Peter Singer: The Military Policy Guru Behind Black Ops II - Forbes

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There has been a lot of talk about the Call of Duty Black Ops II ”unmanned aerial vehicles,” as the defense industry would have us call them. The other 99 percent of us call them drones. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how science fiction has always been the pulse of man’s technological imagination. What started as the figment of a science fiction writer’s imagination becomes a real prototype in the laboratory of a government lab or technology think tank. The Star Trek communicator has become the cell phone. R2D2 is now an iRobot. And Data’s computer music files are now MP3s. But what about when the inventions of science fiction start to appear as functional technology on the playground of the real-world geo-political scene? And how do you go about inventing fresh iterations of technology in the science fiction literature that already have replicants on the ground, or in the air? I’m talking about the drone technology in Black Ops II of course. The much-heralded quadrotor drones featured in the Tuesday release from Treyarch Studios have been the talk of the battlefield, or at least the talk in every gamer cave the world over.

I spoke with Peter Singer to learn about his work on the game as military policy guru and consultant for Treyarch Studios. Peter W. Singer is the director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative and a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings. Singer’s research focuses on the future of war, current U.S. defense needs and future priorities, and the future of the U.S. defense system. Singer lectures frequently to U.S. military audiences and is the author of several books and articles, including Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.

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Venables: What is the technical feasibility of deploying the drone technology such as the quadrotor drone of Black Ops II?

Singer: Ah, well, I think it’s a good illustration that you hit in some of the other questions of the back and forth between reality and science fiction. The concept of the small tactical quadcopter was something that we looked at in terms of the trends of where robotics was headed. We’re seeing more and more robotics used on the battlefield. The U.S. has gone from having just a handful 10 years ago to . . . we’ve got more than 8,000 in the U.S. military inventory. But for the most part, the focus has been on the large scale systems. So, something like the Predator is the size of a Cessna plane. It’s for placement. The Reaper is the size of an F-16. The one they’re testing out, the unmanned strike jet that’s being tested out in Maryland for the Navy is basically the size of a jet fighter. So, that’s one direction.

Then, one of the things that, working with the group at Treyarch, we explored is another trend that’s picking up steam â€" which is smaller and smaller unmanned systems. A good example of that is one that’s used in Afghanistan today, the Raven, which essentially is, imagine like a javelin with wings. It’s literally how it takes off. You run and you throw it and then it sort of flies off into the air. To smaller systems like the Switchblade, which literally is the size of a rolled-up magazine. And then all the way down to teeny tiny ones. I was in an Air Force lab and saw one that was set on the tip of a pencil. So that was a different direction that we explored and that’s actually where I think much of the battlefield is headed, also toward these smaller systems and that was where the concept of the quadcopter came from.

And then essentially it was kind of combining that trend with certain existing technologies like the various quad and tricopters that are being developed for everything from police surveillance to these do-it-yourself folks with the homemade kits, like the Parrot system is around 300 dollars. And, essentially, you know, it’s being Call of Duty Black Ops II then, looking on how you can make it nasty. So, how could you put a weapons system on it, or explosives.

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And then the second part is, make it easier to use. The early versions of drones required a pilot’s expertise to fly them, to now we’re seeing ones where you can use an iPhone app [to fly them], so integrating that into the conception of the fictional drone in the game. So that’s where the concept came from. Kind of a weird striking story is how then for the advertising for the game, they [Treyarch] built a working version and put it in one of the commercials. That viral video got more than, I wanna say, I think it’s more than 10 million hits so far. And among those was a Pentagon office that saw it and said “Hold it!”. And, the viral video was of this funny Russian guy playing with one of them. And they said, “You know what, this crazy Russian guy has a better drone than the entire U.S. Marine Corps has right now. That’s not right. We ought to get our own.” And so now, the strange thing was, while the game was projecting on into 2025, the game has created a dynamic where it’s actually going to happen earlier. The fact that it is technologically possible today, meant that it accelerated the future that we were projecting.

Venables: Neil Stephenson talks about key technological inventions, the “hieroglyphs” in science fiction that can inform and inspire technological advances in our culture. Conversely, can Black Ops II technology that is based on reality actually inform the creation of actual specs on military hardware? Do you think that that’s something that can happen on the ground?

Singer: I’m definitely in agreement with Stephenson’s concept. In fact, there’s a chapter in my last book, Wired for War. It’s a whole chapter on, essentially, science fiction’s impact on science reality. And it goes into this strange phenomenon that science fiction is continually a better predictor of the future than the non-fiction world of government policy and the like, [that] constantly gets things wrong. Actually, here’s a good illustration: the talk that I was giving to this Army strategy group. The opening slide that I show is from an article in October 1903 in the New York Times, where the New York Times said that it would be between one to 10 million years from now before we had a working flying machine. And the very same day that article was published in the New York Times is when the Wright Brothers started the assembly of their flying machine in a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. And, then I was exploring, “Why is this?” “Why is it that science fiction proves to be so influential?” Essentially it comes along two primary lines [of thought]. One is inspiration. And then the other is shaping expectations. So, inspiration is simply people reading or watching or seeing something in fiction and going, “Oooh, I want . . .”

It kind of works in a couple of ways. One is they’re inspired into science and they want to make those things. So a good illustration: the founder of the iRobot company talked about how she grew up with Star Wars as her favorite [film], so it wasn’t a shock that she wanted to make some of the robots in Star Wars too. The flip cell phone. Some of those people [were] inspired into science, other people they get the idea directly. The cell phone â€" the guy who invented that literally can point to the moment when he was at a break in his lab watching an episode of Star Trek when Kirk was using his Communicator and went, “Ooh, I wanna do that!” Or same, the guy who invented MP3s can point to the episode in Star Trek The Next Generation where Data was playing music from his computer and went “Wow, that would be a really cool idea! Let’s do that.” And it also happens in the military. All the ideas of everything from land ironclads, which is what H.G. Wells came up with the idea of, that Winston Churchill turned into the concept of a tank. To military aeroplanes â€"A.A. Milne was the first to write about that. To atomic bombs â€" that’s another concept that H.G. Wells first came up with, that actually, at the time, many scientists said was impossible. Why would you ever use radioactive materials to build a bomb? The point is people get these inspirations often from science fiction, and like I mentioned with that case of the quadcopter, that’s already played out.

The second tract though, that’s important, is shaping expectations of what the future is gonna be like. So when entities, be they business entities or military organizations or what not, try and say “this is why we should invest in this” they’ll often, when they’re making the justification to funders, whether it’s Congress or whether it’s investors, they’ll say, they’ll try to explain something really complex by making a parallel to something in the fiction world. So they’ll say things like “Oh it’s just like the bridge on the Starship Enterprise” or “it’s just like this thing in â€" you saw that quadcopter that they could control with a tablet computer? It’s just like that.” And, it’s because science fiction sort of creates our idea of what the future is supposed to be like. And then we kind of try and make that future come true. So it’s different than the inspiration. It’s like “Oh, this is what I ought to have.”

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Venables: While researching the game with Treyarch, you were quoted by Kyle Orland in a post on Ars Technica as saying, “Hey, look, there’s also these other consequences, and all of this is moving much more rapidly than we have been anticipating”. Can you give some comment on how these changes (in military technology) might have directly affected the Black Ops II narrative without revealing too much of the story-line?

Singer: Sure, and I would even take it beyond just the military technology side. First, on the military tech side, an example that I remember talking to them [Treyarch] about has been woven into the game. Not just the fact that we’re using more and more unmanned systems. When I say “we”, not just the U.S. military. There are at least 50 other countries from Great Britain to Israel to China to Iran that are using these technologies as well. But it’s not just the boom, it’s in the ripple effects that come out of that boom. Obviously we’re seeing an impact on our politics in terms of drone strikes and the like. But, one example that is kind of an unexpected consequence is, you suddenly had, as you’re using more and more of these, [a situation in which] they were relying on networks that didn’t plan for them. I remember speaking with them about an example of how insurgents had been able to tap into the video feed of our Predators in Iraq. So, the insurgents were actually watching the video feed that we were gathering. And you can find examples about this. They weren’t completely hacking it. It would be more the parallel of a chief listening on the police radio scanner. That’s why radio scanners are encrypted now. But the links for the Predators weren’t, because it all happened so quickly. They hadn’t planned on building an entirely secure network, because they hadn’t planned on having so many of these technologies. And then the other was, once they found out about the vulnerability, well, they thought, “Wow, it’s really tough, it’s really difficult to crack into that.” But, when they first identified it, that was true, but over the course of time, technology got easier, so something that was really complex when they first identified it, by the time the insurgents were doing it in 2009, they were using this $30 piece of software that had been developed for a Russian website to illegally download movies off the Internet. The insurgents were using it to illegally download Predator feed! But the point is, it was this unanticipated consequence because everything was happening so quickly.

And then we’re seeing the same thing all the way into the hacking side. Like a team at the University of Texas showed how you could hack the GPS of a drone to make it think it was somewhere other than it physically was. And so, that was an example that we took inspiration from. One of the interesting things is, of course, reality started to bear that out. So, the development of the game has been going on for well, over 18 months, and by the time we decided â€" this whole concept had been played about with, then you’ll remember just a couple of months ago, the RQ-170 drone that was lost over Iran? It was kind of like a validator of some of the â€" it was an unfortunate validator of the trends that were being explored in the game.

But I wouldn’t just limit it to technology. The same thing happens in other areas, like the changes in our economy and how people think about the importance of resources. They kind of typically focus just on energy resources. You know, the scramble for oil. And that’s real. That’s valid. But one of the other trends it’s building is “rare earth”. These essentially, exceptionally rare minerals and elements that are so integral to modern, particularly information technology, but also things like the batteries in a hybrid vehicle. And they’re really, really rare, and so that’s one of other examples we look to as kind of a trend that leads to a different kind of consequences.

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