War By Remote Control, With Military Robots Set To Self Destruct

New submitter RougeFive writes "A new wave of Kamikaze unmanned military aircraft, ground robots and water vessels are being built to deliberately destroy themselves as they hit their targets. Since it now makes more economic sense to have them crash into enemy targets rather than engage them, and since direct impact needs only manned or automated navigation rather than the highly-trained skills of multiple operators, these UAVs could well become the de-facto method of engagement of the future."

Comments

Rocket Bombs and Buzz Bombs

[grahamlord86]

Nice to hear we now have a obscenely expensive version of the WW2 V-1 "Buzz Bomb"... or Rocket Bomb for the 1984 nerds out there... I'm amazed we even bother to deploy soldiers these days.

Jhadi robots and hero robots

[Old97]

What happens to a robot that "martyrs" itself for the cause? Does it go somewhere where it is greeted warmly by 72 robots still in their original packaging? For other causes would their be posthumous medals awarded and parades and all? If not, then who gets the "credit"? Oh, so that's the point!

Design meeting discussion

[Overzeetop]

I suspect the conversation went something like this:

General: Team, we need to find a way to double the range of these drones, but I don't have any additional design money for this project.

Senior Engineer: There's no room in the flight profile to double the energy storage - it would require a complete redesign.

Manager: It can't be done; we can't do this for free.
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Junior Engineer: What if it didn't need to return?