Watching Your Tax Dollars, Arny Has Different Ideas for the Future, Robots!

Based on the article below, it's safe to say that entering the computer age of robots is a safe place to place your career goals. There will be a need to program the future soldiers as well as maintenance!


More robots, fewer people. That’s where the US military is headed in the future. But what kind of robots?
Army Gen. Robert Cone, four-star commander of the powerful Training and Doctrine Command (aka TRADOC), said that the service is studying how robots could help replace 25 percent of the soldiers in each of its 4,000-strong combat brigades. That’s because the current budget crunch is pushing the military to replace expensive human beings – and the expensive hardware required to keep them alive — with cheaper and expendable robots. The Army is under particular pressure because it has the most people, spending almost half its budget on pay and benefits, and those people take the heaviest casualties.

What’s hotly debated, however, is what jobs robots should do, under what level of human control. Should do they the drudge work of war, sparing humans the “dirty, dull, and dangerous” jobs like clearing roadside bombs? Or should we trust robots to kill on their own initiative?

The Army basically wants R2-D2s and mechanized mules, helpful bots that haul supplies, scout ahead, and provide technical support to the human heroes who do the actual fighting. They want small robots that trundle alongside the foot troops, loaded with sophisticated sensors so they can point out potential dangers, “robots that respond, if you will, like a bird dog,” said TRADOC’s Maj. Gen. William Hix in a conference call with journalists this morning. They want mid-size robots that carry extra supplies for infantrymen on long patrols, a concept once officially called MULE. They want big trucks that drive themselves, entire supply convoys where a long line of robots plays “follow the leader” behind a single human-driven vehicle at the front. They want scout drones that fly ahead of manned helicopters and report back what they find.
But, as TRADOC Col. Kevin Felix once told me, “No Terminators.”

Not so outside the Army. In a thinktank report released today, 20YY: Preparing for War in the Robotic Age, former Navy Under Secretary Robert Work and co-author Shawn Brimley call for developing “autonomous attack systems” cheap and numerous enough to form “reconnaissance-strike swarms.” Think big, robotic killer bees that attack with smart bombs instead of stingers and that coordinate their maneuvers using wi-fi instead of pheromones.

Both sides agree there’ll be more robots in the future military — and not just our military. In fact, when you put together cuts to military research and development, the spread of high technology worldwide, and our unease about letting computers decide when to pull the trigger, there’s a real fear that more agile and less ethical enemies may field killer robots first.

These are questions of life, death, and taxes — that is, the tens of billions of your taxpayer dollars that the military will have to invest in whatever it decides to do.

The Army is already experimenting with armed robots like the MADDS prototype pictured above, but they always have a human being pulling the trigger, albeit by remote control. TRADOC doesn’t anticipate the actual fielding an of “unmanned combat platform” until around 2035 — and the military programs its unmanned systems not to fire without direct orders from a human. That’s not a restriction Army leaders are eager to release.