Will America's Next Soldiers Be Machines?

Foreign Policy magazine visits a U.S. military training exercise that pitted Lt. Isaac McCurdy and his platoon of infantry troops against machines with camera lenses for eyes and sheet metal for skin:

Driving on eight screeching wheels and carrying enough firepower on their truck beds to fill a small arms depot, a handful of U.S. Army robots stormed through the battlefield of the fictional city of Ujen. The robots shot up houses where the opposition force hid. Drones that had been loitering over the battlefield for hours hovered above McCurdy and his team and dropped 'bombs' — foam footballs, in this case — right on top of them, a perfectly placed artillery shot. Robot dogs, with sensors for heads, searched houses to make sure they were clear.

'If you see the whites of someone's eyes or their sunglasses, [and] you shoot back at that, they're going to have a human response,' McCurdy said. 'If it's a robot pulling up, shooting something that's bigger than you can carry yourself, and it's not going to just die when you shoot a center mass, it's a very different feeling.'

In the United States' next major war, the Army's brass is hoping that robots will be the ones taking the first punch, doing the dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs that killed hundreds — likely thousands — of the more than 7,000 U.S. service members who died during two decades of wars in the Middle East. The goal is to put a robot in the most dangerous spot on the battlefield instead of a 19-year-old private fresh out of basic training... [Several] Army leaders believe that almost every U.S. Army unit, down to the smallest foot patrols, will soon have drones in the sky to sense, protect, and attack. And it won't be long before the United States is deploying ground robots into battle in human-machine teams.
The robots haven't been tested with live ammunition yet — or in colder temperatures, the magazine notes. (And at one point in the exercise, 'Army officials jammed themselves, and a swarm of drones dropped out of the sky.) But the U.S. Army is 'considering a proposal to add a platoon of robots, the equivalent of 20 to 50 human soldiers, to its armored brigade combat team.'

Six generals and several colonels watched the exercise, according to the article, which notes that the ultimate goal isn't to replace all human soldiers. 'The point is to get the advantage before China or Russia do.'

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