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The Rules for Killer Drone Boats Are as Vague as the Ones for Predator Drones

The Navy just demonstrated its autonomous, swarming boats—but what are the rules of engagement?
Screengrab: US Navy

The US Navy's armed boat drones are here, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the rules for using them are about as poorly defined as the ones governing how the military uses Predator drones for targeted killings in the Middle East.

An Office of Naval Research video demonstrating the swarming capability of these vessels shows five small boats that are outfitted with sensors and a software package called CARACaS that allows the boats to share information and autonomously converge on a target.

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The boats can be armed with .50 calibre machine guns and will fire on enemy boats if the human supervisor in the control loop approves the action. According to the ONR, the technology will be ready for field testing in a year.

"If an adversary threat decides to come closer, we can give them another warning, or potentially say you've come too close and we're now going to destroy your vessel," Matthew Klunder, Chief of Naval Research, said in the video.

Image: US Navy

The military has long said that there's nothing "unmanned" about Predator drones (they prefer to call them remotely piloted aircraft), and that appears to be the same tack that the Navy is taking here with its unmanned boats.

When I told a Navy phone operator that I had questions regarding the rules of engagement for autonomous boats, she told me that "all of that is still being worked out by our JAG department," and that officials would not be able to share specifics.

"Rules of engagement and firing of weapons was not a focus of this demonstration," Bob Brizzolara, ONR program director, told me in an email. "So while the swarming capability is autonomous, without humans on board, there is always a human in the loop when it comes to the actual engagement of an enemy, whether through non-lethal or lethal effects. Operational specifics beyond that are classified."

According to Brizzolara, when and how the autonomous boats can be ordered to kill will be tested later. All that matters right now is getting the technology battle-ready: "Future demonstrations could include rules of engagement and what it will take for the Navy to engage adversaries," he said.

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It's true that every new technology always requires extensive research and testing to be applied correctly. However, Klunder's suggestion that a boat could be destroyed by autonomous boats simply for coming too close to an American vessel is troubling.

And, once the technology exists, it'll be tempting for the military to use, whether the rules are ready or not.

"If systems are fielded with full autonomous capabilities, including the capability to select and engage targets without human intervention, there will be strong pressure, in any real combat situation, to utilize those capabilities," Mark Gubrud of the International Committee for Robotic Arms Control told me.

In recent years, the Navy has changed its rules of engagement to be much more aggressive when there's a perceived threat. The autonomous boat program was developed after the USS Cole was attacked by a small boat carrying explosives in Yemen in 2000, an act for which Al-Qaeda later took credit for.

A major point of contention in the wake of the attack was that the Navy's standing rules of engagement didn't allow the USS Cole's crew to fire upon the attacking boat because they were not being shot at.

"If we had shot those people, we'd have gotten in trouble for it," Petty Officer Jennifer Kundrack, who survived the attack, told The Telegraph. "That's what's frustrating about it. We would have gotten in more trouble for shooting two foreigners than losing 17 American sailors."

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Image: US Navy

Since then, the Navy has revamped its standing rules of engagement to allow for more offensive action when it comes to defending ships at sea, although the specific changes are classified.

Presumably, swarms of robotic boats would conform to these new standards. If Klunder wasn't just blowing smoke when he described a scenario in which the boats would destroy a target for merely coming too close to a high-value ship, then one can guess that they might be deployed liberally.

That's certainly been the case with Predator drones, and its a concern that should be mirrored here. In July, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism released a report outlining the shocking information vacuum that drone strikes take place in, and getting any sort of information about when and why a potential suspected is targeted has been excruciatingly difficult.

When the government actually did release the legal rationale for extrajudicially killing Anwar al-Awaki, a US citizen in Afghanistan, in a drone strike, the legal dodging and loophole-jumping on display was, for lack of a better word, totally bonkers. A similar approach to drones at sea appears to be taking shape in the Navy.

Indeed, the use of the USS Cole attack as justification for autonomous boat technology smacks of a particular brand of post-9/11 "never again" mentality—the kind that has allowed for innumerable breaches of civil and human rights for over a decade.

Time and time again, the government has used "the War on Terror" to justify everything from drone strikes, to torture, to widespread surveillance. Now, it appears as though it will usher in an age of killer robots at sea.