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Unmanning the skies

I think it is great that we are taking steps to get humans out of the danger zone but it does make me wonder what effect this will have on warfare.

In the future it may become simply robots attacking eachother controlled from home base, if this event were to occur war would have only one real element... the economy.

If little or no humans actually died in combat the only real means of determining a winner would be how fast and effiecently one country could turn out machines designed to exploit shortcomings of the enemy's country. I think this would be great for the world, war would become the pasttime of wealthy countries for one simple reason.

Alot of technological advances have been made in warfare, if warfare was reduced to machine v. machine then 1. warfare could be televised and there could be commercial breaks and such. 2. a lot of sophisticated weapons platforms would have to be created and a good amount of them could also be used for civilian purposes.

Take for example mountain rescue teams, these teams often have to snatch skiiers out of treacherous situations, the standard method when conditions support it is a simple snatch and extract using a helicopter. As I know you all know the helicopter was first designed for the military, as was the internet before people realized this is the least secure crap we've ever built.

Also if we unman the frontlines automatic rifles would become obsolete, resulting in manufactureres vastly cutting down on production making them much more difficult to obtain through the black market. As it stands now alot of weapons get left behind, then we come home and make more to leave behind on the next mission. This policy only ensures that we will have insurgent armies and genocides for years to come.

But say a remote control battle drone runs out of gas or something and can't be flown back stateside, how will people lacking the necessary equipment fly it?

yes things would temporarily be worse but you have to think of the long term effects here, guns wear out and need to be replaced and guess what if those guns aren't made anymore they can't be replaced. And also it wouldn't really matter if automatic rifles began carrying armor piercing because there wouldn't be any humans in the battle field to shoot at

but they would be dramatically reduced, and in warfare isn't that one of the primary objectives, protecting the civilian population from as much damage as physically possible?

... about to have rush limbawe moment right now

in our superior being we try to mimize civilian casualties in this day and age.

Except that you'd still have the problem of disorganized insurgents with explosives who are cabable of taking out the droids and then hiding among the citizenry. And you'll never be able to eliminate the black market for weapons.

While military robots would be great for saving lives (or at least our people's lives), they wouldn't solve the fundamental problems of wars. I'd rather we focussed on preventing them (isolationism!) rather than finding another shiny new way to fund the military-industrial complex.

I'm not talking about a North Korea-style cutoff from the rest of the world though. I mean a stance of military isolationism. The US military should stop trying to get involved all over the world, because interfering in other countries' affairs usually leads to more harm than good.

Nothing wrong with international trade or global communications, it's the idea that America has to get involved everywhere militarily that's the issue.

*shrug* Some men just watch the world burn...

And some just have matches.