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Pilotless Planes, Pacific Tensions
by
Richard Parker
May 12, 2013
THIS week the Navy will
launch an entirely autonomous combat drone — without a pilot on a joystick
anywhere — off the deck of an aircraft carrier, the George H. W. Bush. The
drone will then try to land aboard the same ship, a feat only a relatively few
human pilots in the world can accomplish.
This exercise is the
beginning of a new chapter in military history: autonomous drone warfare. But
it is also an ominous turn in a potentially dangerous military rivalry now
building between the United States
and China.
The X-47B, a stealth plane
nicknamed “the Robot” by Navy crews, is a big bird — 38 feet long, with a
62-foot wingspan — that flies at high subsonic speeds with a range of over
2,000 miles. But it is the technology inside the Robot that makes it a
game-changer in East Asia. Its entirely
computerized takeoff, flight and landing raise the possibility of dozens or
hundreds of its successors engaged in combat at once.
It is also capable of
withstanding radiation levels that would kill a human pilot and destroy a
regular jet’s electronics: in addition to conventional bombs, successors to
this test plane could be equipped to carry a high-power microwave, a device
that emits a burst of radiation that would fry a tech-savvy enemy’s power
grids, knocking out everything connected to it, including computer networks
that connect satellites, ships and precision-guided missiles.
And these, of course, are
among the key things China
has invested in during its crash-course military modernization. While the
United States Navy is launching an autonomous drone, the Chinese Navy is
playing catch-up with piloted carrier flight. Last November the Chinese
Navy landed a J-15 jet fighter on the deck of the Liaoning aircraft carrier, the country’s
first carrier landing.
Though China still has miles to go in developing a
carrier fleet to rival America’s,
the landing demonstrates its ambitions. With nearly half a million sailors and
fast approaching 1,000 vessels, its navy is by some measures already the second
largest in the world.
With that new navy, Beijing
seeks to project its power over a series of island chains far into the Pacific:
the first extends southward from the Korean Peninsula, down the eastern shore
of Taiwan, encircling the South China Sea, while the second runs southeast from
Japan to the Bonin and Marshall Islands, encompassing both the Northern Mariana
Islands, a United States territory, and Guam — the key American base in the
western Pacific. Some unofficial Chinese military literature even refers to a
third chain: the Hawaiian Islands.
To project this kind of
power, China
must rely not only on the quantity of its ships but also on the quality of its
technology. Keeping the Americans half an ocean away requires the capability
for long-range precision strikes — which, in turn, require the satellite
reconnaissance, cyber warfare, encrypted communications and computer networks
in which China
has invested nearly $100 billion over the last decade.
Ideally for both countries, China’s efforts
would create a new balance of power in the region. But to offset China’s
numerical advantage and technological advances, the United States Navy is
betting heavily on drones — not just the X-47B and its successors, but
anti-submarine reconnaissance drones, long-range communications drones, even
underwater drones. A single hunter-killer pairing of a Triton reconnaissance
drone and a P-8A Poseidon piloted anti-submarine plane can sweep 2.7 million square miles of ocean in a single mission.
The arms race between the
world’s largest navies undermines the likelihood of attaining a new balance of
power, and raise the possibility of unintended collisions as the United States deploys hundreds, even thousands
of drones and China
scrambles for ways to counter the new challenge. And drones, because they are
cheap and don’t need a human pilot, lower the bar for aggressive behavior on
the part of America’s military leaders — as they will for China’s navy, as soon
as it makes its own inevitable foray into drone capabilities (indeed, there
were reports last week that China was preparing its own stealth drone for
flight tests).
By themselves, naval
rivalries do not start wars. During peacetime, in fact, naval operations are a
form of diplomacy, which provide rivals with healthy displays of force that
serve as deterrents to war. But they have to be enveloped in larger political
relationships, too.
At present, the United
States-China relationship is really just about economics. As long as that
relationship remains vibrant, confrontation is in neither country’s interest.
But should that slender reed snap, there is little in the way of a larger
political relationship, let alone alliance, to take its place. The only thing
between crisis and conflict, then, would be two ever larger, more dangerous
navies, prepared to fight a breed of drone-centric war we don’t yet fully
understand, and so are all the more likely to fall into.
Richard Parker, a journalist,
is the author of the forthcoming book “Unblinking: Rise of the Modern
Superdrones.”
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