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Robot leadership

An amazing revolution is taking place in the history of war.

The U.S. military went into Iraq with zero unmanned systems on the ground and just a handful of drones in the air, none of them armed.

Today, there are more than 5,300 drones in the U.S. inventory and roughly 12,000 more on the ground. And these are just the first generation, the Model T Fords compared with the smarter, more autonomous and more lethal machines already in the prototype stage. And we aren’t the only ones using them. Forty-two other countries — as well as a host of nonstate actors — have military robotics programs.

But like any major change in war, the robot revolution is not turning out to be the frictionless triumph of technology. Unmanned systems are raising all sorts of questions about not only what is possible but also what is proper in politics, ethics, law and other fields — and these questions are rippling into all aspects of the military endeavor.

Take the challenges that surround the role of command. At the unit level, a colonel talked about how commanding a team fighting remotely with unmanned systems proved even tougher than commanding a deployed unit.

Indeed, the fact that unmanned aerial vehicle pilots in Nevada have rates of combat stress even greater than many units physically deployed points to the darker side of this change in the human experience of going to war.

The ripple effects of robotics on leadership even affect the strategic level. Many have discussed the idea of “strategic corporals,” younger and younger troops who are being given greater and greater power and responsibility.

But the rise of robots has created an opposite phenomenon — the rise of what I call “tactical generals.”

Our technologies are making it easy, perhaps too easy, for leaders at the highest level of command to peer into and even to take control of the lowest level operations. One four-star general, for example, talked about how he once spent two hours watching drone footage of an enemy target and then personally decided what size bomb to drop on it.

Similarly, a special operations captain talked about a one-star, watching a raid on a terrorist hideout via a Predator, radioing to tell him where to move not merely his unit in the midst of battle, but where to position an individual soldier.

The ability to watch and then reach into a battle in real time certainly helps commanders become better informed and take personal responsibility for the decisions made in combat. But the line between timely intervention and micromanagement is a fine one. A four-star general can do the job of a captain, but a captain can’t do the same on the kind of big strategic issues that only a four-star general has the authority and experience to handle.

Even more, we have to ponder the long-term consequences. What happens when the young officers now being cut out of the chain, or micromanaged in the midst of battle, advance up the ranks, but without the experience of making the tough calls?

This leadership issue is not just one for the troops. Civilian leaders equally now have a new ability not only to watch at the tactical level but even decide what should be done.

Citing President Lyndon Johnson’s frequent attempts to influence the bombing campaign in Vietnam, a former service secretary worried that, ultimately, “it’ll be like taking LBJ all the way down into the foxhole.”

We have to start wrestling with all the tough questions that are beginning to flow as science-fictionlike capabilities are being used in our very real and very human world. Fortunately, in looking at what seem like futuristic challenges, the lessons of the past remain solid guideposts.

For example, on the issue of leadership, Gen. George Marshall, Army chief of staff during World War II, remains a model even for 21st-century leaders. Inventions like the radio and teletype gave him a revolutionary ability to instruct his officers from afar.

However, Marshall’s approach was to set the broad goals and agenda, have smart staff officers write up the details of the plan — and ensure that everything remained simple enough that a lieutenant in the field could understand and carry out everything on his own.

Just as the bedrock values of good politics, ethics and law remain the same, regardless of the technology or century, so do the tenets of good leadership.

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The writer is the director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution. His new book is “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.”