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US Army to Replace Human Soldiers with “Humanoid Robots”
General Robert Cone, Commander of the Army Training and Doctrine Command, told the audience his team is researching the feasibility of shrinking the size of the brigade combat team from about 4,000 soldiers to 3,000 over the coming years, filling the gap with robots.
Cone’s comments come at a time when the Secretary of Defense is already planning other ways to shrink the Army to its smallest size since before World War II.
While the military’s interest in a robotic force is hardly new, and ground robots that crawl or roll are already being deployed, an army of humanoid robots seems inevitable.
The Department of Defense issued a Directive in 2013 titled “Autonomy in Weapons Systems”—another sign of how seriously the military is taking this. Among other things, it “Establishes guidelines designed to minimize [emphasis added] the probability and consequences of failures in autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems that could lead to unintended engagements.” But the directive also requires that the robots will “Function as anticipated in realistic operational environments against adaptive adversaries.”
Coping with “adaptive adversaries” implies at least a degree of autonomy—and that is a discomforting notion for some. Opponents of these looming “soldiers” have already formed an online campaign, the “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots,” which argues that “Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield is an unacceptable application of technology.”
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/us-army-replace-human-soldiers-humanoid-robots/
