Will Robots Stop Genocide?

This Sunday's Washington Post contained a fascinating piece by GlobalSecurity.org's John Pike.  In it, Pike predicts "Soon -- years, not decades, from now -- American armed robots will patrol on the ground as well, fundamentally transforming the face of battle."  We all know that technology's on the rise - so why does this matter?

Apparently, "Conventional war, even genocide, may be abolished by a robotic American Peace."

How? "The excellence of American military technology makes it possible for U.S. forces to inflict vast damage upon the enemy while suffering comparatively modest harm in return."

"No human army could withstand such an onslaught. Such an adversary would present the enemy with the simple choice of martyrdom or flight. So equipped, America's military would be irresistible in battle...

[T]he large-scale organized killing that has characterized six millenniums of human history could be ended by the fiat of the American Peace.

Genocide, and the failure of the outside word to intervene, could also become a thing of the past. The industrialized murder of the Holocaust could perhaps have been disrupted by Allied bombers, but subsequent genocides have been less institutionalized, and far less vulnerable to air power. Intervention would require infantry and a decision to accept casualties. Genocide prevention may be in the interest of our common humanity, but it has never been in the national interest. But with no body bags to explain to bewildered voters, America's leaders may be less hesitant in the future about imposing an end to atrocities in places such as Darfur."

Now, the likelihood of other countries having this same technology isn't very high.  So would America be willing to send our robots into the battlefield to kill actual living, breathing people?  And while Pike says that the choices are "martyrdom or surrender" he doesn't take into account the fact that so many unwilling people are conscripted into military service, and those are often the ones sent to the front lines.  Will these robots be able to distinguish and help child soldiers when they go into Uganda to defeat the LRA?

I am all in favor of solutions that would help stop genocide and provide protection between genocidaires and innocent victims.  But I fear that Americans would be too willing to send these robots into battle, without thinking about the potential implications.

And over at Opinio Juris, Kenneth Anderson asks: "Is it so very hard to imagine a future, and a future technology, in which it was a war crime for the human, rather than the robot, to decide to fire the weapon?"

What do you think?  Could robots help create a technological Pax Americana?  Would a Pax Americana be a good thing?  Should we (as taxpayers, democratic citizens) encourage our government to pursue the creation of fighting robots in the hope that it will stop genocide?

Image from a 2005 MSNBC article on the deployment of  Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems.

This post cross-posted (with a silly personal analogy) at my new blog, Inside the Beltway & Outside the Ordinary.