Marines Seek To Outnumber Enemies With Robots « Breaking Defense - Defense industry news, analysis and commentary: Mass, as a principle of war, boils down to “quantity has a quality all its own.” The US has spent decades developing ever-smaller numbers of ever more expensive and “exquisite” weapons. Each fighter, helicopter, tank, or ship is vastly more capable than its predecessors, able to hit more targets over a wider area in a shorter period — but it still can only be in one place at a time, which limits your flexibility. Each high-end system can also be killed by one lucky shot, which limits your resilience against damage.
These factors may not have been crippling in counterinsurgency, but in an all-out war, there’ll be enough shots that some will get lucky. (It’s an old problem, as Kipling wrote of British officers on the Indian frontier: “Two thousand pounds of education/Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.”) And enough brute force can flatten finesse. At the receiving end of, say, a Russian cluster-munition barrage, expensive advanced technology blows up as easily as cheap stuff.
To reduce casualties in future landing operations, Walsh has already called for amphibious forces to have robotic vanguards. “Instead of Marines being the first wave in, it’s unmanned robotics, whether it’s in the air or the surface or subsurface…sensing, locating, and maybe killing (targets),” he said this morning at the AUVSI Unmanned Systems Defense conference. But today he also went into greater detail about a wider range of robotic applications that the Marine Corps’ considering.
