India To Develop Military Robots For Warfare 169
WoodenKnight writes "Indian DRDO chief Avinash Chander has told reporters that development of robotic soldiers would be one of his 'priority thrust areas', saying that 'unmanned warfare in land and air is the future of warfare.' He foresees robotic soldiers assisting human soldiers initially but, he hinted at forward-position deployment of such robots. He gave a timeline of at least a decade for the project to see any practical use but said a number of labs in India are now working on this."
What a Simple World You Live In (Score:2, Informative)
The fact that the US is one of the few countries to start foreign wars in the past decade,
The only one foreign war that the USA has started since the Cold War is the 2nd Gulf War. Every other war has been legitimate (the war in Afghanistan), the invasion of Panama (which even the majority of Panamanians welcomed it), UN sanctioned to prevent genocide (as in the Balkans) or ill-prepared, ill-advise attempts to provide support to desperately needed UN-sanctioned peacekeeping/humanitarian work (the Somali War and the "Black Hawk Down" incident.).
and that the president responsible got re-elected makes me doubt that.
Junior (that's how I call Bush Jr.) got re-elected once due to not having a viable non-flip-flopping opposition candidate. Kerry at the time was not such a candidate. Opposing without providing clear alternatives is not a viable opposition alternative at all.
We were still recoiling fresh from 9/11 with a fresh 2nd conflict in Iraq. We needed a viable alternative to Junior, and Kerry only opposed, but didn't provide a clear, workable alternative either (and no, an immediate withdrawal at that time was not practical.)
Many people, myself included wanted someone other than Junior. There was none. Ergo, you know the rest of this tragedy. Obviously, hindsight is always 20/20, and there were certainly some jingoistic elements in the US who rooted for Junior. But to pretend that him getting re-elected is solely the result of the population not giving a shit about body bags, that's overly simplistic.
Such a theory makes for excellent rhetoric, I grant you that.
Hell, even in a bunch countries just supporting the US in Iraq and Afghanistan the political fallout was bigger.
Is that surprising? Why should it have not been a greater fallout in the other countries? For those governments, the 2nd Gulf War was not their war, so of course the fallout would be greater. I'm not sure what is so surprising about it, or how one can derive logical or moral conclusions from the fallouts or lack thereof in US politics.
Not sure about India though.
India has a lot of reasons (not necessarily valid or practical in the absolute sense of the word, however.) They have a continuous border dispute with Pakistan, a lot of it with unique hardships and challenges posed of high-altitude, mountain warfare. There might or will be eventual border disputes with China (also under mountain warfare conditions.) The is an asymetric terror warfare going on in India.
Robotics, drones and the like, I can see why India would push this. Whether they have the technical wherewithal to do so now, that's a different question. True that India has a lot of problems in terms of quality control, but so did the Japanese. And while here in the US people used to dismiss the Japanese as "makers of cheap cameras", they rose up to the challenge and almost ate our lunch.
All those quality control and process problems, those are implementation details that countries like India will eventually work out. There is nothing other than time from preventing that from happening.