(OK, this one’s a bit odd, but I swear there’s a factual question at the heart of it.)
On reviewing the classics of western literature, I’ve come to the conclusion that, when using robots or androids as replacments for human infantry, said machines really break down into two categories: robots that surpass human combat abilities—superhuman strength, lots of firepower and armor, etc.—and robots that merely equal human abilities, or even fall a bit short, but are cheap and expendible, so you can field hordes of them.
My question is about the latter. Specifically, the economic issues of marketing them.
Say you were selling such a “cannon fodder” robot (a perfectly servicable, if not spectacular, robot soldier. But one that won’t go berserk, mutiny, commit overt war crimes, or cause bad press by getting shipped home in a body bag) to a modern military (say…the US Army, for example). How much would be too much to charge for it? I mean, obviously, if they cost $10 billion each, it wouldn’t be cost effective for anyone to buy them. But how about a few tens, or hundreds, of thousands of dollars per robot?
Kinda hard to put a pricetag on something that doesn’t exist.
That noted, I’d imagine you could get to a guesstimate by figuring the cost of getting a soldier from boot through AIT for initial acquisition, and then allow some percentage of the soldier’s expected salary over the remainder of his enlistment for maintenance costs…
Or to estimate the cost another way, how much does the US currently spend on expendable munitions (cruise missiles, torpedoes, etc.)? If one battledroid could, on average, inflict as much useful harm upon an enemy force or target as a cruise missile, then the US would probably be willing to spend at least what it spends on a cruise missile. In fact, considering the sophistication of the software in our latest missiles, they almost ARE 'droids.
I can see this heading straight for Great Debates. There is no factual answer because it depends almost entirely on social factors and has very little to do with hard economics.
For one extreme we might select China at the time of the Korean war.
This was the time of the “human wave” tactic, where literally thousands of soldiers were thrown at an objective each hour and if the objective was taken the tactic was considered a success. Under this type of society your robots would never become economical, China had a surplus of people who could fight better than your robots and they were available for free.
Since the approximate value of a human life in the Red Chinese army at the time was the same as the cost of equipment and rations a robot would have to be capable of being sold and maintained and shipped for less than a few thousand dollars in today’s money. Just not going to happen.
At the other extreme we can look at the US involvement in the “conflict” in Iraq today or Viet Nam 30 years ago. Public tolerance for human deaths in these societies is almost non-existent, while public tolerance for military spending and the associated taxation is astoundingly high. The US military is already quite happy to use expendable spy drones or smart bombs worth millions of dollars a piece if it reduces US casualties. It’s hard to put an exact figure on it, but it is quite plausible that the US government would happily spend $10 million on each soldier right now if they could eliminate all deaths. They would have probably had similar thoughts when the VietNam protest movement was starting to gain ground on the late 60s.
The point being that in these societies money isn’t an object. Wars are being won and lost on public sentiment rather than because of a lack of resources. In such societies almost any price is considered worthwhile if human, or at least home, casualties can be reduced.
We could certainly envisage SF types scenarios even more extreme. An ultra-wealthy state with incredibly high standards of living and low reproductive rates might be willing to pay almost any price to avoid the loss of human life. If such a state were involved in a situation such as we see in Iraq, where relatively few troops are actually being shot at, they might well be prepared to pay a billion dollars each to replace every such soldier. That wouldn’t be strictly economical but it could easily be viable simply because it would maintain public support for the war. A few trillion dollars to stop the body bags coming home would look like a sweet deal to the leaders of such a state.
Conversely we could easily imagine a situation where a state has an extremely large, uneducated, rapidly reproducing peasant class. Under such conditions it might not be economically viable to use robots even if they are free. Robots will need maintenance that isn’t easy to obtain from a peasant army and “Glorious Deaths in Battle” are socially beneficial.
So really the answer could range from “an army wouldn’t take them even if they were free. They would just melt them down for scrap” to " an army would buy them even if they were selling for a billion dollars each".
This is going to be a bit of a hijack, but the Chinese “Human wave” is entirely a fanciful American explanation for why they performed so poorly against the Chinese during the initial stages of the Korean war. The Chinese army in Korea never, at any one point, outnumbered the UN forces by any significant margin, and they were often outnumbered themselves. Nor did the Chinese suffer a great deal more casualties in total compared to the UN forces. Of course, in terms of firepower, an American battalion at the time had more firepower at their disposal than a Chinese division. The fact that 300,000 Chinese without tanks, airpower, or even much motorized transport had sent 425,000 UN troops, backed by the US airforce and navy, into a reeling retreat is something that MacArthur never came to grips with, so the “human wave” is invented.
It was done . (SWORDS ones, down on the page, have GPMG onboard)
About OP, there is another one factor. Price to a degree have impact on tactical use of android soldiers. If they are pricey, there is possibility of teaming them with humans. For example, teams of ten human soldiers and two androids, where androids go first and take the bullet (to be repaired later) and human soldiers fire at enemy from behind. Still better PR from fewer humans getting killed, and much lower cost total than 100% transition.
Yeah, why an android? Why not a relatively dumb but relatively tough robot to soak up a bit of fire (as mentioned) for human troops or simply to roll towards an enemy and blow itself up? Why not supplant human suicide bombers with robot suicide bombers?
And it you can make it look and sound anything like the Protoss Reaver, that would be a bonus
While at the US Infantry School a Turkish officer and I brainstormed on this topic quite a bit. Espically after serving in Iraq my opinion is that the most reasonable, cost effective, and quickly fieldable choice would be DOGS, trained, smart, agile, and MEAN to bad guys. The dog I had chance to work with in Iraq was a great pet and brought smiles to the troops’ faces all the time, BUT put the tracker leash on him and he would destroy folk with the smell of explosives or a shirt etc. he had smelled previously. He would also do simple IED/Explosives detection. I think the DoD is spending something on the order of millions to make a machine as effective as the dog’s nose at detection (although the dog IS subject to wind direction, overheating etc., but the maint. costs are lower)
The dog, I think, cost ~1k and was trained in Holland (?) for ~25k. In a tactical sense the dog is fast+small=hard to shoot. Give an Infantry Platoon one per team (6) and give the enemy something else to think about other than you as you approach. The dog is able to enter rooms from MUCH smaller breaches in the wall and has cornered the market on sharp, ferocious teeth. Talking with Cardinal off line it has been suggested that the terrorists need only shut the doors and away goes the dog menace. However, I think that since we already breach doors close up just having a different ‘1 man’ to enter the room first would be a plus to me. I wonder if the dog could be trained to try and detect how many people are in the room? Just to have the dog let you know when there is someone behind the couch etc. would solve what we consider to be a HUGE problem.
Considering the current operating environment, I do not think we are really having a big problem defeating the terrorists face to face in battle a la Fallujah. They are good with IEDs, small hit and run raids, and wiping out civilians. The dog could help on the first two on a dismounted foot patrol.
In addition, there is some historical proof of the Army using dogs as more than MP helpers and message runners. The Disney movie immortalized a candy version of how how dogs were used in WWI to help protect GI’s and kill Huns, so the idea is fairly proofed.
You don’t want a cannon fodder combat android. Or at least, building one would be needlessly complex and expensive, heavy and slow. The only reason you’d want one is so that it could use tools and weapons already designed for existing infantry. But that’s self-limiting. Just the need for bipedal locomotion adds a huge amount of complexity.
We do right now have some bomb sniffing robots that have been outfitted with machine guns. Very, very intimidating to see on the battlefield, but still expensive and of limited use, even if heavily armored.
What I suspect you will see in the very near future is “smart” bullets and smart “bombs”. Imagine a gun or grenade on spider legs or wheels with a small wireless cam for remote guidance, sensors for target acquisition, and just enough battery power and builtin smarts so that it can move * fast *. We’re talking Saturday night SciFi Channel creature of the week fast. A few hundred of those could cause a lot of attrition. I imagine something like that could be mass produced for $20-$50K (once you finished the billion dollar development program).
Probably the biggest holdup right now (as for any type of robot) is power. Solve the power issue and the rest would be relatively easy.
I realize I’ve wandered far from the original OP. Right now, we value the pilot more than the multi-million dollar jet aircraft. But a fully human capable android would cost more than a jet aircraft and would contain more military secrets. At the same time, an android would not be significantly more battle capable than a human – we don’t have any of the magic Robocop-bullets-bounce-off lightweight metals to construct something that could stand up to much more than light arms fire. So at current levels of technology, I don’t see that tradeoff being made.
Considering that, historically, Isreal has almost always been outnumbered in the wars with its Arab neighbors, I’d say a disposable robot trooper would be a dream come true to the IDF.
BTW–I can’t belive that I was the first to post THIS LINK
Actually, I think that Johnny Five design (maybe somewhat up-armored) is quite reasonable body plan for urban combat robot. With humanoid upper body it’s capable of operating machinery designed for humans, and semi-tracked chassis allows to fit into doors, narrow corridors or to climb stairs. Until we develop capable AI it could be remote controlled by two operators, one of them in these animatronics harness for upper body control.
I think the US Army’s current doctrine is to enable the current soldier/marine to have such a greater amount of information than the enemy that the battle is swung. This seems to be the more cost effective method for now. I was just at Ft. Irwin with Chounard Fan, and he was pointing out the infrared reflective flags that you wear on your sleeve if you think your enemy isn’t the type to have infrared goggles. This gives a very nice asymmetrical view of the battlefield, as you know where your men are, and they presumably are having a much tougher time.
I was just listening to an NPR podcast that did a story on the army’s testing of even more tech gadgets for the foot soldier. I think one thing was tying in video from flying drones to a much lower level, not just sending it back to base. Maybe Chouinard Fan can chime in with things he’s heard. Here’s a little something: Businessweek - Bloomberg
I think the cost and effort of making an autonomous robot soldier would be prohibitive. The paradigm for future combat robotics is, I think, a Predator… an unmanned weapons system controlled remotely via satellite from an air-conditioned trailer in Las Vegas. As time goes by, I think we’ll see more tanks and mobile artillery automated and scaled down… by removing the crew, these systems can be smaller, more heavily armed and armored, lighter, and more fuel efficient. I think we’ll see things like sentry drones… robots good for securing perimeters of occupied areas.
Where the robots are going to fall short is things like handling prisoners, dealing with civilians, etc… those are places where “Please place your hands in the handcuffs and await further instructions” is not going to cut it.
Well the info flow is sure a big topic these days. A lot of the talk in the ‘android’ vein is to put the soldier in a suit that hydraulically enhances the movements of the soldier in the suit. Run at 30 mph, kick through walls, carry your own A/C and be surrounded by scags of metal/kevlar protection. Basically, produce a machine that takes advantage of that Climate Controlled highly efficient, ‘who knows how many terabyte’ computation device known as the brain.
Hmmm.
Back in the early 1990s I read a Time magazine article that stated the replacement cost (including retraining) for a serviceman kicked out due to being gay.
The numbers are fuzzy in my mind, but I seem to recall $160K for enlisted and something in the vicinity of $1M for an officer.
So, assuming a device that matches the effectiveness of an enlisted man and has a repair cost 50% of the cost of original assembly, I’d say the “break even” cost would be in the vicinity of $200K in 1992 dollars.
So, in my estimation, $280K, using consumer price index as an inflator.
In reality, I expect battlefield robots will go from “stupid to even use them” to “7 of those changed the tide of the war” in one generation. I doubt they’ll ever be “just as useful” as an infantryman.
I suppose we should probably factor in veteran’s benefits here, but it’s a good starting point for discussion…
(SWORDS ones, down on the page, have GPMG onboard)
