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Why haven’t killer drones replaced human soldiers?

John Arquilla
Professor of defense analysis, US Naval Postgraduate School
Infantry can go places (from casbahs to caves) that tele-operated machines can’t, and they cannot be hijacked by hackers or fried by electropulse weapons. Also, soldiers are far less affected by adverse weather and can win “hearts and minds” far better than any bag of bolts. However, this is not an either-or situation – machines can vastly improve human performance. Indeed, the best armed forces of the 21st century will be those that learn to blend both into a new strategic mix.

Sebastian Thrun
Director, Stanford AI Lab; Darpa Grand Challenge winner
Soldiers do so much more than a self-driving car could. People have this wonderful ability to look at, say, an urban intersection and be aware of cars, pedestrians, traffic signs, curbs. A soldier will quickly identify good places to hide, threats such as roadside bombs, and so on. Robots see lots of pixels, and attaching meaning to those pixels remains one of the hardest problems in AI.

Colby Buzzell
Author, My War: Killing Time in Iraq
Fighting without manpower is for sci-fi novels – we still need grunts because robots don’t have instincts. For example, when I was in Iraq we avoided IEDs a couple of times because we noticed the street we were driving down, which was normally filled with pedestrians, was suddenly empty. All that unmanned crap is fine, but they’re only toys that are pretty much worthless by themselves. Then again, what the hell do I know – I was a lower enlisted infantry guy who didn’t go to war college.

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