The Future of Unmanned Maritime Systems

                                         Photo by Boeing.
   
Robots are on the ground, in the air, can be used inside your body to fight disease and now, they roam autonomously beneath the water.  They are coming for your jobs. But, they are also coming for independence.  Robots, lethality and autonomy can create combinations with world altering consequences.

  From a U.S. military perspective, development and testing of  underwater maritime systems (UMS) can't happen fast enough.  Eckstein (2017) points this out in the article Navy Racing to Test, Field Unmanned Maritime Vehicles for Future Ships. According to Eckstein, the current push is to clear underwater mines and obstacles, but probable usage is likely to go far beyond that.

  The present focus of the U.S. military is in supplementing both surface and underwater naval operations with UMS.  In fact, the Navy is designing a new type of deployment configuration called the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).  The LCS acts as a "mother ship" in controlling UMS craft configured for many different types of missions, some of them autonomous (Eckstein, 2017).  
Some of the specific uses that Eckstein details are the use of UMS in underwater obstacle and mine clearing, underwater mapping, sonar use, explosives rigging and de-rigging and acting as communications relays (2017).   

Trevithick (2017) points out that the U.S. Navy has now developed an underwater drone “squadron.”  This group of UMS is  called the Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Squadron 1, with submarine-type UMS capable of carrying various payloads to include weapons, listening devices, sonar and even electromagnetic weaponry.  The U.S Navy has also committed $600 million dollars to developing UMS for military purposes. 

It is obvious that the U.S. military is intent on developing UMS with a multitude of capabilities.  Some of these capabilities include the carriage of weapon systems, much like the Predator unmanned aerial vehicles in use by land forces.  This plan raises ethical considerations about using unmanned vehicles for lethal purposes, especially as artificial intelligence (AI) begins to increase unmanned systems' capabilities for autonomous decision making.

In spite of the ethical considerations, Grome (2018) advocates for the development of a “specters of the sea” UMS fighting force that utilizes AI and autonomous function to become the most effective fighting force “the world has ever seen.” Grome’s fundamental argument is that the use of these undersea robots is ethical, as long as a human being is kept in the control loop and decides whether or not to kill someone. 
                
I would argue that it would be “best” for all of humanity not to use these new inventions. People like me seem to be in the minority to the policy makers.  It’s just too tempting to take advantage of the massive increases in effectiveness that these unmanned machines offer.  They bring warfare to a new level, reduce errors in warfighting and lower the risk to human operators.

Even with these advantages, I predict that the line between the “ethical” operation of unmanned vehicles (as Grome describes) and completely autonomous operations will blur and eventually disappear.  Why?  Because the very reason that unmanned advocates provide is the identical reason that they will become fully autonomous: efficiency.  There will always be sacrifices for an edge during conflicts, especially when a war needs to be won and the potential of failure can negatively impact the fabric of a culture or success of a nation.  Designing the machine to evaluate all of the data and make an instant decision, will be faster than a human intervention regarding use of lethal force. Then, the technology war will continue in designing computer systems that can be onboarded to unmanned systems that can make the lethal decision faster than the opponent’s hardware.  It won’t be about ethics any longer, it will be about the speed of the lethal decision-making process.

 References

 Eckstein, M. (2017). Navy Racing to Test, Field Unmanned Maritime Vehicles for Future Ships.               Retrieved from   https://news.usni.org/2017/09/21/navy-racing-test-field-unmanned-maritime-             vehicles-future-ships
Grome, E. (2017). Spectres of the Sea: The United States Navy’s Autonomous Ghost Fleet, its
     Capabilities and the Impacts, and the Legal Ethical Issues that Surround.  Retrieved from
     https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/docview/2036208261?pq-                           origsite=summon

Trevithick, J. (2017). The Navy has Created it’s First Ever Drone Squadron. Retrieved from

     http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14733/the-us-navy-has-created-its-first-ever-underwater-         drone-squadron


   

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