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."

Comments

Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave...

[Pig Hogger]

Imagine... Robots without the three laws...

Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave...

[Anonymous Crowhead]

No. I am talking about the book, which I read long before the movie came out. The three laws are moronic and regardless of Isamov's intentions, the book clearly shows that. You can't write around pure logic. The book was great but the laws are pure folly.

By the way, Maddox put it best when he stated that the only thing the movie and the book had in common was the title.

Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave...

[iamhassi]

""This seems like it'd be a great idea in Iraq - breach a door"

and get hit with a chair. Millions of taxpayers dollars lost to breach a door lost to a $5 dollar chair."

Screw you flamebait. How about you go breach a door and have someone shoot back and see if you'd rather have the robot breach the next door.

And if you bothered to read the wikipedia article you'd see these robots are only $230,000, and could drop to 150k if ordered in large quantities. Dirt cheap compared to a couple of dead soldiers.

Also they're 100 lbs so they're not being knocked over easily and I really doubt a chair would seriously damage it... or if it did you'd risk setting the gun off. Would you hit a armed robot with a gun? Honestly you'd probably have better luck surprising a armed soldier with a swift chair to the chest than hitting this robot.

Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave...

[dcollins]

"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."

Here is my counterargument. It's well established that when safety features are widely distributed -- like helmets for bikers, or airbags for car drivers -- injuries actually go up, because people feel free to engage in more risky behavior. (http://www.thedaily.washington.edu/article/2007/2 /2/bicycleHelmetsMoreHarmThanGood)

The same will happen here. While soldiers will feel safer using the robot drones, that means that they'll feel free to run more missions, penetrations, and infiltrations. When the USA is suffering fewer casualties, politically and economically we'll feel free to run more invasions, longer counterinsurgency campaigns, and so forth. Even though any single incident may in fact have fewer casualties, over time the expected value will go up, just because more missions are being run against civilian areas. Just like with bicycle helmets.

Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave...

[shilly]

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2125135,00 .html
It's a left-wing newspaper. If that's enough for you to discount the article, more fool you.

Convoys
Two dozen soldiers interviewed said that this callousness toward Iraqi civilians was particularly evident in the operation of supply convoys--operations in which they participated. These convoys are the arteries that sustain the occupation, ferrying items such as water, mail, maintenance parts, sewage, food and fuel across Iraq. And these strings of tractor-trailers, operated by KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) and other private contractors, required daily protection by the US military. Typically, according to these interviewees, supply convoys consisted of twenty to thirty trucks stretching half a mile down the road, with a Humvee military escort in front and back and at least one more in the center. Soldiers and marines also sometimes accompanied the drivers in the cabs of the tractor-trailers.

These convoys, ubiquitous in Iraq, were also, to many Iraqis, sources of wanton destruction.

According to descriptions culled from interviews with thirty-eight veterans who rode in convoys--guarding such runs as Kuwait to Nasiriya, Nasiriya to Baghdad and Balad to Kirkuk--when these columns of vehicles left their heavily fortified compounds they usually roared down the main supply routes, which often cut through densely populated areas, reaching speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed by the rule that stagnation increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in traffic jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto sidewalks, scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles, shoving them off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of civilian cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys as a warning to other drivers to get out of the way.

"A moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one," said Sgt. Ben Flanders, 28, a National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, who served in Balad with the 172nd Mountain Infantry for eleven months beginning in March 2004. Flanders ran convoy routes out of Camp Anaconda, about thirty miles north of Baghdad. "So speed was your friend. And certainly in terms of IED detonation, absolutely, speed and spacing were the two things that could really determine whether or not you were going to get injured or killed or if they just completely missed, which happened."

Following an explosion or ambush, soldiers in the heavily armed escort vehicles often fired indiscriminately in a furious effort to suppress further attacks, according to three veterans. The rapid bursts from belt-fed .50-caliber machine guns and SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons, which can fire as many as 1,000 rounds per minute) left many civilians wounded or dead.

"One example I can give you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in a convoy and all of the sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben Schrader, 27, of Grand Junction, Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division, from February 2004 to February 2005. "And, you know, you've got these scared kids on these guns, and they just start opening fire. And there could be innocent people everywhere. And I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions where innocent people died because we're cruising down and a bomb goes off."

Several veterans said that IEDs, the preferred weapon of the Iraqi insurgency, were one of their greatest fears. Since the invasion in March 2003, IEDs have been responsible for killing more US troops--39.2 percent of the more than 3,500 killed--than any other method, according to the Brookings Institution, which monitors deaths in Iraq. This past May, IED attacks claimed ninety lives, the highest number of fatalities from roadside bombs since the beginn

Re:T-1

[venicebeach]

I guess these guys haven't seen Terminator 3

... or the Matrix, or Battlestar Gallactica, or I Robot.. the list goes on. Our subconscious has been warning us about this in the form of fiction for years and the warnings have been getting louder and louder....

Hardware

[bigattichouse]

I remember this movie! "Hardware" circa 1989. The movie has like 10 different endings, a damn good soundtrack, and lots of bad acting. Spoiler: Guy finds pieces of a battlebot on the field and gives to his girlfriend to use in her art. Machine rebuilds itself, kills fat stalker (Oh we all walk, the wifferly wafferly walk...), really awesome sex scene, and well, rambles on worse than my post. I wonder if armed robots fall under geneva conventions.. oh, wait, our administration quit the geneva conventions right before they started "streamlining" our Bill of Rights. I really feel sorry for a kid that runs across one of these ED-209's

Great Ideas don't work in the military

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Gatling Gun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun

The purpose of this gun was to save lives. Dr Gatling figured that a gun that would shoot faster would mean that an army would need less soldiers to spray out the same number of buttets and therefore there would be less soldiers on the field getting killed and injured. Therefore the machine gun would save lives.

Of course it did not work out that way.

So now we have a bunch of robots running around. That should mean less soldiers getting killed, right?

Wrong: Bot soldiers will eventually be used to do suicide missions that the meat variety won't do. That means more intense and grubby conflict which means more injury and deaths - not less.

Re:Great Ideas don't work in the military

[mi]

So now we have a bunch of robots running around. That should mean less soldiers getting killed, right?

Yes, very likely. The high-tech of the war is astounding. We lost 50K Americans in the Korean War, for example — plus about half a million Chinese soldiers died and millions of Koreans (civilians and not).

This war? Less then 4K dead Americans. Technology helps a great deal — and not only to the side, that has it.

Wrong: Bot soldiers will eventually be used to do suicide missions that the meat variety won't do. That means more intense and grubby conflict which means more injury and deaths - not less.

The second sentence does not follow from the first. Quite the opposite. For example, instead of calling on Air Force to level a building with a sniper-nest on the roof, using these bots our forces could deal with the sniper without leaving dozens of residents homeless (and some dead).

Call me old-fashioned, but I do rejoice at my side's progress...

Re:Great Ideas don't work in the military

[CastrTroy]

I've always find it kind of odd that they make such a big deal about how many people are dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places. Not that I don't appreciate that people have laid down their lives, but they act like it's tons of people. When you consider how many Americans, and Canadians are dying in recent wars, it's nothing like it used to be during Veitnam, WWII, and WWI. They seem to make a huge deal everytime 1 person dies. If they had done this during Vietnam, they probably would have required 5 or 6 channels, dedicated to displaying the list of people who had died.

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

My impression (working from memory, not looking it up) is that while the SWORDS robots have been in use for a while now, they've never been ARMED until now - they were used for scouting ahead, especially in urban environments.

Looks to me more like....

[Anonymous Coward]

....a free machine gun, and a nifty automated lawnmower with a little modchip action and some cheap walmart parts.

Re:Robot? That Ain't a Robot- THIS is a Robot.

[Kjella]

Ok - let us for a moment assume that invading Iraq was a decent idea and that Saddam was a threat that should be eliminated. The Iraqi army falls like a house of cards, all territories occupied, "mission accomplished". You also get full dictatorial power over the US military and an incredibly loyal public opinion that'll support any action. Now what?

There aren't exactly vast troops hiding in the jungle, because there is no jungle. Your enemies are hiding among the general population, striking at your troops but mostly at civilians supporting your side. Would you like to:

a) Withdraw and leave the whole country in anarchy and civil war
b) Create a "no-mans" land out of the cities (Nothing like a little genocide in the morning)
c) Start ignoring colleteral damage and/or retaliate against the civil population
d) Try to flush out the guerilla fighters in DisneyWar

If you go in with an army, fuck them up one side and down the other then leave them you'll only make things worse. That's essentially the tactic used on Germany after WWI, and all it did was create an angry and resentful population which led to nationalism, racism and Hitler.

Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca

[Anonymous Coward]

but does it run linux?

Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca

[C0y0t3]

WHY NOT replace the human element, at least as a target? The first side that effectively does so wins. Hey, a generation didn't spend our youths' playing 1st person shooters for nothing. Americans would PAY (apparently around $14.95/month) to run them (so would many others I'm sure, a coalition of the willing, let the market decide), soldiers could hold the line and watch. It would be like sending in the hordes of Celts to soften em up for the orderly ranks who walk in and clean up the mess.

That is, until either Skynet becomes conscious, or The Singularity occurs and machine intelligence (MI) leaves we petty humans behind, or probably keeps breeding stock around just in case somebody fires off a global EMP weapon. But I digress... lets get out of Iran oh dear I mean Iraq (whichever) first.

After all, Eastasia has always been at war with Europa...

ROBOTS?! The enemies just have to use WATERGUNS!!!

[HOTTILA.COM]

No more bullets... they can use water guns and that's it.... hehehe... OR water bombs...how's that? :)

Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca

[Joe Tie.]

they can be repaired only for a fraction of the cost of a surgical operation.

I think the idea is that traditionally, the soldier would just die instead of being able to be kept alive long enough for an operation. With the end effect of a disposable soldier being much cheaper than the robot. This war has been the exception that showed just how costly our new ability to keep people alive actually is.

Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca

[Climate Shill]

WHY NOT replace the human element, at least as a target?

Well, for a start, if you don't appear on the battlefield, why would your enemy bother fighting you there? They know where your country is, it makes much more sense to kill you at home instead.

A more thorough treatment

[benhocking]

The mentioned article on bicycle helmets is a masterpiece of crappy reasoning.

An excellent book that give numerous examples, statistics, etc., is "Why Things Bite Back" by Edward Tenner. I put it up there with "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (by Thomas Kuhn) as for how it altered my thinking. That said, the arguments put forth in Tenner's book don't lead you to the premise that bicycle helmets (or armed drones) are bad - just that they can have unintended consequences. You and dcollins both make excellent points, and I don't think they're mutually exclusive. People need to ask the tough questions about whether this could lead to an increased willingness to engage in unnecessary warfare.