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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."
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.
Oh, please. I, Robot was pretty much a treatise on how stupid those laws are.
"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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
rj
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.
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
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.
""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.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
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
My cousin served two tours in Iraq and he glibly reports of ramming cars off the road and forcing them into concrete barriers and walls, often killing the occupants - simply because the car was on the road when a US convoy happened to be approaching. So, that's much better than shooting at them.
I'm sure it's all in the name of "winning hearts & minds" and brining democracy and freedom, so it's okay. I'm sure the Iraqis don't mind.
Oh yeah, my cousin's pretty fucked up now. I'll be really surprised if he doesn't end up in jail for assaulting or killing someone now that he's back home. He wasn't like that before he went. 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. It's amazing what we do to others and our own in the name of democracy.
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."
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