The (Too-) Smart Bomb

Here’s the first of many near-future-conflict CounterStories. As with most good scenarios, this one is based on only a handful of technological, economic or social changes—but those seemingly small changes quickly add up to a different set of decisions that policy-makers might face. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to let me know what you think.--Paul Kretkowski

Assumptions: By the year 2016, global trade and shipping recover from the 2008–2010 recession, but high-seas piracy worsens as well. Manned offshore patrols remain as costly as ever, but technological advances enable cruise missiles to stay airborne for days rather than hours.

Scenario: The U.S. has deployed long-range, semi-autonomous cruise missiles to patrol international shipping lanes in regions where manned seagoing vessels are spread too thin. With human air-traffic controllers (ATCs) monitoring them, these missiles criss-cross areas around the Strait of Malacca and Gulf of Aden, for example, where piracy is rampant but enforcement vehicles and manpower are scarce.

The missiles loiter around shipping lanes and occasionally “interrogate” ships’ captains by radio to try to determine whether they are pirates. The missiles’ computers use a variety of criteria to rate whether or not a particular vessel is likely a pirate—the captain’s responses, ship’s tonnage, registry, destination and manifest. Human ATCs then decide whether to allow a legitimate-seeming vessel to proceed—or demand that an alleged pirate vessel surrender or be disabled or destroyed by the missile.

Since these cruise missiles are “smart” enough to be semi-autonomous, a single human ATC can monitor and manage several missiles at once, overseeing their day-to-day, largely scripted interrogations of international shipping—the robotic equivalent of today’s police DUI checkpoints.

On the high seas as elsewhere, though, manpower and attention are at a premium.

Off the Kenyan coast, pirates manage to seize a commercial ship and begin running it toward the nearest East African port, diverting Navy eyeballs and resources from monitoring cruise missiles deployed near the Gulf of Aden.

The suddenly busy human ATC uses a new option, that of switching most of his cruise missiles over to a fully automatic “crisis” mode while he focuses his attention elsewhere.

The cruise missiles near the Gulf of Aden continue to aggressively question civilian vessels about their ship and their intentions, just as before. Those ships take the missiles’ intrusiveness seriously because the cruise missile is nearly impossible for civilian vessels to counter, and flits in and out of radar range while it makes up its “mind” about the civilians’ status.

For the first time in history, humans are forced to engage in a sort of Turing-test-in-reverse administered by a machine, and must prove to a computer alone that they are not pirates.


This scenario raises several questions. As a “police” system, the cruise missiles and their ATCs normally err on the side of freeing the guilty rather than punishing the innocent. In “crisis” mode, though, the now-autonomous missiles make life-or-death decisions on their own, and opportunities for mistakes multiply.

What is the structure of checks and balances that might allow the ATC and the cruise missiles to make the right call, both morally and in accordance with maritime law? How would laws relating to piracy have to be modified to allow robotic cruise missiles to use disabling or deadly force without a positive order to do so? Is the trade-off of a more widespread maritime presence worth the potential cost in lives, should a cruise missile make the wrong decision?

For some interesting fiction that discusses machine volition and friend-or-foe problems, see Fred Saberhagen’s “Berserker” stories and Keith Laumer’s “Bolo” stories.