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The Army Is Preparing To Send Driverless Vehicles Into Combat (vice.com)

The U.S. Army is getting ready to send driverless trucks into combat. "Next fall, [the Army's] 'Leader-Follower' technology will enable convoys of autonomous vehicles to follow behind one driven by a human," reports VICE News. "It's a direct response to the improvised explosive devices that caused nearly half the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan." From the report: Much of the research and development of these technologies has been done at TARDEC, the Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, in Warren, Michigan. Typically human-driven trucks are outfitted with sensors and cameras through a TARDEC-created applique kit. They're not exactly robots, just regular military trucks that have been made a lot smarter. The technology is expected to be ready for field use in September 2019.

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  1. Re:Behind? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

    The US could have conquered the world at any point in the last two generations. The fact that they have not is evidence of no desire to do so.

    The US has never stripped resources from a region in the way most established powers have done. The fact that they have the power to do these things yet have not is evidence of no desire to do so.

    Before inventions of smart munitions by the US, 1000 civilian casualties to kill a handful of military personnel was not called collateral damage. It was called the cost of war. Just because there are some negative events within a whole does not damn the whole. True for gender, true for religions, true for race, true for countries.

    The fact that the UN, NATO, long-term hotbed border region DMZ security, and international shipping lane security is overwhelmingly funded and protected by the US is evidence of a desire for peace and calm rather than dominance, theft, killing, and oppression.

    We are ostensibly in a time of enlightenment but on certain subjects people's rational selves check-out whereby evidence and rational thought no longer matter. In any subject which the US can be treated as pure evil, this is the case and ought not be. It's the only dominant military power in all of history that has not tried to gobble up the entire rest of the world as soon as military leaders within the country thought it could. The grand experiment is ongoing, and has given us the modern world as we know it and the longest era of relative peace the west has ever seen.