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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."
I believe they're called 'missiles'
Sounds like they're simply missiles/bombs with non-traditional methods of locomotion.
In the scheme of things it's an easy sell, because they'll say "hey, we either send in the smart bomb and use lower yields and more accurate target detection, or we level the place".
Like any weapon the trick will be using them to only injure those that you specifically want to injure. Getting lazy, sloppy or inhuman with these things will be the same as with any other type of weapon.
My biggest fear with these UAV's is that we take the human factor out. I'm not talking about a human's ability to not kill innocent people--we know that is subjective--I'm talking about the military's decisions to carry out certain types of strikes when we literally have no "skin" in the game. It's already an issue with super accurate missiles and current generation of UAV's, these roomba-bombs may only make it worse.
I do believe that you're right. 'Guided Missiles' specifically.
I guess the difference here is that the UAV can do more than just head to a target for destruction, and CAN be recovered intact for reuse if the operator doesn't chose to detonate it. A cruise missile was launched at a specific target. This you could launch for recon then use destructively if a target of opportunity pops up.
A Missile+, perhaps.
I don't read AC A human right
but over WIFI and more expensive?
Like autonomous and more expensive, although there's no need for them to be. Smart rocks will soon be almost as cheap as dumb rocks, if enough stupid people with technical educations are let loose.
For the people who feel like killing people is a good way to spend their time and use their education: please use plain language to describe what you do. "Method of engagement" is a coward's way of saying "means of killing people and destroying things."
Take the extra time to use the extra words that actually describe what you're using your incredibly sophisticated abilities for, and don't hide behind euphemisms like some prim Victorian virgin who doesn't have the guts to say she wants a good hard fucking.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Granted I assume these are more sophisticated than traditional missiles and now it seems they'll be land based as well but still these are missiles that phone home.
They rely on a very developed infrastructure. This is true of all drones, of course, but I think it's a problem being widely overlooked. It's okay so long as you're fighting insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan; once you're fighting someone with the ability to disrupt your communications infrastructure then half your weapons become useless. And once you're fighting someone with a weapon that can target radio emissions they become downright dangerous...
It seems to me that the main development that has enabled these is battery technology. The idea of drones is not new. The idea of Kamikaze aircraft is not new. What is new is a small, quiet kamikaze drone that doesn't have a significant heat signature because suddenly batteries are good enough to keep one flying long enough to be useful.
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Robot Suicide Bombers
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
One of the key differences here is the electrical propulsion. It means the thing's heat signature is quite hard to differentiate from the background. A V1 or a modern missile has a big, hot jet (or rocket) exhaust at the back, which is easy to detect. If someone launches a stinger (or similar) at you, the usual way of detecting it is from its heat signature. These things, on the other hand...
It's hard to imagine a current missile counter-measure that would be effective against one of these things. Since it's pumping out RF at a fairly high rate for its data comms, it's not that hard to imagine how to develop one, but for now they're pretty hard to counter.
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Pulse jet, a prop job could intercept and knock it down. Problem is, it was already on it's way down somewhere, all they ended up doing was knocking ot down somewhere else, where it still exploded.
This sounds oddly like a re-branded Cruise Missile. Don't we already have those?
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.
"Method of engagement" is a coward's way of saying "means of killing people and destroying things."
It's quicker to say though, and there are ways you can engage without killing people and destroying things. Rubber bullets and tear gas is still a 'method of engagement', as is cyber-attacks, graphite bombs over power substations, leaflets, etc...
The navy uses port and starboard not just to be different. They use it because it means 'left and right' absolutely for the ship, and can't be confused for the sailer's left and right.
I don't read AC A human right
Most people are expendable to the people who would deploy these weapons.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
There was a scene like that in the movie Dark Star, as I recall. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069945/ There is a smart bomb that is going to destroy the ship, and one of the crew goes out to talk the bomb out of it.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Where's my mod points when I need 'em.
This is one thing that really disgusted me about engineering. A good bunch of people in my classes at the time wanted to go and build weapons systems. I doubt any of them actually did end up doing that, but for so called educated people to have the desire to do that in the first place is...puzzling.
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
This is the picture of our robot facilitated science fiction future: little unmanned "planes" flying into things because we're too lazy to fly them back. No more NASA. Cut back science spending. People out of work because corporations with lots of money are sitting on their piles of cash like Scrooge McDuck and getting overly picky about who they hire: surely we can't have them trained... not even by a robot. Nope we use our robots for industrial purposes to run manufacturing more efficiently. Let 5 guys do what 50 did. Its the trickle down affect. Money flows to those at the top and barely trickles down. Thanks robots. Way to make our lives better. Maybe science fiction writers from all these recent decades should have been more pessimistic.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Although unlike landmines you won't have millions of land mines sitting in the ground for decades waiting for people to step on them.
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!
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Been there, done that...
As long as you're the General in command, War is always 'remote-control".
Indeed, it always bothers me greatly to hear Americans saying things like, "We're not at all like them! They're bad people! They kill innocents in the pursuit of their objectives!"
As if the US hasn't likewise declared objectives and knows damned well that they're going to be killing innocent people in the pursuit of their objectives, and has ruled them to be "acceptable losses" to achieve their objectives.
I mean, *Really*? You don't see the glaring moral hole there?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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.
.
.
.
Junior Engineer: What if it didn't need to return?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If you assume your missile will spend it's life between the launch site and target it should be pretty easy to hide it's comm chatter with a rear-facing directional antennae - wouldn't even need the complexity of tight-beam and associated aiming complexity, just so long as nobody in front of it can hear it. The control site's transmission could still be heard, but that doesn't help you locate the incoming bogey.
Moreover if it's designed to be autonomous then during the attack it could maintain complete radio silence and just listen for the last-minute abort code (I would hope). Give it a radar (and even visual) profile of a large gliding bird (or fish in the case of the submersible drones being discussed) and it'd be devastating. Chaff, EMP, or even concussive countermeasures could quite likely take them out without trouble, but first you have to know they're coming.
The article however talks about using them to destroy mines, which seems like a pretty stupid use of $100k autonomous mini-subs. How much does it cost for a radio(sonar?)-controlled sub and some plastique? It's not like your target is likely to be taking a lot of evasive action or deploying advanced countermeasures. Save the sensor-packed autonomous vehicles to act as a diffuse network of "mine-sniffing dogs" that can navigate the interdicted zone in relative safety locating and "painting" targets for simple, low-yield homing torpedos.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Am I the only one who has the impression that the moral high ground is turning into the Mariana trench?
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