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"Military planners say robot soldiers will think, see and react increasingly like humans. In the beginning, they will be remote-controlled, looking and acting like lethal toy trucks. As the technology develops, they may take many shapes. And as their intelligence grows, so will their autonomy. "
San Diego Union-Tribune

"The solider-warrior could kill his collective enemy, which now included women and children, without ever seeing them. The cries of the wounded and dying went unheard by those who inflicted the pain. A man might slay hundreds and never see their blood flow......
Less than a century after the Civil War ended, a single bomb, delivered miles above its target, would take the lives of more than 100,000 people, almost all civilians. The moral distance between this event and the tribal warrior facing a single opponent is far greater than even the thousands of years and transformations of culture that separate them....
The combatants in moder warfare pitch bombs from 20,000 feet in the morning, causing untold suffering to a civilian population, and then eat hamburgers for dinner hundreds of miles away from the drop zone. The prehistoric warrior met his foe in a direct struggle of sinew, muscle, and spirit. If flesh was torn or bone broken he felt it give way under his hand. And though death was more rare than common (perhaps because he felt the pulse of life and the nearness of death under his fingers), he also had to live his days remembering the man's eyes whose skull he crushed."
-Richard Heckler
In Search of the Warrior Spirit.

"To fight from a distance is instinctive in man. From the first day he has worked to this end, and he continues to do so."
-Ardant du Picq Battle Studies

The picture above is the SWORDS robot developed by the Army and Foster-Miller, a robotics firm bought in November by QinetiQ Group PLC, which is a partnership between the British Ministry of Defence and the Washington holding company The Carlyle Group.

SWORDS is the next effort in fighting from a distance, a distance that brings with it an increasing ability to kill. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes in his 1996 book On Killing that despite the portrayal in our popular culture of violence being easy, “There is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.”

One of the most effective solutions to this quandary, the military has discovered, is to introduce distance into the equation. Studies show that the farther the would-be killer is from the victim, the easier it is to pull the trigger. Death and suffering become more sanitized—the humanity of the enemy can be more easily denied. By giving the Army and Marines the capability to kill from greater distances, armed robots will make it easier for soldiers to take life without troubling their consciences.

Contrary to the ability of the human soldier to be transformed by what he/she experiences on the battlefield, a transformation that is a profound testament to the human conscience, automated robots programmed to decide between friend and foe will not have the ability to be moved by seeing in the "enemy" a father, mother, brother, or sister. Rather than becoming a conscience objector, such machines allow persons to take life without troubling the conscience.

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