Military Technology

"No discussion is complete without mention of the dilemma of military technology. How can we reconcile the existence, if not the need for military technology in the world when its primary purpose appears to be to dehumanise, often in the most extreme ways? This truly is a dilemma that remains unresolved. This appendix tries to unravel the issues so that we may see them more clearly. The military ethicist Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institute concluded in a 2010 article in the Journal of Military Ethics that in a world of ‘killer apps’, robotic weapons that can function autonomously, it is necessary to open up a constructive dialogue on how to deal with the moral dilemmas created by this new category of weaponry.\n\nPeter W. Singer notes that throughout history, certain technological advances have been ‘game-changers’. For example the printing press, gunpowder, the steam engine, or the atomic bomb. Not only are the current military technologies game-changers, they are part of a cresting wave of advances that are coming at us thick and fast. These include directed energy weapons (Lasers), precision guided weapons (‘smart’ IEDs), nanotech and microbotics (The Diamond Age), bioagents and genetic weaponry (DNA bombs), chemical and hardware enhancements to the human body (IronMan meets Captain America), autonomous armed robots (Terminators), electromagnetic pulse weaponry (The Day After, Ocean’s 11), and space weaponry (Star Wars). These may seem to be the stuff of science-fiction, but all of them are currently in development and are likely to be deployed in active service around 2030 or sooner."