On Monday night, June 8, Iranian forces shot down a U. S. helicopter with a two-member crew aboard off the coast of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz. Presumably they bailed out with life jackets or some other means of flotation, but their prospects for rescue were uncertain, to say the least.
The U. S. Navy chose to direct a Corsair unmanned sea drone, made by Saronic Technologies, to the last known location of the flyers. The Corsair was inspired by Ukraine's successes with unmanned sea drones used to attack Russian naval assets. It's a 24-foot-long boat that can carry a payload of up to 1,000 pounds. Early Tuesday morning, it successfully located the helicopter crew members, who climbed aboard it and rode on it to another location where a helicopter picked them up and took them to safety. They were in the water for about two hours before being rescued.
This success story shows how unmanned drones are taking on more roles in modern warfare all the time. The Corsair's rescue was the first time in history that an unmanned sea-going drone was used in a successful rescue attempt.
A BBC report on the rescue quotes naval expert Bryan Clark, of the Hudson Institute, as saying the drone was probably manually piloted during the search. The boat has a 360-degree camera and onboard radar, both of which would have been helpful in locating the downed flyers.
Remotely-controlled floating vehicles are nothing new. In 1898, Nikola Tesla demonstrated a radio-controlled model boat in a small tank at his New York City laboratory, and filed numerous patents on it in the hopes of interesting the day's naval powers in it. Although World War II saw some work with remote-controlled planes, the communications technologies of the day were not up to the challenge of sending the massive amounts of data needed to both convey an adequate picture of the vehicle's environment and to exert precise control over it.
With computer networks and satellite communications, those challenges have been overcome. Now drones play an essential role in the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as the conflict between Iran and the U. S. While the emphasis has been on hostile drones carrying weapons or doing surveillance, it's good to know that drones can be used for search-and-rescue operations as well. One wonders when the U. S. Coast Guard will get into the drone business in a major way, to avoid endangering their own personnel during hazardous searches for lost boats.
Saronic, the company recently awarded $392 million to produce Corsairs and similar products, is a newcomer to the defense industry, with much of its operations based in Austin, Texas. It is not surprising that the big innovations in technological warfare are coming not from the large, established firms such as Boeing and General Dynamics, but from newer upstarts such as Palantir and Saronic. This is a pattern that plays out in most new technical fields, and says something about the sociology of invention and organizational innovation.
Reportedly, the U. S. Navy has about fifty Corsairs all told, and it was a good thing that one of them was deployed close enough to effect the rescue earlier this week. Should the Navy be worrying about acquiring larger seagoing drones to do more than just rescue a few downed flyers?
This is a debate that has been going on for some time in the engineering ethics community: the question of autonomous warfare, in which unmanned devices and systems do the things that soldiers and sailors used to do.
In the case of a benign action such as a rescue, I think everyone would agree that sending a seagoing drone to do the job is better than risking human lives, as long as the drone succeeds. In peacetime, drones and remotely-controlled robots are resorted to in situations such as building collapses that are simply too hazardous for people to enter. This advantage compensates for the expense and limited abilities of drones and robots compared to a human being.
In the case of war, drones become another tool or weapon that is ultimately controlled by those in charge of fighting. The fear of turning loose a completely autonomous drone or robot in the battlefield is that it will be unable to discriminate between enemy fighters who are legitimate targets, and innocent bystanders such as housewives or children, who should be exempt from attack, although that ethical principle has been violated countless times in the last several decades. Also, an autonomous drone might turn against its own operators.
Those are some of the hazards that have kept drones out of warfare historically, although in places like Ukraine where the need to fight trumps almost all other considerations, these hesitations have been swept aside. Not too long ago, a group of Russian soldiers were captured by remotely controlled Ukrainian robot fighters. The capture was a legitimate act of war, and whether the Ukraine soldiers were standing right there with guns or safely ensconced in a control room miles away didn't make any difference to the Russians.
Drones are making war into a new kind of ball game, and any country which wants to remain militarily competitive can't afford to ignore that fact. What seems to be happening now is a kind of innovation that is integrated into the whole matrix of the battlefield, rather than standing out as a totally novel kind of warfare, the way the invention of nuclear weapons did.
"War is hell," according to General Sherman, whose depredations in the South were notorious for their thoroughness and harshness. He should have known. While it would be wonderful if all war ceased, the realities of international politics mean that all available technologies will be pressed into service of military priorities. It's nice to know that a technology which Ukraine developed to blow up Russian ships has been modified to serve as a rescue vehicle. And there may be other positive benefits that wartime technological developments bring in the future.
But for now, we should expect to see more firsts of many kinds involving drones and autonomous weapons. While they are not so effective as to make war unthinkable, they may make it safer for those who fight, and that would be a good thing.
Sources: I referred to a BBC News account "What we know about US sea drone used in helicopter crew rescue mission," which appeared at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2xvnd5eqwo. I also referred to the Saronic website at https://www.saronic.com/. A description of Tesla's experimental radio-controlled boat appears on pp. 229 of W. Bernard Carlson's supreme biography, "Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age" (Princeton Univ. Press, 2013).
No comments:
Post a Comment