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Pentagon Urged to Just Say No to AI-Powered Killer Robots
"The Department of Defense should declare its opposition to the development and deployment of autonomous weapons."
Mar 26, 2024
The watchdog group Public Citizen on Tuesday led a letter urging Pentagon leaders "to clarify that the Replicator Initiative will not involve the development and deployment of autonomous weapons systems," also known as "killer robots."
Last September, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks "asserted that the development of all-domain, attributable autonomy systems (ADA2) is an essential way for the Pentagon to maintain its comparative cutting-edge and keep up with the technological advancements of other states," notes the letter, which was addressed to her and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
"However, those comments failed to specify whether or not supporting autonomous weapons systems is one of the key focuses of this initiative," the letter stresses. "When addressing whether or not 'ADA2 means weapons systems,' Secretary Hicks stated: 'That's a serious question to be sure. They are not synonymous. There are many applications for ADA2 systems beyond delivering weapons effects.'"
"Autonomous weapons are inherently dehumanizing and unethical, no matter whether a human is 'ultimately' responsible for the use of force or not."
Public Citizen and the 13 other organizations argued that "this is no place for strategic ambiguity. Autonomous weapons are inherently dehumanizing and unethical, no matter whether a human is 'ultimately' responsible for the use of force or not."
Deploying lethal weapons that rely on artificial intelligence (AI) "in battlefield conditions necessarily means inserting them into novel conditions for which they have not been programmed, an invitation for disastrous outcomes," the groups warned. "'Swarms' of the sort envisioned by Replicator pose even heightened risks, because of the unpredictability of how autonomous systems will function in a network. And the mere ambiguity of the U.S. position on autonomous weapons risks spurring a catastrophic arms race."
"We believe the Department of Defense should declare its opposition to the development and deployment of autonomous weapons," the coalition concluded. "However, even if you are not prepared to make that declaration, we strongly urge you to clarify that the Replicator Initiative will not employ autonomous weapons."
In addition to Public Citizen, the coalition included the American Friends Service Committee, Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network, Backbone Campaign, Demand Progress Education Fund, Fight for the Future, Future of Life, National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, RootsAction.org, United Church of Christ, the Value Alliance, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom U.S., Win Without War, and World Beyond War.
The letter comes on the heels of Public Citizen releasing a report about the rise of killer robots, AI Joe: The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence and the Military.
The February report addresses the Pentagon's AI policy, the dangers of killer robots, the need to ensure decisions about nuclear weapons aren't made by automated systems, how artificial intelligence can increase not diminish the use of violence, risks of using deepfakes on the battlefield, and how AI startups are seeking government contracts.
The publication concludes with recommendations that Public Citizen president Robert Weissman echoed in a statement Tuesday.
"The United States should state plainly that it will not create or deploy killer robots and should work to advance global treaty negotiations to ban such weapons," Weissman said. "At minimum, the United States should commit that the Replicator Initiative will not involve the use of autonomous weapons."
"Ambiguity about the Replicator program essentially ensures a catastrophic arms race over autonomous weapons," he added. "That's a race in which all of humanity is the loser."
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Warren Leads Bipartisan Bill to Stop Price Gouging by Military Contractors
"Defense contractors have been exploiting loopholes in the law and raking in massive profits by price gouging the Pentagon and American taxpayers," said the senator.
Jun 21, 2023
A month after sending letters to the U.S. Department of Defense and military contractors, Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday partnered with a pair of colleagues to introduce bipartisan legislation intended to stop price gouging at the Pentagon such as "$71 for a pin that should have cost less than a nickel and $80 for a drain pipe segment that should have cost $1.41."
Warren (D-Mass.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, and Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Readiness, first unveiled the Stop Price Gouging the Military Act last year. Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) joined with them to reintroduce the bill.
"Defense contractors have been exploiting loopholes in the law and raking in massive profits by price gouging the Pentagon and American taxpayers," Warren said Wednesday. "My bipartisan bill with Sen. Braun and Rep. Garamendi would close these loopholes and ensure that DOD has the necessary tools to prevent these abuses."
In additon to addressing issues with existing law and ensuring DOD has the "information necessary to prevent future rip-offs," the bill aims to financially incentivize contractors to improve performance, a fact sheet from Warren's office explains.
As the document details, the legislation would reduce advanced payments for companies to 50% but allow them to receive up to 95%, rewarding them for:
- Meeting program schedules and milestones 95% of the time;
- Not having major outstanding corrective action requests;
- Having required business systems;
- Timely responses to requests to provide certified cost or pricing information;
- Disclosing first tier subcontractor data, beneficial owners, and total executive
- compensation;
- Meeting small business subcontracting goals; and
- Providing subcontracting opportunities for the blind and severely disabled.
"Defense contractors are taking advantage of the DOD and American taxpayers by charging more and delivering less," declared Braun, adding that the bill "will inject transparency and accountability into the process."
After an explosive "60 Minutes" investigation last month showed how private corporations are overcharging the Defense Department, Braun and Warren along with Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to the Pentagon urging a probe into contractor price gouging. That same day, Warren and Garamendi sent letters to the DOD, Boeing, and TransDigm about companies' refusal to provide pricing data.
"As a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, I know how much we pay for parts to keep military equipment ready," Garamendi said Wednesday. "We know that taxpayers and service members are routinely overcharged by defense contractors due to loopholes in current regulations. We cannot allow taxpayer money to be wasted to inflate the bottom lines of giant defense contractors. Our service members need the tools to properly negotiate prices. This is just common sense."
The bill's reintroduction comes as U.S. weapons contractors celebrate the debt ceiling deal recently negotiated by the congressional Republicans and President Joe Biden, which proposes a military budget increase while capping other discretionary federal spending. As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet said during a conference that the resulting legislation is "as good an outcome as our industry or our company could ask for at this point."
Notably, Biden was already requesting a $886 billion military budget for fiscal year 2024, a $28 billion increase over current levels. Writing about the debt limit agreement for OtherWords last week, economic analyst Sam Pizzigati pointed out that "defense contractors will pocket about half of that," which will in turn line the pockets of their top executives.
"In 2021, the most recent year with complete stats, the nation's top five weapons makers—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman–grabbed over $116 billion in Pentagon contracts and paid their top executives $287 million," he noted, citing Pentagon-watcher William Hartung.
As Pizzigati put it, "Does anyone have a sweeter deal than military contractor CEOs?"
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'Brass for Gold': Warren Report Details Revolving Door Between Capitol Hill and War Profiteers
"When government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials' integrity."
Apr 27, 2023
Nearly 700 former Pentagon officials, congressional lawmakers and staffers, and other federal employees now work for major military contractors, primarily as lobbyists, confirming that the revolving door between the U.S. government and the weapons industry is "still spinning rapidly" and must be closed through "legislative and regulatory overhauls."
That's according to Pentagon Alchemy: How Defense Officials Pass Through the Revolving Door and Peddle Brass for Gold, a report published Wednesday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel.
"The abuse of the revolving door between government service and the private sector can corrupt government decision-making," says the report. "When government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials' integrity and casts doubt on the fairness of government contracting. This problem is incredibly concerning and pronounced in the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the United States' defense industry."
Warren's analysis found "672 cases in 2022 in which the top 20 defense contractors had former government officials, military officers, members of Congress, and senior legislative staff working for them as lobbyists, board members, or senior executives. In 91% of these cases, the individuals that went through the revolving door became registered lobbyists for big defense contractors."
"The sheer size of America's military budget provides ample and lucrative opportunities for former government officials," the report notes. "Last year Congress gave the DOD over $851 billion in total funding. The DOD is also the largest federal contracting agency: Of the total $692.3 billion in contracts awarded by the federal government in FY 2021, 61% were awarded by DOD amounting to $386.9 billion."
That almost 40% of Pentagon contracts were awarded to just 10 corporations is "unsurprising" given the consolidation of the arms-making business, states the report. "After waves of mergers and acquisitions, competition has decreased significantly—from over 50 firms to just five large rivals—decreasing DOD's ability to choose from a broad range of competitors."
It goes without saying that injecting more competition into the contracting process would not necessarily address the more fundamental problem of escalating military spending, which is what private companies—big and small alike—are feasting on.
The largest war profiteers, however, often hire the most revolving-door lobbyists and put the most ex-government officials on their boards, the analysis points out, increasing their chances of appropriating more public money.
According to the report, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Electric (GE) employed the most former government officials as of last year. Boeing has hired 85, including six high-ranking executives, two board members, and 77 registered lobbyists. Raytheon has hired 64, including one executive, three board members, and 60 registered lobbyists. GE, for its part, has hired 60 revolving-door lobbyists.
Those three corporations are far from alone. Pentagon contractors in general are hiring hundreds of former military and civilian officials from both major parties and across administrations into executive roles, board positions, and lobbyist jobs.
As the report makes clear, "This practice is widespread in the defense industry, giving, at minimum, the appearance of corruption and favoritism, and potentially increasing the chance that DOD spending results in ineffective weapons and programs, bad deals, and waste of taxpayer dollars."
Notably, the Pentagon recently failed its fifth consecutive annual audit while nearly 40 million people in the U.S. languish in poverty.
According to the report:
Current federal ethics laws that are supposed to regulate the revolving door are overly complex and often insufficient to prevent conflicts of interest. Indeed, even though the DOD has improved certain practices, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that DOD could further enhance its compliance efforts by amending regulations to require contractors to demonstrate their employees' compliance with post-government employment lobbying restrictions established in the National Defense Authorization Act. Post-government employment restrictions remain an impossibly confusing "tangled mess" that hinders effective implementation and compliance—and keeps the revolving door spinning.
The revolving door swings both ways. For instance, before U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was nominated by President Joe Biden to lead the Pentagon, the retired Army general was a member of Raytheon's board of directors.
During a Wednesday hearing of her Senate Armed Services subcommittee, Warren questioned Pentagon staff and ethics experts about revolving-door hiring, new revelations about former U.S. government officials working for foreign governments, and the problems posed by current executive branch personnel owning stock in companies affected by their decisions.
The lawmaker reiterated her demand for far-reaching ethics reforms at the Pentagon and across the federal government.
While Warren's Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act aims to increase transparency and combat conflicts of interest throughout Washington, her Department of Defense Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, introduced in 2019 and again in 2022, is tailored to cleaning up issues at the Pentagon.
As the report explains:
This legislation would impose a four-year ban on giant contractors from hiring DOD officials and prevent them from hiring former DOD employees who managed their contracts. The act would also require defense contractors to submit detailed annual reports to DOD regarding former senior DOD officials who are subsequently employed by contractors. The act also bans senior DOD officials from owning any stock in a major defense contractor and bans all DOD employees from owning any stock in contractors if the employee can use their official position to influence the stock's value. Lastly, the act raises the recusal standard for DOD employees by prohibiting them from participating in any matter that affects the financial interests of their former employer for four years.
"These safeguards would slow the revolving door, improving government ethics and bolstering the integrity of the DOD contracting process—actions that, as this investigation demonstrates, are desperately needed," the report concludes.
Last year, the Institute for Policy Studies' National Priorities Project published a report showing that the U.S. has spent more than $21 trillion on militarization since September 11, 2001.
Citing that analysis, Jacobin's Luke Savage argued at the time that the nation's military spending—now even higher than it was at the height of the Cold War—is not only wasteful but also inherently anti-democratic:
Military spending allocated for 2022 considerably exceeds the cost of five separate Green New Deal bills. For a miniscule fraction of what America spent on the two-decade-long "war on terror," it could have fully decarbonized its electricity grid, eradicated student debt, offered free preschool, and funded the wildly popular and effective Covid-era's anti-poverty child tax credit for at least a decade. Spending public funds so lavishly on war inevitably means not spending them elsewhere, and it's incredible to imagine what even a fraction of the money sucked up every year by America's bloated military-industrial complex could accomplish if invested differently.
Fundamentally, however, the case against the Pentagon's ever-expanding budget is a democratic one. Every year, the government of the world's most powerful country now allocates more than half of its discretionary funds to what is laughably called "defense spending"—regardless, it turns out, of whether the nation is at risk of attack or officially at war.
"Corporate capture of Congress is a problem in most major policy areas," wrote Savage, "but defense contractors and other military concerns have a stranglehold that is arguably unmatched."
Approximately 55% of all Pentagon spending went to private sector military contractors from FY 2002 to FY 2021, according to Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute. If that privatization of funds rate continues this year, weapons dealers can expect to rake in well over $400 billion of the current $858 billion military budget.
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