Behind the Curve

I've had fun thinking Very Advanced Thoughts about military applications of robotic technology, particularly with biomimetic design of individuals and flocking-and-schooling algorithms for groups.

What I've really been thinking are Laughably Behind the Curve Thoughts, though, judging from a set of videos by German robotics developer Festo: penguins of the water and air, rays, and jellyfish.

Incidentally, biomimetic design isn't the exclusive province of German scientists; check out this bit of footage of robot fish schooling at the University of Washington.

Pickets' Charge

IN WHICH UAVs TRICKLE DOWN TO NON-STATE ACTORS, THEN BACK UP TO ROGUE STATES.


Advances in UAV technology among non-state actors—from California farmers to Hezbollah to Silicon Valley writers—imply the tiny unmanned planes will also see greater use by large companies that need cheap ways to peek over the horizon from their operations.

Internationally, commercial shippers and offshore oil rigs are logical users of commercial UAVs. Both types of businesses are capital-intensive and vulnerable to human threats, and the cost of UAV-based surveillance and defense is small relative to the replacement value of company facilities and employees.

It’s not hard to imagine that blue-water freighters and offshore drilling rigs may soon deploy their own pickets—screens of UAVs that extend their hosts’ alertness and increase warning times in trouble-prone waters. Since UAVs are on their way to becoming fully automatic (particularly since they’ve long performed complex tasks such as crossing the Atlantic on their own), it’s reasonable to expect they might also be programmed to work with one another closely.

However, these concepts can also translate to offense, as this next scenario posits.

Assumptions: By 2015, rogue states mimic Western advances in UAVs and robotics.

Scenario: The South Korean Navy P-3 banked slowly over the crippled freighter. At this distance the P-3’s pilot could easily read the name painted in big white letters near the ship’s bow: MV Maersk Global.

The massive container ship appeared much as its crew had warned it would be, and the P-3’s radio operator started relaying his observations back to the plane’s base at Pohang Airport.

Pohang, Recon One Four here. Target ship is in sight below us in calm seas. Hull appears undamaged. No crew on deck and pilothouse is empty. Burn marks, possibly from small explosions, at several points along decks. Pilothouse window appears blown in and there are burn marks on superstructure nearby, over.

The reply came instantly, since many high-ranking officials were monitoring the P-3’s mission.

Recon One Four, Pohang. Acknowledged. Continue.

The pilot swung around for a pass over the ship’s rear as the radioman continued his assessment.

Pohang, Recon One Four. Blast marks around rudder and possible damage. Screws are not turning and ship is adrift, over.

Recon One Four’s pilot mused that the decks were clear and the ship adrift for good reason: Thirty hours ago the crew had barricaded themselves belowdecks to ride out an attack by a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Yesterday morning, the Global’s crew was startled to see about 10 prop-driven UAVs flying around their ship. Since their ship was in international waters east of North Korea, the crew assumed the small planes had somehow strayed from an exercise by Pyongyang.

Still, the Global’s navigator triple-checked their location, confirming that the ship was well away from North Korean territory. In fact, it was on almost exactly the same line from Vladivostok to Pusan that it had traveled a dozen times before, always without incident.

So for the next 10 minutes, the crew treated the buzzing UAVs as an interesting nuisance—until the small aircraft turned out to be armed. Crewmen reported later that the UAVs fired a few small but potent missiles at the deck, causing the sailors to scatter. The UAVs then specifically targeted the ship’s rudder, damaging it so that it was stuck in a shallow left turn.

Once the crew realized they had no defenses and couldn't steer, they’d idled the ship’s engines, locked themselves below, and called for help. They would have happily surrendered to human attackers, but none appeared.

Nearly blind, the crew had no idea whether the UAVs were still present and no taste for finding out, considering that some of them had suffered minor burns and one apparently had some light hearing damage.

In the day or so since then, the Global had drifted westward and now was just about in North Korean waters.

The Maersk company quickly persuaded Danish diplomats to contact the North Korean government, which denied knowledge of any incident and any UAVs. Although multiple countries were ready to blame Pyongyang anyway, none of them had monitored any transmissions to or from the UAVs. The aircraft certainly communicated with each other—they had coordinated an attack—but seemingly not with anyone else.

Yes, it was difficult to blame Pyongyang, which also professed outrage that someone had attacked a peaceful commercial vessel so near its territory. To the world’s great surprise, North Korea told Denmark that it would allow anyone into the North’s waters to aid the Global—South Koreans, Americans, whoever the Danes thought might help.

Unfortunately, the North said, since the rescue might be hazardous—UAVs had attacked a freighter, and who knew where they might strike next? The North had to protect its own coast in case they reappeared!—Pyongyang’s own navy would stand off and observe while other nations aided the Global.

And that was how a South Korean P-3 came to be loitering, unmolested, over a giant, abandoned-looking Danish container ship in North Korean seas.

Recon One Four, Pohang. Global crew ask that you verify no UAVs in the area.

Pohang, Recon One Four, that’s affirmative, no UAVs or other aircraft in target’s area. We are alone, over.

The pilot looked down again moments later to see two Global crewmen peering cautiously from behind a heavy-looking hatch that opened out from the superstructure. They waved, and the pilot waggled the P-3’s wings to acknowledge them.

It was remarkable, the P-3’s pilot thought: Zombie aircraft had created a zombie freighter.


Policy Issues: In one stroke, Pyongyang broadcasts that its technological prowess has jumped and that its coast is off limits, all at minimal cost in manpower or political capital.

Tactical Issues: How do you handle attribution in the above case? What countermeasures can a civilian ship’s crew take to defeat the UAVs? Must commercial ships begin to carry their own UAVs for safety? Are dueling automated UAVs a possibility in the next 10 years?

Technical Issues: In the animal kingdom, swarming, flocking and schooling are governed by simple algorithms that regulate an animal’s speed, course, and distance from its peers and other objects. What algorithms would enable aggressive yet useful swarming by UAVs? Can targets employ countermeasures that disrupt those swarms, fooling them into “believing” they are too close together, too close to a target, or acting too aggressively?

Fictional References: The late Michael Crichton’s Prey, which deals with ludicrously advanced swarming, learning nanobots.

The Warlord and His Carpenters

IN WHICH CHEAP TALENT AND LABOR GIVE A HIGH-TECH ASSAULT FORCE FITS.


Cities, and especially Third World cities, remain problematic for urban warfighters, as they (and readers of Black Hawk Down and similar accounts) understand. The confusion and friction that occur even in natural terrain multiply in densely built urban areas as sight lines shorten, while buildings and tunnels add a third dimension to the hazards that attackers must consider.

First World armies’ technologies let them accurately reconnoiter and map cities before a battle; for example, UAVs can help visually untangle slums and aid ground units. However, in the scenario below, low-tech (if labor-intensive) countermeasures defeat even the best mapping technology.

Assumptions: Small GPS-linked robots are deployed en masse to map Third World slums prior to military action. Somali warlords continue to compete with the weak central government.

Scenario: In 2018, Mogadishu remains a maze of largely unplanned development that features winding streets, low-rise buildings, and large numbers of unemployed men and women.

The city is somewhat wealthier than in previous decades. For one thing, commercial shipping now frequents its port thanks to international suppression of Indian Ocean piracy during the late 2000s.

Mogadishu is still largely lawless, however, which is why four U.S. helicopters now sweep in over the densest part of downtown. They are the vanguard of a team whose mission is to quickly seize Warlord Rashid from his headquarters.

The helicopters simultaneously release what observers at first mistake for gas clouds—perhaps of pesticide. In reality, the “clouds” are composed of thousands of golf-ball sized robots, each weighing mere ounces, that float to the ground beneath tiny paper canopies. Each device is a miniature sensing station equipped with GPS plus a separate radio transmitter, video camera and microphone.

Although they cannot move, these devices quickly orient themselves and begin to observe their surroundings, coordinating with one another and with rear-echelon computers.

From rooftops, streets, courtyards, awnings and even the hoods of cars and beds of trucks, these Advanced Mapping Devices (AMDs) rapidly generate an accurate, continually updated map of downtown Mogadishu and its inhabitants that is accurate to the centimeter, including overlapping video coverage and some capture of nearby voice traffic and background noise.

Minutes later, a second wave of helicopters approaches bearing an assault force that is now highly confident of its ability to navigate Mogadishu and capture Warlord Rashid. The attackers have an informant who places Warlord Rashid inside a known building, and the just-created AMD network knows he hasn’t left there. Teams of soldiers fast-rope from helicopters to the street, ready to race off to their assigned tasks once everyone is on the ground. Thanks to the AMDs, this should be a quick in-and-out; there will be no lengthy Black Hawk Down-style battle today.

But as the first soldiers to hit the ground watch, Mogadishu begins to change.

Its inhabitants have watched three times before as U.S. forces have conducted these fast, robot-mapped raids, and this time they are better-prepared.

First, groups of children converge on the AMD drop zone, racing around and smashing the tiny electronic observers wherever they find them—and continually degrading the AMD network’s overlapping coverage. Older Somalis rapidly start and re-park the cars and trucks whose locations other AMDs have so painstakingly mapped. Women hurriedly take laundry in from some clotheslines and run it out on others, changing and obscuring sight lines. Still other groups climb onto sterile-looking rooftops and cover them with pre-built wooden decks and patio furniture.

More startlingly, whole false walls of buildings swing out on giant hinges from either side of narrow streets, turning thoroughfares into cul-de-sacs. Giant potholes are revealed when large steel plates are dragged to one side.

And on it goes: Windows are rapidly boarded up or unboarded to alter the appearance of apartment buildings, garage doors are rapidly opened and quickly transformed into storefronts, and iron grilles blocking doorways are either opened or closed.

Warlord Rashid’s followers have radically changed Mogadishu’s complexion to confuse and hinder an attacking force, all in a few minutes following the first helicopters’ arrival. Here’s how:

Months ago, Warlord Rashid became interested in camouflaging himself, the better to hide from Western officials who had started blustering about the need to bring him to justice. Shortly thereafter, some of his agents abroad began hiring the best workers for creating short-duration, high-impact illusions: carpenters, engineers and builders from Hollywood and Bollywood, who specialize in building lightweight structures that can be moved or modified on short notice.

At first, Warlord Rashid was able to persuade only the most adventurous of these skilled creatives to travel to Mogadishu and help turn his part of the city into a giant breakaway set. Soon, though, ever-larger groups arrived as word spread among Los Angeles and Mumbai creatives that Warlord Rashid was a good—if somewhat demanding—employer who paid top dollar, honored contracts, and protected those who worked for him while they were in Somalia.*

Entertainment-industry carpenters, painters and set dressers were suddenly in high demand thousands of miles from Hollywood and Mumbai, not least because other clans’ warlords began competing with Warlord Rashid to see how rapidly their part of Mogadishu could be changed during a Western military incursion.

Although the Hollywood/Bollywood types were expensive to keep on hand, their designs and instructions could be realized cheaply through the labor of hundreds of unemployed Somalis eager to earn a few weeks’ pay.

The assaulting troops, watching the cityscape change around them and keep changing, are stymied and quickly lose the surprise and mobility that their plan requires to apprehend Warlord Rashid.

Better yet from the defenders’ point of view, this goal has been accomplished largely without violence—Warlord Rashid long ago sternly instructed those involved in changing the city’s appearance to carry no firearms. This both minimizes the defenders’ casualties and increases their feelings of superiority over the invaders.

The assaulting troops can now choose to destroy or penetrate Mogadishu’s obstacles and camouflage; but doing so risks civilian casualties. Meanwhile, their quarry successfully flees more quickly than the assaulting force can pursue.

Questions: In this scenario, determining how much a place’s appearance can change becomes as important as mapping its streets and landmarks. Is a second mapping pass, in which a second set of robots coordinates with remnants of the first, feasible? Should U.S. forces drop a few decoy robots (or a whole set of fakes) first, to fool Mogadishu defenders into revealing planned modifications, then drop the full load of robots after those modifications are revealed?

Is it now important to monitor the costs of and demand for certain kinds of skilled labor in cities as removed as Mumbai and Los Angeles? Does a sudden tightening of skilled-trades markets in those cities, or spot shortages of lumber, nails and construction tools in East Africa, indicate that Warlord Rashid or his colleagues are up to something?

References: Minority Report’s mobile, eyeball-scanning spider robots (kinda like this minus the legs); the burning tires and barricades of the first Battle of Mogadishu; the kasbah chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark; and the finale of Blazing Saddles, where Sheriff Bart builds an entire fake Western town to fool marauders.

*While some Hollywood contractors shunned work in Somalia for ethical or legal reasons, others figured that working for a glorified bandit such as Warlord Rashid wasn’t that different from designing and building a 1,500-seat theater at a mobbed-up U.S. casino, which would then show Cats twice per night at an average $115 per ticket. Banditry, the contractors reasoned, came in all sorts of guises.

Ian Wilson on Strategic Implementation

The University of North Carolina's Horizon project has an interesting piece by scenarist Ian Wilson titled "From Scenario Thinking to Strategic Action" that's notable for:

a) Its insistence on knowing what type of decision you're trying to arrive at by using scenarios, and

b) Wilson's own quote, from 1975, that "all our knowledge is about the past, and all our decisions are about the future," which is so obvious yet covert in our everyday lives that it might almost be Zen.

CSI: M4; or, The Magic Bullets

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End posits a near-future San Diego in which a wide range of everyday objects are equipped with wireless Internet access and some kind of sensory apparatus. Thanks to wearable computing gear that interprets this constantly shifting data stream both visually and audibly, citizens can walk around in a real-life Toontown that constantly informs and interacts with them.

But Rainbows End, as fun and insightful as it is, looks only at the civilian side of this very wired future. The scenario below looks at the consequences of equipping military tools to report on their status and surroundings; in this case, bullets and their rifles.

Assumptions: First World militaries produce rifles and bullets that contain simple versions of the “black boxes” found on aircraft.

Scenario: The Round Recovery Team advanced from cover toward what was pretty clearly a dead insurgent.

Its three soldiers listened to the battle’s sounds growing more distant, but it was not their mission to rush toward combat. Instead, they were here to account for several rounds that an Army Specialist named John Smith had discharged during the firefight in this clearing had occurred here some 90 minutes earlier.

The group’s sergeant wielded a small GPS device whose screen featured an arrow that pointed toward the insurgent’s body. Specialist Smith’s rifle had thoughtfully transmitted GPS coordinates for the body’s probable location to the RRT just after Smith pulled the trigger, and now the modified M4 rifle proved as good as its word.

The RRT advanced to within two meters of the body and the sergeant pressed a few buttons on his GPS to see whether a U.S. Army bullet might be somewhere nearby.

Sure enough, one round—lodged somewhere inside the insurgent, from the appearance of the man’s body—woke up and started radioing what it knew. The sergeant’s GPS device immediately began capturing data from the round’s tiny, low-powered “black box.”

The round wasn’t terribly smart, but it didn’t have to be; it simply recorded where it had been and what it had encountered during its brief period of freedom, then served that data in an encrypted burst to any properly credentialed device.

The sergeant quickly scanned a summary of the bullet’s information on his screen.

“Narrative Summary for 5M4-4820576632-06, round 6 of 30 that were loaded into clip 1 of SPC John Smith’s M4 rifle. (Please consult this rifle for a view of my apparent target at the time of firing.)

“I was fired at 1039:04.18 UTC on 4 May 2015 as part of a burst of at least six rounds. I am currently not moving, facing 244 degrees magnetic at a downward angle of 17 degrees from level. External temperature is 90.4 degrees Fahrenheit and decreasing at about 0.5 degrees/minute.

“Note: I am 8 grams lighter than at firing. I broke apart at +0.882 seconds from firing against an object with the density of bone. I was traveling at 842 meters/second until this impact, giving the missing fragment a probable maximum radius from my resting place of 23 meters. Click on more details for full data.”

The sergeant pressed two more buttons on his GPS device to beam the bullet’s data even further behind the lines, where computers would compare it with accounts pouring in from other rounds expended during this battle. That data would then be cross-matched with records from the rifles in Specialist Smith’s platoon and possibly with the tiny gimbals and accelerometers embedded in his BDUs.

Analysts would pore over the resulting mountain of data to determine whether the insurgents might be using new tactics, and how well Smith and his colleagues had reacted in any case.

The data had more ominous uses, of course, at least from the perspective of a soldier who felt military lawyers looking over his shoulder on a daily basis.

For instance, the sergeant thought, that whole business about a burst of six rounds or more—the bullet had no way to know whether other rounds were fired after it—became important if the Hague showed interest a few hours from now. The suits might want to investigate to see whether Smith et al. had used excessive force.

In that case, a different team would come in before sunset, grab the body for autopsy, then swab the whole battlefield for bullet fragments, footprints, DNA and other evidence—a level of investigation that the sergeant thought was excessive, not to mention costly—and develop a second-by-second account of the battle for possible use at trial. It almost never came to that nowadays, but it wasn’t out of the question.


Questions: Monday-morning quarterbacks at the Hague, auditing the record of a small-unit action, may conclude that a soldier could have acted differently so as to remove the need to fire his or her weapon. When weapons use is so thoroughly monitored, does non-total war—in any cases but those of national survival—remain politically feasible?

Soldiers will attempt to spoof this system. Can the bullets be made to “lie” or be “accidentally” microwaved before a mission to prevent their reporting back? In that case, if the rifle and its rounds did not agree on what had happened—or if the round made no report at all—how would the military handle this?*

Cultural References: JFK-assassination conspiracy theories. First-person “shooter” video games in which players have enhanced senses. The film Dark Star, with its sentient (and moody) Exponential Thermostellar Bombs.


*Much further into the future, if the rifle and its bullets were sufficiently smart, they might argue. The bullets might complain that the rifle was a rear-area paper pusher that never really got out into the field. A round’s black box may be sufficiently expensive that it is reused after being recovered, and remember previous times that it was fired—and that the rifle couldn’t get its story straight then, either.

David Brin's Remarks

Just after I posted "The Opaque Society, Part 2" last Thursday, I dropped David Brin a quick note saying that I was referring to his work. He was nice enough to write back on Friday with an expansion on his thinking and a correction or two to mine. Here's what he wrote:

PK said: “Brin proposed (briefly) that a) governmental and private surveillance technology was eroding citizens’ privacy, and b) one possible cure was to have truly ubiquitous surveillance, including publicly accessible cameras that watched the watchers. Brin wrote that this regime of many-to-many surveillance would tend to counter abuses of the surveillance system by those in power.”

This characterization of my position is better that some of the capsule summaries I’ve seen. Though almost any capsule becomes a caricature, in regards an issue this complex. In essence, I am not urging ubiquitous anything, but rather, continuing fealty to the fundamental bargain of the Enlightenment. Which is this: since no men or elites or groups can be trusted with power, let us arrange things so that men, women, citizens can hold each other reciprocally accountable. That's it. The core.

Reciprocal accountability is the central driver of democracy, markets, science and justice -- the four great “accountability arenas” of our civilization. And these arenas either thrive or fail in direct proportion to the degree that participants know enough to practice economic, political, scientific or legal accountability effectively.

(For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see the lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition for Society's Benefit." or at: http://www.davidbrin.com/disputationarticle1.html)

In The Transparent Society I do not argue for ubiquitous surveillance, nor an end to privacy (human beings need some). Accountability arenas have been proved to be robust enough to operate with a little slack and even some asymmetries. What I do argue is that we must constantly remember THAT reciprocality is the core element. And that widely open information flows and open knowledge are what makes it possible.

“But what if you posit a sudden sharp increase in governmental surveillance, one that the great majority of the population favors, with no countervailing increase in citizen surveillance of the authorities?”

This is, indeed a concern. But the Enlightenment and our Constitution provide an answer. Break up centers of power so that they are not monolithic. So they are mutually suspicious. So that whistle blowers are rewarded. So that non-governmental agencies have some ability to aggregate the citizens’ individual rights to “look-back.”

What you are describing is the “ratcheting effect” that I discuss in The Transparent Society - wherein government powers to see & surveil keep increasing, each time there is a crisis... and those powers are not given back, when the crisis eases. (See page 206 of The Transparent Society for a chilling paragraph in which I ask “what if the trade center towers ever go down? What will the Atty General ask for?” And I go on to predict the Patriot Act. Seriously! See p206.)

That is why I object to the WAY the ACLU and other freedom defenders oppose the Patriot Act. They aim all their ire at new wiretapping rules etc. But the very idea of restricting govt’s ability to see is absurd. All efforts should instead go toward ensuring reciprocality. Making certain that govt cannot USE such power against us, because somebody is always watching them.

See one example suggested at:
http://www.davidbrin.com/suggestion07.htm
There are countless other ways to break up centers of power and ensure that - even if they can see nearly everything, in an effort to stymie crime, they cannot use that power to hurt people, in general.

As for face coverings, I expect such endeavors to occur. They will be countered by other bio-tracking methods that measure walking gait, hand bone ratios, even scent. I portray such tracking games in my novel KILN PEOPLE. It won’t work much. Anyway, I’d be a fool to depend on it working. It’s like the cryptography fetishism of the 1990s. A silly distraction from the key need and goal.

You will never blind elites. But history shows that you can (with difficulty) make them walk naked.

(feel free to post this response.)

With cordial regards,

David Brin
http://www.davidbrin.com

The Opaque Society, Part 2

Yesterday’s CounterStory looked at the implications for civilian policymakers of the mass use of automated surveillance cameras to sift through images of people’s movements in search of suspicious patterns. Today I’ll examine a few of the military implications of the same technology.--PK

Military Scenario: Even as civilian courts debate privacy issues in the years 2012-2013, automated mass identification is old news for the U.S. military, whose application of this technology is significantly ahead of civilian programs. In fact, U.S. forces can now target specific soldiers and officers in opposing armies by combining UAV footage, data-mining of enemy nations' records, and social-networking software that reverse-engineers soldiers’ movements and communications to create a remarkably accurate picture of an army’s order of battle.

While this is an unprecedented jump in precision targeting, it has one important side effect: Every military shot fired can now be seen as an assassination. Unless a target is an imminent threat—he is firing or readying a weapon to fire, or directing others to do the same—knowing the target's identity and rank makes it difficult to justify killing him and not his commander.

By 2020, this phenomenon has caused rules of engagement to tighten until few people besides heads of state and senior military commanders are legitimate targets of war. Anyone else who is not actually holding a weapon or directing fire is off limits.

Perversely, just as the U.S. military circa 2009 avoided providing “body counts,” it now avoids specifying the identity or reasons for killing any specific opponent. This makes it difficult to trumpet the “good” news of eliminating a particular enemy leader.

Question: Is the law of armed conflict (LOAC) equipped, and is the U.S. military ready, to handle the phenomenon of large-scale but targeted killings?

Reference: P.W. Singer’s Wired for War