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To date, most warfare has taken place within what Robert J. Bunker terms "human space," meaning the traditional four-dimensional battlespace that is discernible to the human senses.1 In essence, war has always consisted of human beings running, dodging, and hurling things at each other, lately with the help of machinery. Even such revolutionary developments as gunpowder only enhanced our ability to throw things at enemies we could see and hear.
The first crude examples of autonomous weapons were probably the early experiments by the US Navy and Sperry Gyroscope Company on unpiloted aircraft during the last years of the First World War. Then came the advent of electronics, especially radar, and warfare began to leave the realm of human senses. Ships and planes could fire on enemies that were no more than ghostly green images on a cathode ray tube. Later came military robots such as cruise missiles that were able to autonomously execute missions formerly requiring manned systems. Advanced radar engagement systems enabled pilots to locate, identify, and destroy enemy aircraft without ever seeing them. Some robotic systems became even more independent, such as the Navy's Phalanx close-in air defense weapon, which is "capable of autonomously performing its own search, detect, evaluation, track, engage, and kill assessment functions."2 Thanks to advanced sensors and information processing, target recognition and identification methods are being developed to permit truly autonomous guided munitions. This includes munitions capable of autonomously engaging fixed and mobile ground targets, as well as targets in air and space.3 Warfare has begun to leave "human space."
A long step in this direction was taken in mid-2000 when the US Senate Armed Services Committee added $246.3 million to its version of the 2001 defense authorization bill to speed development of unmanned combat systems. The committee set two ambitious goals-within ten years, one third of all deep-- strike aircraft would be unmanned; and within 15 years, one third of ground combat vehicles would operate without human beings on board.4 At about the same time, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US Army selected initial contractors for the Army's planned Objective Force. The concept calls for "a network-centric, distributed force that will include a manned command and control element/personnel carrier, a robotic direct-fire system,...