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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (486248)	6/7/2009 11:35:48 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572060

Air and sea, sure. Those are relatively simple environments. Surface? Not any time soon. Unless you are talking about something like the Sahara desert, you have to deal with a cluttered environment. When I said "surface" I was referring to surface as opposed to submarine. Ground is a different matter, although, you are underestimating, I think, the current state of the art. Which is not to say we won't field such weapons, the history of those sort of mistakes is pretty clear. I believe I already provided you with the example of the AEGIS shootdown of the Iranian jetliner. Deadly force has effectively been here for years, disguised as an "Abort" button. At any rate, military robotics is growing very fast and will continue to do so. lab isn't a battlefield When you talk about "labs", you're talking about after-action battlefield analysis. The deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are for more extensive than most people realize. Machine-gun armed SWORDS units have been deployed for a couple years now. They work well, but the engineering efforts to make them better are substantial. They're reliable, effective, and most importantly, if they get killed it isn't a big problem for anyone. Now, there are none that use deadly force without human intervention -- that's true -- and it may be a long time before that happens -- a long time being a couple decades at the outside. But battlefield robots are the future of warfare. And we're not talking about a decade on that. Within a few years most (i.e., the majority) of the military vehicles our government owns and uses will be unmanned.