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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."
Imagine... Robots without the three laws...
In this case, it might be better to call it a "do not kill" switch.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
only three of the robots are currently in Iraq.
Wow, that'll take care of business...
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
"You have 20 seconds to drop your gun"
:)
Iraqi drops gun.
"19... 18... 17..."
Sorry
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
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
More importantly, where can i get one?
No-- more importantly, can it find Sarah Connor?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The robots also have a bad habit of killing anyone that answers the door in the affirmative to the name "Sarah Connor"
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Depending on how much paperwork you're willing to sign, I know some people that would be happy to give you an opportunity to use a M249. There's a time commitment involved, though...
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
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
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.
The project is considered a failure due to the mass number of cowardly robots forgetting to fire their weapons, instead shouting "NO DISSEMBLE!!!" in the hopes they aren't turned into scrap metal.
However, the project is eventually reborn by turning the bots into chefs for the real troops. One was heard talking to itself:
Number 5: Okay, to make these golden fluffy pancakes... add flour, milk and eggs... Mix thoroughly...
[uses his own motor to rotate the mixer - the bowl contents splatter all over the room]
Number 5: Ooooo... Still lumpy!
I don't think it's the army itself that defective I think it's the brass, politicians and the American people. America has become extremely risk averse in regards to American lives. The politicians thus won't touch anything that endangers people and the brass relay these sentiments. It might be because of better communication and media which makes casualties more then numbers, it might be a very big shift in the idea of duty vs cost of duty. It might be the frivolous nature of the wars America has gotten itself into lately. Vietnam was about ideology, Iraq is about economics and influence while the major wars previous WWI and WWII was about duty to your allies and stopping actual threats to your security and economy. Korea was about ideology as well so perhaps it is a shift of the people.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
We have had armed flying robots for some time already.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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
meh
Nuff Said.
-Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
Back during WWII the Russians built radio control "Teletanks" that were controlled by a human operator in another tank. They were equipped with far more firepower than SWORDS, so technically SWORDS is NOT the first armed robot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletank
funny how slashdotters hate history, politics, economics, etc, (see the recent story on engineering colleges costing more) but the first thing they try to do when a subject like this comes up is dabble in amateur history, amateur politics, amateur sociology, and so forth and so on. and since they are completely untrained, they usually make a huge mess of it, and come off (to anyone familiar with the subject matter) as ignorant blowhards.
for example, you get a lot of things right, but then you say 'armies are not for keeping the peace'. is this the philosophy that led the americans to disband the iraqi army? is this why bush did not want to give authority a single, competent military person in charge of the occupation, or why he wouldnt even call it an occupation? what was so awful about mcarthur and patton after WWII and their occupations of germany and japan? is this why looting and riots broke out because nobody wanted to 'keep the peace'? what exactly was going to happen, then, if the military couldnt do the job of holding the country it had taken over? who was supposed to do that, if not the defense department? the 'keep the peace' department? oh the 'state department'? if that is the case, then what manpower is the state department supposed to use? do you want a bunch of civilians swooping down on a post-war country, while the army goes home, job done? and what is the state department supposed to do when armed militias try to blow up a building? but if state is supposed to be in charge, then why would you second guess a bunch of state department decisions, and mix and match between pentagon and state with various decisions going on after the country was taken over? have you read 'state of denial' or mil blogs or other resources? what do you say about these things?
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.
That's a bunch of Green Lantern will-to-victory horseshit. Military strategy does not depend on people at home clapping harder for Tinkerbell to be okay, it depends on manpower, munitions, strategy, and the setting and achieving of CLEAR, REALISTIC GOALS. We lost in Vietnam because no amount of killing people will make them love you and want to be more like you, and you can't fight a guerrilla war with a military - it's a political and social problem that's INTENDED to make miltary operations ineffective.
Dirty fucking hippies back home had jack squat to do with it.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
Then why the fuck are we still in Iraq? Last I checked, Saddam was dead now.
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.
... instead of suicide bombers they can use robot suicide bombers.
Why would they bother. Human life is much, much cheaper in that part of the world, and a robot would have a hard time sneaking through a security perimeter. Besides, there appears to be no shortage of those willing to immolate themselves on the altar of terrorism.
The real question, in my mind, is this: what would a robot do with all those virgins?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"The real question, in my mind, is this: what would a robot do with all those virgins?"
I believe Japanese animators have already answered that question.
The also used dogs w/ bombs strapped to them and trained them by feeding them under tanks. They set them loose on the battle field and the ones that didn't freak out ran under the tanks where they were promptly blown by radio control.
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.
Easy to hate: An occupying force has replaced your disbanded your military and technocratic society.
Easier to hate: An army of faceless scary-ass future-bots who have replaced your disbanded your military and technocratic society.
If there's anything I've learned from SciFi it's this - Controlling robots is awesome, but being controlled by robots results in pissed off people and counter insurgency. (Not that we haven't already hit that milestone without gun toting robots.)
And as jokingly sarcastic as that may be, I'm somewhat serious. I'm all for keeping out troops out of harm's way, but I'm somewhat curious about the blowback that results from being attacked by T-100's. Ground combat robots seem like something that might serve to dehumanize Americans during a time when we really need to do the complete opposite.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A robot can make decisions autonomously. A remote control car with a gun on it is not a robot.
I can't believe that nobody has mentioned the movie Screamers!
They got it right down to the name of the robots! You don't think SWORDS was original, did ya?
Autonomous Mobile Swords?
All they need is a high frequency speaker, and the MPAA would sue the hell outta the government for infringement!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamers_(film)
1) No peripheral vision
2) No armor
3) Easily taken out by a paint ball gun
4) Easily taken out by a sheet
5) Easily taken out by a well thrown egg
6) I suspect these are going to be easily taken out by jamming equipment that would fit in a van.
okay 3-5 are "Has only one eye that is unarmored and mounted pointing forwards"
These cheeseheads seem to think the enemy is going to not attack the weakest spot.
This should have 50 vision systems mounted all over it and easy to switch too. It should probably have three operators to watch to the sides, above and behind. The video feed back should be a composited image from 6 cameras with most of it being the forward mounted camera but some of it being the other cameras so if you see movement you can zoom in.
Armor-- it needs armor. A couple machine gun volleys are going to shred the thing. The video shows them scouting out the sniper who is not allows to fire back at the robots. The bombs over there are flipping Abrahms tanks-- that is a pretty big bomb. The treads look like a couple 50 caliber rounds would disable them.
I think they are great for entering a building and being destroyed after taking out one or two insurgents. They are great for reducing risk at the trade of some dollars. They may be great for breaking enemy lines since you could pin the guys down with gunfire and then run your robots over with grenade launchers or something like that. It's not like the robots are worthless.
But they show typical optimistic "everything will work perfectly and our enemies are stupid as bricks" thinking. What they need to do before letting these things loose is give a group of a dozen smart guys about 500 grand to disable and overcome a squad of these things.
At a minimum, you should not be able to disable one of them for 25% of it's cost.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The number one goal of military strategy is to destroy your opponents ability to fight effectively. That means destroying his willingness to fight just as much, if not more, than his capability.
No, the number one goal of military strategy is to set realistic target goals, setup conditions and sub-goals for those goals, and create a coherent strategy which achieves those goals. And then plan out the aftermath of how achieving those goals fit into the larger security concern. The singular and only goal here was the overthrow of Saddam, which happened as quickly and painlessly as predicted. The major failing was that we didn't plan out whatever to do afterwards.
We're not still fighting a war. We won. We saw the banner and everything. Saddam's army fell, and he was deposed. What we're fighting now is a combination of a rebellion and a civil war. And we're woefully underprepared to deal with that.
Suppressing a rebellion is very different than fighting against a standing army. You suppress a rebellion by a combination of making it incredibly dangerous to be a rebel while supplying for people's basic needs enough so that they don't want to rebel. We promised the second one, but have pissed away all the money by hiring expensive and unprepared american contractors to do all the work and pocket huge profit margins. The first one we're moderately good at, but just shooting people alone is a bad way to stop a rebellion.
Especially since any enemy the American military goes up against knows that if they can drag the thing out for more than four or five years, the Americans will pack up and leave due to lack of political support.
If we can afford to just pack up and leave, did we really need to be in the war in the first place? I thought wars were just for life-and-death-of-the-country stuff.
The ______ Agenda
"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it." -- Robert Edward Lee.
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And when they grab you with those metal claws, you can't break free.. because they're made of metal, and robots are strong. Now, for only $4 a month, you can achieve peace of mind in a world full of crime and robots, with Old Glory Insurance. So, don't cower under your afghan any longer. Make a choice.
Old Glory Insurance. For when the metal ones decide to come for you - and they will.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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
No more bullets... they can use water guns and that's it.... hehehe... OR water bombs...how's that? :)
Strive to be happy...
So you want to steal the new toy of a group of marines while they're watching? You've got nerves, man.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Then you've not understood what happened. His army did surrender, and you then disarmed it, creating a power vacuum your army could not fill, and which was instead filled not by the secular Ba'athists who composed the army, but by religious provocateurs who've neatly sucked you and the whole of Iraq into a hellhole.
Alas, the dogs had learned in training to associate food with the undersides of Soviet tanks, not German tanks. The result of all this was predictable.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Remote-controlled devices are NOT robots.
Fata viam invenient.
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").
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Obligatory...
"Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply."
"A country of MBAs does not a military make."
1) Strap explosives to MBA
2) Add a time-delay detonator triggered by the words: synergy, right-sizing, or consultant
3) Send MBA to a "conference" hosted by your enemy
4) ???
5) Profit!