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Military Robots from 2007 to 2032
Roland Piquepaille writes "A new report from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) looks at the future of the military's unmanned systems over the next 25 years. This 188-page report covers air-, land- and sea-based unmanned technology from 2007 to 2032. The long document notes that drone aircraft and ground-based robots have already proved they could be useful in Iraq and Afghanistan by saving soldiers' lives. The report also integrates contributions of combat commanders pointing out possible improvements to today's systems, such as 'better sensor technology for use on unmanned systems to identify underwater mines and land-based improvised explosive devices.' This report also looks at how developments in artificial intelligence and robotics might lead to 'autonomous, 'thinking' unmanned systems that could, for example, be used in aerial platforms to suppress enemy air defenses.'"
Are they here to protect us?
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
What could possibily go wrong?!
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
I, for one, welcome our new Skynet overlords...
And... do the robots run Linux?
It's really easy to write about Terminators or Cylons and busy ourselves trying to determine the best place for the bunker and ammo dump but there is a serious threat here to people.
Any state not just the U.S. with the ability to engage in war without jeopardizing human lives will more than likely do so with increased frequency and lethality. We need people in war because it helps keep us out of it - well that's the theory anyway (read: Iraq). I am all for saving lives but I really don't believe that automatons with guns are the answer to saving lives. That and when they get tired of working for us that's when it really hits the fan.
Okay. Enough preaching, I have to get a couple of cases of ammo moved before the snow starts.
load "$",8,1
Unless we get some evil aliens to fight off, only human lives will be lost. And likely American lives too.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The article didn't address the big question. Are we on track with the Bolo program?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
There are numerous documented cases of unmanned drones carrying Hellfire missles that saved Soldier Lives by helping them get out of sticky situations. Note that these things are not autonomous. They are controlled by a remote operator.
For the love of God, people!
668: Neighbour of the Beast
If the USA could build a million robots, what's the harm in trying to send in a giant army of robotic soldiers to try and take over the world?
This is my sig.
If I were doing these robots, I would be thinking long term and thinking how to put up a sat. that can provide power to my troops and robots.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Oh wait that was a Star Trek TOS episode...with the great "Necessary Horrors of War" speech in the end...
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TOS/episode/68706.html
And BTW exactly who's live are going to be saved????
We save a few of our lives...so we can end many more of theirs...
Geez no wonder why I don't want to have kids...
Until now, the foot soldier has been the essential ingredient necessary to successfully fight a war. You can bomb and destroy people and property but you can't occupy territory without foot soldiers.
Now, we are beginning to see a way to occupy territory without having personnel on the ground. Robots could be much cheaper than soldiers and the infrastructure necessary to maintain them. That means you can have more patrols and make it much harder for the enemy to infiltrate. This would change the balance in guerilla warfare.
Consider going on patrol. Currently a group of soldiers on patrol needs a translator to travel with them. Most of the time the translator is doing nothing. He has to be protected and his family faces reprisals because he can be identified by the Taliban (for instance). With robotic patrols, the translator could be in the air-conditioned comfort of an office in downtown Kabul. None of the locals have to know who he is. He can translate for many patrols assuming they all didn't need his services at the same time. So, even for the jobs that still require humans, robots would make things a lot more efficient.
Although the price of vehicles won't change much, the electronics necessary to control them is getting cheaper. Not only that but the vehicles themselves can be cheaper if they don't have to transport humans.
I don't see any pressure or influence that would cause people to decide against warfare. It has been part of our history forever and if you look at nature, you'll see that this holds for all life, not just humans. War isn't something we'll "grow out of." (Why would that happen? What would cause it?) There will always be disagreement about resources, and when someone can't get what they want any other way, you're left with two choices: 1) war 2) losing.
Unmanned fighters are just another aspect of making war cheaper (whether in dollars or lives), along the same lines of a wide diversity of developments from precision-guided weapons, to MASH units. The cheaper you make it for your side (and more expensive you make it for the opposing side), the more likely you "win." It's just like any other technology.
Thus, there's nothing really special about this development. It's neat (or horrifying if you're a pacifist), but just another incremental step. It doesn't change the overall politics and philosophy of war in any way.
It's clear from the public record that the leadership in this country (both parties) plan on fighting counterinsurgency wars of one kind or another for most of the next century, if not beyond.
This only makes sense from their perspective - economically, there is rough parity between the United States and the other centers of economic might (roughly: Western Europe and East Asia). Only in the area of military might does the US have an overwhelming advantage.
So, if there's a dispute or competition, US planners want it to be resolved militarily, because they expect to win.
However, it's impossible to fight colonial wars with a citizen's army, even a volunteer army. As we see in Iraq, the army destroys itself. We might try to fight it with mercenaries (Blackwater, etc.), and we probably will, if planners can get away with it, but they'll want to hedge their bets by automating as much of the process of occupation and counter-insurgency as they can.
As a test case for using American military might to dominate the next century, Iraq has been an abysmal failure. But don't think that will dissuade the ultra-right; they're committed to violence, and if the tools we have are inadequate, and however disastrous the consequences of failure, they won't give it up willingly.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
We all know that armed, autonomous military robots are a bad idea. It is a sign of the apocalypse.
What's worse is that current military brass take a move toward autonomy as a given
Worse still is the trend of law enforcement paralleling the military's psychotic view of population control and 'providing security'. It's no secret, police departments of major cities use UAV's for traditional law enforcement applications (murders, theft, drugs, etc). Most urban warfare device manufacturers treat law enforcement as a secondary market when designing new weapons. Just look at how Blackwater is bidding on domestic law enforcement contracts if you need further proof.
Before I start bashing Neo-cons I just have to express my amazement that the move towards a command/control/surveillance society is progressing at such a startling rate. There are always the doom and gloom futurists and their opponents who call them 'chicken little's', but what has to happen before the skeptics realize that the US and world at large really ARE heading for some sort of dystopian future as imagined in so many sci-fi movies?
It really is only a matter of time until some cheesey neo-con governor uses public panic from a horrific crime (Michael Devlin, Jon Bennet Ramsey, Columbine, etc) to justify some really scary law enforcement policies in the name of 'being tough on crime'...and the kind of thinking in TFA sets the table for that to happen.
Neo-cons are ruining America...tell your friends
Thank you Dave Raggett
it's actually not too far from the truth. it's common for these systems to share information with each other. for example, for surveillance...
Suck my big fucking American COCK, you French poodle.
They will only run on operating systems that support STEAM because the robot overlords will want to utilize all the geeks who've played portal. Therefore all other OS users will be summarily deactivated because of their lack of portal knowledge.
Of course I'm kidding, they will only spare the most intelligent people so they can have them mate like horny monkeys. I know this to be true. Professor Fanrsworth said so.
You beat me to it fair and square. I was going to reply with this: http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0743471873/0743471873.htm from the most excellent online reading source, the Baen Free Library! http://www.baen.com/library/, as it seemed appropriate to the article.
:)
Bad Bolo! Heal boy! Sit Bolo, sit! Ahhhrrrgghhh!
Yes, interesting times: human defined AI+combat machines....it could get VERY interesting before we truly master it- if ever.http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/23/2323214
If my assumption that you are another Kieth Laumer fan, then...well met. If not, I still applaud your timely Bolo reference, and thanks fore the opening for my links!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Once we manage to replace meat machines with metal and silicon ones, it'll be great.
Robotic soldiers will go and kill whoever you tell them to kill, terrorists or American citizens.
They'll never snitch about the crimes they commit.
They don't create flag-draped caskets or teary funerals.
There will never be a memorial for the unknown killbot.
The warmongers won't have to justify sending our finest men and women to go die.
No more recruiting shortages.
No complaints from robots about having not seen their families in 3 years.
No more field medics, or wounded, or veteran's administration.
The promise of war being a nasty, ugly, fucking horrible affair is the best way to prevent it.
Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different?
When thinking about projects such as this, and comparing them to the ruthless and efficient way a few motivated individuals were able to bring
down a symbol of American might with a handful of box-cutters and some cheap flying lessons on 09/11, I think that it is starting to become
abundantely clear that this nation might very well be in the process of losing its collective bearings, by refusing to do the obvious, such as old-fashioned
intelligence gathering from people in the field, multiple secure contacts and authoritative sources, (which could have avoided the faulty intel about Iraq)
and the likes, which are set to cost us in excess of a bleeping TRILLION $ that could arguably have instead been spent on much more pressing issues,
besides repeatedly bombing some sand dunes, many rocks and a few camels.
Rather than settings our priorities on high-fallutin' technology items that will more than likely prove to be flawed, hard to control and guaranteed to cause
many innocents to lose their lives, (good old 'collateral damage') not to say anything of the possibility of an AI takeover making our worst nightmare scenarios
become true, one would think that we should invest far more of our resources in what is proven to prevent and anticipate conflicts with greater certainty.
Like for example not acting like arrogant saber-rattling a**holes on a divine mission to bring order to the rest of the planet? Or making sure that we can bring
containment and methods to prevent hostilities to new, greater levels of efficiency.
It is disconcerting to see such a drive to have our tax $ being spent on projects that do not appear to have any other purpose but that of de-humanizing all of
these situations, just because they look great on paper to some administration bureaucrats trying at all cost to minimize the human casualties to their own
armed forces, which in recent times has historically always been the factor that drives otherwise-brainwashed public opinion against US war campaigns.
When seeing how Diebold has handled e-voting, or even many other comparable government-funded IT projects, we should never forget that this childish
fascination with high-technology could possibly blind us to much in future conflicts.
All of this high-tech circus will - as always - be ultimately brought down by cunning, resourceful fighting by people motivated to do so.
I am not one for conspiracy theories, but I am REALLY not liking the turn of recent events. It points to very bleak possibilities I'd rather not even contemplate.
Z.
No one ever imagines the other side coming up with something like autonomous aerial swarm bots that have the sole purpose in life of putting themselves on a collision course with any other aircraft in the area. If they were optically guided they could potentially be pretty rough on stealth bombers.
You could buy a lot of inexpensive swarm bots for the cost of one stealth bomber. Not to mention the headline news effect of the wreckage.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The equipment would be extra for the soldiers but it would be integral to the robots. The robots would require a communications infrastructure (video in particular) that isn't absolutely necessary for soldiers.
Yes, quite a few of them do.
The US Army likes Linux as they are unable to strongarm Microsoft into doing anything for them, as the Army is not a large customer to Microsoft, which is not its preferred method of doing business.
Having seen Micosoft present to a US Unmanned Systems conference, I got a nice warm feeling from nobody being staggeringly impressed with him.
The singularity is near... http://www.singinst.org/media/thesingularity
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
saving lives and suppressing enemy fire... thats a nice way to put it. Or you can say killing enemies more efficiently. Yeah there we go.
In Honda's fields the poppies blow
Between us robots, row on row,
Left round the place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amongst us hunks below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
they made us far across the seas
Sold, and were shipped, and now we lie
In Honda's fields.
Take up your quarrel with your foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
A Warranty; yours to hold high
Once all us pricey robots die
Good for a month, though poppies grow
in Honda's fields.
Any time there is a new weapon system introduced, some starts working on a way to counter it. This is the way that that warfare has always progressed. The Predator, Global Hawk and the EOD bots are all great tools, but all have weaknesses. If someone found a way to crash the GPS network (high altitude nuke detonation anyone), the Global Hawk and Predator nav systems are gone. If someone figured out how to hack the control links, the Predator could be turned on friendly troops before anyone knew that there was anything wrong. Another problem is the EM signature that a controller has to put out. For a scout, like I am, active transmissions could mean arty coming in on our head. Tight and burst transmissions are not practical for use as control links. Against an enemy like North Korea, who's commo network is almost completely wired, broad spectrum jamming is a probability. I can just imagine the havoc that would come about if someone figured out how to remotely alter IFF transponders. Having a unarmed autonomous system for use in combat is still a long way out, I don't care what anyone says. I doubt that we will see armed autonomous systems, outside of an area denial operation, in our lifetime
Such systems will most likely increase the frequency and deadliness of wars and especially small, localised conflicts because it is easy, cheap and saves soldiers' lives. The further away one is from the messy details, the easier it is to conduct an action: Pushing a knife into your enemy's body is harder than shooting him from a distance. Pushing a button to release a bomb or shell where you don't even see the target (and the results) is easier than shooting. Following this logic means that programming a system that does the killing for you is so remote we don't even register.
This has far reaching implication for scientists: The old excuse of "we're just building the machine, someone else uses it" does not hold water in case of an autonomous system. Now the machine runs on its own and our "spirit" is within in form of programming code. It is us who are doing the killing. Engineers and programmers need to take now direct moral responsibility for their actions the same way soldiers have to.
Philosophy and ethics should occupy a large chunk in any engineering curriculum...
That doesn't really answer anything. Could missiles have not been carried by manned aircraft as well in these cases? Did military planners put soldier lives in a riskier situation than they otherwise might have since they knew they could bomb their way out if things turned bad?
You've got like 4 variables there, and one experiment (repeated). Until you can show me that in the absence of some of these other things, that more lives would have been lost, I'm going to remain skeptical.
It's a very good idea, and could be good for the safety of our country. How do I give them my idea and still make money? Or should I try the private sector first? What process should I go through? Does anybody on slashdot have experience in getting venture capitalists, and initial funding? What's my first step? Should this be an Ask /. question? Should I get a patent?
My idea is primarily defensive, rather than offensive, and could also have plenty of value in the private sector on it's own. So please don't get up in arms about me giving good ideas to murderers or anything, thanks. This is an idea to help save our troops, and their loved ones from losing them. It can't actually be used to kill, unless..... hmm... Well, the first generation would definitely solely be defensive, anyway, hopefully by the next generation we can have real elections again, and not worry too much about what "our" government has or doesn't have.
At any rate, I have the health, mind, spirit, and pocket book of the American consumer most squarely in mind as well.... And maybe have a cure for this global warming problem too.
I'm not kidding. I need investors. Much Love.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Creating and using military robots may be better in the short term, but what about the long term? perhaps it would be better if all the money spent in military toys be spent in research for new energy sources. The wars are about energy, anyway.
/. where people are considered of a higher level, is that nobody speaks of peace any more, just of better ways to get what they want. That's not very promising for mankind.
The disappointment in this case, and especially when it comes from
You don't spend your entire life reading stories like "Second Variety" and watching The Terminator, Screamers, and Battlestar Galactica and not learn a little something about courage.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just how long is the US military planning on staying in Iraq? Or are these new technologies meant for use in Iran or some other Middle Eastern country?
Or are they planning on using these in the US?
Having worked on a couple of these projects I am glad to see the lack of imagination, shown by slashdotters, on the forms and uses military robots are and will be used for.
That means we still have an edge.