Military technology is difficult to restrain for many reasons. Military forces and associated technology serve important functions in the foreign policy of states. Military technology is also pursued to enhance military capability and cost-effectiveness of military forces, to ensure that one's own forces outperform those of an adversary, to play symbolic roles, and to preserve or improve stability in the international system. In addition, new military technology and new systems are (...) advocated by military services and military equipment manufacturers for organizational and economic as well as strategic reasons. To date, arms control agreements have not significantly restrained innovation in military technology, nor are they likely to do so in the future. This is a result of asymmetries between the forces of the United States and the Soviet Union and of the intrinsic difficulties of designing arms control agreements that restrain technological innovation m ways that are both meaningful and verifiable. Although the difficulty of restraining military technology should temper expectations for both nuclear and con ventional arms control, there is no reason to believe that meaningful arms control will be rendered impossible as a consequence. (shrink)

The prospect of increasingly autonomous military robots has raised concerns about the obfuscation of human responsibility. This papers argues that whether or not and to what extent human actors are and will be considered to be responsible for the behavior of robotic systems is and will be the outcome of ongoing negotiations between the various human actors involved. These negotiations are about what technologies should do and mean, but they are also about how responsibility should be interpreted and how (...) it can be best assigned or ascribed. The notion of responsibility practices, as the paper shows, provides a conceptual tool to examine these negotiations as well as the interplay between technological development and the ascription of responsibility. To illustrate the dynamics of responsibility practices the paper explores how the introduction of unmanned aerial vehicles has led to (re)negotiations about responsibility practices, focusing particularly on negotiations within the US Armed Forces. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper is divided into four parts. Part I is a conventional, if necessarily very brief description of the way in which military technology and armed force reinforced each other from about 1500 until 1945. Part II examines the period between 1945 and the present; it argues that what most people saw as unprece-dentedly rapid military-technological progress did in fact constitute the onset of overkill and degeneration. Part III explains how, obscured and in part protected by (...) military-technological progress, low-intensity warfare was allowed to develop from about 1660 on until it represented almost the only form of armed conflict still left on this planet. Finally, part IV pulls the threads together, pointing to the way in which war, and with it the military technology on which it depends, can be expected to go in the future. (shrink)

We live in a world of rapidly advancing, revolutionary technologies that are not just reshaping our world and wars, but also creating a host of ethical questions that must be dealt with. But in trying to answer them, we must also explore why exactly is it so hard to have effective discussions about ethics, technology, and war in the first place? This article delves into the all-too-rarely discussed underlying issues that challenge the field of ethics when it comes to (...) talking about war, weapons, and moral conduct. These issues include the difficulty of communicating across fields; the complexity of real world dilemmas versus the seminar room and laboratory; the magnified role that money and funding sources play in shaping not just who gets to talk, but what they research; cross-cultural differences; the growing role of geographic and temporal distance issues; suspicion of the actual value of law and ethics in a harsh realm like war; and a growing suspicion of science itself. If we hope better to address our growing ethical concerns, we must face up to these underlying issues as well. (shrink)

This article presents a systematic review carried out around the development of technologies that have driven military communication, describing the evolution of communication equipment and protocols used throughout history. This work was carried out from the review of 80 articles related to the field of militarycommunications, from which the fundamentals of the different technologies, equipment and means of communication were extracted. It is concluded that technological progress has improved the speed of response in digital signals, has proposed.

New scientific advances have created previously unheard of possibilities for enhancing combatants' performance. Future war fighters may be smarter, stronger, and braver than ever before. If these technologies are safe, is there any reason to reject their use? In this article, I argue that the use of enhancements is constrained by the importance of maintaining the moral responsibility of military personnel. This is crucial for two reasons: the military's ethical commitments require military personnel to be morally responsible (...) agents, and moral responsibility is necessary for integrity and the moral emotions of guilt and remorse, both of which are important for moral growth and psychological well-being. Enhancements that undermined combatants' moral responsibility would therefore undermine the military's moral standing and would harm combatants' well-being. A genuine commitment to maintaining the military's ethical standards and the well-being of combatants therefore requires a careful analysis of performance-enhancing technologies before they are implemented. (shrink)

The invention of the laser in 1960 and the innovation process of laser technology during the following years coincided with the dramatic increase of the East-West-conflict during the 1960s – the peak of the so-called Cold War after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The predictable features of the new device, not only for experimental sciences, but also for technical and military applications, led instantly to a laser hype all over the world. Military funding and (...) research played a major part in this development. Especially in the United States military laser research and development played an important role in the formation of Cold War sciences. The European allies followed this example to a certain degree, but their specific national environments led to quite different solutions and results. This article describes and analyzes the special features and background of this development for the Federal Republic of Germany in the area of conflict between science, politics and industry from 1960 to the early 1970s. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to justify the feasibility and prospects of including case technology in the process of independent training of cadets in a military higher educational institution. Scientific novelty lies in justifying the increase in the effectiveness of independent training through the implementation of case study technology. The article analyzes the impact of case technology on the development of professionalism of future officers, determines the stages of work on cases, examines the activities of (...) cadets and the tasks that are solved during each stage. As a result, the approaches to the organization of independent training of cadets in the process of implementing the case-training technology are identified; the capability of case technology, as a means of forming competencies such as design, organizational and communicative, is indicated; the features of the cadets' activity aimed at the formation of the above-mentioned competencies are revealed. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Military and Technology A Nano‐Enabled Military A Nano‐Enabled Defense System Ethical Concerns.

This paper presents an overview of the key ethical questions of performing gene editing research on military service members. The recent technological advance in gene editing capabilities provided by CRISPR/Cas9 and their path towards first-in-human trials has reinvigorated the debate on human enhancement for non-medical purposes. Human performance optimization has long been a priority of military research in order to close the gap between the advancement of warfare and the limitations of human actors. In spite of this focus (...) on temporary performance improvement, biomedical enhancement is an extension of these endeavours and the ethical issues of such research should be considered. In this paper, we explore possible applications of CRISPR to military human gene editing research and how it could be specifically applied towards protection of service members against biological or chemical weapons. We analyse three normative areas including risk–benefit analysis, informed consent, and inequality of access as it relates to CRISPR applications for military research to help inform and provide considerations for military institutional review boards and policymakers. (shrink)

Instructional technology, and the cognitivist and systems paradigms that underpin it, grew out of the military-industrial complex during the Cold War. Much as the Pentagon and this military complex defined the architecture of the Internet, they also essentially created, ex nihilo, the fields of instructional technology and instructional design. The results of the ongoing dominance or influence of the Pentagon in these specific disciplines have been traced in research that appeared during the final phases of the (...) Cold War. But this research has not been updated to reflect circumstances now most definitive of the post–Cold War world: the rapid development of Internet infrastructures and applications, and the aggressive expansion of US military spending and activity. Tracing the imprint left by the US military on instructional technology and design, this paper considers how this influence may now extend, like the Internet itself, into schools and the university. It will conclude by stressing that the end of the Cold War, along with more recent developments concerning the US military, presents a juncture offering both opportunity and challenge to the evolving field of educational technology or “e-learning.”. (shrink)

The evolving nature of armed conflict, characterized by a new emphasis on crisis management and peace support, is bringing morality to the forefront of military leadership. The challenges of today's military operations place a new imperative upon Professional Military Education (PME) to maximize the quality of instruction on ethics in terms of both content and effectiveness. This volume presents the refined proceedings of two conferences of the European Forum on Military Pedagogy dealing with ethical issues of (...) teaching and learning in PME. It explores the philosophical and scientific aspects of current ethical questions, as well as the historical, psychological, and technological dimensions of education in ethics. Further attention is given to ethical and educational implications of asymmetric conflict and warfare. (shrink)

Recent developments such as the 'new wars' or the growing privatisation of warfare, and the ever more sophisticated military technology, present the military with difficult ethical challenges. This book offers a selection of the best scholarly articles on military ethics published in recent decades. It gives a hearing to all the main ethical approaches to war: just war theory, consequentialism, and pacifism. Part I includes essays on justice of war (jus ad bellum), focussing on defence against (...) aggression and humanitarian armed intervention, but also addressing topics such as conscientious objection and the relation of patriotism to war. Articles in Part II deal with the central problems of justice in war (jus in bello): civilian immunity and 'collateral damage' to civilian life and property. Essays in Part III look into the moral issues facing the military as a profession, such as the civil - military relations, the responsibilities of officers to their soldiers and to their military superiors, and the status and responsibilities of prisoners of war. (shrink)

Military and defense-related procurement has been an important source of technology development across a broad spectrum of industries that account for an important share of United States industrial production. In this book, the author focuses on six general-purpose technologies: interchangeable parts and mass production; military and commercial aircraft; nuclear energy and electric power; computers and semiconductors; the INTERNET; and the space industries. In each of these industries, technology development would have occurred more slowly, and in some (...) case much more slowly or not at all, in the absence of military and defense-related procurement. The book addresses three questions that have significant implications for the future growth of the United States economy. One is whether changes in the structure of the United States economy and of the defense-industrial base preclude military and defense-related procurement from playing the role in the development of advanced technology in the future, comparable to the role it has played in the past. A second question is whether public support for commercially oriented research and development will become an important source of new general-purpose technologies. A third and more disturbing question is whether a major war, or the threat of major war, will be necessary to mobilize the scientific, technical, and financial resources necessary to induce the development of new general-purpose technologies. When the history of United States technology development in the next half century is written, it will focus on incremental rather than revolutionary changes in both military and commercial technology. It will also be written within the context of slower productivity growth than of the relatively high rates that prevailed in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s or during the information technology bubble that began in the early 1990s. These will impose severe constraints on the capacity of the United States to sustain a global-class military posture and a position of leadership in the global economy. (shrink)

New scientific advances have created previously unheard of possibilities for enhancing combatants' performance. Future war fighters may be smarter, stronger, and braver than ever before. If these technologies are safe, is there any reason to reject their use? In this article, I argue that the use of enhancements is constrained by the importance of maintaining the moral responsibility of military personnel. This is crucial for two reasons: the military's ethical commitments require military personnel to be morally responsible (...) agents, and moral responsibility is necessary for integrity and the moral emotions of guilt and remorse, both of which are important for moral growth and psychological well-being. Enhancements that undermined combatants' moral responsibility would therefore undermine the military's moral standing and would harm combatants' well-being. A genuine commitment to maintaining the military's ethical standards and the well-being of combatants therefore requires a careful analysis of performance-enhancing technologies before they are implemented. (shrink)

Military Medical Ethics for the 21st Century is the first full length, broad-based treatment of this important subject. Written by an international team of practitioners and academics, this book provides interdisciplinary insights into the major issues facing military-medical decision makers and critically examines the tensions and dilemmas inherent in the military and medical professions. In this book the authors explore the practice of battlefield bioethics, medical neutrality and treatment of the wounded, enhancement technologies for war fighters, the (...) potential risks of dual-use biotechnologies, patient rights for active duty personnel, military medical research and military medical ethics education in the 21st Century. (shrink)

Abstract The institution of war is the broad framework of rules, norms, and organizations dedicated to the prevention, prosecution, and resolution of violent conflict between political entities. Important parts of that institution consist of the accountability arrangements that hold between armed forces, the political leaders who oversee and direct the use of those forces, and the people in whose name the leaders act and from whose ranks the members of the armed forces are drawn. Like other parts of the institution, (...) these arrangements are responsive to changes in military technology and needs, to geopolitical facts, and to moral and political norms. In particular, they are sensitive to the forms that military organization takes. Since the emergence of modern states in Europe some 500 years ago, there have been three main such forms: private providers?in the form of mercenaries, in early modern Europe?then professional standing armies, which in turn developed into citizen armies. Although elements of the three organizations have coexisted in many armies, the citizen army model has dominated until recently. That model brought with it a particular conception of the accountability relations between the army, the state, and the people. The state had authority over and directed the army, which was accountable to it. In turn the state was accountable for its use of the army to the people, on whose behalf it acted. The dominance of state authority over the military is now under strain, with the professional and private elements?in the form of private military and security companies (PMSCs)?having increasing importance. As those elements increase in power and presence, so it becomes more difficult to make the state accountable to the people for its use of the military, and more difficult for the people to act as a restraining force on the way in which the military used. In this essay, I outline and assess these developments?with particular emphasis on the emergence of PMSCs?in the light of a liberal view of (political) violence. The essay focuses on the situation in the United States, which possesses by far the most important military force in the world today, and in which the use of PMSCs is most developed. The paper has three main sections and a brief conclusion: the first section sketches the liberal view of violence and its implications for organizations dedicated to its use; the second outlines the salient characteristics of the three historically dominant forms of armies; and the third looks at the current situation in which the three forms coexist uneasily. (shrink)

To deal with an uncertain future, global ethics as an academic endeavour might consider a common value we all share, such as sustainability, which acts as an all-encompassing term to indicate our future direction. Technologies of the near future that are currently in development hold problems and promise, and are clear subjects for the ethics of sustainability at a global level. Autonomous military combat robots, insects as food and in vitro synthetically grown meat are significant cases. Such robots might (...) in fact serve injustice and work against sustainability, and such novel food technologies may hold hope for promoting sustainability and global justice. (shrink)

This study looks at some of the traits that characterized Argentina’s scientific and university policies under the military regime that spanned from 1976 through 1983. To this end, it delves into a rarely explored empirical observation: financial resource transfers from national universities to the National Scientific and Technological Research Council (CONICET, for its Spanish acronym) during that period. The intention is to show how, by reallocating funds geared to Science and Technology, CONICET was made to expand and decentralize (...) to the detriment of universities. This was the primary tool used by the military regime to thwart higher education’s research development, bolstering research efforts at other realms. Thus, CONICET grew in budget, number of researchers, and staff size, creating new research institutes, while national universities struggled with reduced funding and were forced to shut down their institutes and programs. As a result, CONICET virtually concentrated all scientific research, foregoing the knowledge accumulated at universities, which drove a wedge between both institutions. This military approach to science and technology policy-making is discussed, bearing in mind the notion of dependence—both in terms of the state’s intervention in the inner workings of the scientific-university field as well as regarding the role played by international financial support in scientific research development. (shrink)

Essay Review: A Socialized History of Science: Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society, Science, Technology and the Military, Scientific Knowledge Socialized .

The introduction of Autonomous Military Systems (AMS) onto contemporary battlefields raises concerns that they will bring with them the possibility of a techno-responsibility gap, leaving insecurity about how to attribute responsibility in scenarios involving these systems. In this work I approach this problem in the domain of applied ethics with foundational conceptual work on autonomy and responsibility. I argue that concerns over the use of AMS can be assuaged by recognising the richly interrelated context in which these systems will (...) most likely be deployed. This will allow us to move beyond the solely individualist understandings of responsibility at work in most treatments of these cases, toward one that includes collective responsibility. This allows us to attribute collective responsibility to the collectives of which the AMS form a part, and to account for the distribution of burdens that follows from this attribution. I argue that this expansion of our responsibility practices will close at least some otherwise intractable techno-responsibility gaps. (shrink)

The military-industrial complex, military operations, and wars are major contributors to exacerbating both climate change and biodiversity crises. However, their environmental impacts are often shadowed due to national security reasons. The current paper aims to go through the devastating impacts of military operations and wars on climate change and biodiversity loss and challenges that hinder the inclusion of military-related activities into environmental crisis mitigation efforts. The information blind spot induced by concerns about national security reasons jeopardizes (...) the efforts to involve the military-industrial complex and military operations in the global climate and biodiversity agendas. Besides that, many military-related challenges, such as specificity of operational requirements and lifecycles, dependence on fossil fuels, complex supply change, inadequate civilian technologies and innovations, and requirements of structural changes, can hinder emission reduction. Meanwhile, wars and conflicts not only threaten to drain all human and material resources available to tackle environmental problems but also inflict long-lasting destructions, pains, and trauma that can lead to hatred and distrust among nations and parties. With the rising hatred and distrust, global agreement and commitment to address climate change and biodiversity will hardly be achieved. Thus, promoting peace is the humanistic and planetary conscience. (shrink)

This article analyzes two traditional approaches to teaching military ethics, aspirational and functionalist approach, in light of the existing technological development in the military. Introduction of new technological solutions to waging warfare that involve dehumanization, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as employment of different technological tools to enhance humans participating in war and to improve military efficiency, not only bring to the surfaces the obviously existing weakness and inadequacies of the two traditional approaches to (...) class='Hi'>military ethics education, which have been rendered suboptimal, but also raise new challenges. The paper argues that teaching military ethics solely from the two perspective does not meet the demands of the upcoming military technological revolution and that the future will demand a more profound and conceptual moral education of military personnel that will reassess the role of martial virtues, increase responsibility for killing in war and result in military professionals that resemble “a Renaissance man” in their philosophical outlook. Only by ensuring that all military professionals have been properly and adequately ethically educated, future armies, as well as entire societies, can actively aspire toward optimal armed forces structure, a more professional and efficient approach to military profession, and ultimately better and more responsible military personnel in total. (shrink)

Democratic societies expect their armed forces to act in a morally responsible way, which seems a fair expectation given the fact that they entrust their armed forces with the monopoly of violence. However, this is not as straightforward and unambiguous as it sounds. Present-day military practices show that political assignments, social and cultural contexts, innovative technologies and organisational structures, present military personnel with questions and dilemma’s that can have far-reaching consequences for all involved – not in the last (...) place for the soldiers themselves. A thorough training and education, in which critical thinking is developed and stimulated, seems therefore a necessary condition for morally responsible behaviour. This book aims to contribute to this form of ‘reflective practitioning’ in military practice. (shrink)

Clinical trials aim to minimise participant risk and generate new clinical knowledge for the wider population. Many military agencies are now investing efforts in pushing towards developing new treatments involving Brain-Computer Interfaces, Gene Therapy and Stem Cells interventions. These trials are targeting smaller disease groups, as such they give rise to novel participant risks of harms that are largely not accommodated by existing practice. This is of most concern with irreversible harms at early trial stages, where participants may forfeit (...) any future therapy, and in personalised medicine, where the individual participant assumes all of the trial risk. Given these new experimental interventions involve high risk of irreversible harms, how much risk should patients be exposed to when participating in experimental testing of innovative technologies? Designing clinical trials which better balance risk/benefit ratios for participants is crucial. The aim of this book chapter is to suggest a new stratified risk framework aimed at minimising the risk-benefit ratio to participants in clinical trials associated with high risk of irrevocable harms. We will argue it demands a higher-level of clinical data capture at earlier trial stages than predicated by current trial doctrine; it also requires publication of all trial data to minimise risk to participants of any future trial. (shrink)

Using robots in the military contexts is problematic at many levels. There are social, legal, and ethical issues that should be discussed first before their wider deployment. In this paper, we focus on an additional problem: their human likeness. We claim that military robots should not look like humans. That design choice may bring additional risks that endanger human lives and by that contradicts the very justification for deploying robots at war, which is decreasing human deaths and injuries. (...) We discuss two threats—epistemological and patient. Epistemological one is connected with the risk of mistaking robots for humans due to the limited ways of getting information about the external world, which may be amplified by the rush and need to fight with robots in distance. The patient threat is related to the developing attachment to robots, that in military contexts may cause additional deaths by the hesitance to sacrifice robots in order to save humans in peril or risking human life to save robots. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become nearly ubiquitous in modern society, from components of mobile applications to medical support systems, and everything in between. In societally impactful systems imbued with AI, there has been increasing concern related to opaque AI, that is, artificial intelligence where it is unclear how or why certain decisions are reached. This has led to a recent boom in research on “explainable AI” (XAI), or approaches to making AI more explainable and understandable to human users. In the (...) military domain, numerous bodies have argued that autonomous and AI-enabled weapon systems ought not incorporate unexplainable AI, with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United States Department of Defense both explicitly including explainability as a relevant factor in the development and use of such systems. In this article, I present a cautiously critical assessment of this view, arguing that explainability will be irrelevant for many current and near-future autonomous systems in the military (which do not incorporate any AI), that it will be trivially incorporated into most military systems which do possess AI (as these generally possess simpler AI systems), and that for those systems with genuinely opaque AI, explainability will prove to be of more limited value than one might imagine. In particular, I argue that explainability, while indeed a virtue in design, is a virtue aimed primarily at designers and troubleshooters of AI-enabled systems, but is far less relevant for users and handlers actually deploying these systems. I further argue that human–machine teaming is a far more important element of responsibly using AI for military purposes, adding that explainability may undermine efforts to improve human–machine teamings by creating a prima facie sense that the AI, due to its explainability, may be utilized with little (or less) potential for mistakes. I conclude by clarifying that the arguments are not against XAI in the military, but are instead intended as a caution against over-inflating the value of XAI in this domain, or ignoring the limitations and potential pitfalls of this approach. (shrink)

Arming uninhabited vehicles is an increasing trend. Widespread deployment can bring dangers for arms-control agreements and international humanitarian law. Armed UVs can destabilise the situation between potential opponents. Smaller systems can be used for terrorism. Using a systematic definition existing international regulation of armed UVs in the fields of arms control, export control and transparency measures is reviewed; these partly include armed UVs, but leave large gaps. For preventive arms control a general prohibition of armed UVs would be best. If (...) that is unattainable, several measures should be taken. An explicit prohibition of autonomous attack, that is without a human decision, should be added to IHL. Concerning armed UVs remotely controlled by a human soldier, recommendations differ according to type or mission. New kinds of uninhabited nuclear-weapon carriers should be banned. Space weapons should be prohibited in general. UVs smaller than 0.2–0.5 m should be banned. Bigger remotely controlled armed UVs not equipped with weapons of mass destruction should be subject to numerical limitations in various categories. For these the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe is an important precedent. (shrink)

In this study, we analyse the public perception of military AI in Estonia, a techno-optimistic country with high support for science and technology. This study involved quantitative survey data from 2021 on the public’s attitudes towards AI-based technology in general, and AI in developing and using weaponised unmanned ground systems (UGS) in particular. UGS are a technology that has been tested in militaries in recent years with the expectation of increasing effectiveness and saving manpower in dangerous (...) military tasks. However, developing weaponised systems often raises questions about their safety and accountability. While there have been public debates about the possible outcomes of AI-based civilian technologies like self-driving cars, equivalent discussions have not been held about military technologies. A discourse on potentially sensitive technologies can diminish biased representations and the distribution of worst-case scenarios. The results of this study reveal that an overall positive attitude towards AI-driven technologies is related to a positive perception of military AI systems. However, trustworthiness and human control are the main aspects that are expected from military technologies. (shrink)

“Technological determinism” is predominantly employed as a critic’s term, used to dismiss certain classes of theoretical and empirical claims. Understood more productively as referring to claims that place a greater emphasis on the autonomous and social-shaping tendencies of technology, technological determinism is a valuable and prominent perspective. This article will advance our understanding of technological determinism through four contributions. First, I clarify some debates about technological determinism through an examination of the meaning of technology. Second, I parse the (...) family of claims related to technological determinism. Third, I note that constructivist and determinist insights may each be valid given particular scope conditions, the most prominent of which is the scale of analysis. Finally, I propose a theoretical microfoundation for technological determinism—military–economic adaptationism—in which economic and military competition constrain sociotechnical evolution to deterministic paths. This theory is a special case of a general theory—sociotechnical selectionism—which can be regarded as also including constructivist theories as special cases. Greater understanding of, respect for, and engagement with technological determinism will enhance the study of technology and our ability to shape our sociotechnical systems. (shrink)

The article focuses on the inconsistency between the European Commission’s position on excluding military AI from its emerging AI policy, and at the same time EU policy initiatives targeted at supporting military and defence elements of AI on the EU level. It leads to the question, what, then, does the debate on military AI suggest to the EU’s actorness discussed in the light of Europe as a power debate with a particular focus on Normative Power Europe, Market (...) Power Europe, and Military Power Europe. By employing discourse analysis, the article examines the EU’s AI strategic discourse, consisting of selected AI-related policy documents from different EU institutions. As a result, the article proposes the Military Power Europe definition based on four categories proposed from the Europe as power debate: ways of action, self-definition, preferred international engagement, and the role of the military. It argues that alongside normative proposals for military AI governance, there are evident desires for militarization in the context of AI development, and a considerable role for the military in the future directions of the EU’s digital and security policies. Despite the inconsistency among EU institutions, military AI appears to be actively discussed within the selected discourse, and so is a part of the EU’s emerging AI policy. (shrink)