E. L. Koba wrote:

Chairman Mao wrote:

Ray, of Light wrote:

Explain, please, to me the lack of unmanned ... anything in the modern battlefield. Crewless tanks or aircraft would permit designs and tactics that aren't otherwise feasible, and (it seems to me) would offer more offense per dollar/hour/cu.ft of carrier space/litre of oil/whatever.

That's one of the plans for the FCV/FCS. It will supposedly consist of a system of a manned armoured vehicle, small robot drone vehicles of various locomotion, and possibly several large semi-autonomous gun carriages. To what extent all of that will materialize is anyone's guess, but its coming.

I'm not sure the infantry (or the human tankers for that matter) will be too keen on working in close quarters with a AI controlled machines with large weapons. Do you really want Superfly and Mikiko to be your backup when your life is on the line?

At least with human operators, if your radio is jammed or broken you can waive (we still learn all our hand and arm signals for everything), or, god forbid, get of your tank to go talk to someone. They don't just default to crush-kill-destroy mode.

I think it's good research, but most of it won't see the light of day. The marines are already using a battalion level drone (Dragon eye?) to scout out ahead of the forward elements. And the 10th mt and Rangers were using the iRobot pakbot dealie in Afganistan also as a scout in the villages. Don't know if they got much use in Iraq though. The problem with any sort of robot is that it's very very very hard to even manuver on the ground compared to the air, and the Army can't dedicate a whole satelite to each drone like the airforce can. One of the Airforces big coups during Iraq was that they managed to fly two predators at the same time! The Army couldn't give a flying fuck about only 2 of anything. They need 200 or 2000.