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First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq
An anonymous reader writes "Robots have been roaming Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time — the first time in any war zone — the 'bots are carrying guns. The SWORDS robots, armed with M249 machine guns, "haven't fired their weapons yet," an Army official says. "But that'll be happening soon." The machines have actually been ready for a while, but safety concerns kept them off the battlefield. Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy," according to the Army. I feel safer already."
This dude thinks so:
- robot-idea-from-shitty.html
http://shitsnaz.blogspot.com/2007/07/us-army-gets
" 1995, the movie "Evolver" is released to the public. This piece of shit is about a robot that goes crazy and kills people so it can win at laser tag. At one point, the two protagaonists/high school students of the movie break into a military research facility (!) and watch a video about a top-secret government project for a futuristic military robot. It was called project "SWORDS".
The two acronyms and purposes of the robots are plain to see. It's painfully obvious to me that the Army stays up late and flips back and forth between demiporn on Cinemax and the horrible movies on USA. I can only imagine a researcher dropping his can of "Da Beast" to realize that, yes, there *has* to be a project SWORDS and a killer robot."
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
I like it. It's no fun going out on patrol and being ordered into an area to see if you draw any enemy fire. The robot can be repaired.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And the only results they have is a simple kill/estop switch, which (and I am guessing) whose command code is probably transmitted along the same comm pathway as the other command codes.
Wow
Simon H
I'm pretty sure the idea isn't to replace combat squads, but to augment them. These things just go in front, and act as a bullet magnet, while still being able to shoot back.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Just more proof that the modern army is defective on basic no-man's land tactics that their grandfathers would have been familiar with.
The army is plenty familiar with how to make a no-man's land, it's the press, and consiquentially the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had. War is terrible and ugly, the people don't want terrible and ugly, because they don't really believe in the cause. So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
We are all just people.
These things are about as close to Asimov's robots as my toaster is to my PC.
These are not the kinds of robots that would need the 3 laws.
We have had armed flying robots for some time already.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Not really. For the most part, I Robot showed that the laws tended to work pretty well. Of course, a story where everything always went smoothly wouldn't be particularly interesting, so he wrote about the interesting exceptions and contradictions that could arise. I just don't see how you managed to draw that conclusion from the book.
Um, the whole point of these robots IS to have the enemy shoot at the robots. If an insurgent sees a robot armed with a machine gun turning around the corner and starts to aim at him, hes gonna spend a few seconds not shooting at U.S. soldiers. In the eyes of the media and the government, thats multi-billion dollar project just earned every cent. The fact that it can shoot back simply sweetens the deal.
Artillery projectiles and bombs were "deciding" when to blow up for well over a century now...
Their logic was far more simplistic, of course.
Various traps where harmful "robots" too — mechanisms, designed to kill their intended victim automatically. These traps, and their descendants — land-mines — have killed many thousands of unintended victims since.
Our technology is progressing, and so does the military section of it... Although this weapon is novel, there is nothing new in principle here.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What do the three laws of robotics have to do a remote controlled gun on wheels? Judging from what they were doing in the video, a soldier would have to be within a few hundred yards of the robot for it to receive commands (no huge transmitter on the robot or on the laptop they were using). This seems like it'd be a great idea in Iraq - breach a door, then send in the bots to check things out while our soldiers say outside in relative safety. (I do wonder about accurately reading the image on the screen during daylight in a desert though - maybe some goggles would be in order?)
Also, looking at the little guy, I have to wonder how it takes a grenade hit... (and whether it could right itself after being tossed on to its side). Seems like a good platform for covering squads with cross fire, and maybe in performing the designated marksman role.
He didn't read the book ... but he saw one wicked-assed movie with Will Smith!
rj
Sadly most of us here are better educated and better at it than most of the young administrators that were sent straight from the "think tanks" halfway through undergraduate college into running things in Iraq. This is the amateur war run by disparate groups pulling in different directions without any central control actually in the same country - at least that is what retired military professionals are telling us.
They did it differently and could actually set and carry out policies without interference and they were not encumbered by unaccountable spooks turning up to play Bond villian without warning.
I see the increased value put on lives as a good sign that humanity is maturing. 50 years ago, the US military would have simply fire-bombed/napalmed places like Fallujah where civilian contractors were being killed and things were getting nasty. Instead they tried making truces, allowing humanitarian aid in, let tens of thousands of civilians leave, etc. 50 years ago, torture really was torture. I see it as a good sign that nowadays the world is upset about humiliating photos. We still have a way to go, but we are improving.
There are whole families behind those doors, cowering in fear, especially given the American strategy of concentrated firepower and fire first, ask questions later.
Imagine you are a marine. You have a report that some house somewhere might have some insurgents merrily making bombs to go blow up in crowds of Shiites trying to go shopping. You come to a house in a residential neighborhood. You now have two options.
1) You can kick in the door and send in a dozen of heavily armed teenagers scared shitless that a bomb is about to go off or that a dozen armed men are about to ambush them. Like must humans facing the potential for imminent death, they are hopped up on adrenaline and probably more than a little twitchy. Once inside they run the risk of coming face to face with some equally scared armed fellow who think she is defending his family by standing in the doorway with an AK-47 pointed at their face. This is how the majority of civilians get gunned down. Two groups of armed people scared to death of each other come face to face with each other, one side flinches, and before you know it you have a home riddled in bullets.
2) You send in an armed robot. Said armed robot comes face to face with a guy with an AK-47, but the calm controller who is in not in harms way and not terrified for his own life wavers, assesses the situation, and sees that it is just some poor scared daddy standing in front of his kids worried that a Shiite militia has come to kill them all. Instead of turning daddy and family into a bloody mess, the marines can now assess the situation, tell him to drop the gun, keep his hands up, and in general keep the two twitchy fingered parties away from each other until everyone has calmed down enough to make rational decisions.
Drones are what are going to lead in dramatic drops in civilian casualties. Civilians die when scared soldiers either make poor snap judgments about a threat, or soldiers have to pick between returning fire into an area that might kill civilians or dying. Drones can help to eliminate these decisions. It is okay for a drone to die. Drones can be the first ones in so that soldiers can remotely assess the situation and have more then a split seconds to decide if they have stepped into a room full of bomb makers gearing up to blow away some civilians (intentionally), or if they have stumbled into a family with a couple of scared and armed brothers and fathers thinking that they are defending their family. Further, even when encountering resistance, drones can be sacrificed to save civilians. Telling an American teenager armed to the teeth and trained for war to not fire when someone is pointing an RPG his way under the cover of civilians is a damn hard thing to do. Most people are pretty unwilling to let themselves die. On the other hand, a drone can face down an RPG and die without firing a shot if that is what the rule of engagement call for.
I am not saying that drones are a magical cure all. Drones are still pathetic substitutes for human soldiers. What drones do bring to the table is a the ability to send a pair of armed eyes forward into situations where sending a few men forward might result in they or civilians being killed. If nothing else, they are a tool to assess the situation calmly, rather than while being pumped with adrenaline and being forced to make life and death decisions in split seconds.
The Discovery Channels documentary Future Weapons featured these in one of the earlier episodes.
.50 cal sniper rifles on a mountain side could do though.
I'd wager the bullet magnet role is not as impressive as what letting loose a dozen of these mounted with
They seem like they'd be more efficiently deployed as disposable sniper units than front line combat units.
the American strategy of concentrated firepower and fire first, ask questions later
Nice. I like how you've never been placed under restrictive rules of engagement, in which even if you see someone with a weapon you're not allowed to fire on them until they actually pointed it in your direction, but some how know EXACTLY what US military doctrine is. I really don't understand why these sorts of comments go unchallenged on Slashdot, when if you were to comment on any other complex, technical subject without knowing what the hell you were talking about, you'd be eaten alive by dozens of subject matter experts who have been working in that field for years.
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The army is plenty familiar with how to make a no-man's land, it's the press, and consiquentially the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had. War is terrible and ugly, the people don't want terrible and ugly, because they don't really believe in the cause. So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
I agree that armies are not appropriate for 'peace-keeping'. When I was in the business, folks called it OOTW (Operations Other Than War) and dreaded it. There are no clear goals, no battle lines, and the rules change every day.
The problem with treating it like a typical occupation or 'total war,' is that you have to figure out who you are actually fighting. When we occupied Germany, things were simple: any German with a gun was resisting. When the French decided to weigh in on our Revolutionary war (what McCain wants to compare it to), similarly simple: only two sides (although things got interesting with guerillas and Torreys). You don't have that here.
If you follow McCain's logic that we are the French, who's side are we on? The insurgents (obviously not)? The Shia? The Sunni? The Kurds? Al Qaeda? The organized crime syndicates? Who do we shoot? We cannot simply declare everyone with a gun an enemy. Why not? Because every civilian in Bagdad has a legitimate need for a gun: to protect themselves from the other five sides, plus the corrupt police. We don't have the manpower to protect them 100% of the time or to disarm everyone at once. The average dad with an AK47 would be committing suicide and sacrificing his family to disarm. Men, women, and children are combatants. Children can and do deliver bombs (I have family that died that way). The only way that soldiers waging conventional war could stop the problem is to systematically shoot every man, woman, and child, block by block. Do you have the stomach for that?
So instead, we use soldiers, trained and armed to kill or be killed, in a situation for which they are manifestly unsuited. They are foreign invaders. They know little of the local language and culture. They have little or no police training. The Iraqi police and military liaisons who should be helping are unreliable. A significant fraction of the people they are trying to protect are hell bent on killing each other. Our soldiers use military tactics: fire support, artillery, etc., in populated areas. They don't bother identifying people before killing them (Wedding at Falujah, recent "friendly fire" helicopter attack on an Iraqi militia unit, etc.). They gun down families in their homes because a terrified father has a gun. They use 500 pound bombs or rockets to flush out individual insurgents in a row of block houses. And none of this is unusual: it's what soldiers are trained to do.
The thing is, there is no reason we should not have seen this going in (and many people did). Hussein's iron-fisted regime was the only thing holding the country together. Perhaps we would not have thought it would be this bad, but it should have been predicted and on the table. We had essentially four options: 1) accept the fact that we would have to brutally massacre most of the Iraqi civilians 2) Train and deploy a whole lot of Arabic speaking Military and perhaps civilian trained Police with the military as backup (and accept high casualties among Americans and Iraqis), 3) Fence the area in, let them go at it, and see who survives, 4) possibly combined with #2, reinstate the draft, arm and equip enough police and soldiers that we could realistically declare, enforce, and maintain total martial law, pre-cutting their food and giving them sp
Routinely? Hardly. I've not seen nor heard of civilian vehicles getting shot simply because the convoy wanted the vehicle to move. Warning shots, sure, but never actually targeting the vehicle. The reason why I haven't heard of it is because it'd be a violation of CENTCOM's rules of engagement and whoever did it would have gotten his nuts crushed for it.
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The irony is that he laughs about how some kid's head was blown apart but nearly cries about a dog they had to leave on a rooftop.
That's not really all that surprising or ironic if you frame the situation properly. It's a lot harder for most humans who are used to pets to hate a pet as much as another human being. Pets are often seen as ultimately innocent, whereas other humans can be enemies. Also, it seems from your description that he had a personal bond with the dog and not with the kid who died. That also makes a difference in a lot of people's capacity for empathy, especially in a heightened "us vs. them" situation like a war. Such situation strengthens the bonding with those who are "us" and make it easier to hate and be callous to those who are "them." It's just human instinct -- our adaptations for competition as a pack animal.
Lastly, it's worth noting that Hitler loved dogs and was a vegetarian (the irritating kind that liked to tell fellow diners how sausages they were eating were made) because he hated animal cruelty, and yet he presided over the genocide of an entire people. Not to Godwin the discussion, but it is a stark "contradiction" in his personality that many have a hard time reconciling until you frame it in terms of "enemies" and "innocents."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
AFAIK - I'm not a sniper, but I've shot some rifles accurately at a longer distance than their normal range, fairly reliably. And I've never had any formal training. I know there's a lot of calculus/physics/etc when it comes to sniping. And then there are the other variables - elevation, wind speed, velocity, swallows laden with coconuts, heat (rising air), etc.
It can be blowing 1000yds away, but deathly still where you are. The only way to judge is by movement in the grass/flags/trees. Then you also have to have target recognition - is that an enemy with a rocket launcher, or one carrying a pole with some water? I think human snipers will be better for a long time, however, I prefer my bullet magnets (front line) to be robots. I figure in about 50 years now, they'll realize "why fight for PHYSICAL land? Let's just do this C&C style baby! h4>0rs to the max!" Or something like that...
I wish I had a witty