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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."
Combatbot? That ain't a combatbot, THIS IS A COMBATBOT. That's just a little remote controlled toy tank, not much different than a Predator armed with a Hellfire missile, no more intelligent than a remote controlled car.
I was about to post "About damned time"- but that would have been in response to a bot patrolling at random a rectangular set of GPS co-ordinates that fired at anything that set off it's motion detector, not a remote-controlled toy that has to ask "father may I" three times before firing.
Just more proof that the modern army is defective on basic no-man's land tactics that their grandfathers would have been familiar with. And in so doing, guarantees a loss on the battlefield as they try to sort out what God only knows- who is really the enemy. Just kill them all, God can sort 'em out. And in so doing, you can separate populations that want to kill each other, by a line of death that neither can successfully cross.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
We can build more robots, and faster, than the taliban can make humans. Now we don't care if our soldiers(robots) are blown up by suicide bombers. Keep the economic squeeze on and we just might win this thing.
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- I think the GP's point is that, in the long term, this won't make war any better/safer. Once both sides have kill-bots (eg in the next war, or the war after that), there will be more robo-suicide missions and more human casualties. Just like with the Gatling gun - once both sides have it, more people are killed faster.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
And as for claims of feeding them and giving them water and fuel... gee. Saddam was doing that too. What is the big difference between you and him at least from Iraqi perception?
If anything, you guys have destroyed the infrastructure and made life harsher and less safe, for civilians. And on top, you have the gall to expect gratitude? How about they come over to your house, squat and order you about, raid your fridge and expect you to be on your knees in gratitude when they throw you a few scraps from your own fridge?
You are not there to save lives, help democracy or any of that crap. You are just there to secure interests of oil corporations. Plain and simple. Don't delude yourself of having some higher purpose.
And your top brass knows that without *some* iraqi frontfaces, they would have no legitimacy in Iraq... since they would lose the thin excuse that interim iraqi government has requested them to stay... so as a low level grunt, you had to basically eat shit and continue working with folks who didn't want you there.
Stop preening you stupid hypocrite!
That shit hole is full of Islamist scum who need killing, but are not worth one drop of an American soldier's blood.
Can we deploy them in Detroit and Finsbury Park?
--ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Horseshit. Since you overthrew Saddam, there have been about nearly three-quarters of a million Iraqi deaths in just four years. You didn't kill the majority of them, but the US has certainly killed thousands, if not tens of thousands. 80%+ of the dead are civilians -- and of course, a high proportion of the militants you've killed were not militants at the start but took up arms against their oppressors.
Yes we all know that the American military is not responsible for any crimes
and American military doctrine has not resulted in genocide of indigineous peoples or wars of aggression. What rules of engagement did the armed forces follow when they slew Al-Jazeera *reporters* in Iraq?
Those animals all ready have, and continue to massacre our civilians and other nation's innocent civilians. So when did you become sympatric to the religion of peace after they target Iraqis and bombed a soccer game or before that. The problem is with the Muslims is I rarely if every hear denouncements of bombings of soccer games or bombings of other innocents, but is you draw a picture of the rapist Mohammad then you hear outcry. Those animals don't want to fight they want to instill fear on innocent people, now they have to deal with robots they can't kill or intimidate.
Judging by the formatting in your post, I'd say you're the resident expert on dumb console terminals.
;)
P.S. They make displays with more than 40 columns now.