The New York Times
On a recent day at Eglin Air Force Base on Florida’s Gulf coast, Maj. Ross Elder, 34, a test pilot from West Virginia, was preparing for an exercise in which he would fly his F-15 fighter alongside the Valkyrie. The possibility of building fleets of smart but relatively inexpensive weapons that could be deployed in large numbers is allowing Pentagon officials to think in new ways about taking on enemy forces.
That is because China is lining its coasts, and artificial islands it has constructed in the South China Sea, with more than 1,000 anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles that severely curtail the United States’ ability to respond to any possible invasion of Taiwan without massive losses in the air and at sea.
The drones, for example, could fly in front of piloted combat aircraft, doing early, high-risk surveillance. They could also play a major role in disabling enemy air defenses, taking risks to knock out land-based missile targets that would be considered too dangerous for a human-piloted plane. “But you can present potential adversaries with dilemmas — and one of those dilemmas is mass,” Jobe said in an interview at the Pentagon, referring to the deployment of large numbers of drones against enemy forces. “You can bring mass to the battle space with potentially fewer people.”
“You’re stepping over a moral line by outsourcing killing to machines — by allowing computer sensors rather than humans to take human life,” said Mary Wareham, the advocacy director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, which is pushing for international limits on so-called lethally autonomous weapons.
Air Force officials said they fully understand that machines are not intelligent in the same way humans are. AI technology can also make mistakes — as has happened repeatedly in recent years with driverless cars — and machines have no built-in moral compass. The officials said they were considering those factors while building the system.
The Pentagon, through its research divisions like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory, has already spent several years building prototypes like the Valkyrie and the software that runs it. But the experiment is graduating to a so-called program of record, meaning if Congress approves, substantial taxpayer dollars will be allocated to buying the vehicles: a total of $5.8 billion over the next five years, according to the Air Force plan.