Combat Drones in RL, US army modifing bomb disposal robots Options

[Kanada Ten]

I think it was the Screamers reference that was pushing my buttons about war becoming an anonymous video game of destruction. Meh, should have let the damn thing go.

[Moon-Hawk]

Let me see if I can get a handle on both sides of this.
I think we can all agree that people dying is bad.
Increased technology means that you can kill people more effectively. Killing people more effectively ends conflicts more quickly, as well as killing less "innocents" along the way. (by "innocents" I mean people who are not your target, whether or not they are truely innocent) This means that there will be less deaths, and it is good.
However, the potential downside is that too much technology can make it too easy, and it becomes like a video game and people would lose their reluctance to engage in wars. So while individual wars cause less death, we now have many more wars, increasing the death-toll overall, and it is bad.

I think the point in all this is that technology that allows you to kill more effectively when it comes time to kill it good, but we must remember that however it is accomplished, we still must make a conscious decision to kill and never underappreciate the gravity of that decision.
Which leaves the question: how will the various governments react to more technology. Will they get "war-happy" and make the above decision too lightly, since it is so much easier? Will the media keep this in check? Will people even object anymore if their government can win so effectively, thus negating the balancing power of the media?

If I've misunderstood the argument, please correct me.

edit: I think my sig is particularly relevant to the discussion at hand.

[Method]

Wow, did this post go off topic or what?

My 2 cents: War is inevitable. Its like a tsunami or a tornado or a famine. Things we do (planning, education, avoidance) can reduce the risk of losing lives, but the wars will still happen. If we could have made a machine that saved even 1% of the tsunami victims in Indonesia we wouldn't hesitate to use it. Our precision guided bombs have saved way more people than that in the past 20 years.

Americans killed almost as many innocent men women and children fire bombing Tokyo in WW2 than Hitler killed in the concentration camps... need we even consider Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

I don't think anyone can argue that wars are "better" now than they were 50 years ago.

And I don't think you can argue that there is less resistance to war with our modern tech. In WW2 the Japanese bombed pearl harbor. The first thing the US did was invade northern Europe, and nobody batted an eye. Nobody argued that Europe was "irrelevant" or had nothing to do with the Japanese. Today we invade Iraq and people argue that "it has nothing to do with the war on terror" and enlisted men try to sue the government for deploying them into combat. Back then young men killed themselves (literally) because the army wouldn't take them. In terms of anti-war sentiment and policy, public opinion and the media are the best (and worst) things that have happened to warfare since Viet Nam.

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Garland]

[hobgoblin]

there are some slight but important differences between the counter (yes counter) invasion of europe and the invasion of iraq. the first was done to trow out a invader (hitler and nazi germany. in fact its similar to the gulf war as there kuwait was invaded to trow out a invader, saddam) while the second had no clear goal other then to remove a unliked ruler. one can argue that the invasion of iraq was similar to the invasion of afghanistan. only that there was no clear indication that iraq was houseing or training terrorists, much less terrorists that was in any way linked to the 9/11 attack.

allso, in ww2 the japanese and the nazi was allys, and hitler declared war on usa right after the pearl harbor bombing. to to that off, there was an agreement that first usa would help with hitler, then england would help with japan. had saddam any declared links to bin-laden? is there in fact any similarity at all? i fail to see any.

[mfb]

i'm not sure the justification for the iraq invasion is really revelant. we're not discussing the whys of war; we're discussing the hows.

[Kanada Ten]

[mfb]

i don't think it's possible to conclude that resistance to war has increased or decreased. in ww2, resistance was low after pearl harbor. in vietnam, resistance was very high, even after we pulled out. in gulf war and gulf war 2, resistance was kind of in the middle.

i'm also not sure what your point is, kanada. if it's "war is bad", well, that's kinda self-evident; what's it got to do with the furthering of technology that makes war less bad? should we stop trying to minimize civilian deaths through technological advancement? or maybe we should stop researching technological applications for war--that'll make war stop happening, right?

[Method]

Okay, forgive my (attempted) use of real world examples. I don't want to take this thread into a whole new debait on things all too real (i.e. the relevance of iraq to the war on terror... i believe it is but many do not).

but my points were these:

- War is inevitable. it is part of human nature to kill and wage war. given this, anything anyone can do to inhibit the loss of life (especially civililan) is an improvement.

- Despite all our improved technology that makes war "cleaner" and "less human" it seems to me that the general public is MORE resistant to war than ever.

[hobgoblin]

killing is human nature only if we need to for survival, same as with every other animal out there. ok so some people go around killing for pleasure but those are like rabbid dogs, only one solution...

the reason people have become more resistant to war is that with our fast transport systems it allows a war on the other side of the world to affect you and me in a matter of hours, not days or weeks or months. and war have become less about armys beating each other into paste on open fields (alltho those are still a large part) and more about takeing vital urban areas, bringing the war to the civilians.

remeber that high society in washington rode out to watch the opening battle of the civil war as if it was a theater. they expected low numbers of wounded and dead and was shocked when whole formations where blown away by the cannons. war was no longer something where you could stand 5 meters away from someone with a gun and get away unharmed. and even if you got hit, you stood a nice chance of getting away with a warwound to brag about.

the last "clean" war was ww1, as it stayed in the trenches. with ww2 and blitz krieg you got the fast moveing army that was only slowed down by house to house fighting in urban areas. right in the middle of where most of the civilians are located. welcome to total war.

allso, before ww1 one at best heard about the fighting days, weeks or months after. depending on where it happend, if someone was present to write about it and was able to cable it to some newspaper. and then it was most likely something happening in the colonys.

as more and more people see the true horror of someone getting limbs blown of by a bomb or most of their body destroyed by a machinegun burst, more and more people want nothing to do with it. the more graphic and direct the news reports becomes, the more people understand the meaning of killing someone.

still, there are people that grabs blades and guns at the smalles of provocations. it may be a question of upbringing as they are more used to the idea. personaly i wish no child the experience to grow up and only know violence and revenge...

[Slamm-O]

thanks for the reply mfb, very interesting.

[Demosthenes]

[Austere Emancipa...]

The SWORDS system and similar RL combat drones aren't really armored, though. They can be taken out quite easily with concentrated small arms fire. Assault rifles and light machine guns should be plenty effective against these, unlike in SR. Armor plating weighs too damn much to use on a very small vehicle where your choice of power plant is limited.

[toturi]

[Demosthenes]

Indeed. And since (from what I've read) they're basing the whole system on pre-existing tech, they'll be trying to keep the cost down...

So by the look of it, you'll see the SWORDS and similar drones deployed where? To provide additional fire support to conventional infantry, or to be "first into the breach"?

[ Spoiler ]

For some reason I just flashed on the complete anachronism of Scipio Africanus having to give a SWORDS a corona muralis...too much reading.
:silly:

Never mind. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Added spoiler tag because I'm feeling silly.

[Birdy]

[mfb]

i beg to differ on the idea that ww1 was "clean". there were plenty of civilian deaths to go around.

birdy, the computer may not have been invented for war--but how much has wartime development improved it?

on an unrelated note, here's the gist of what i wanted to get across with my how-encryption-stuff-works post: the US military does not, by any stretch of the imagination, leave anything to guesswork when it comes to encryption. if an encrypted item is lost, either it will be found or destroyed, or the encryption used on all similar units will be changed. to gain access to an encrypted US military communications network, you'll have to do a lot more than simply blow something up and pick up the pieces.

[Birdy]

[mfb]

true, but you still have to figure out what frequencies you want to jam (not difficult, granted; all you have to do is pick up a publicly-available FM), and you'll have to make sure you're not using the same chunk of the spectrum. and, of course, like you said, jamming that large a chunk of the spectrum makes you a juicy target for artillery, airstrikes, offshore bombardment, lawn darts, thrown brickabrack, etcetera.

as for military research and computing, some of the more advanced VR stuff and networking stuff is being developed right now with an eye towards military applications. sure, not all computer science advances come from military research--probably not even most of them. but a lot of them do.

[spotlite]

humans=predators. Predators kill. Its what they do. I don't like it, I can't change it. nuff said.

That robot is pretty cool though. I think its a bit cheeky that it costs so much considering all they've effectively done is taken an existing model and bolt a gun to it - it can't have taken THAT much r&d to make it. I understood the range was fairly decent though, at least a few miles.

As for war being like a vidoe game, well, its already like a video game. Someone posted a link on these boards to some real US chopper footage sometime near the beginning of the.. action.. in Iraq, showing the crew firing on some vehicles on a road, seemingly up to no good (I beleive about a year later the media caught up and made a stink about it breifly). We won't go into the rights/wrongs of them shooting the already injured man after the smoke cleared, but the point is the vocal chatter from the crew was very much exuberant, eager even in my opinion. The vehicles were a couple miles away and they were aiming and firing from the infra red sensor (which is what the footage was of). Point, click, boom. I assume this is fairly typical behaviour, and the bits of footage I've seen of british sqaddies in northern ireland from a para friend of mine with some friends in archives would seem to indicate its typical of soldiers in our army too. I'm not criticising. If you kill people daily and risk your life you've got to cope somehow.

Just saying a lot of combat from ship combat to aircraft and presumably tanks as well is already via video link, and this is no different. It does make it easier to dehumanise your targets, of course it does. Common sense tells us this! Whether you want that from your armed forces is a matter for the military, politicians (in theory therefore the people of the country the forces are from), and international law, not me!

I got the screamer reference. i haven't read the book, I liked the movie (but then anything with Peter Weller in is generally pretty good), but Deus did the exploding kids better.

[Req]

[Garland]

What about binocular vision (is this even the right term)? That seems to imply a focus on hunting.

[Req]

No, that implies a focus on living in the trees, at some point. Depth perception is madd vital when you're 50' in the air.

[Method]

Apes in the wild very often hunt, kill and cannibalize other apes, especially in cases where an unfamiliar ape enters another shrewdness' territory (a shrewdness btw is a group of apes). It’s a well-documented behavior. In fact they sometimes use what you might call small unit tactics to kill the infiltrating ape, and the fighting is exceedingly violent.