Monday, November 17, 2003
It occurred to me recently that one major obstacle we have to winning the war in Iraq is technology. We may arguably be the most technologically advanced country on earth but all the stealth bombers in the world won’t help us occupy a hostile nation. Yet I know from my time at the Military’s R&D department, also known as CMU, much of what we are working on addresses problems we don’t have. Autonomous tanks and planes will not be useful in the future’s most likely theatre of operation, the city.
My guess is that our future conflicts will be low intensity and urban. The world is increasingly urbanized and we probably won’t start a war against a truly powerful nation unless something really awful happens. Given this reality we need to be developing technologies that overcome the difficulties of operating in this type of environment.
Each day, reading news about the war, it becomes obvious to me that our soldiers don’t have the tools they really need. No one should be carrying a machine gun in a densely populated area, even if they’re the weapons of choice for the enemy. Machine-guns are like hoses, only instead of water they spray death, (bonus for points for who ever knows who said that first, and where), they can only increase support for an insurgency. We need a new generation of non-lethal weapons that can disable a person while causing them no permanent harm. Imagine our soldiers firing into a crowd and not hurting anyone. Imagine the PR benefits that come from being on the side that never accidentally kills civilians.
The design problem is this: create a device that has the same range as a gun, fires either continuously or in rapid succession, and that once hit a person can no longer fight but is not seriously injured. This has to be an easier problem to solve than creating the artificial intelligence needed to build an autonomous tank.
