Robots to replace soldiers on the battlefield.

Magnetick said:

This obviously won't happen any time soon, but the idea of machines fighting all the battles sounds like a great concept. I mean, come on, turn bloody warfare into robot warfare. Hell, turn it into a sport and put it on TV like it's Sunday Night Football.

"The West Division team is sending it's robotroops over to Israel for a territory bout. Time for some Friday. Night. Invasion!"

I can imagine future wars in space, over rocks that are rich with resources. Perhaps it will be similar to the age of colonialism, but instead of Man O' Wars and riflemen, it will be space warships and space drones.

Maes said:
How can the electorate care about what an army of professionals do? Do they worry in the same way about e.g. the Police or the Fire Brigade?

Not sure how long it'll be till the US replaces soldiers with robots, but it seems the Greeks are already replacing internet users with robots!

myk said:

Not sure how long it'll be till the US replaces soldiers with robots, but it seems the Greeks are already replacing internet users with robots!

Does not compute (pun intended).

Of course they want to start replacing troops with robots. Robot's won't suffer from PSTD from fighting in dirty wars with high civilian casualty rates.

Satyr000 said:

Of course they want to start replacing troops with robots. Robot's won't suffer from PSTD from fighting in dirty wars with high civilian casualty rates.

You can always enlist more desperate, less scrupulous and less picky troops among criminals, both domestic and foreign. Something like "pardons for service". What can possibly go wrong? . Plus there are a lot of experienced veterans of many wars, especially from the Balkans, Africa and South America as well as parts of Asia, that would be happy to work as mercs anytime. So there certainly is no shortage of disposable people you don't have to worry or nanny about after a "dirty job" is done.

Though, if you want a more socially acceptable recruitment reservoir for the main core of the army or you fear that criminals and mercs are harder to control/unreliable, you can always turn to immigrants: go do some killin' and peacekin' for Uncle Sam and after a reasonably long term (min 5 years) you'll be a Class A Citizen. If you offered this chance to every wetback Gonzalez and Pedro, don't you think they'd jump straight at it? What's pulling the trigger on a bunch of terrorists when they order you to, if that means that you get to be a citizen of the world's richest country, and your family will have bread on the table?

I'm still waiting for space marines to replace normal marines. Because there's no water in space.