[Gatac]

You've strafed one of my pet topics. Take cover, for I will now whip out a small treatise on the subject.

You ask why we have soldiers and WMDs. This is a bad question, because it assumes that war is only about the quickest and cheapest way to kill the most people. This is a common misconception. War is about defeating the enemy, specifically crushing his military might. While this can be served by killing his soldiers, this is often inefficient and hard to pull off, because humans are surprisingly sturdy. It is not so much our ability to directly withstand damage but to survive, to dig in, to keep your head down and spring up again. In a (relatively) recent example, Soviet forces on the Eastern front in WW2 were regularly taken by surprise when they advanced, because German troops knew exactly how to dig in. Even after hours of artillery bombardment, they'd still be alive - and ready to fight.

Simultanously, using WMDs has serious drawbacks. To start with, only nuclear weapons have any degree of proven effectiveness - biological and chemical weapons as they exist today are not controllable enough (biological) or just plain ineffective (chemical). Gruesome, yes, but frankly not worth the effort. Nuclear warfare doctrine takes a book to fully analyze, but the basic problems are this: Nukes are indiscriminate. You can train soldiers to kill other soldiers only, and for the most part that works out okay, but nukes kill everyone, and lots. Then, you have lingering, widespread effects, not to speak of the image penalty you take once you start tossing nukes. The danger of a nuclear free-for-all can not be understated, and even though steps have been taken to mitigate this, you can be sure that "nuclear deterance" is really just a nicer way of saying "mutually assured destruction".

As if that wasn't bad enough, we're increasingly getting boggled down in 4th Generation assymmetric warfare. You can't nuke terrorists. We need people on the ground, and lots of them. Simultanously, conventional wars are fought all the time, and the combined arms tactics used today are mind-bogglingly complex. To answer your question, I pull out the word "flexibility". If all you have is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail. A military force can have a forte, sure, but these days Air, Sea and Ground forces work together so closely that not being up to snuff in one area leaves you seriously vulnerable. We have to have all these toys because the other guys have them, too. You're sitting on a twisted form of the Prisoner's dilemma: Rationally, we all want peace. But we can't be vulnerable against possible attacks from X - who, by extension, can't be vulnerable against possible attacks from us.

"You put your gun down first!" "No, you!"

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Now, how can robots help make war? First off, I don't expect the introduction of AI into warfare to shake things up quickly. I don't want to come off as arrogant, but even the smartest AI tank won't replace ten normal ones. A lot of the problems we deal with today are actually rather independant of the soldiers - communications and the fog of war, supply lines, the laws of physics. Could a robot tank possibly make shots faster and more accurate, figure out a better way over rough terrain or conduct longer missions because it doesn't need rest? Possibly, but these are incremental improvements and likely won't even show up in the first few generations of military AI, if they even stick around and work on it long enough to get something effective going. Humans are very smart machines. It'll be a while before we can build better ones even after we create something that is an artificially intelligent lifeform. Expect dogs and children, not digital Einsteins.

One often-cited aspect is human endurance. Robot tanks don't sleep! Robot jets can pull more Gs! Certainly true, but tanks today are rarely limited by crew endurance. They need fuel and maintenance as well as ammo, and the logistics trail it takes to provide that maybe gives you five instead of four tanks you can supply with the same amount of cargo capacity if you cut out the soldiers. Possibly more if you can also leave the maintenance and resupply to other robots and cut out the humans completely. Similarly, an AI jet could certainly pull more Gs, but we're also limited by the materials we have. Flying is extremely complicated, too. (Look how much work *human* pilots have to put in.) I do think that there's a lot of potential here, though.

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So, what does all my rambling mean? (Certainly not coherent, more stream of consciousness, but oh well...) No big robot armies. Robots are going to be a very helpful resource - for human soldiers. Drones, powered armor, remote-control artillery fire - that's where we're going, with improved communications and recon as well as augmenting infantry soldiers. AIs could probably help us design much better gear, though.

And in 400 years, we'll have Bolos. Yay.

Gatac