[BartSimpson]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

In that scenario there wouldn't be. I'm thinking more to the future when a machine is armed with a rifle and is allowed to determine it's own targets and let loose on a village to weed out insurgents. Somewhere carpet bombing isn't an option because of the 'friendlies'. Or perceived friendlies, anyhow.

Hmm.

Not now, but eventually I expect artificial intelligence to be better capable of determining intent than are people. They'll be able to read stress, do voice analysis, sense blood pressure changes, and etc.

That said I would not rule out the possibility of a 'terminator' wandering through a group of hundreds of armed individuals (like at a typical sandbox marketplace) and neutralizing only the valid threats.

Who knows? Maybe the mere existence of such technology will be sufficient to mitigate the threat before it happens?

[sandorski]

Drones introduce a Moral/Ethical problem. That is, it removes risk and thus can lead the User(s) of them to increasingly engage in war or violence for frivolous reasons. In many ways, I think they are more of a problem than Nuclear weapons, especially since they are technology that can more easily be produced than Nuclear weapons. Terrorists are more likely to get access to Drones far before they have access to Nuclear weapons.

They certainly are not as destructive in the amount of Casualties, but the ability to target key individuals can result in being just as destabilizing.

[ShepherdsDog]

Any drone should have a human guiding it. Autonomous machines on a battlefield have too much of a skynet feel to them.

[Jabberwalker]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

Skynet will take care of everything.

How well did that work out?

[saturn_656]

While I wouldn't want to see autonomous machines outright replace humans, they will have their uses and will no doubt be part of our future arsenals.

[Public_Domain]

[Freakinoldguy]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Thanos Thanos:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

.....how long has it been since two armies met against each other on a battlefield?........

Back when Douglas Haig heroically managed to get one out of every three soldiers that served under him machine-gunned to death or blown into pieces by mortar rounds?

$1:

In a modern context, the drones would have been ordered to kill a civilian population. Not the intended target at all. Bad PR to boot.

Well, it's bad optics when a wedding attended by Taliban and Al Qaeda gets blown up but compared to what the above-mentioned Douglas Haig got up to the casualty rate by the new methods is really kind of low. Just because the old ways were traditional it doesn't mean they were good.

There was a person who gave the order, and a person who carried it out. The drone didn't decide to fire the missile by itself.

Had slick Willie Clinton given that order we would have been rid of Bin Laden in 99 and history might have been alot different for hundreds of thousand people.

So there's definitely positives and negatives to using drones. But, you know they're gonna use them no matter what any peace group says. Technology has been advanced through war for millennium and this is no different.

So, given that military technology always becomes civilian technology at some point you'll just have to wait awhile before an Amazon Drone starts delivering packages directly to your front door no muss, no fuss, no complications, although, I'd suggest you check first to make sure it says Amazon on the side before opening the door.

[Thanos]

Pretty sure that the attack on Bin Laden would have been a standard air strike by fighter-bombers if Bubba had ordered it to go ahead. Drones at the time were still fairly new and I don't think that they considered them for use in an assault back then.

[commanderkai]

Thanos Thanos:

Pretty sure that the attack on Bin Laden would have been a standard air strike by fighter-bombers if Bubba had ordered it to go ahead. Drones at the time were still fairly new and I don't think that they considered them for use in an assault back then.

I thought Tomahawk missiles were all the rage back in the 90s?

[Freakinoldguy]

Thanos Thanos:

Pretty sure that the attack on Bin Laden would have been a standard air strike by fighter-bombers if Bubba had ordered it to go ahead. Drones at the time were still fairly new and I don't think that they considered them for use in an assault back then.

My mistake. I watched the 60 minutes video and thought they wanted to use a drone strike but actually they only used it to identify Bin Laden and that incident was the catalyst for the CIA trying to figure out how to arm a Drone with Hell Fire missiles.

$1:

Hank Crumpton: So we were driven to look at various technical options. And we looked at a range of things. Long-range optics, they were too heavy, too cumbersome to get over the mountains. We looked at balloons. The prevailing winds would take those balloons to China. That would be a bad thing. We scrapped that. And then we stumbled across the UAVs, particularly the Predator. And sure enough, wasn't long before we had the Predator in theater over Afghanistan, the Predator unarmed at the time. And our human sources took us to a village-- far-- not far from Kandahar.

$1:

Hank Crumpton: Clearly. And we had-- the optics were spot on. It was beaming back to us, CIA headquarters. We immediately alerted the White House. And the Clinton administration's response was, "Well, it will take several hours for the TLAMs, the cruise missiles launched from submarines, to reach that objective. So you need to tell us where bin Laden will be five or six hours from now." The frustration was enormous.

Lara Logan: So at that moment you wanted to kill him?

Hank Crumpton: Yes.

Lara Logan: But you couldn't get permission?

Hank Crumpton: Correct.

He couldn't get permission to do anything, including allowing the CIA's Afghan agents on the ground to attack bin Laden's compound. That missed opportunity in the late summer of 1999, led Crumpton and his CIA team to figure out how to arm the Predator drone with hellfire missiles.

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-shepp ... z30MyrBQFq