On the other other hand, if the Kurzweil-borg gets out of hand and starts zapping people and knocking over buildings, and the EMP weapon fails to neutralize it, who ya gonna call?
The upside of using killable human soldiers is that you’re less likely to send them into harm’s way unless you have to. When killing becomes a matter of point-and-click it’s easier to disregard what a serious matter war really is. IMHO that’s one of the major problems with drone strikes. When you can wage war without endangering the lives of your own troops or even have to see the faces of the people you’re killing the whole thing becomes too damn easy.
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Unless you’re the soldier. Then the killability becomes a major downside.
Certainly. But war should never seem like an attractive option.
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I agree here. But the developments cannot be stopped, the evolution is too logical and the arguments are too compelling.
The question is, how to adjust the battlefield tactics of asymmetric warfare to account for the new technology.
Yup.
I was just reminded of the Call of Duty mission when you’re the gunner on an AC-130.
Up until that mission, you’re on the ground, killing your way through the levels, constantly in danger, having to scavenge ammo, adrenaline pumping, infantry warfare.
Then suddenly you’re up in the AC-130 at 30000 feet, middle of the night doing slow laps around the town.
You have FLIR and three weapons: 20mm autocannon, 38mm autocannon, and a crew-served 120mm artillery cannon, and unlimited ammo.
All of a sudden your fight goes from a battle for survival, to leisurely laying down 120mm shells as fast as they’re loaded. Why bother with the 20mm and 40mm when you can blow up a 25 square meter area with one shot? All you have to do is just not kill the little dots that blink on FLIR. Any non-blinking dot goes into the meat-grinder.
Oh, and you lose if you hit a mosque.
It puts it in very stark contrast. If there were women and children, first, you’d probably never be able to tell on the FLIR, but also, they’re just collateral. You can still win even if you injure your own soldiers. Why wouldn’t you win if a few kids get some shrapnel.
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Like more likely to get involved in petty wars? Maybe. Similarly we are more likely to do an air strike vs boots on the ground.
Arm up a dozen bots.
Drop them off near shopping malls.
Set a Go time.
They walk/roll into the food courts all at the same moment, with only Paul Blarts to get in their way…
What was that fairly gloomy warning story.,.
Oh yeah, “Second Variety” by Philip Dick…
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It will be interesting to see how this plays out. There are other types of weapons that are not allowed to be used by nation states, like chemical and biological. The bans don’t keep countries from having them of course, but often come into play when levying sanctions or when a defeated leader goes on trial after a conflict.
Meanwhile, S. Korea already has these along the DMZ. They currently require human input as an ‘okay to fire’ but they are completely capable of operating without it.
I suspect that, if anything is done at all, there will be some sort of carve-out for fixed installations that cover a specified area. CIWS designs date back to the mid '70s, with comparatively common deployment by the mid '80s, and (while they can be controlled manually) they are intended to intercept missiles and things coming in too fast for a human operator to respond in time, and so are capable of automated fire.
They haven’t exactly aroused much controversy during that time; and convincing any of the world’s navies to remove them seems unlikely. They also don’t have quite the same ‘terrifying killbot’ affect because they can’t move.
On similar grounds, it’s hard to imagine there not being an exception for the class of systems that operate autonomously during the final stages of delivery. If it is called ‘heat seeking’, ‘fire and forget’, or a variation of those, that means that it is autonomous for a short time just before it hits something. Again, not new, Sidewinders originated in the 1950s; also not likely to be something you could get people to give up.
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To the point where every single navy friend I have has consistently describe the PHALANX as “The one that looks like R2-D2 with a hardon.”
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Shouldn’t volley fire be in there somewhere? It certainly was a game changer when it was first deployed for the first time with guns in Japan in the battle of Nagashino in 1575. No idea why the Europeans then took another 30 years to figure out the same idea on their own, they already had the idea for archers.
How about non state actors screwing around somewhere? Laptop, quadcopter and a payload like semtex or some bio-agent could be pretty easily assembled. Not just one mind you, do it in several cities and have em all activate at the same time. All with off the shelf components kept for the payload, though that too could be off the shelf.
Aaaaand there it is.
I’m not a military historian and my list should not be taken to be exhaustive. You’re absolutely right.
I already replied to a very similar comment. I don’t see amateur tinkering as nearly as much of a threat as the global superpowers putting trillions of dollars into R&D. I’m not sure what you mean by “bio-agent”, but it seems to me that the quad copter is not really the threat in that scenario so much as that a terrorist had access to the “bio-agent” to begin with. Presumably they could find some non-quad copter distribution method if they were unable to get a quad copter for it.
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True enough, those happened to be the first I picked.
Who said anything about big things? Presumably if Lockheed made autonomous weapons systems they would make them as small as possible. Given their R&D budget, that would be smaller (and much more reliable) than anyone could do in their garage.
It would decrease supply, increase cost, suppress the amount of money spent on research thereby suppressing the reliability and effectiveness of such systems. Or at least flatten the curve.
I think it’s in everyone’s best interest to prevent or delay Dick’s story “Second Variety” from coming to pass. Land mines left over from past conflicts are a huge problem for people who live near them. Now imagine land mines that actually hunt for you. No, we can’t prevent really determined people from putting together something like this, but we can make it as difficult as possible.
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