Emerging and Readily Available Technologies and National Security A Framework for Addressing Ethical, Legal, and Societal Issues: Summary (2014) / Chapter Skim
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These investments cover a broad range of efforts, from fundamental research that might eventually support national security needs, broadly defined, to specific development and eventual production of weapons and other military materiel intended to address particular national security problems.
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Concerns about technologies that can be used for both military and civilian purposes fall into this category. • Unanticipated, unforeseen, or inadvertent ELSI consequences of either research or applications; such consequences are usually manifested by something going awry, as when research does not proceed as expected and thus causes harm outside the original bounds on the research or when unanticipated applications raise additional ELSI concerns.
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Drawing on ELSI-related insights from the consideration of the three foundational ERA technologies and four ERA technology-based applications discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the report sets forth a framework to help identify ethical, legal, and societal issues that might not otherwise be apparent to program officials. Addressing the relevant questions associated with each stakeholder should help to develop useful knowledge on ethical, legal, and societal issues regarding specific military R&D programs and projects.
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To support, develop, and enhance the judgment of individual roject proposers and program offi p cials, a number of mechanisms, sometimes topic specific, have been used to address ethical, legal, and societal issues -- some apply to research, and some to actual deployments of technology. Mechanisms discussed in Chapter 7 and Appendix D include self-regulation and self-awareness; DOD law-of-armedconflict review and treaty compliance; codes of ethics and social responsibility in science, engineering, and medicine; ELSI research; oversight bodies (such as institutional review boards)
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To maximize the likelihood that ethical, legal, and societal issues will be addressed, an agency's senior leadership should designate a point of functional accountability for this responsibility. Parties with functional accountability provide a second line of defense against overlooking ELSI concerns that complements the primary role played by project teams in executing a program.
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For the proposals that warrant a "yes," the process in Recommendation 2.b comes into play. 2.b–Reviewing proposals that raise ELSI concerns Once an agency has identified research proposals or projects that may raise significant ethical, legal, and societal issues, some closer scrutiny is needed to ascertain how likely it is that such issues will arise, how serious they are likely to be, and whether there are ways to mitigate them.
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The fields that assess ELSI concerns arising with various technologies have their own vocabularies. At the very least, the agency personnel dealing with these issues will have to understand, at some level, the relevant "language." At the same time, those with ELSI responsibilities and/or expertise must have some understanding of the underlying research in order to identify issues that may or may not emerge.
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Leveraging policies and procedures already in place to address ELSI concerns associated with certain kinds of research will help to minimize unnecessary overhead in institutions performing research on ERA technologies with military significance, and where policies and procedures already exist to address ethical, legal, and societal issues that are common to both military and civilian-oriented research, new ones should not be created to address them.
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