The US Army's latest recruits are 1 meter (about 3 feet) tall, wear desert camouflage and are armed with black M249 machine guns. They also move on caterpillar tracks and -- thanks to five camera eyes -- can even see in the dark.The story also notes that Northrop Grumman as well as the South Korean electronics firm Samsung Techwin are among the companies competing in the still-developing-apparently robot defense market.
The fearless fighters are three robot soldiers who, unnoticed by the general public, were deployed in Iraq in mid-June, charged with hunting down insurgents. As if guided by an unseen hand, they hone in on their targets and fire at them with their machine guns. It's the future of war -- and it's already here.
"It's the first weaponized robot in the history of warfare," says Charles Dean, an engineer with Waltham, Massachusetts-based Foster-Miller, the manufacturer of the new devices. Dean and the 70 employees in his department are eager to find out how their three protégés are holding up on the front. Because the three robots, dubbed "Swords," are being used in a secret mission, their creators have no idea whether the devices have already killed enemy fighters in combat.
Well, as long as our military continues to be sacrificed for utterly pointless reasons in Iraq, at least this gives us an opportunity to see how machines fare in battle, thus giving their makers new insights into how to perfect this technology and make more money (tongue definitely in cheek here).
We were once spoon-fed the notion that we had to compete with the former Soviet Union because of a “missile gap.” Will we now be told the same nonsense due to a “robot-defense gap” with real or imagined enemies?
And somewhere, Isaac Asimov is saying, “I told you so.”
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