1NC – HEG
The LAW arms race has already begun, but the US can stay ahead
Del Re 17 [(Amanda Del Re - J7 Missile Defense Planner at The Joint Staff, MA: Naval War College) (Tim
Schultz - Dean of the U.S. Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, research includes the
transformative role of automation in warfare and the impact of technological change on institutions,
society, and military strategy) “Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Take the Human Out of the Loop” US
Naval War College, June 16, 2017] fp
The United States came close to employing autonomous weapons but ultimately hesitated. The Special
Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Direct-action System (SWORDS) was an unmanned ground
vehicle (UGV) that was deployed to Iraq in 2007. There is significant controversy surrounding the fate of
these three robots as they reportedly never left their forwarding operating bases (FOBs). The Army
program manager, Kevin Fahey, publicly stated that “the gun started moving when it was not intended
to move.”62 This comment was strewn across the media with provocative reports that “ground-crawling
US war robots armed with machine guns” had “turned on their fleshy masters almost at once.”63 The
facts surrounding this attempted “kill-droid rebellion” are vague and mysterious and the fact that the
robots were never employed again stirred up more rumors.64 Fahey attempted to explain the reason
for the Army’s reluctance: “once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to
try it again.”65 The United States does not want to haphazardly employ a devastating weapon without
fully understanding the effects. Unfortunately, other countries do not follow that school of thought.
Russia demonstrated that it is able and willing to use fully autonomous weapons. In 2013, Russia
introduced its “mobile robot complex” developed by the Izhevsk Radio Plant. The “mobile robot
complex” will protect Russia’s ballistic missile installations with a 12.7-millimeter heavy machine gun,
speeds of up to 30mph, ten hours’ worth of battery life and a up to a week- long sleep mode.66 These
robots are autonomous with the ability to “detect and destroy targets, without human involvement.”67
Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin, discussed projects in development that “include a
remote controlled android with driving and shooting skills” and a system capable of “delivering strikes
on its own.”68 Rogozin also boasted that “someday soon, one Russian soldier will do the work that takes
five or 10 soldiers today, which would be impossible without advanced robots.”69 Rogozin described
employing both a humanon-the-loop and human-out-of-the-loop scenario which demonstrates that
Russia does not have an issue with removing the human from the loop. Israel has employed a fully
autonomous weapon and has sold it to other nations in the Middle East. Israel Aerospace Industries’
(IAI) Harop is an upgraded version of the antiradiation drone, Harpy, with significant differences. The
Harop can loiter longer than its predecessor and can find, identify, attack, and destroy targets
autonomously. While the Harop is an “autonomous platform operation” Israel keeps a “man-in-the-loop
for attack” for “avoiding collateral damage.”70 Just because Israel retains a man-in-the-loop before
kinetic use does not mean that other countries will. In June 2015, IAI demonstrated Harop’s capabilities
in a serious of tests for “anonymous foreign buyers.”71 In April 2016, the drone was spotted in the skies
over Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus and it allegedly targeted and attacked a bus full of Armenian
volunteers killing seven of them. The Azerbaijani army claimed that it was responsible for the attack and
that it was indeed using the Israeli Harop. 72 There is no available information regarding whether there
was a human-in-the-loop during the time of the engagement. This example illustrates that the
technology is available and other countries are willing to use it in warfare. If other nations are already
paving the way for the acceptable use of lethal autonomous weapons then rogue nations and non-
state actors will likely not hesitate to use them. The probability of a non-state actor acquiring a LAW is
not unrealistic. In October 2016, an IED drone employed by ISIS killed two Kurdish soldiers and injured
two French Commandos.73 While the IED drone was not suspected of being autonomous, it illustrates
that non-state actors have the capacity to acquire new lethal technologies as well as willingness to use
them. If available, it is likely that non-state actors will employ lethal autonomous weapons on the
battlefield without reluctance. Furthermore, rogue nations could potentially sell (or give) autonomous
weapons to a non-state actor to see what the effects of the weapon are on the battlefield and what the
international reaction is. In conclusion, the lethal autonomous weapons arms race is in progress and
the United States needs to stay ahead. History has shown that reluctance to employ existing
controversial strategies and technologies has resulted in flawed execution and more casualties. On the
contrary, waiting to decide to employ controversial strategies during conflict has resulted in some of
warfare’s greatest atrocities. The United States needs to continue to develop, test and employ lethal
autonomous weapons so that those difficult decisions are not made in a vacuum.
China is quickly catching up to US in AI development with the explicit purpose of
pursuing stronger commercial-military ties to facilitate intelligized warfare
Tadjeh 10/30 (Yasmin Tadjeh, Senior Editor at National Defense Magazine, 10/30/20,
National Defense Magazine, “China Threatens U.S. Primacy in Artificial Intelligence
(UPDATED),” https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/10/30/chinathreatens-us-primacy-in-artificial-intelligence)
It is a statement that has been broadcasted and heard around the world: China
intends to be the global leader of artificial
intelligence by 2030. The country is putting its money where its mouth is, officials and analysts say, and
making investments in AI that could threaten the United States and erode Washington’s advantages in
the technology. “The Chinese Communist Party recognizes the transformational power of AI,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper recently said during remarks
at the Defense Department’s AI Symposium and Exposition. Beijing views the technology as a critical component to its future military and industrial power, said the
Pentagon’s recently released “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020” annual report to Congress. The country’s “Next
Generation AI Development Plan” details Beijing’s strategy to employ commercial and military organizations to achieve major breakthroughs by 2025 and become
the world leader by 2030, the report said. Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman and CEO of Google and the chairman of the National Security Commission on
Artificial Intelligence, said the
Asian power is rapidly catching up to the United States. “We’re a year or two ahead of China,” he
said. “We’re not a decade ahead.” The general consensus is that leading AI research is still conducted in the United States, but its strategic competitor is advancing,
he said during an event hosted by the Hoover Institution. “We’re in a contest, and part of the reasons I think that China may win is that they have five times as many
people,” Schmidt said. “They’re very focused on STEM education. They have incentives now in their research community for people to publish papers. … The quality
may not be there, but numerically they’re there.” Husanjot Chahal, an analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said
Chinese Communist Party leaders see the development of AI as a rare opportunity for China to surpass the United States. Michael Brown, director of the Pentagon’s
Defense Innovation Unit, said the United States is in a “superpower marathon with China” to acquire advanced technology. There
are already areas
where Beijing is ahead, he said. These include facial recognition software, small drones, quantum
communications, telecommunications, genetic data, cryptocurrency and more, according to his
presentation slides. “Frankly, when I put this slide together, I was surprised by how many technologies China had the lead on,” Brown said. Areas
where China is challenging the United States’ lead include artificial intelligence, biotechnology,
pharmaceuticals, rocket launches, quantum computing, quantum sensing and supercomputing,
according to his slides. According to the Pentagon’s China military power report, Beijing is pursuing a whole-of-society effort to become the worldwide
leader in AI, which includes designating certain private companies as “AI Champions” to emphasize research and development in specific dual-use technologies. In
2017, China delegated Alibaba, Baidu, iFlytek and Tencent as AI Champions. SenseTime joined in 2018 and in 2019 Beijing added 10 new companies to the list,
including Huawei, Hikvision, Megvii and Yitu, according to the report. Both Huawei and Hikvision are major suppliers of AI surveillance technology worldwide, it
noted. Beijing is constructing what Esper called a 21st century surveillance state “designed to wield unprecedented control over its own people.” China has
hundreds of millions of cameras strategically located across the country and billions of data points generated by the Chinese internet of things, he said. “The CCP
will soon be able to identify almost anyone entering a public space, and censor dissent in real time,” he said. “More troubling is the fact that these systems can be
used to invade private lives, leaving no text message, internet search, purchase or personal activity free from Beijing’s tightening grip.” Esper also noted that China
is using its AI surveillance apparatus to repress its Muslim Uighur population and to identify, seize and imprison pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong. “As China
scales this technology, we fully expect it to sell these capabilities abroad, enabling other autocratic governments to move toward a new era of digital
authoritarianism,” he said. The
country is also investing in autonomous systems and views AI as a “leapfrog”
technology that could enable low-cost, long-range autonomous platforms to counter U.S. military
conventional power projection, Esper said. “At this moment, Chinese weapons manufacturers are selling
autonomous drones they claim can conduct lethal targeted strikes,” he said. “Meanwhile, the Chinese
government is advancing the development of next-generation stealth UAVs, which they are preparing to
export internationally.” In 2019, private Chinese company Ziyan UAV demonstrated armed swarming drones which it claimed employed AI to perform
autonomous guidance, target acquisition and attack execution, according to the Defense Department report. Over the past five years, China has made
achievements in AI-enabled unmanned surface vessels, which it plans to use to patrol and bolster its
territorial claims in the South China Sea, the document said. It has also tested unmanned tanks as part
of research efforts to integrate AI into ground forces. Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army is shifting away from today’s
“informatized” method of warfare and moving to “intelligentized” warfare, according to the report. “ PLA strategists broadly describe
intelligentized warfare as the operationalization of artificial intelligence and its enabling technologies,
such as cloud computing, big data analytics, quantum information and unmanned systems, for military
applications,” the report said. Beijing plans to pursue intelligentized warfare through its military-civil
fusion development strategy — which requires that technology developed by the commercial sector be
transferred to the military — and by reforming its R&D strategy and doctrine organizations, according to the study. To support intelligentized
warfare, China is pursuing new AI capabilities to support autonomous command-and-control systems, more
sophisticated and predictive operation planning, as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
fusion, the report said. “In addition, the PLA is developing more capable command information systems and decision aids for battlefield commanders,”
the document said. “Future command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems will seek to use AI to collect, fuse
and transmit big data for more effective battlespace management and to generate optimal courses of action.” Beijing also plans to improve its cyber and electronic
warfare capabilities through AI-assisted network vulnerability analysis, countermeasure identification and electromagnetic spectrum management, the study noted.
Because the Chinese military is short on recent combat experience, the
country is using AI for wargaming, said Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior
been attention to the
application of AI in wargaming and the development of several systems both to play against and train to
some extent human players or AI systems … to generate data, to experiment with new concepts and
draw lessons learned about trends and the character of warfare,” she said. It is difficult to pinpoint how much China is
fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. “ There’s
spending on artificial intelligence, but it could be in the low billions of dollars for just research and development, Kania said. “China’s defense budget is generally
considered quite opaque,” she noted. Beijing is working on a growing number of early stage AI projects and systems with funding from institutions such as the
Central Military Commission Science and Technology Commission, which is roughly analogous to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Kania said.
Autonomous weapons development is critical to primacy – history and increasing
adversary competition:
Schmidt et al. 19 [(Dr. Eric Schmidt - chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial
Intelligence and the former CEO and chairman of Alphabet) (Robert Work - former Deputy Secretary of
Defense) (Dr. Steve Chien- Technical Group Supervisor of the Artificial Intelligence Group and Senior
Research Scientist in the Mission Planning and Execution Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
California Institute of Technology where he leads efforts in automated planning and scheduling for
space exploration, holds a B.S. with Highest Honors in Computer Science, with minors in Mathematics
and Economics, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the University of Illinois) “Interim
Report: November 2019” National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, November 2019] FP
Technological change is creating first-order national security challenges for the United States. Strategic
competitors have invested in advanced capabilities to erode American military advantages, exploit
vulnerabilities, and undermine conventional deterrence.94 Decisions about how to apply AI for national
security purposes will help determine whether the United States reverses the trends and meets its
traditional national security objectives: defending the homeland, deterring war, protecting allies, and
winning on the battlefield.
U.S. military strategy has long relied on technological innovation to achieve strategic objectives and
maintain U.S. advantage. The past two decisive military-technological revolutions, known as the “first
offset” and “second offset,” were enabled by specific technological breakthroughs that solved core
defense problems. The first offset began early in the Cold War and solved the problem of how to deter
a massive conventional Soviet threat to Western Europe by miniaturizing nuclear components to build a
new generation of battlefield atomic weapons. Once the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity, the
second offset of the 1970s and ’80s sought to renew U.S. advantage and restore a credible deterrent by
exploiting innovations in information technologies and digital microprocessors. These efforts led to new
conventional guided weapons, stealth, GPS, and wide-area ground surveillance––technological
innovations that enabled the United States and its allies to “look deep and shoot deep.” Each offset
drove the development of new battlefield capabilities able to resolve a core defense dilemma.95
Today, strategic competitors have caught up with the United States technologically, and threaten U.S.
military-technical superiority. Efforts to address this development began with the 2014 Defense
Innovation Initiative, which paved the way for a third offset strategy, the precepts of which were
reflected in the 2018 National Defense Strategy.96 The Commission believes AI is key to the next
technological leap which, if leveraged appropriately, will equip the United States to extend its
advantages and preserve a credible deterrent in East Asia and Eastern Europe. AI-enabled systems
could allow U.S. forces to understand the battlespace more clearly and rapidly; make better informed
and faster command decisions; use autonomous systems to mount operations even when
communication links are under attack; and develop capabilities to better defend against adversary AI
systems. Intelligence agencies will be able to integrate massive amounts of data and better identify
threats and discern patterns, which will provide military commanders and policy makers with more
timely and sophisticated analysis.97
AI can enable our national security agencies to understand, operate, and execute their missions faster.
However, the DoD and the IC are still a long way from realizing AI’s potential benefits. Efforts to
integrate AI face obstacles throughout the adoption pipeline. The history of military innovation suggests
that overcoming these challenges is essential for effectively using new technology.98 As with difficulties
incorporating mechanized armor, steam-powered ships, aviation, and other technological advances into
military operations, government can be its own worst enemy as it tries to translate AI strategy on paper
into practice and technological breakthroughs in the lab into results in the field.
The challenge is compounded because the government has not yet effectively incorporated commercial
developments or found a way to be a fast adopter of the latest technologies. To remain competitive,
the U.S. government must accelerate efforts to apply AI and rethink military doctrine, strategy,
organization, budgeting, acquisition, talent management, tactics, training, and infrastructure.
INITIAL CONSENSUS JUDGMENTS:
AI can help the United States execute core national security missions, if we let it.
With better AI applications, DoD can take advantage of autonomous and intelligent systems that can
help our forces become more effective; the Intelligence Community can more effectively process and
analyze vast amounts of data; and agencies can find efficiencies in business operations, so those
resources can be reallocated to the highest priority missions. Across these contexts, AI applications
enable greater autonomy, automation, speed, endurance, scaling, information superiority, and
decision-making.99
The potential value for national security missions is significant and wide ranging. For example, AI can
process information and react at superhuman speed, providing an advantage in missions where speed is
critical, such as cybersecurity or missile defense. In electronic warfare, cognitive systems could
autonomously detect and respond to signals jamming.100 AI-enabled autonomous systems can also
operate with superhuman endurance, providing, for example, around-the-clock overhead
reconnaissance. In anti submarine warfare, an unmanned vessel could navigate the open sea and hunt
adversary submarines for months at a time.101 And AI can help scan vast quantities of data to provide
options to decision-makers, about, for example, prioritizing maintenance needs or selecting which
forces and equipment to send into battle.
Implementation of the government’s security strategies for AI is threatened by bureaucratic
impediments and inertia. Defense and intelligence agencies must urgently accelerate their efforts.
On paper, the government clearly acknowledges the importance of AI for national security. The
National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, DoD’s AI and Digital Modernization
strategies, and the Intelligence Community’s AIM Initiative all recognize AI as a transformative
technology.102 Secretary of Defense Mark Esper identified AI as a top modernization priority.103
However, it is not clear that these top level beliefs and strategic priorities have been fully embraced by
departments and agencies. There must be broad organizational understanding of how AI can address
core national security challenges and what is needed to achieve an AI advantage. Without clear
communication linking vision to organizational change, adoption will stall and AI could be consigned to
a series of niche applications, or dismissed by skeptics as the next tech fad to be waited out.
US primacy prevents great-power conflict — multipolar revisionism fragments the
global order and causes nuclear war
Brands & Edel, 19 — Hal Brands; PhD, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at
the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Charles Edel; PhD, Senior Fellow and
Visiting Scholar at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of
Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 6: Darkening Horizon; Published by Yale University Press;
//GrRv)
Each of these geopolitical challenges is different, and each reflects the distinctive interests, ambitions,
and history of the country undertaking it. Yet there is growing cooperation between the countries that
are challenging the regional pillars of the U.S.-led order. Russia and China have collaborated on issues
such as energy, sales and development of military technology, opposition to additional U.S. military
deployments on the Korean peninsula, and naval exercises from the South China Sea to the Baltic. In
Syria, Iran provided the shock troops that helped keep Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power, as
Moscow provided the air power and the diplomatic cover. “Our cooperation can isolate America,”
supreme leader Ali Khamenei told Putin in 2017. More broadly, what links these challenges together is
their opposition to the constellation of power, norms, and relationships that the U.S.-led order entails,
and in their propensity to use violence, coercion, and intimidation as means of making that opposition
effective. Taken collectively, these challenges constitute a geopolitical sea change from the post-Cold
War era.
The revival of great-power competition entails higher international tensions than the world has known for decades, and the revival of arms
races, security dilemmas, and other artifacts of a more dangerous past. It entails sharper conflicts over the international rules of the road on issues
ranging from freedom of navigation to the illegitimacy of altering borders by force, and intensifying competitions over states that reside at the intersection of rival powers’ areas of interest. It
rival powers could overturn the favorable regional balances that have underpinned
the U.S.-led order for decades, and that they might construct rival spheres of influence from which America and the
liberal ideas it has long promoted would be excluded. Finally, it necessitates recognizing that great-power rivalry could lead to great-power war, a
requires confronting the prospect that
prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto the ash heap of history.
Beijing and Moscow are, after all, optimizing their forces and exercising aggressively in preparation for potential conflicts with the
United States and its allies; Russian doctrine explicitly emphasizes the limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve escalation dominance in a war
Both
with Washington. In Syria, U.S. and Russian forces even came into deadly contact in early 2018. American airpower decimated a contingent of government-sponsored Russian mercenaries that
The
world has not yet returned to the epic clashes for global dominance that characterized the twentieth century, but it has returned to the historical norm of greatpower struggle, with all the associated dangers.
was attacking a base at which U.S. troops were present, an incident demonstrating the increasing boldness of Russian operations and the corresponding potential for escalation.
Those dangers may be even greater than most observers appreciate, because if today’s great-power competitions are still most intense at the regional level, who is to say where these
Russia does not simply want to be a “regional power” (as Obama cuttingly described it) that
dominates South Ossetia and Crimea.37 It aspires to the deep European and extra-regional impact that previous incarnations of the Russian state
enjoyed. Why else would Putin boast about how far his troops can drive into Eastern Europe? Why else would Moscow be deploying military power into the
Middle East? Why else would it be continuing to cultivate intelligence and military relationships in regions as remote as Latin America?
competitions will end? By all appearances,
Likewise,
China is today focused primarily on securing its own geopolitical neighborhood, but its ambitions for tomorrow are clearly much bolder. Beijing probably
does not envision itself fully overthrowing the international order, simply because it has profited far too much from the U.S.-anchored global economy. Yet China has nonetheless positioned
. Chinese military forces are deploying ever farther from China’s immediate periphery; Beijing
has projected power into the Arctic and established bases and logistical points in the Indian Ocean and Horn of Africa.
itself for a global challenge to U.S. influence
Popular Chinese movies depict Beijing replacing Washington as the dominant actor in sub-Saharan Africa—a fictional representation of a real-life effort long under way. The Belt and Road
Initiative bespeaks an aspiration to link China to countries throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe; BRI, AIIB, and RCEP look like the beginning of an alternative institutional
Xi Jinping told the Nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that Beijing could now “take
center stage in the world” and act as an alternative to U.S. leadership.38
architecture to rival Washington’s. In 2017,
These ambitions may or may not be realistic. But they demonstrate just how significantly the world’s leading authoritarian powers desire to shift the global environment over time. The
revisionism we are seeing today may therefore be only the beginning. As China’s power continues to grow, or if it is successful in dominating the Western
Pacific, it will surely move on to grander endeavors. If Russia reconsolidates control over the former Soviet space, it may seek to bring parts of the former
Warsaw Pact to heel. Historically, this has been a recurring pattern of great-power behavior—interests expand with power, the appetite grows with the eating, risk-taking increases as early
geopolitical revisionism by unsatisfied
major powers has so often presaged intensifying international conflict, confrontation, and even war. The great-power behavior occurring
gambles are seen to pay off.39 This pattern is precisely why the revival of great-power competition is so concerning—because
today represents the warning light flashing on the dashboard. It tells us there may be still-greater traumas to come.
The threats today are compelling and urgent, and there may someday come a time when the balance of power has shifted so markedly that the postwar international system cannot be
sustained. Yet that moment of failure has not yet arrived, and so the goal of U.S. strategy should be not to hasten it by giving up prematurely, but to push it off as far into the future as
possible. Rather than simply acquiescing in the decline of a world it spent generations building,
preserving and perhaps even selectively advancing its remarkable achievements.
America should aggressively bolster its defenses, with an eye to