The imaginations of Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, James Cameron, and many other science-fiction visionaries may not have been as wild as they seemed years ago. The concept of an automated robot army fighting on the front lines of battle has been slowly moving from a fantasy to a reality over the last thirty years.

Even now, hundreds of robots are sparing soldiers from potential danger by digging up roadside bombs in Iraq, standing as armed guards at weapons depots, and searching the remote crevices of Afghanistan's caves. A NYT article recently shows the Pentagon's overarching goal of building upon these prototypes to create a fully automated fighting force at the Army's disposal.

By April, an armed version of the bomb-disposal robot will be in Baghdad, capable of firing 1,000 rounds a minute. Though controlled by a soldier with a laptop, the robot will be the first thinking machine of its kind to take up a front-line infantry position, ready to kill enemies.
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Congress ordered in 2000 that a third of the ground vehicles and a third of deep-strike aircraft in the military must become robotic within a decade. If that mandate is to be met, the United States will spend many billions of dollars on military robots by 2010.
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It's more than just a dream now," [Gordon] Johnson said. "Today we have an infantry soldier" as the prototype of a military robot, he added. "We give him a set of instructions: if you find the enemy, this is what you do. We give the infantry soldier enough information to recognize the enemy when he's fired upon. He is autonomous, but he has to operate under certain controls. It's supervised autonomy. By 2015, we think we can do many infantry missions.

"The American military will have these kinds of robots. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when."

Of course the potential for sparing the lives of young American soldiers is an enticing concept, made even more so by the mounting American casualties in Iraq's post-war occupation. Nearly as appealing to the military is the ability buy robots for a fraction of the cost of training, paying, and feeding live soldiers , let alone funding the benefits for them and their family during and after their term of service.