Cyber and Drone Attacks May Change Warfare More Than the Machine GunBy Ross Andersendroneroom_615.jpgThe new look of drone-enabled war. Reuters.From state-sponsored cyber attacks to autonomous robotic weapons, twenty-first century war is increasingly disembodied. Our wars are being fought in the ether and by machines. And yet our ethics of war are stuck in the pre-digital age. We're used to thinking of war as a physical phenomenon, as an outbreak of destructive violence that takes place in the physical world. Bullets fly, bombs explode, tanks roll, people collapse. Despite the tremendous changes in the technology of warfare, it remained a contest of human bodies. But as the drone wars have shown, that's no longer true, at least for one side of the battle.Technological asymmetry has always been a feature of warfare, but no nation has ever been able to prosecute a war without any physical risk to its citizens. What might the ability to launch casualty-free wars do to the political barriers that stand between peace and conflict? In today's democracies politicians are obligated to explain, at regular intervals, why a military action requires the blood of a nation's young people. Wars waged by machines might not encounter much skepticism in the public sphere.We just don't know what moral constraints should apply to these new kinds of warfare. Take the ancient, but still influential, doctrine of Just War Theory, which requires that war's destructive forces be unleashed only when absolutely necessary; war is to be pursued only as a last resort and only against combatants, never against civilians.But information warfare, warfare pursued with information technologies, distorts concepts like "necessity" and "civilian" in ways that challenge these ethical frameworks. An attack on another nation's information infrastructure, for instance, would surely count as an act of war. But what if it reduced the risk of future bloodshed? Should we really only consider it as a last resort? The use of robots further complicates things. It's not yet clear who should be held responsible if and when an autonomous military robot kills a civilian. These are the questions that haunt the philosophers and ethicists that think deeply about information warfare, and they will only become more pertinent as our information technologies become more sophisticated. Mariarosaria Taddeo, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Hertforshire, recently published an article in Philosophy & Technology called "Information Warfare: A Philosophical Perspective" that addresses these questions and more. What follows is my conversation with Taddeo about how information technology is changing the way we wage war, and what philosophy is doing to catch up. How do you define information warfare?Taddeo: The definition of "information warfare" is hotly debated. From my perspective, for the purposes of philosophical analysis, it's best to define information warfare in terms of concrete forms, and then see if there is a commonality between those forms. One example would be cyber-attacks or hacker attacks, which we consider to be information warfare; another example would be the use of drones or semi-autonomous machines. From those instances, to me, a good definition of information warfare is "the use