be exempt if underlying assumptions disappear-that
humans respond to a certain level of pain and need sleep and food-as I
suggested at the beginning. Further, enhancements that transform our biology
could violate the Biological Weapons Convention, if enhanced humans (or
animals) plausibly count as "biological agents", which is not a
well-defined term. International law aside, there may be policy questions:
Should we allow scary enhancements, which was the point of fierce Viking
helmets or samurai masks? Could that exacerbate hostilities by prompting
charges of dishonor and cowardice, the same charges we're now hearing
about military robots?
Military-civilian issues
As history shows, we can
expect the proliferation of every military technology we invent. The method of
diffusion is different and more direct with enhancements, though: Most
warfighters return to society as civilians (our veterans) and would carry back
any permanent enhancements and addictions with them. The US has about 23
million veterans-or one out of every 10 adults-in addition to 3 million active
and reserve personnel, so this is a significant segment of the population.
Would these enhancements, such as a drug or an operation that subdues emotions,
create problems for the veteran to assimilate to civilian life? Would they
create problems for other civilians who may be at a competitive disadvantage to
the enhanced veteran who, for instance, has bionic limbs and enhanced
cognition?
Soldier 2.0 is a Hybrid
The military technology
getting the most public attention now is robotics, but we can think of it
as sharing the same goal as human enhancement. Robotics aims to create a
super-soldier from an engineering approach: they are our proxy
mech-warriors. However, there are some important limitations to those machines.
For one thing, they don't have a sense of ethics-of what is right and
wrong-which can be essential on the battlefield. Where it is child's play to
identify a ball or coffee mug or a gun, it's notoriously tough for a
computer to do that. This doesn't give us much confidence that a robot can
reliably distinguish friend from foe, at least in the foreseeable future.
In contrast, cognitive and
physical enhancements aim to create a super-soldier from
a biomedical direction, such as with modafinil and other drugs. For
battle, we want our soft organic bodies to perform more like machines.
Somewhere in between robotics and biomedical research, we might arrive at the
perfect future warfighter: one that is part machine and part human, striking a
formidable balance between technology and our frailties.
In changing human biology, we
also may be changing the assumptions behind existing laws of war and even human
ethics. If so, we would need to reexamine the foundations of our social and
political institutions, if prevailing norms can't stretch to cover new
technologies. In comic books and science fiction , we can ignore or
suspend disbelief about these details. But in the real world-as life imitates
art, and "mutant powers" really are changing the world-the details
matter.
Acknowledgements: This article
is adapted from a research report, in progress, funded by The Greenwall
Foundation, with co-investigators Maxwell Mehlman (Case Western Reserve
University) and Keith Abney (Cal Poly).
Images: 1. US Marine Corps. 2.
Lockheed Martin. 3. US Marine Corps. 4. US Marine Corps. Note: these images
have been digitally enhanced.
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