Lethal Autonomous Weapons and the CCW

Today in Geneva the CCW (Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons) Meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems got underway. The primary purpose of the meeting is to develop recommendations regarding potential controls on lethal autonomous weapons system (LAWS) to be considered by the Fifth Review Conference, a regularly scheduled meeting of parties to the CCW that will occur in December 2016.

Lethal autonomous weapons systems are, in effect, robots programmed to kill without direct human guidance. Just as self-driving cars have advanced to the point where no human interaction is required beyond the point of identifying a destination, weapons systems are now at the point where a mission, including the use of weapons, can be programmed by humans and then executed by the machine without further human interaction. Clearly there are many technological, political, legal, and ethical questions to be considered in the face of such an important development.

There is no shortage of scholars, NGOs, IGOs, and governments interested in weighing in on lethal autonomous weapons and their implications. A range of papers and presentations prepared for this week's Meeting of Experts is available on the UNOG (United Nations Office at Geneva) website here. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a key contributor to international humanitarian law, has weighed in with an argument for preserving human responsibility in decisions to kill. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a project that brings together a number of NGOs including Human Rights Watch and the Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs, has articulated a similar position.

There are many reasons to hope that the Fifth Review Conference in December will be able to make progress toward a ban on fully autonomous lethal weapons systems.

Gassed

One hundred years ago, on April 22, 1915, German troops near the village of Gravenstafel along the Ypres Salient in Belgium released 170 tons of chlorine gas in an attack against the trenches occupied by French forces including units from Morocco and Algeria. The gas was released from canisters along the German line and allowed to drift with the wind toward the French line where it settled into the trenches. Soldiers scrambling out of the trenches to escape asphyxiation were hit with a withering fusillade from the Germans.

John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919)

The French and colonial forces suffered approximately 6,000 casualties with many of the wounded being blinded and suffering serious lung damage. A four-mile wide gap in the defensive line was opened up by the attack, but the Germans were unprepared to exploit it fully.

Adam Hochschild's description of the attack in To End All Wars (pp. 140-41) is worth quoting at some length:

On April 22, 1915, near the battered city of Ypres, French soldiers and troops from French colonies in North Africa noticed a strange, greenish yellow mist billowing out of the German positions and blowing toward them in the wind. An unfamiliar smell filled the air. When the acrid cloud reached them, it was so thick that they couldn't see more than a few feet. Soldiers quickly found themselves gagging and choking, yellow mucus frothing out of their mouths. Hundreds fell to the ground in convulsions. Those who could still breathe fled, staggering into first-aid posts blue from suffocation and coughing blood, speechless but pointing desperately to their throats. In the next few days, Canadian troops fell victim as well. Whatever this mysterious cloud might be, it was heavier than air and sank into the trenches, hugging the earth and forcing soldiers to stick their heads out into a hail of bullets. "The chaps were all gasping and couldn't breathe," a sergeant remembered later. "And it was ghastly, especially for chaps that were wounded--terrible for a wounded man to lie there! The gasping, the gasping!"

The spring leaves just coming out on the trees shriveled; grass turned yellow and metal green. Birds fell from the air, and chickens, pigs, cows, and horses writhed in agony and died, their bodies rotting and bloating. The ever-fatter rats that normally swarmed through the trenches, keeping men awake by running over them in the dark on the way to feast on soldiers' corpses, themselves died by the thousands.

This was the first widespread use of poison gas--chlorine--on the Western Front. Deadly and painful as it could be, later forms of gas would be still worse. Like so much else about the war, chlorine was the product of an industrial economy, in this case made by a complex of eight large chemical firms in Germany's Ruhr region known as the IG cartel. Chlorine and its compounds had a long history in manufacturing, but its new use in warfare was an ominous landmark, seeming to open up a range of horrifying possibilities that had previously existed only in the realm of early science fiction.

Chastened by the experience of World War I in which even the Allied Powers eventually deployed chemicals, the international community attempted to close off the "range of horrifying possibilities." In 1925, the Geneva Protocol was adopted to ban the use of chemical and biological weapons in international conflicts. Significant gaps in the coverage of the Geneva Protocol were closed with the adoption in 1993 of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which 190 states are party. The CWC prohibits not only the use but the manufacture and stockpiling of chemical weapons.

Credible evidence indicates that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons--including chlorine gas--with devastating effects on civilians in recent attacks conducted in violation of Syria's obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention and UN Security Council Resolution 2118 (2013). Acting on the basis of findings by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Security Council, on March 6, 2015, adopted Resolution 2209 threatening enforcement action under Chapter VII of the UN Charter in the event of further use of chemical weapons.

It seems unlikely that the Security Council will be able to back up its threat to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons given the continued intransigence of Russia and China on matters related to Syria's civil war. However, both states voted for Resolution 2209. Both are also paying a diplomatic price for their grossly immoral position.

 

Victims of Wars Long Ago

Next Sunday will mark the 99^th anniversary of Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia, an event that prompted, in quick succession, Russian mobilization for war, the German invasion of Belgium, and French and British declarations of war against Germany. Preparations for the Great War were years in the making; nonetheless, its onset somehow seemed improvised, spontaneous, even accidental.

The last veterans of World War I have all died--the last one on February 4, 2012--but the weapons of that war survive in large numbers in the fields of Belgium and western France. From time to time, they are unearthed and claim new victims. A recent story in the Telegraph describes the work of Dirk Vanparys, a member of the Belgian army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company. On a recent, all-too-normal day, Vanparys and his team collected 73 unexploded shells and 57 grenades and fuses that had been found by farmers. Many of the shells that are recovered on a regular basis contain mustard gas, chlorine gas, or phosgene--agents that killed and disabled hundreds of thousands of troops along the Western Front during the many spasms of chemical warfare in World War I. Four months ago, seven people were hospitalized after a German shell containing gas exploded as a trench was being dug to lay cable south of Ypres.

Weapons used in World War I will continue to kill and maim completely innocent people for years to come. In 2012, Belgian and French authorities collected 185 tons of munitions left from World War I; the total collected in 2011 was 274 tons. Such totals are possible because nearly one and a half billion shells were fired during the war.

In preparation for the Battle of the Somme, an assault by British troops on German trenches that began on July 1, 1916, British artillery fired 1.5 million shells over five days. Tunnels dug under the German lines were packed with explosives—as much as thirty tons of explosives in a single mine—and set off as the assault began. The final artillery barrage—224,221 shells in a span of 65 minutes—created a rumble that, Adam Hochschild writes, “could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London,” almost 200 miles away. In spite of this extraordinary effort to “soften” German defenses, the first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the British Army over 57,000 casualties, including almost 20,000 killed.

A story posted yesterday by the McClatchy News Service describes another unending war. Forty years after the end of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War (or, to the Vietnamese, the American War), there are still cases of children being born with severe birth defects caused by Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant used by the United States in Vietnam from 1961 to 1971. The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that Agent Orange has affected 3,000,000 people in Vietnam, including 150,000 children born with birth defects since the fall of Saigon in 1975.  While the United States has, since 1991, extended disability benefits for any of fifteen diseases linked to Agent Orange to U.S. military personnel who served in Vietnam, it has provided little assistance to the Vietnamese and has avoided acknowledging any responsibility for health problems caused by the use of the chemical. There is a U.S.-funded effort underway to clean up chemical contamination near the Da Nang International Airport, which was used by the U.S. Air Force during the war, but this site is just one of many Agent Orange “hot spots” in Vietnam.

There is some evidence that humankind is getting better at calculating the costs of war and that, as a result, we have become more successful at avoiding it than we have been in the past. What World War I is teaching us now, and what the Vietnam War seems destined to echo, is this: the costs of a war should be calculated out to a century (or more) beyond its conclusion.

"Acquisition Malpractice"

Problems with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are the subject of a front-page article in today's New York Times. The Times, drawing from a June Government Accountability Office study of the F-35 that focused on "affordability risks," reports that total program costs could reach $396 billion if the Pentagon purchases 2,443 of the planes by the late 2030s as is currently planned. That would make the program the costliest weapons program in history by close to a factor of four. The cost per plane has risen from $69 million in 2001 to $137 million today. Frank Kendall, who has directed the Pentagon's weapons-purchasing operations since May, describes the decision to begin production of the F-35 before flight testing had even started as "acquisition malpractice."

Sovereignty and Atrocity

Human Rights Watch is reporting today that eleven children were killed over the weekend when a Syrian MiG-23 dropped cluster bombs on the town of Deir al-'Assafeer. An indiscriminate attack of any kind on noncombatants violates international humanitarian law, but the focus in HRW's account of what happened is on the use of cluster munitions, and for good reasons.

Cluster bombs, first, are used primarily as antipersonnel weapons. When noncombatants die in an attack employing conventional bombs or artillery shells, a plausible claim can sometimes be made that the deaths were unintended collateral damage incidental to an attack on a legitimate target. On the other hand, when civilians--and only civilians--are killed by cluster bombs, there is a strong case to be made that a war crime has been committed.

Second, cluster munitions tend to leave behind a deadly legacy of what are sometimes rather bureaucratically referred to as explosive remnants of war (ERW). Everywhere they have been employed, unexploded submunitions--bomblets--continue to pose a threat to civilians (poor farmers more often than not) long after the conflict ends. Disposing of unexploded submunitions is very hazardous, requiring both resources and political will that post-conflict societies often find to be in short supply. According to HRW, video footage of the attack on Deir al-'Assafeer and its aftermath shows at least fifty unexploded bomblets around the site.

Human Rights Watch maintains that cluster munitions "are subject to a ban under international law due to the harm they cause to civilians," in the words of Mary Wareham, the organization's arms division advocacy director. The ban to which Wareham refers is articulated in the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, which entered into force on August 1, 2010. The Convention today has 111 signatories, 77 of which have ratified the agreement. Syria is not a party to the agreement, however, which means the ban does not apply to it in the absence of a determination that the ban is part of customary international law (a claim that has not, to my knowledge, been pressed by HRW).

There is no question that the use of cluster munitions to deliberately target noncombatants is illegal. The deaths of eleven children in the bombing of Deir al-'Assafeer should be added to the long list of crimes for which the Assad regime ultimately should be held accountable. But it is not clear--in fact, it is almost certainly wrong to say--that international law makes it illegal for Syria to use cluster munitions under any conditions. While I would prefer to side with Wareham and Human Rights Watch on this issue, the fact that Syria is not a party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions is significant. It has opted out of the obligations imposed on states parties by the Convention, as has the United States. The right to do so, however unfortunate in this particular case, is inherent in the notion of sovereignty. Sovereignty shields states--including bad ones like Syria--from the imposition of law, including laws banning cluster munitions, by outsiders. But only up to a point.

Wareham states that "all governments, including Syria’s allies, should condemn Syria’s continued use of cluster bombs," and there is good reason for this, even if Syria is not legally subject to the ban imposed by the Convention on Cluster Munitions. The condemnation of other governments can erode the protection that sovereignty provides for the use of cluster munitions by states that have not ratified the Convention. While sovereignty ensures that states bear primary responsibility for their own laws and their own actions (at least insofar as their actions are confined to their own territories), international law as a means of limiting the freedom of states pushes back against sovereignty where customary international law and, more importantly, peremptory norms (jus cogens) are involved. If cluster munitions are to be "subject to a ban under international law," it will come from universal ratification of the Convention on Cluster Munitions or, more likely, from a sufficiently widespread acceptance of the Convention and broad-based condemnation of holdouts that, in combination, generates a customary international law norm against possession or use of the weapons. Human Rights Watch may have jumped the gun in suggesting that a ban on cluster munitions currently exists, but it is hastening the day when that will be true by publicizing what the Syrian government is doing with these weapons.

The Campaign to Ban Autonomous Killer Robots

Last week, Human Rights Watch, joined by the Nobel Women's Initiative, launched a campaign to develop an international ban on autonomous killer robots. A 50-page report, Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots, published jointly by HRW and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, was released on Monday.

According to the report, the U.S. Department of Defense is spending roughly $6 billion per year on unmanned systems, a figure projected to grow quickly given the military's avowed interest in procuring more robotic weapons with expanding capabilities. A number of other countries are also investing in military robotics with increasing degrees of autonomy. The most newsworthy example in recent days has been Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. At present, the Iron Dome system puts a human operator in the loop, but it is clearly a system for which fully autonomous operations would be possible.

The report opposes the deployment of lethal autonomous robots on three grounds: (1) such robots would not conform to the rules of international humanitarian law as they relate to noncombatant immunity, proportionality, and military necessity; (2) they would not be subject to extra-legal protections for civilians such as those predicated on human compassion and empathy, thus making them suitable for use by repressive governments against their own populations; and (3) they would make it difficult to establish accountability for war crimes given the elimination of direct human agency. The report concludes with a recommendation that those involved in the development of robotic weapons generate a code of conduct governing work that might lead to the creation of fully autonomous systems.

Clinton Confronts a Legacy of the Vietnam War

Secretary of State Clinton is in Phnom Penh where she attended the just-concluded annual foreign ministers' meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).  Earlier in the week, she became the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Laos since John Foster Dulles visited in 1955.  In the interim, there was the Vietnam War.

Like Cambodia, Laos was a sideshow in the Vietnam War.  But that hardly means it was ignored.  In fact, on a per capita basis, there is no country in the world that has been bombed as much as Laos.  Because the Ho Chi Minh Trail passed through Laos and the Viet Cong used Laotian territory both as a refugee and as a source of supplies, the United States extended its massive bombing campaign to Laos.  According to testimony by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Scot Marciel before a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2010, the United States dropped 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos during the Vietnam War--more than were dropped on Germany and Japan, combined, during World War II.  Many of the bombs were cluster munitions with failure rates as high as 30 percent.

Even now, an estimated 300 people per year die when unexploded ordnance (UXO) explodes--because they stepped on unexploded submunitions from a cluster bomb, because they were trying to recover the valuable scrap metal from unexploded bombs, because they stepped on landmines--in short, because they were going about the normal activities of daily life in Laos.

Secretary Clinton met a survivor during a stop at an artificial limb center in Laos.  Phongsavath Sonilya, who lost both forearms and his vision when a cluster bomb exploded three years ago, had a message for the secretary of state.  The nineteen-year-old suggested that more needs to be done to halt the use of cluster munitions like the ones that contaminate many places where the United States has made war:  Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

There is a Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an international agreement that prohibits the use, manufacture, stockpiling, and transfer of cluster bombs.  It was adopted in May 2008 and entered into force on August 1, 2010.  Seventy-four states have ratified the CCM, binding themselves to eliminate this particular weapon and to aid those countries, like Laos, that have suffered so much from its use.  The United States is not a party to the CCM.  No one could make a better case for why the United States should ratify the agreement than Phongsavath Sonilya did when he met Secretary Clinton.

WWII UXO

Not every bomb dropped or shell fired in a war explodes.  Those that don't are called UXO, or unexploded ordnance.  UXO can kill long after the war comes to an end.

Nearly half the population of Koblenz, Germany has been evacuated following the discovery of a 3,000-pound bomb dropped by the Royal Air Force into the Rhine during World War II.  The evacuees include the residents of seven nursing homes, two hospitals, and a prison.  German authorities will attempt to defuse the bomb tomorrow after draining the water from an area of the river surrounding the bomb.

In June 2010, three German explosives technicians were killed in Gottingen when the World War II bomb they were trying to defuse exploded.

UPDATE:  The bomb in Koblenz has been successfully defused, along with a smaller one found in the same place.  German authorities have also defused a small bomb in Nuremberg after evacuating 200 people there.

Viktor Bout: Friend or Foe?

On Wednesday, November 2, the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout was convicted in a federal court in Manhattan on four counts of conspiracy in connection with the sale of weapons to Colombian rebels.  Bout, who once advised the Soviet military in Africa, bought weapons and a fleet of cargo planes from the former Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War and began trafficking arms to both governments and rebel forces in various conflicts around the world.  A British government report published in 2000 referred to him as "the Merchant of Death."  The movie Lord of War, which starred Nicholas Cage, was based on his exploits.

Here is the description of Bout in the second edition of Seeking Security in an Insecure World:

Bout is alleged to have sold over seven hundred surface-to-air missiles, military helicopters and airplanes, and thousands of guns to FARC, the Colombian paramilitary organization.  He has also sold weapons in Afghanistan and in various war zones in Africa.  At a Bangkok hotel in March 2008, Bout offered undercover agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency posing as FARC representatives a wide range of weapons, including land mines, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and C-4 explosives.  He was arrested at the conclusion of the meeting, which was taped, and, in August 2010, a Thai court ordered his extradition to stand trial in the United States.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times on Friday, Andrew Feinstein, author of The Shadow World:  Inside the Global Arms Trade (reviewed here by John Tirman), writes that in 2003 and 2004, Irbis Air--a company owned by Bout--flew supplies into Baghdad under contract to the U.S. Defense Department and KBR, a private contractor that was itself working for the U.S. Government.  Feinstein points out that "governments protect corrupt and dangerous arms dealers as long as they need them and then throw them behind bars when they are no longer useful."

Off the Reservation

It doesn't bother me that five Advanced Cruise Missiles armed with nuclear weapons were flown on a B-52 from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Lousiana on August 30, but I am somewhat concerned that the Air Force didn't know it.

The appropriate military authorities are also concerned and have launched--check that--begun an investigation.

Twenty-one Problems; Solutions Included

Foreign Policy has asked twenty-one experts to suggest one thing that would make the world a better place. In response, Joseph S. Nye, Jr. addresses anti-Americanism, Jeffrey D. Sachs considers global poverty, and Lt. Gen. William E. Odom takes on nuclear proliferation--to name just a seventh of the experts and their issues.

See the complete collection here.

Hyping the DPRK Threat

Joseph Cirincione makes a compelling case that the Bush Administration handled intelligence on North Korea's nuclear weapons program with the same disregard for inconvenient facts that it displayed with respect to Iraq. He writes:

What once appeared the exception now seems the rule. Officials in U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration are gingerly walking back from claims that North Korea was secretly building a factory to enrich uranium for dozens of atomic bombs. The intelligence, officials now say, was not as solid as they originally trumpeted. It does not seem that the North Korean program is as large or as advanced as claimed or that the country's leaders are as set on building weapons as officials depicted.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The original claims came during the same period officials were hyping stories of Iraq's weapons. Once again, the claims involve aluminum tubes. Once again, there was cherry-picking and exaggeration of intelligence. Once again, the policy shaped the intelligence, with enormous national security costs. The story of Iraq is well known; that unnecessary war has cost thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and an immeasurable loss of legitimacy. This time, the administration's decision to tear up a successful agreement--using a dubious intelligence "finding" as an excuse--propelled the tiny, isolated country to subsequently build and test nuclear weapons, threatening to trigger a new wave of proliferation.

This is just the introduction; Cirincione provides many specifics in the paragraphs that follow.

The charge of cherry-picking intelligence on the subject of North Korea's nuclear weapons program adds a new dimension to the consensus expressed by proliferation experts at a recent conference hosted by the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA: The Bush Administration has failed miserably in its handling of North Korea.

A Deal with North Korea

This looks like good news. It also looks an awful lot like the 1994 Agreed Framework that the Clinton Administration negotiated with North Korea--several North Korean nuclear weapons ago.

Killing the Innocent

The realization that innocent people have been sentenced to die and, in some cases, actually executed has been a key factor in prompting some states to impose a moratorium on capital punishment. In warfare, the killing of innocents sometimes leads to inquests and courts martial--if the killings occur in the context of ground combat. But, as Simon Jenkins points out in a column in tomorrow's Guardian, killing innocent people from the air hardly rates any concern at all. Jenkins writes:

When bombing from the air kills non-combatants, as it does to an appalling degree, there should at least be a military inquiry into why. . . . Massacres committed by infantrymen are subject to courts martial. If soldiers enter a house by the front door and kill civilians inside, then they are hauled before world opinion and condemned. If a dropped bomb enters the same house through the roof and has the same effect, it is dismissed as collateral damage. In Iraq it is not even recorded.

That military strategy is so casual about bomb inaccuracy is largely due to the technological glamour attached to air forces as against ground troops. The latter are always worse equipped and worse protected. Air commanders have long oversold the efficacy of strategic bombing and ignore the degree to which, in counter-insurgency war, such bombardment can be wildly counter-productive. The destruction of non-military targets and the incidental killing of civilians is far more damaging to the cause of victory than friendly-fire casualties that attract so much publicity and inquiry.

In the United States, attitudes toward aerial bombardment were shaped by World War II and the indiscriminate bombing campaign led by General Curtis LeMay. LeMay summed up his own attitude toward war in these words: "I'll tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting."

Until the United States comes to terms with the LeMay legacy, it may be impossible to understand "collateral damage" for what it is: killing the innocent.

Zap 'Em

The development of non-lethal weapons is a serious matter, but it's hard not to laugh when thinking about where the inspiration for these latest designs might have come from.

First, there's a microwave device that zaps bad guys 500 yards away. It doesn't cook them--that, to state the obvious, would make it a lethal weapon--but it does make them feel hot under the collar. Not angry hot under the collar, but "I feel an overwhelming desire to go jump in the nearest lake" hot under the collar.

Second, there's a spray-on equivalent of the banana peel. The "polymer ice," according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is supposed to "degrade the ability of our adversaries to chase us." It's suitable for use on streets, sidewalks, stairs, and dance floors in any country where plaintiffs' attorneys are in short supply.

Coming soon: automated ear-twisters.

[Via Foreign Policy Passport.]

Remember the Titans

On March 16, 1962, the United States conducted its first test of the Titan II ICBM, a two-stage liquid-fueled rocket capable of being launched from a hardened silo (unlike its predecessors, the Atlas and Titan I ICBMs). By the end of 1963, a total of 56 Titan II ICBMs had been deployed. (The number would eventually reach 60 in 1966 before dropping to 54--18 in Arkansas, 18 in Arizona, and 18 in Kansas--in 1967.) In addition to carrying the largest nuclear payloads, the Titan II was also used as the launch vehicle for NASA's Gemini manned space program and for many of the U.S. Air Force's largest satellites.

Almost as soon as it was deployed, however, the Titan II was made obsolete by the Minuteman solid-fuel ICBMs. Solid-fuel missiles were more reliable, easier to maintain, and capable of being launched more quickly (thus the name "Minuteman"). By the end of 1967, there were 1,000 Minuteman ICBMs deployed in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Missouri.

One of the reasons the Titan II ICBMS were kept around for two decades after the completion of the Minuteman deployment was ability of the Titans to carry large payloads. The largest warhead ever deployed by the United States--a nine megaton thermonuclear device--was placed atop a Titan II. (According to one of the displays at the Titan Missile Museum, a warhead that size would have the destructive power of a train with 90,000 boxcars--long enough to stretch 1,534 miles--filled with TNT.)

The Reagan Administration's Strategic Forces Modernization Plan, drafted in 1981, called for the elimination of the Titan II ICBMs by the end of 1987. The 54 Titan IIs were removed from their silos and in every case the silos were destroyed--except for the silo near Sahuarita, Arizona just south of Tucson.

Through the intervention of the Pima Air Museum, Site 571-7 was preserved as a museum. A Titan II test rocket was disabled, placed in the silo, and the silo door was permanently fixed in a half-open position (to assure the Soviets/Russians, via their satellite reconnaissance, that the silo was not operational). The satellite photo here shows the silo in the half-open position.

Today, volunteers at the Titan Missile Museum take visitors on an hour-long tour through the surface facilities, down into the silo, and into the underground control room. It is, as the museum likes to note, a step back in time to the front lines of the Cold War.

And that's what I did with my free time while in Tucson last week for the ISSS/ISAC Conference.

The Threat to Civil Aviation

Tomorrow the RAND Corporation will release a study that finds that although shoulder-fired missiles pose a serious threat to civil aviation in the United States, available counter-measures are prohibitively expensive. The study states, "Al Qaeda and its affiliates have both the motive and the means to bring down U.S. commercial aircraft with shoulder-fired missiles." Nonetheless, the $11 billion that RAND researchers believe would be necessary to equip civilian airliners with existing defenses against such missiles is almost three times what is currently being spent on transportation security by the government.

Last November, American intelligence officials revealed that there are an estimated 6,000 light anti-aircraft missiles in circulation outside the control of governments. Some of these are leftover Stinger missiles supplied by the United States to the mujahidin during the Afghan War of the 1980s. Steve Coll, in Ghost Wars, describes the CIA's failed effort to buy back unused Stingers shortly after the Taliban captured Kabul. Today, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles are thought to sell for approximately $5,000 on the black market.

As the Los Angeles Times noted back in December, LAX and other urban airports are virtually impossible to secure against the threat given the range of newer shoulder-fired missiles and the population density of the areas surrounding urban airports. The Department of Homeland Security has been looking at various means to address the threat, but progress has reportedly been slow. In fact, the Air Force initiated a secret program early in 2004 to develop defenses for civilian airliners because of its frustration with the pace of DHS efforts.

Big Brother with a Gun

A Texan (surprise, surprise) has introduced the concept of Internet hunting. No, really. Here's the story from Reuters.

This may give new meaning to the phrase "hunt and peck typing." Instead of "surfing the web," we may soon "safari the web." The "fatal error" message may soon mean "fatal error." Bambi's survival may depend on the speed of a hunter's Internet connection. (Okay, I'll stop.)

What does this have to do with international relations? (Occasionally I have to remind myself that this blog is supposed to focus on IR.) I have an answer for that.

Throughout history, advances in hunting--and fishing--technology have quickly found application on the battlefield, and vice versa. The bow and arrow, used first for hunting, quickly developed into an instrument of war. Dynamite, invented by Alfred Nobel for use in war and industry, evolved into a favorite tool of fishermen. You see where this is going.

If Internet hunting works, the military will take note. The United States could one day police the world from a bank of computers buried deep within the Pentagon. Guns could be mounted on rooftops in the major cities of the world's most dangerous countries and aimed and fired as necessary from a computer half a world away. Eventually, the job of policing the world could be outsourced to a bunch of IT guys in Bangalore, India. The possibilities are endless.

Consider this postscript from P.J. O'Rourke, from a 1991 dispatch reprinted in his book Give War a Chance:

One more thing about this generation of soldiers--they grew up in video arcades. It's no coincidence that watching the Gulf War's high-tech weapons on our TV screens is so much like watching computer games. This war is the daddy of all Mario Brothers, the Gog and Magog of hacker networks, the devil's own personal core dump. And our soldiers have an absolutely intuitive, Donkey Kong-honed, gut-level understanding of the technology behind it. Thank God they do. It's why we're winning. So here's what you folks back home can do to help with the war effort. If you happen to have any kids and they're outdoors exercising in the healthy fresh air and sunshine, give them hell: "YOU GET IN HERE RIGHT NOW AND PLAY NINTENDO!" The future of our nation may depend on it.

The Stinger Threat

Western intelligence agencies have been worried for years about the threat posed to civil aviation by shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles like the Stinger missiles the United States supplied to the mujahedeen for use in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Now the New York Times reports that the threat may be significantly greater than was previously thought.

American intelligence agencies have tripled their formal estimate of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems believed to be at large worldwide, since determining that at least 4,000 of the weapons in Iraq's prewar arsenals cannot be accounted for, government officials said Friday.

A new government estimate says a total of 6,000 of the weapons may be outside the control of any government, up from a previous estimate of 2,000, American officials said.

It is not known how many of the missiles are in the hands of terrorist organizations. However, the price on the black market is said to be $5,000. That means (1) the black-market supply of missiles is plentiful and (2) the price is within reach of almost any organization that might be interested in purchasing them.

F-16 Cockpit Camera

It is perhaps a testimony to the degree of control the Pentagon has exercised over the news coverage of the Iraq War, but we've seen very few of the cockpit camera videos that were so common during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Here (via Matthew Gross), however, is a video that was shown recently on Channel 4 in the U.K. It shows a missile strike from an American F-16 on a group of people on the street in Fallujah back in April.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman devotes considerable attention in his book entitled On Killing to the psychological significance of killing at a distance. He writes (p. 108), "In years of research and reading on the subject of killing in combat I have not found one single instance of individuals who have refused to kill the enemy under these circumstances [of killing from a distance], nor have I found a single instance of psychiatric trauma associated with this type of killing." The video suggests why this is the case. One must force oneself to remember that the dots moving ant-like on the street below are human beings.