Rise of the Robot Squadrons

Velcroman1 writes 'Taking a cue from the Terminator films, the US Navy is developing unmanned drones that network together and operate in 'swarms.' Predator drones have proven one of the most effective — and most controversial — weapons in the military arsenal. And now, these unmanned aircraft are talking to each other. Until now, each drone was controlled remotely by a single person over a satellite link. A new tech, demoed last week by NAVAIR, adds brains to those drones and allows one person to control a small squadron of them in an intelligent, semiautonomous network.'

A larger drone...

[gedrin]

While useful, isn't this just a larger drone with it's parts connected by signals rather than wires? Sure, it's got ablative resilience (one of three drones can go boom and you still have the rest of the formation), and more payload (more drones to cary stuff), but there doesn't seem to be any capacity for communication beyond holding formation and relaying orders from the human controller.

Re:We need robots that can walk around...

[ArsonSmith]

Or the balls to use that air superiority. When used in WWII the war ended quickly.

Re:Semi-autonomous being key

[dgr73]

You could always have swarms and swarms of small, but inexpensive machines with no autonomy over target selection, but preprogrammed attack modes. Things that come to mind are miniature flying darts for anti personnel work. Once a target has been identified and a valid go-ahead has been given by operator, the swarm would detach a portion of it's strength for an suicide attack. If the target remains valid, it could be reattacked or a new validation sought (to prevent dummies from sapping the swarms). For antitank work a slightly heavier flying mine could do the trick, vehicle heat signatures being big enuff, you could not easily mistake one. These are defensive weapons that could substitute mines... probably not useful to the US, as they are always attacking countries, but perhaps very useful against them. The main idea would ofcourse be cheapness.. a peabrain just big enough to see potential targets, some cheap method of elevating them to attack height (balloons?). That would be an automated defense network I could get behind.. cheap, dumb and effective in saving human lives. Plus there's always the scare factor.. everyone can attack an enemy on order, assuming "You will be given artillery support.. blah blah"... but who wants to attack a swarm of razorblades flying at you?

Air superiority...

[Savage-Rabbit]

Or the balls to use that air superiority. When used in WWII the war ended quickly.

Ending WWII was just as much due to Soviet air superiority and Soviet tank superiority as it was to US air superiority. The US didn't have tank superiority since, apart form Soviet armor, Allied armor uniformly sucked a**. A major reason the 8th air force was able to wreck the Nazi military industrial complex, and more importantly their fuel production from the air (which was easily the part of the bomber campaign that hurt the Nazi armies the most) was the fact that from 1943 onwards the Soviets managed to re-equip their forces with large numbers of modern Soviet designed fighter and bomber designs and those Soviet air forces tied down large numbers of german fighters on the eastern front. If anything defeated the Nazis it was the fact that they over-extended themselves militarily in every way.

Yeah, that's bad... for THEM!

[Hurricane78]

Because now, one dedicated hacker with his OLPC will be able to take down a whole army. Or even better: Make them fly back, acting as if they had been successful, landing, and then either detonating right there, or in the face of their best engineers who just before that downloaded the trojan that will now spread though the whole research facility and then report back to its master.

Man... killing is always the action of a coward. No exceptions. No sides taken.
And war is mass murder. Always. Period. No discussion about it.

Re:Controversy what?

[Shimbo]

Controversial? The only controversy is people who want to fly planes but are losing their jobs to video game nerds.

They are controversial because they are rather indiscriminate weapons; figures vary wildly but a midrange one would be that they kill about 10 civilians for each target killed. There's a tradeoff between killing terrorists and alienating the civilian population.