[I was discussing the concept of Robot Soldiers. There was a news story about this from American recently. A friend was writing to me, and I thought my reply might be of interest to others. UAV=Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Jan]

Hi Aakil,
You say some UAV’s can carry a person? Really? What for?

Re: Thinking
Thinking, in the true sense, is extremely complex – and maybe even “metaphysical”… If they mean “intelligent robots” – like those weapons systems on planes which target other planes and can “decide” on a strategy to engage them… that’s much simpler…

I just think that a lot of people who are into this robotics craze are assuming that the best way to build super-machines is to base them on a human design. I think that’s crazy. I think we are far too complex for any design based on the human body to actually be useful and practical. I think other designs which are simpler will work better. For example… I like the security robots which look like a ball and can roll around. I think a military robot with that sort of design is much more practical and useful.

Rather than develop a human-walking type of robot… .go for some kind of ball, or tracked or wheeled vehicle… The cost will be much less… and the results will still be good….

I firmly believe a robot army can be built which can be deadly… but it won’t look human… or look like anything we’re used to.

I’ve been sitting and pondering various ideas… and I think lots of small, intelligent devices can be built which can work in infantry support roles… which can save the lives of soldiers.

For example… The robots do not need to actually “work” with soldiers… where they might actually shoot the soldiers accidentally… I think the robots could for example… lead the attack… and lay down fire and attack the enemy… while the soldiers move in behind… The robots can be shot up by the enemy… but the robots will draw fire away from troops.

Suppose some troops have to attack an enemy position and a platoon of troops have to go in, but there are heavy enemy positions… say trenches… and machine guns…. anti-tank weapons…. Why can’t a *LOT*… of cheap robots… which are armed… lead the attack? Imagine… a platoon of infantry soldiers going in… but in front of them…. are these miniature tanks (2-3 feet high)… which are self-propelled… (e.g by batteries)… which have machine guns on them and sensors…. The mini-tanks are instructed… “attack to the front for 500m”… and they roll forward… each “looking”… with sensors… shooting at anything that moves or fires at it…

So imagine 30 troops being preceded by, say, 60 mini-tanks… which are lightly armoured against small arms fire… and which lay down a hellish fire… Maybe they even have small mortars, or can “fire some grenades”… So you have say, 2 or 3 people behind… in a control vehicle… giving various instructions… to the mini-tanks (as a group)… but the mini-tanks are also autonomous and are looking around… (to the front only) shooting and advancing… If some of them get shot up… no sweat… the others keep up the attack… The mini-tanks… if built cheaply… will draw a lot of fire and attention… while the Infantry… following closely on their heels… can focus on the targets which the tanks have not seen, etc…

I reckon such a thing could work… Even in built up areas… But in house-to-house fighting… it would be different… even so… such mini-tanks… which can run around, say for an hour, on a battery, could be deadly… and would save stacks of soldiers’ lives… They could fire gases inside buildings which could incapacitate the enemy…

I think, in robots, they shouldn’t go (as the Americans for example normally like to do), for super-sophisticated, super-expensive robots… (this whole “thinking robot” nonsense)… Instead… you must go after the “AK47” of robots… a simple robot… that can do very basic, useful functions and which can be produced en-masse CHEAPLY…

Imagine… you can mass produce a robot… for say… $1,000 each… (thumb suck)… but instead of having 1 robot costing $1 million… you produce 1000 @ $1000 each…. Now… you use them EN MASSE…. to overload an enemy’s defences… You use modern factory techniques… to just drown the enemy with these machines… In a major war, you just build 100,000 or 1 million of such cheapie robots and just unleash all living hell on the enemy…

Another robot idea I like… would be a teeny weenie… cheapie ground attack UAV… en mass…. It must have some simple weapony… For example… Give it… say… a few bombs… small ones… like handgrenades… and you unleash them on the enemy… like the tanks… except these little UAV’s are SMALL… just big enough to carry a few Kg of bombs… and fly LOW… So the enemy is in those trenches… and suddenly… 100 little UAVs come flying in at tree top level… and they start dropping little bombs all over the show… and then they turn around and go home…

But you base it on the Russian methodology… which is simple, reliable weapons which can be produced EN MASSE… The Russians love producing masses of cheap weapons…. They did it with their rifles and their tanks. Their flaw though… was they produced such weapons for use with masses of men. What one should do is to produce masses of semi-autonomous weapons… which will still give you the “mass” … but cheaply… Thus they will have strategic effect… which is what everyone is missing and forgetting…

It will totally change the face of warfare… Then… it does not matter how many humans you can call up… what would matter in war, is how quickly your FACTORIES can turn out these weapons…

The AK47, for example, is one of the most amazing weapons ever built… as I’m sure you can appreciate… but one needs to apply the same concept to robotics… and then warfare will never be the same… and I’m sure one will save the lives of infantry soldiers like never before.

I once read a military appreciation of the German V-1 rocket… the buzz bomb… which was the first “cruise missile”… The author reckoned that the V-1, rather than the V-2 (which was the first missile), would have totally changed the war… The V-1, dropped a 1-ton warhead… yet cost about… say a few hundred pounds to manufacture… V-2s were complex, costly and carried smaller warheads. The V-1’s were cheap, simple, and delivered a hell of a warhead. It was estimated that despite the Allies having superiority in the air… the V-1s could have been unleashed by the tens of thousands… and would have flattened England… If the Germans had only produced them in mass….

I think US military methods for example, like the Germans in WWII, focus far too much on low-volume, super-high-tech weapons… whereas… the opposite would have greater effect. By taking a single idea, and working on it… and “thinking big”… you could completely change things. One needs to merge the German/US type of thinking with the Russian type of thinking… and the result would be awesome…

I don’t know how much you know about military history… but the Tank is a perfect example… Tanks are great weapons… but for tanks to truly come into their own, the Blitzkrieg concept was thought up… When Tanks are used massed, in great numbers…. they suddenly take over the battlefield… These days, tanks are huge, cumbersome and mega-complex…. But in the original Blitzkrieg… thousands of tanks, massed, broke through and just caused hell in the enemy rear… and caused the enemy resistance to collapse. This was not possible when tanks were used in small numbers…

There is no reason why some new robot weapon couldn’t have the same impact that tanks once had.

I am convinced that military commanders don’t really understand what technology can do… There are lots of amazing weapons out there… but there is a balance which must be struck between complexity and cost… and I believe… that such weapons could completely revolutionise warfare.

Furthermore… robots are more applicable in certain types of warfare than others. For example, in my view, developing robots that could fight on land is going to be the most complex problem to solve… because terrain can be undulating, woody and difficult… whereas AIR and WATER environments lend themselves more naturally to robots… Theoretically, sea-going robots should be the easiest of all to devise… yet … (unless they are top secret)… I see no navies with any robot ships/subs.

Aerial robots can also be used in a ground-attack role….

I have actually sat back and wondered a lot about robots and technology in an anti-terrorist, anti-guerilla warfare role… and I am sure there must be a place for them…. There must be.

I am fascinated by the fact that in the Vietnam war the Americans dropped “listening devices” all over the jungle… and I’m curious as to how their experiences with them went. I assume these were a failure… But that was 40 years ago… with modern technology…. there must be new ways of solving the problem….

I just think that many of these researchers/designers in America love taking ENORMOUS BUDGETS and then spending too much… to create something new… whereas… thinking in a simpler manner, with much lower budgets… I am sure one could come up with some things that are truly devastating when used in the correct tactical/strategic manner…

You know… a Jet fighter costs $20 million… I am sure… for that kind of money… one could get much more “bang” for a buck…

With modern technology… which already exists… the day of the intelligent weapon has arrived… And I’m not just talking the “smart bomb”… There must be much more intelligent weapons one can produce which would be deadly… or very effective…

When I went to the military museum I saw some amazing things… and I sat and pondered them… There is a lot of scope that has never been explored… It might just require some imagination to come up with new types of weapons.

Here’s an idea for example… A simple one… but it could work… Imagine a robot mortar launcher… A problem with firing projectiles in a curved trajectory is that the enemy can use equipment which measures the seismic waves made when it was fired, versus when the shell hit, and it can calculate the location of the firing device… Hence… you get artillery doing the “shoot and scoot” tactic… to keep changing positions so that they aren’t destroyed by return fire….

Now imagine a robot-controlled mortar or gun… You give it a target to fire at…. and it fires and moves and fires and moves… It keeps changing its own position while laying down fire as fast as it possibly can…

At the military museum I saw Italian tanks… 2 man devices… they were amazingly small… In warfare they were useless because the men inside were killed and the armour was too thin… The tanks were no more than 3 feet high… Now you take those, make them even smaller, and put a computer inside… and mass produce them… and you’ll have a deadly weapon…. and it won’t matter if 100 of them get shot up… since due to low costs…. you won’t lose much.

Modern warfare concepts, like the Americans use… focus on a few soldiers… and few weapons which are extremely good… But they get overloaded easily in a guerilla warfare scenario…. because there aren’t enough to go around… whereas Robots…. would totally change the situation… They can give “volume” while not exposing more humans to being killed.

Why, in this day and age, should a soldier go charging forward into a hail of bullets and get killed? Let a cheap yet intelligent machine… which can shoot back… lead the charge… The enemy cannot ignore the machine… since the machine is shooting at them… and maybe even lobbing grenades at them and the enemy will have to focus their fire on to the machine first… thereby saving soldier’s lives….

In WWII… the most casualties were caused by mortars… Mortars are deadly… Imagine a little machine… which you simply give co-ordinates too… or basic instructions to… like: “saturate area to the front from 200m-500m with mortar fire”… and the machine loads itself and fires one shot after another… changing its angle of fire in fractions of a second…

The ideas are endless… and I’m amazed that nobody has studied these options for infantry support devices…

I’m sure these devices could also play a key role…. in the problem of monitoring guerilla movement, etc… out in the open… or in forests… or mountains… Imagine some kind of device… which you put out in the open… maybe it even looks like a rock, for example… and you leave them lying around… and they monitor sounds, heat, etc… and they make decisions… and transmit the results via radio… Let’s say… one has to monitor a border… where insurgents are crossing… and you have a device which monitors everything around it… trying to determine if this could be a soldier… For example… maybe it conducts some kind of test to determine (a) Is this a moving object… which is emitting Infra-red heat (b) Does it have some metal on it… (e.g. an AK47)

You could have thousands or tens of thousands of devices… feeding such daily data into computer systems… and even if you don’t have the means of determining overtly friend or foe… it might help to uncover info… e.g. It might help discover infiltration routes used at night… Then ambushes can be laid…For example… using such data gathering and analysis… you might uncover suspicious activity and then be able to deal with it… Maybe even use your weapons to do certain things….

Hmmm… imagine …. an intelligent mine-field…. which you can switch on and off at will??? A special encoded radio signal and the landmines are armed… or disarmed… or… a robot mortar… which you switch on at night…. then they have a curfew…. in the area… and the moment the sensor devices pick up activity… the automated mortar starts laying down fire… and the sensors report back to HQ that firing has started??? The machine keeps the enemy busy while the reaction units at HQ are jumping into helicopters to race to the scene…

Because I grew up in Rhodesia, and I often have read the military history and tactics of the area… I often think how much modern technology could completely change guerilla warfare.

It is my opinion, that guerilla warfare can be defeated through technology in ways people never imagined possible in the 1960s or 1970s… Nobody has, to date, come up with a proper way of defeating guerilla warfare… and yet… I am convinced that using masses of intelligent electronic devices… one can secure borders… and deal with guerillas… even in remote areas with difficult terrain…

In Israel, they are building a physical wall… to keep people out… But… one might not need to go to that length…. one could do border control… by having a “wall” of electronic devices… which are camouflaged…. The enemy does not know where the wall is…

I just think the whole field of intelligent warfare devices …. just has so many options… Why aren’t people tapping into it?