Did you read the same article I did?

"I don't have any problem writing to iRobot, saying 'I'm sorry your robot died, can we get another?"' said Colonel Bruce Jette, the Army's point man on robot deployment, who accompanied the first, $45,000 iRobot "PackBots" into the field in Afghanistan. "That's a lot easier letter to write than to a father or mother."

...

Jette says robots will never fully replace soldiers.

"None of them," he says, "are as powerful as the 2.5-pound gray blob inside your head."

So robots are being used for remote monitoring on the battlefield. Sounds like it could save a few lives, instead of forcing our soldiers to go down into cave complexes and get killed in ambushes. Also sounds like they're considering mounting a weapon so it can be used a remote weapon by someone with a handset (think BigTrak with a gun), which also seems a damn good idea.

It's really quite old news in any case. All armies (and most police forces) have been using remote-control bomb-disposal robots for well over a decade, so the failure of armies to produce anything like this up to now is actually the scariest thing - it indicates that until now it was better to throw a human life at the problem instead of using some disposable gadget, bcos the human life was worth less than the gadget. It's only now the price of the gadget has come down that the gadget is worth less than a soldier.

Yes, the first paragraph sounds like a terrifying vision. And then you read on and realise that they can't do it, they don't even have any idea of *how* to do it, and the army don't actually want it. In other words, the first paragraph is 100% invented by the author of the article for the purposes of selling the article with that "wow" factor.

Graham.