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Comments: 661 +-   First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:18PM

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:18PM
from the number-johnny-five dept.
robot
hardware
An anonymous reader writes "Robots have been roaming Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time — the first time in any war zone — the 'bots are carrying guns. The SWORDS robots, armed with M249 machine guns, "haven't fired their weapons yet," an Army official says. "But that'll be happening soon." The machines have actually been ready for a while, but safety concerns kept them off the battlefield. Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy," according to the Army. I feel safer already."
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  • The 'bots "haven't fired their weapons yet," Michael Zecca, the SWORDS program manager, tells DANGER ROOM. "But that'll be happening soon", he smiled evilly, petting his white cat.

      • Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Chmcginn (201645) * on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:44PM (#20095625) Journal
        I'm pretty sure the idea isn't to replace combat squads, but to augment them. These things just go in front, and act as a bullet magnet, while still being able to shoot back.

        • Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca (Score:5, Insightful)

          by blackicye (760472) on Thursday August 02 2007, @11:58PM (#20097521)
          The Discovery Channels documentary Future Weapons featured these in one of the earlier episodes.

          I'd wager the bullet magnet role is not as impressive as what letting loose a dozen of these mounted with .50 cal sniper rifles on a mountain side could do though.

          They seem like they'd be more efficiently deployed as disposable sniper units than front line combat units.

        • Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca (Score:5, Interesting)

          by C0y0t3 (807909) on Friday August 03 2007, @12:07AM (#20097579) Homepage
          WHY NOT replace the human element, at least as a target? The first side that effectively does so wins. Hey, a generation didn't spend our youths' playing 1st person shooters for nothing. Americans would PAY (apparently around $14.95/month) to run them (so would many others I'm sure, a coalition of the willing, let the market decide), soldiers could hold the line and watch. It would be like sending in the hordes of Celts to soften em up for the orderly ranks who walk in and clean up the mess.

          That is, until either Skynet [wikipedia.org] becomes conscious, or The Singularity [wikipedia.org] occurs and machine intelligence (MI) leaves we petty humans behind, or probably keeps breeding stock around just in case somebody fires off a global EMP weapon. But I digress... lets get out of Iran oh dear I mean Iraq (whichever) first.

          After all, Eastasia has always been at war with Europa...
  • Imagine... Robots without the three laws...
    • Oh, please. I, Robot was pretty much a treatise on how stupid those laws are.

    • Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hobbesmaster (592205) on Thursday August 02 2007, @08:15PM (#20095915)
      What do the three laws of robotics have to do a remote controlled gun on wheels? Judging from what they were doing in the video, a soldier would have to be within a few hundred yards of the robot for it to receive commands (no huge transmitter on the robot or on the laptop they were using). This seems like it'd be a great idea in Iraq - breach a door, then send in the bots to check things out while our soldiers say outside in relative safety. (I do wonder about accurately reading the image on the screen during daylight in a desert though - maybe some goggles would be in order?)

      Also, looking at the little guy, I have to wonder how it takes a grenade hit... (and whether it could right itself after being tossed on to its side). Seems like a good platform for covering squads with cross fire, and maybe in performing the designated marksman role.

        • Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Shihar (153932) on Thursday August 02 2007, @11:34PM (#20097369)
          There are whole families behind those doors, cowering in fear, especially given the American strategy of concentrated firepower and fire first, ask questions later.

          Imagine you are a marine. You have a report that some house somewhere might have some insurgents merrily making bombs to go blow up in crowds of Shiites trying to go shopping. You come to a house in a residential neighborhood. You now have two options.

          1) You can kick in the door and send in a dozen of heavily armed teenagers scared shitless that a bomb is about to go off or that a dozen armed men are about to ambush them. Like must humans facing the potential for imminent death, they are hopped up on adrenaline and probably more than a little twitchy. Once inside they run the risk of coming face to face with some equally scared armed fellow who think she is defending his family by standing in the doorway with an AK-47 pointed at their face. This is how the majority of civilians get gunned down. Two groups of armed people scared to death of each other come face to face with each other, one side flinches, and before you know it you have a home riddled in bullets.

          2) You send in an armed robot. Said armed robot comes face to face with a guy with an AK-47, but the calm controller who is in not in harms way and not terrified for his own life wavers, assesses the situation, and sees that it is just some poor scared daddy standing in front of his kids worried that a Shiite militia has come to kill them all. Instead of turning daddy and family into a bloody mess, the marines can now assess the situation, tell him to drop the gun, keep his hands up, and in general keep the two twitchy fingered parties away from each other until everyone has calmed down enough to make rational decisions.

          Drones are what are going to lead in dramatic drops in civilian casualties. Civilians die when scared soldiers either make poor snap judgments about a threat, or soldiers have to pick between returning fire into an area that might kill civilians or dying. Drones can help to eliminate these decisions. It is okay for a drone to die. Drones can be the first ones in so that soldiers can remotely assess the situation and have more then a split seconds to decide if they have stepped into a room full of bomb makers gearing up to blow away some civilians (intentionally), or if they have stumbled into a family with a couple of scared and armed brothers and fathers thinking that they are defending their family. Further, even when encountering resistance, drones can be sacrificed to save civilians. Telling an American teenager armed to the teeth and trained for war to not fire when someone is pointing an RPG his way under the cover of civilians is a damn hard thing to do. Most people are pretty unwilling to let themselves die. On the other hand, a drone can face down an RPG and die without firing a shot if that is what the rule of engagement call for.

          I am not saying that drones are a magical cure all. Drones are still pathetic substitutes for human soldiers. What drones do bring to the table is a the ability to send a pair of armed eyes forward into situations where sending a few men forward might result in they or civilians being killed. If nothing else, they are a tool to assess the situation calmly, rather than while being pumped with adrenaline and being forced to make life and death decisions in split seconds.

          • Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:4, Interesting)

            by dcollins (135727) on Friday August 03 2007, @03:03AM (#20098391) Homepage
            "Drones are what are going to lead in dramatic drops in civilian casualties. Civilians die when scared soldiers either make poor snap judgments about a threat, or soldiers have to pick between returning fire into an area that might kill civilians or dying."

            Here is my counterargument. It's well established that when safety features are widely distributed -- like helmets for bikers, or airbags for car drivers -- injuries actually go up, because people feel free to engage in more risky behavior. (http://www.thedaily.washington.edu/article/2007/2 /2/bicycleHelmetsMoreHarmThanGood)

            The same will happen here. While soldiers will feel safer using the robot drones, that means that they'll feel free to run more missions, penetrations, and infiltrations. When the USA is suffering fewer casualties, politically and economically we'll feel free to run more invasions, longer counterinsurgency campaigns, and so forth. Even though any single incident may in fact have fewer casualties, over time the expected value will go up, just because more missions are being run against civilian areas. Just like with bicycle helmets.

              • The mentioned article on bicycle helmets is a masterpiece of crappy reasoning.
                An excellent book that give numerous examples, statistics, etc., is "Why Things Bite Back" by Edward Tenner. I put it up there with "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" [wikipedia.org] (by Thomas Kuhn) as for how it altered my thinking. That said, the arguments put forth in Tenner's book don't lead you to the premise that bicycle helmets (or armed drones) are bad - just that they can have unintended consequences. You and dcollins both make excellent points, and I don't think they're mutually exclusive. People need to ask the tough questions about whether this could lead to an increased willingness to engage in unnecessary warfare.

        • Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by The Evil Couch (621105) on Friday August 03 2007, @01:05AM (#20097853) Homepage
          the American strategy of concentrated firepower and fire first, ask questions later

          Nice. I like how you've never been placed under restrictive rules of engagement, in which even if you see someone with a weapon you're not allowed to fire on them until they actually pointed it in your direction, but some how know EXACTLY what US military doctrine is. I really don't understand why these sorts of comments go unchallenged on Slashdot, when if you were to comment on any other complex, technical subject without knowing what the hell you were talking about, you'd be eaten alive by dozens of subject matter experts who have been working in that field for years.

            • Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:4, Insightful)

              by The Evil Couch (621105) on Friday August 03 2007, @04:45AM (#20098793) Homepage
              Routinely? Hardly. I've not seen nor heard of civilian vehicles getting shot simply because the convoy wanted the vehicle to move. Warning shots, sure, but never actually targeting the vehicle. The reason why I haven't heard of it is because it'd be a violation of CENTCOM's rules of engagement and whoever did it would have gotten his nuts crushed for it.

              • Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:4, Interesting)

                by shilly (142940) on Friday August 03 2007, @05:30AM (#20098961)
                From http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2125135,00 .html [guardian.co.uk]
                It's a left-wing newspaper. If that's enough for you to discount the article, more fool you.

                Convoys
                Two dozen soldiers interviewed said that this callousness toward Iraqi civilians was particularly evident in the operation of supply convoys--operations in which they participated. These convoys are the arteries that sustain the occupation, ferrying items such as water, mail, maintenance parts, sewage, food and fuel across Iraq. And these strings of tractor-trailers, operated by KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root) and other private contractors, required daily protection by the US military. Typically, according to these interviewees, supply convoys consisted of twenty to thirty trucks stretching half a mile down the road, with a Humvee military escort in front and back and at least one more in the center. Soldiers and marines also sometimes accompanied the drivers in the cabs of the tractor-trailers.

                These convoys, ubiquitous in Iraq, were also, to many Iraqis, sources of wanton destruction.

                According to descriptions culled from interviews with thirty-eight veterans who rode in convoys--guarding such runs as Kuwait to Nasiriya, Nasiriya to Baghdad and Balad to Kirkuk--when these columns of vehicles left their heavily fortified compounds they usually roared down the main supply routes, which often cut through densely populated areas, reaching speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed by the rule that stagnation increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in traffic jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto sidewalks, scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles, shoving them off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of civilian cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys as a warning to other drivers to get out of the way.

                "A moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one," said Sgt. Ben Flanders, 28, a National Guardsman from Concord, New Hampshire, who served in Balad with the 172nd Mountain Infantry for eleven months beginning in March 2004. Flanders ran convoy routes out of Camp Anaconda, about thirty miles north of Baghdad. "So speed was your friend. And certainly in terms of IED detonation, absolutely, speed and spacing were the two things that could really determine whether or not you were going to get injured or killed or if they just completely missed, which happened."

                Following an explosion or ambush, soldiers in the heavily armed escort vehicles often fired indiscriminately in a furious effort to suppress further attacks, according to three veterans. The rapid bursts from belt-fed .50-caliber machine guns and SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons, which can fire as many as 1,000 rounds per minute) left many civilians wounded or dead.

                "One example I can give you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in a convoy and all of the sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben Schrader, 27, of Grand Junction, Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division, from February 2004 to February 2005. "And, you know, you've got these scared kids on these guns, and they just start opening fire. And there could be innocent people everywhere. And I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions where innocent people died because we're cruising down and a bomb goes off."

                Several veterans said that IEDs, the preferred weapon of the Iraqi insurgency, were one of their greatest fears. Since the invasion in March 2003, IEDs have been responsible for killing more US troops--39.2 percent of the more than 3,500 killed--than any other method, according to the Brookings Institution, which monitors deaths in Iraq. This past May, IED attacks claimed ninety lives, the highest number of fatalities from roadside bombs since the beginn

              • Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:5, Informative)

                by hazem (472289) on Friday August 03 2007, @05:39AM (#20099017) Journal
                My cousin served two tours in Iraq and he glibly reports of ramming cars off the road and forcing them into concrete barriers and walls, often killing the occupants - simply because the car was on the road when a US convoy happened to be approaching. So, that's much better than shooting at them.

                I'm sure it's all in the name of "winning hearts & minds" and brining democracy and freedom, so it's okay. I'm sure the Iraqis don't mind.

                Oh yeah, my cousin's pretty fucked up now. I'll be really surprised if he doesn't end up in jail for assaulting or killing someone now that he's back home. He wasn't like that before he went. The irony is that he laughs about how some kid's head was blown apart but nearly cries about a dog they had to leave on a rooftop. It's amazing what we do to others and our own in the name of democracy.

                • Not all that ironic or surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)

                  by Valdrax (32670) on Friday August 03 2007, @08:50AM (#20100453)
                  The irony is that he laughs about how some kid's head was blown apart but nearly cries about a dog they had to leave on a rooftop.

                  That's not really all that surprising or ironic if you frame the situation properly. It's a lot harder for most humans who are used to pets to hate a pet as much as another human being. Pets are often seen as ultimately innocent, whereas other humans can be enemies. Also, it seems from your description that he had a personal bond with the dog and not with the kid who died. That also makes a difference in a lot of people's capacity for empathy, especially in a heightened "us vs. them" situation like a war. Such situation strengthens the bonding with those who are "us" and make it easier to hate and be callous to those who are "them." It's just human instinct -- our adaptations for competition as a pack animal.

                  Lastly, it's worth noting that Hitler loved dogs and was a vegetarian (the irritating kind that liked to tell fellow diners how sausages they were eating were made) because he hated animal cruelty, and yet he presided over the genocide of an entire people. Not to Godwin the discussion, but it is a stark "contradiction" in his personality that many have a hard time reconciling until you frame it in terms of "enemies" and "innocents."

        • Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by iamhassi (659463) on Friday August 03 2007, @12:09AM (#20097587) Journal
          ""This seems like it'd be a great idea in Iraq - breach a door"

          and get hit with a chair. Millions of taxpayers dollars lost to breach a door lost to a $5 dollar chair."

          Screw you flamebait. How about you go breach a door and have someone shoot back and see if you'd rather have the robot breach the next door.

          And if you bothered to read the wikipedia article you'd see these robots are only $230,000 [wikipedia.org], and could drop to 150k if ordered in large quantities. Dirt cheap compared to a couple of dead soldiers.

          Also they're 100 lbs so they're not being knocked over easily and I really doubt a chair would seriously damage it... or if it did you'd risk setting the gun off. Would you hit a armed robot with a gun? Honestly you'd probably have better luck surprising a armed soldier with a swift chair to the chest than hitting this robot.

  • Kill switch? (Score:5, Funny)

    by qbwiz (87077) * <john@ba u m a n f a m ily.com> on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:20PM (#20095361) Homepage
    In this case, it might be better to call it a "do not kill" switch.

  • An army of bots.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by superphreak (785821) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:23PM (#20095389) Homepage
    only three of the robots are currently in Iraq.

    Wow, that'll take care of business...

    • Re:An army of bots.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by sokoban (142301) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:39PM (#20095565) Homepage

      only three of the robots are currently in Iraq.

      Wow, that'll take care of business...
      You see all these advertisements on American TV about being "an Army of one." Well, this is three times better.

      And they're ROBOTS.

    • Re:An army of bots.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Frumious Wombat (845680) on Thursday August 02 2007, @08:41PM (#20096117)
      Wait until they release the robotic M1A1 Abrahms. Three ought to do it. It'll come with the Three Laws of Army Robotics.

      1. If it moves, shoot it.

      2. If it doesn't move, make it move.

      3. See Law 1.

  • Robot to Iraqi: (Score:5, Funny)

    by markov_chain (202465) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:26PM (#20095423) Homepage
    "You have 20 seconds to drop your gun"

    Iraqi drops gun.

    "19... 18... 17..."

    Sorry :)

  • Is this from a shitty 90's movie? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cheezus (95036) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:27PM (#20095437) Homepage
    This dude thinks so:

    http://shitsnaz.blogspot.com/2007/07/us-army-gets- robot-idea-from-shitty.html [blogspot.com]

    " 1995, the movie "Evolver" is released to the public. This piece of shit is about a robot that goes crazy and kills people so it can win at laser tag. At one point, the two protagaonists/high school students of the movie break into a military research facility (!) and watch a video about a top-secret government project for a futuristic military robot. It was called project "SWORDS".
    The two acronyms and purposes of the robots are plain to see. It's painfully obvious to me that the Army stays up late and flips back and forth between demiporn on Cinemax and the horrible movies on USA. I can only imagine a researcher dropping his can of "Da Beast" to realize that, yes, there *has* to be a project SWORDS and a killer robot."

  • "Sarah Connorz" (Score:5, Funny)

    by syousef (465911) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:37PM (#20095541) Journal
    The robots also have a bad habit of killing anyone that answers the door in the affirmative to the name "Sarah Connor"

  • Great Idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Detritus (11846) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:42PM (#20095589) Homepage
    I like it. It's no fun going out on patrol and being ordered into an area to see if you draw any enemy fire. The robot can be repaired.

    • Great Ideas don't work in the military (Score:5, Interesting)

      by EmbeddedJanitor (597831) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:57PM (#20095739)
      Gatling Gun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun [wikipedia.org]

      The purpose of this gun was to save lives. Dr Gatling figured that a gun that would shoot faster would mean that an army would need less soldiers to spray out the same number of buttets and therefore there would be less soldiers on the field getting killed and injured. Therefore the machine gun would save lives.

      Of course it did not work out that way.

      So now we have a bunch of robots running around. That should mean less soldiers getting killed, right?

      Wrong: Bot soldiers will eventually be used to do suicide missions that the meat variety won't do. That means more intense and grubby conflict which means more injury and deaths - not less.

      • So now we have a bunch of robots running around. That should mean less soldiers getting killed, right?

        Yes, very likely. The high-tech of the war is astounding. We lost 50K Americans in the Korean War [wikipedia.org], for example — plus about half a million Chinese soldiers died and millions of Koreans (civilians and not).

        This war? Less then 4K dead Americans. Technology helps a great deal — and not only to the side, that has it.

        Wrong: Bot soldiers will eventually be used to do suicide missions that the meat variety won't do. That means more intense and grubby conflict which means more injury and deaths - not less.

        The second sentence does not follow from the first. Quite the opposite. For example, instead of calling on Air Force to level a building with a sniper-nest on the roof, using these bots our forces could deal with the sniper without leaving dozens of residents homeless (and some dead).

        Call me old-fashioned, but I do rejoice at my side's progress...

            • I see the increased value put on lives as a good sign that humanity is maturing. 50 years ago, the US military would have simply fire-bombed/napalmed places like Fallujah where civilian contractors were being killed and things were getting nasty. Instead they tried making truces, allowing humanitarian aid in, let tens of thousands of civilians leave, etc. 50 years ago, torture really was torture. I see it as a good sign that nowadays the world is upset about humiliating photos. We still have a way to go, but we are improving.

                • Re:Great Ideas don't work in the military (Score:5, Informative)

                  by The Evil Couch (621105) on Friday August 03 2007, @01:56AM (#20098077) Homepage
                  I don't see us putting a lot of value on the lives of people with Iraqi surnames.

                  No? Let me relate to you a fun story of mine.

                  About two and a half years ago, I was a squad leader in Iraq, just outside of Ar Ramadi. We had a pair of outposts on one of the major highways in the Anbar province, one on each side of the highway. Next to our outpost, there was a barracks for Iraqi National Guardsmen. We built it up for them, gave them beds, toilets, showers, water, food, weapons, ammo, training, etc. One night, two of them put on civilian clothes and their body armor, sneak out of their compound and begin digging a hole in the check point to put a bomb inside of.

                  One of my privates is on tower guard at the time and watches them do it. After radioing back and forth with the operations center, over the course of several minutes, he finally gets the authorization to open fire. He kills one and wounds the other. They flee back into their compound.

                  Long story short, the second guy went to Abu Ghirab and is probably in Guantanamo. You know what happened after we had unquestionable proof that we couldn't trust the battalion of Iraqi National Guardsmen? Not a damn thing. We continued working with them. We continued feeding them. We continued giving them water and fuel, working the checkpoint with them and going on patrols with them.

                  Next time you think that US soldiers don't care about the lives of Iraqis keep that in mind. We knew for a fact that at any time, we could get murdered by Iraqis that we had done so much for, but because it's THEIR country, we sucked up the danger and kept working with them.

  • Erratic behaviour (Score:5, Insightful)

    by simonharvey (605068) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:44PM (#20095623) Homepage

    Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy," according to the Army. I feel safer already."
    As an engineer that designs industrial equipment, all of which involves paying incredible detail to the small things in order to protect the user from injury or loss of life, I am very amazed to hear that the US Army would use control protocols and algorithms that are so flaky that the robots are described as "going crazy" when they misbehave. Especially when they are carrying weapons!

    And the only results they have is a simple kill/estop switch, which (and I am guessing) whose command code is probably transmitted along the same comm pathway as the other command codes.


    Wow
    Simon H

  • I can see it now... (Score:3, Funny)

    by GFree (853379) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:49PM (#20095661)
    The project is considered a failure due to the mass number of cowardly robots forgetting to fire their weapons, instead shouting "NO DISSEMBLE!!!" in the hopes they aren't turned into scrap metal.

    However, the project is eventually reborn by turning the bots into chefs for the real troops. One was heard talking to itself:

    Number 5: Okay, to make these golden fluffy pancakes... add flour, milk and eggs... Mix thoroughly...
    [uses his own motor to rotate the mixer - the bowl contents splatter all over the room]
    Number 5: Ooooo... Still lumpy!

  • Predators? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by flyingfsck (986395) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:54PM (#20095701)
    We have had armed flying robots for some time already.

  • This is Nothing New, the Russians did it before. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Plazmid (1132467) on Thursday August 02 2007, @08:07PM (#20095843)
    Back during WWII the Russians built radio control "Teletanks" that were controlled by a human operator in another tank. They were equipped with far more firepower than SWORDS, so technically SWORDS is NOT the first armed robot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletank [wikipedia.org]

  • Detonator was a "robot" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mi (197448) <mi+slashdot@aldan.algebra.com> on Thursday August 02 2007, @08:13PM (#20095903) Homepage

    Artillery projectiles and bombs were "deciding" when to blow up for well over a century now...

    Their logic was far more simplistic, of course.

    Various traps where harmful "robots" too — mechanisms, designed to kill their intended victim automatically. These traps, and their descendants — land-mines — have killed many thousands of unintended victims since.

    Our technology is progressing, and so does the military section of it... Although this weapon is novel, there is nothing new in principle here.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by venicebeach (702856)

      I guess these guys haven't seen Terminator 3
      ... or the Matrix, or Battlestar Gallactica, or I Robot.. the list goes on. Our subconscious has been warning us about this in the form of fiction for years and the warnings have been getting louder and louder....
    • Just more proof that the modern army is defective on basic no-man's land tactics that their grandfathers would have been familiar with.

      The army is plenty familiar with how to make a no-man's land, it's the press, and consiquentially the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had. War is terrible and ugly, the people don't want terrible and ugly, because they don't really believe in the cause. So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.

      Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.

      • Re:Robot? That Ain't a Robot- THIS is a Robot. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Kjella (173770) on Thursday August 02 2007, @09:10PM (#20096363) Homepage
        Ok - let us for a moment assume that invading Iraq was a decent idea and that Saddam was a threat that should be eliminated. The Iraqi army falls like a house of cards, all territories occupied, "mission accomplished". You also get full dictatorial power over the US military and an incredibly loyal public opinion that'll support any action. Now what?

        There aren't exactly vast troops hiding in the jungle, because there is no jungle. Your enemies are hiding among the general population, striking at your troops but mostly at civilians supporting your side. Would you like to:

        a) Withdraw and leave the whole country in anarchy and civil war
        b) Create a "no-mans" land out of the cities (Nothing like a little genocide in the morning)
        c) Start ignoring colleteral damage and/or retaliate against the civil population
        d) Try to flush out the guerilla fighters in DisneyWar

        If you go in with an army, fuck them up one side and down the other then leave them you'll only make things worse. That's essentially the tactic used on Germany after WWI, and all it did was create an angry and resentful population which led to nationalism, racism and Hitler.

      • The army is plenty familiar with how to make a no-man's land, it's the press, and consiquentially the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had. War is terrible and ugly, the people don't want terrible and ugly, because they don't really believe in the cause. So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.

        Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.

        I agree that armies are not appropriate for 'peace-keeping'. When I was in the business, folks called it OOTW (Operations Other Than War) and dreaded it. There are no clear goals, no battle lines, and the rules change every day.

        The problem with treating it like a typical occupation or 'total war,' is that you have to figure out who you are actually fighting. When we occupied Germany, things were simple: any German with a gun was resisting. When the French decided to weigh in on our Revolutionary war (what McCain wants to compare it to), similarly simple: only two sides (although things got interesting with guerillas and Torreys). You don't have that here.

        If you follow McCain's logic that we are the French, who's side are we on? The insurgents (obviously not)? The Shia? The Sunni? The Kurds? Al Qaeda? The organized crime syndicates? Who do we shoot? We cannot simply declare everyone with a gun an enemy. Why not? Because every civilian in Bagdad has a legitimate need for a gun: to protect themselves from the other five sides, plus the corrupt police. We don't have the manpower to protect them 100% of the time or to disarm everyone at once. The average dad with an AK47 would be committing suicide and sacrificing his family to disarm. Men, women, and children are combatants. Children can and do deliver bombs (I have family that died that way). The only way that soldiers waging conventional war could stop the problem is to systematically shoot every man, woman, and child, block by block. Do you have the stomach for that?

        So instead, we use soldiers, trained and armed to kill or be killed, in a situation for which they are manifestly unsuited. They are foreign invaders. They know little of the local language and culture. They have little or no police training. The Iraqi police and military liaisons who should be helping are unreliable. A significant fraction of the people they are trying to protect are hell bent on killing each other. Our soldiers use military tactics: fire support, artillery, etc., in populated areas. They don't bother identifying people before killing them (Wedding at Falujah, recent "friendly fire" helicopter attack on an Iraqi militia unit, etc.). They gun down families in their homes because a terrified father has a gun. They use 500 pound bombs or rockets to flush out individual insurgents in a row of block houses. And none of this is unusual: it's what soldiers are trained to do.

        The thing is, there is no reason we should not have seen this going in (and many people did). Hussein's iron-fisted regime was the only thing holding the country together. Perhaps we would not have thought it would be this bad, but it should have been predicted and on the table. We had essentially four options: 1) accept the fact that we would have to brutally massacre most of the Iraqi civilians 2) Train and deploy a whole lot of Arabic speaking Military and perhaps civilian trained Police with the military as backup (and accept high casualties among Americans and Iraqis), 3) Fence the area in, let them go at it, and see who survives, 4) possibly combined with #2, reinstate the draft, arm and equip enough police and soldiers that we could realistically declare, enforce, and maintain total martial law, pre-cutting their food and giving them sp

        • Re:sounds alot like that 'liberal arts' stuff to m (Score:5, Insightful)

          by dbIII (701233) on Thursday August 02 2007, @08:52PM (#20096207)

          dabble in amateur history, amateur politics, amateur sociology, and so forth and so on. and since they are completely untrained, they usually make a huge mess of it,

          Sadly most of us here are better educated and better at it than most of the young administrators that were sent straight from the "think tanks" halfway through undergraduate college into running things in Iraq. This is the amateur war run by disparate groups pulling in different directions without any central control actually in the same country - at least that is what retired military professionals are telling us.

          what was so awful about mcarthur and patton after WWII and their occupations of germany and japan?

          They did it differently and could actually set and carry out policies without interference and they were not encumbered by unaccountable spooks turning up to play Bond villian without warning.

    • Re:Robot? That Ain't a Robot- THIS is a Robot. (Score:5, Funny)

      by king-manic (409855) on Thursday August 02 2007, @07:49PM (#20095663)
      I don't think it's the army itself that defective I think it's the brass, politicians and the American people. America has become extremely risk averse in regards to American lives. The politicians thus won't touch anything that endangers people and the brass relay these sentiments. It might be because of better communication and media which makes casualties more then numbers, it might be a very big shift in the idea of duty vs cost of duty. It might be the frivolous nature of the wars America has gotten itself into lately. Vietnam was about ideology, Iraq is about economics and influence while the major wars previous WWI and WWII was about duty to your allies and stopping actual threats to your security and economy. Korea was about ideology as well so perhaps it is a shift of the people.

    • Re:Well that's an easy target. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MMaestro (585010) on Thursday August 02 2007, @08:07PM (#20095839)
      Um, the whole point of these robots IS to have the enemy shoot at the robots. If an insurgent sees a robot armed with a machine gun turning around the corner and starts to aim at him, hes gonna spend a few seconds not shooting at U.S. soldiers. In the eyes of the media and the government, thats multi-billion dollar project just earned every cent. The fact that it can shoot back simply sweetens the deal.
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