Q: How do your systems work?
A: Our Autonomous anti-Personnel Systems (APSs) navigate to their target automatically, avoiding obstacles, finding entries, and overcoming countermeasures. Then, based on criteria provided by the operator prior to launch, they select and eliminate one or more targets.
Q: What are the advantages of your autonomous weapons over more conventional weapons such as aircraft or drones?
A: There are many. Military aircraft are obscenely expensive to purchase, maintain, and pilot. Piloted drones require a complex communication infrastructure only available at great cost to major militaries, along with trained pilots. Our APSs require far less expertise and infrastructure, allowing them to be used by a much wider variety of clients. They are also much more targeted, and cheaper as well!
Q: Do your APS save lives?
A: Yes! You can use our systems risk-free without endangering your own personnel, and there is a much lower chance of collateral damage in achieving your goals. This means you can use them against a much wider variety of targets, greatly reducing the risk and cost of armed conflict and enabling a much greater scope of operations.
Q: Are your systems compliant with international humanitarian law?
A: While we of course support international humanitarian law, we consider it the responsibility of our clients to ensure that such rules are followed. Where the specific technology makes this extremely difficult (e.g. in ensuring proportionality, distinction, and non-discrimination) we encourage our clients to take appropriate measures to mitigate this difficulty.
Q: What if one of your systems accidentally attacks the wrong target?
A: We work hard to ensure that targeting is accurate given the parameters laid out by the operator, and we are confident that accidental and collateral deaths are statistically well below that of most other weapons systems. (Note that by the terms of our user agreement, responsibility for such accidental injuries lies expressly with the unit operator, or with the unit itself should the unit have made the incorrect decision.)
Q: What are the defenses against your systems?
A: With autonomous weapons offense is much easier than defense, so we’re confident we can stay ahead of countermeasures. For example, auto-avoidance, stochastic flight patterns, and EMP-hardening are already built in. Future systems will counteract future countermeasures. And if all else fails, you can succeed with numbers, since you can send thousands or even millions of drones at your adversary for the cost of a single missile, overwhelming the most robust defenses.
Q: How do we stay ahead of adversaries with similar systems?
A: Despite the rapid pace of technology, we are confident that it will be months or even years before other major military powers — those who are not our clients — will have comparable capabilities, and even longer for smaller states. Although the hardware is within capability for many manufacturers, our state-of-the-art software is multiple years ahead of the competition, and our IP is closely guarded. Stealing our software would be almost as hard as smuggling information out of the NSA.
Q: How does this fit into the landscape of military technologies and global levels of armament?
A: We’re proud to be a disruptive company. Every new military technology will have upsides and downsides for various parties. Our technology excels at making it inexpensive, low-risk, and easy to eliminate opponents, even anonymously. Parties that have an interest in more of that taking place in the world will be advantaged at the expense of those that don’t.
Q: I’m interested in using APS to remove the command structure of an adversary. Is that a good use case?
A: Absolutely. If you can identify your adversary’s leaders by image, voice, gait, or other characteristics, you can take them out automatically. (Here we must stress that these weapons be used in compliance with national and international laws of war and engagement, as per and committed through the terms of service. We do not endorse the use of our systems to attack persons, entities, or governments not deemed a threat by your national or the international community, even though it may be operationally trivial.)
Q: What about peacekeeping and population control?
A: This is one of the most exciting things: connecting our systems to easily available and purchasable sets of personal data means that our systems can identify targets for surveillance (or more) by nationality, gender, contacts with subversive elements, even radical political ideology, however defined.
Q: How do your systems rate in terms of kills-per-dollar?
A: They are superb. Drone strikes are extravagantly expensive, costing upwards of $30,000 per hours of flight, plus expensive munitions. Bullets are cheap, but well-trained soldiers can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to maintain. Even nuclear weapons don’t rate as high: a single-warhead missile can cost $75-200 million, and is unlikely to kill more than a million people even with the most efficient targeting. An entry-level APS unit can cost as little as $50. The only thing more efficient are biological weapons – nothing can compete with a vial of smallpox!
Q: Don’t you think by posting all this information you are giving good ideas away to people who should not have them?
A: We’ll be honest: all of our products are based on ideas that have been publicly discussed in the industry and more widely. The key point is that we have been able to miniaturize and refine our systems, and outfit them with carefully-engineered expert-developed software. This is only made possibly using the generous funding of lucrative government military R&D contracts, so individuals or small companies are unlikely to be able to compete.
Q: Is this website for real?
A: No, but this is a glimpse of where the current trajectory of automation in weapons systems is likely to take us, unless such weapons are banned or curtailed by international agreement. If you don’t like what you see, get involved.