Army Gives Robo Jeeps a Go

jamesl writes with an excerpt from Defense Tech, which says the U.S. Army is sending "four [of] Lockheed's Squad Mission Support System (SMSS) robot jeeps to Afghanistan where they'll haul supplies for troops. The trucks are being sent there as part of a test program to see just how useful robot cargo trucks can be. The 11-foot long trucks can carry a half a ton of supplies for up to 125 miles after being delivered to the field in a CH-47 or CH-53 helo."

Comments

Re:How expensive are they?

[darkmeridian]

A snide little, fuzzy-haired, self-styled intellectual who hasn't touch a boobie yet: not even human. Waging war? Someone has to do it. It isn't going to be you, so shut up when someone else does it.

Re:Drones?

[darkmeridian]

The countermeasure would be to have Reapers escorting the robo-car convoy. Robots would be able to maintain perfect spacing to minimize the damage from daisy-chained IEDs. Shooting out the front and back only works if you have a way to destroy the vehicles trapped in the middle, which might be difficult to do when there's a Reaper firing Hellfires up your ass.

Even if they succeed in blowing up some supplies, at the end of the day, they're paying human lives while we're just burning money. They'll run out of people before we run out of money, especially we aren't spending human lives, which cost a lot in terms of benefits to survivors and medical care for the injured and disabled.

Look at it another way. Pretend we can maintain the war without putting humans at risk. We are going to spend at least a trillion dollars on this war. Even if we spend a million dollars to kill a bad guy, that's still a million dead bad guys.