Merciless robots will fight future wars: researcher

Using conventional lethality in assymetrical warfare causes increasing collateral casualites and damage with decreasing effect on the insurgent groups. So how about limiting robot targets to other weapons? Get lots of them on the field disabling/destroying whatever weapons they find and BINGO- what's the problem- a bunch of guys running around with no guns/bombs/cordite/rpg's etc looking like idiots. A major recruitment trigger is similarly removed as collaterol damage declines.

The only horror these machines are going to spare humans are the horrors spared the aristocracy when dealing with the lower classes. One doesn't need to worry about a guilty soldier's conscience, or the dual loyalties of sometimes unstable 'hired' mercenaries, when one has a killing machine at it's beck and call. One need not worry about calling martial law and being forced to use non-foreign troops for the policing of the state.

Ahem.

The trouble with robots, so far unmentioned, is not just the problem of enabling them to identify justifiable targets, but that of the enemy being able to crack your security protocols, either by electronically reprograming your machines to turn on you or by convincing such units to overlook or even protect the enemy physically and/or electronically if it can successfully disguise itself as you.

In short, not only can we look forward to a new era of new kinds of genuine friendly fire deaths and accidental attrocities, but a new era of new kinds of deliberate black operations slaughter covered-up as unintended mistakes.

And when you add to this recipe the dimension of a new era of world-wide paranoia in which UFO sightings'll no longer dismissed as merely the concern of wackos who believe in men from Mars then you can see the not so far off future is going to be a fun time had by all.